HAROUN THE CARPENTER

Haroun, bien entendu, was not his name, but it was that by which some called him among themselves. The reason will appear in the sequel. He lived in a low house of one storey, with a door in the middle, and a window on each side, a typical Welsh cottage, with a thatched roof, and the roof drawn down over the gables, also in a peculiarly Welsh style.

He had his yard and workshop behind the house. In front was a bit of garden, of which he took great care, and which was bright with flowers from earliest spring to latest fall.

“Aaron,” the squire’s wife would say, “how do you manage to get your bulbs to bloom before mine?”

“My lady,” he would reply, “I hold they like the smell of the wood.”

Aaron was, in fact, his Christian name. The reason why, in the rectory and in the Hall, he was called Haroun was this:—

Aaron was a man of one book, and that book was the “Arabian Nights.”

Many years ago a copy was given to the lending library of the village, and was taken out by Aaron Price, the carpenter. He had not read three pages before his mind was in the grip of the narrator. He read, he did not sleep, he did not work, or worked badly, he went to church, but did not pray—his mind had been carried up and away from the present, away from the green Welsh valley in which he lived, away, over the russet mountains to the gorgeous East, and to the times when Jinns were all-powerful unless controlled by Solomon’s seal, and magicians were as common as blackberries and as mischievous as kittens.

Aaron very nearly fell into disrepute as a carpenter on account of that book, so badly was his work done when under the spell. But he rallied. He became active, industrious, skilful once more, yet never, thenceforth, was the witchery of the “Arabian Nights” off his mind. He had no rest to his soul till he had purchased a copy for himself, and from that precious volume he read daily. He never wearied of it; he never wanted another book.

“Lord, sir, it is meat and drink to me!” he said once when questioned about it. He was advised to give it up. “I couldn’t do it,” was his reply. “Beside—what would be the good? It’s in me, all over me, in every fibre. I know it from one cover to the other.”

“Then why not part with it—if so familiar?”

“Why don’t you part with your wife because you know her face and voice and thoughts? I couldn’t do it. I love the book because so familiar to me—every tale, every word.”

One day a note from the Hall told the rector that the squiress had got a real treat for Haroun. She was going to give him as a Christmas present “Tales of the Genii.”

The rector laid down his daily paper, took his hat and stick, and pushed down to the Hall at once.

“My dear lady! I implore you, do nothing of the kind. Give him a book on practical carpentering or a dictionary of gardening. But another book of Jinns and necromancers will turn poor Haroun mad altogether.”

Now and then, on a Sunday evening, the rector would say to his wife, “Look here, Rosie, I could read Haroun’s mind to-day as he sat under the pulpit, as though it were a book in large primer type, open before me. He was very attentive when I began my sermon, and he followed me some way, but by degrees his eye became vacant, abstracted, his expression of face altered, and I knew that he was away with the Three Calenders, hearing why Zobeide whipped the hounds.”

“Harry,” responded the rectoress, “you have only yourself to blame. Try to be more interesting when you preach.”

“My dear Rosie,” exclaimed the parson, “I do my level best, but what pulpit discourse could ever compete with ‘Sindbad’s Voyages’ or ‘The Hunchback’?”

The good lady sighed and said, “Whatever will Haroun do for a wife? We have no Fatimas and Zobeides in this village.”

“I wish with all my heart that Haroun would weave his own web of romance, fall in love, and—then he’d forget the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“In time this infatuation will wear off.”

“I doubt it. This has now been going on for years, and that book only works its way deeper into his soul. Upon my word, Rosie, I believe the Bible interests him only because of the wonders that are in it.”

“Then, my dear, I am sure you judge him wrong. He is a good man, and God-fearing.”

“Yes—but oh! so fantastical.”

Aaron Price did not keep his treasury of stories bottled up in his own breast. He was great at retailing them, but he transferred the scenery to Wales, translated Camaralzaman and Badoura into David Jones and Sheena Williams, located every incident in some well-known spot, and thoroughly bewildered his hearers, who could not make out whether he were poking fun at them or narrating facts.

Perhaps the climax was reached when he converted Ganem the slave of Love, into the amiable, somewhat corpulent, and eminently respectable squire, Sir John Vaughan, at Llanselyf. The whole tale was told with so much circumstance and such actuality, that next Sunday, when the squire came to church, he found himself the object of intense interest, observation, and private whispered comment.

It may be remembered that in the original tale Ganem was up a tree overhanging a cemetery when he saw some slaves bury a chest, at the dead of night, in the earth. When they were gone he descended from the tree, dug down to and opened the chest, when he found it contained a lady of incomparable beauty who “as soon as she was released from her confined situation, and exposed to the open air began to sneeze, and half-opening her eyes and rubbing them exclaimed, ‘Zohorob Bostan (Flower of the Garden), Schagrom Marglan (Branch of Coral), Cassabos Souccar (Sugar-cane), Nouronnihar (Light of Day), Nagmatos Sohi (Star of the Morning), Nouzhetos Zaman (Delight of the Season), speak, where are you?’”

