THE BELL
While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner of this enclosure a city is built. The rest of the place is occupied by fields, woods, and tombs; and here and there, under the shadow of sycamores, the vibrations of a bronze gong far within a pagoda deflect the echoes of the monster as they die away.
I have seen, near the observatory where Kangchi went to study the stars of old age, the pavilion where the bell resides under the guard of an oldbonze, honored by offerings and inscriptions. The outstretchedarms of an average man are the measure of its width. I knock with a finger upon its surface, which sings through a six-inch thickness at the least shock. For a long time I lend an ear. And I recall the history of the molder.
That cord of silk or catgut should resound under the curve of the bow, that wood, having been instructed by the winds, should lend itself to music,—in these phenomena the artisan found nothing singular; but to attack the very element, to extort the musical scale from primitive soil, seemed to him the means of properly making Man resonant and awakening his clay. So his art was the casting of bells.
His first bell was carried up to heaven in a storm. The second, when they had loaded it on a boat, fell into the deep and muddy waters of the Kiang. The man resolved to make a third before he died, and this time he wished to gather into one deep vessel the soul and the whole voice of the nourishing and productive earth, and pack into one thunderous vibration the fulness of all sound. This was the plan that he conceived, and the day that he commenced his enterprise, a daughter was born to him.
Fifteen years he labored at this work.But it was in vain that, having conceived the idea of his bell, he planned with a subtle art the dimensions, curves, and caliber; or that, having extracted from the most secret metals whatever listens and trembles, he made sheets so sensitive that they would vibrate at the mere approach of a hand; or that, from a sonorous instrument placed among them, he deeply studied properties and harmonies. When a pure and faultless bell had issued from the mold of sand, the copper side would never respond the expected answer to his interrogation; or, if the double beat balanced itself in even intervals, it was his misery never to feel life in them,—that indefinable mellowness and moisture which is given to words formed in the human mouth.
Meanwhile the girl grew with her father’s despair; and, when she saw that the old man was consumed by his mania and no longer searched for new alloys, but threw into his crucibles blades of wheat and the sap of aloes, and milk and the blood from his own veins,—then a great pity was born in the heart of the maiden, for which women come to the bell today to venerate her image of painted wood. Having said her prayer to the subterranean god, she clothed herself in wedding garments; and,like a dedicated victim, having fastened a stalk of straw about her neck, she threw herself into the molten metal. So the bell was given a soul; and the resounding elementary forces gained this feminine, virginal grace, and the ineffable liquid note.
Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not keep from dying.
Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell—in the celestial spaces—and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell—in the depths of the immense and muddy Kiang.