This, as related by the carpenter, took a very local and personal complexion. The incident was transferred to the churchyard of his own parish, and to a certain elm tree that grew there; it was Sir John Vaughan who climbed the tree, and the lady when released from the box exclaimed, “Mary Jones, my housemaid, Flower of the Garden, and you, Susanna Rees, scullery-maid, Branch of Coral; and you also, Elizabeth Thomas, tweenie maid and Sugar-cane; and you, Margaret Cole, the lady’s-maid, Light of Day, and under housemaid Joan, Star of the Morning, and third housemaid Wilmot, Delight of the Season, speak, my dear tried servants, where are you?”

Now, on this particular Sunday morning, not only was Sir John an object of great interest, but so was Lady Vaughan, and when, during the service, she sneezed, it produced a general agitation; so also were the maid-servants of the family. On their arrival there were nudgings, “Here comes Branch of Coral, and there is Light of the Day. But where is Flower of the Garden?” To which an answer came in a whisper, “Got a bad cold in her head, and can’t come to church.”

Now, a remarkable occurrence in the parish took place. Aaron, alias Haroun, fell in love, and took to courting Elizabeth Thomas, alias Sugar-cane, alias Cassabos Souccar, the tweenie maid. It took the whole parish by surprise, for Elizabeth was not beautiful; she had not the eyes or the frame, or the svelte movements or the elastic tread of the light gazelle. She was a somewhat heavily formed, broad-shouldered, pudding-faced damsel, who could not cross a room without rattling all the chimney ornaments, and who had no more imagination and genius than has a duck. And in what did the attraction consist? Why had Aaron not become enamoured of the lady’s-maid, a most willowy person with a very sweet and refined face? Why not with the kitchen-maid, the Sprig of Coral, who had indeed coralline lips, and who in time would know how to boil a potato and do a chop so as not to be done to leather. But a tweenie! and such a tweenie! The whole parish discussed it for a month. It was most astounding that the man who romanced about every one and everything and every place, should make such dead prose of his own love affair. However, after this had been debated in the servants’ hall, at the forge, in the stable, at the tavern, each such debate ended with some one remarking sententiously, “After all, it is his affair and not mine.”

It is, however, a mistake to say that Aaron’s courtship was prosaic. That it was not so was proved by one of his letters to Elizabeth Thomas, which the girl carelessly left about; and it got read, copied, and distributed through the village, and excited much admiration at the splendour of the style, till some one detected the original, of which it was but a copy, in the story of Abdul Hassan and Schemselnihar. Here is the epistle—

Not to make too long a story of this. The course of true love ran smoothly enough. The adored tweenie took it all very calmly, very much as a matter of course, and in due time they were married.

No one supposed that they could be happy together, so opposite were they to each other. Yet never did the parish see a more affectionate and devoted couple. Aaron “yarned” to his Bessie, telling her his marvellous tales. She knitted or darned listening with a stolid face, and when he had done said, “Aaron, get along with your nonsense, I don’t believe in any of your marvels.”

He took her unbelief in good part. If she did not relish his tales, it was her misfortune and not her fault. He was soul, she was body, and each has its proper place in the economy of nature. He was everything that was imaginative, she was wholly commonplace, and the mixture in one household produced not ferment, but peace.

“I wish,” said Aaron, “I wish, Lizzie, I could see wonders. I read of them, I think of them, I tell of them, and yet I have never seen one.”

Suddenly, to the amazement of every one, Aaron died. He caught a chill that settled on his lungs, and he was dead in three days. His wife attended to him with devotion and unflagging solicitude. One night he turned his bright feverish eyes on her and said—

“Liz! kiss me. I’m going at last to see wonders, and you won’t say to me there, where I am going: ‘Get along with your nonsense.’”

He did not say another word, but passed in this eager, expectant attitude of soul into the World of Wonders.

Every one respected Haroun, though he had perplexed all, and all had laughed at him. His death was felt by all, and the entire parish attended his funeral. Sir John Vaughan forgave having been converted into Ganem, the slave of Love, and he was there.

And when Aaron was gone, all said—

“We can’t, for certain, have a more pleasant and romancing carpenter in his place, even if we get—which is doubtful—a better workman.”

And now I come to another singular fact, and fact it is. The widow, Bessie Price, that dull, inanimate, prosaic body—soul none thought to call her—moped and drooped after his death. Nothing roused her, nothing interested her, she seemed to have lost everything when the earth closed over the dear, rodomontading carpenter. Folk said at first, “Bless you, she’s not one to feel her loss. She has not the depth in her.”

But they were mistaken. She felt her loss so deeply, so intensely, that without any apparent malady, she drooped, faded, and from no perceptible physical cause sank, and within twelve months, this bit of putty or dough was laid by the quicksilver of her husband.

And so, even in this dull, heavy creature there was the poetry of love, the romance of a life devoted to one man. Where Love is—there is the Spirit of Poesy.