A POTTER'S WHEEL

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS

IN the course of the following week, Harvey Porter received permission to climb a flight of steps up which he had often cast longing glances. From the wedging-table the clay was carried straight to the potting-room, and now Harvey shared this work with other lads. He ascended, bearing a load of perfected clay, and found himself in a large and lofty chamber full of air and light, illuminated on the north and west by tall windows, and having white-washed walls. In the midst were ranges of open shelves to support the six-foot boards, and round about stood potters' wheels and turninglathes. Men came and went, boys hastened hither and thither, and the hum of Mr. Trolley's steam-engine ascended through the open flooring. For two lathes and two wheels were worked by steam, the power controlled by the potters' and the turners' feet. But Thomas Body sat apart at the string-wheel, and a boy supplied the motive power for him. He made the large pieces, and while beside the younger man spread hundreds of lesser things turned by their swift hands from the spinning clay, on Body's board rose varied vases that obeyed no gauge, but budded and blossomed to his will.

Porter was told to prepare his lump of clay for Mr. Body, and with a weight and scales he separated his mass into lesser masses, each weighing three pounds. These balls he ranged before the potter, and was permitted for a while to watch the magic business.

A little shining wheel of steel stood in a basin thickly spattered with red mud, and beside the thrower were the few tools that he used-prickers, calipers, drill, and sponge. Within reach of his hand, also, were ribs of slate and tin-modeled for the inside and outside of the pot—and a wire with which he cut the finished piece from the wheel. Beside him, in the trough where his wheel spun, stood a bowl of water colored to redness.

Another perpendicular wheel more than six feet high stood close at hand, and made Charlie Coysh, who turned it, look small. Its great revolution and steady progress were more fitted to master work than the steam-driven wheels, and it escaped their vibration.

Mr. Body sat like a king on his throne. He was red to the eyes. He wore a great apron, and his sleeves were turned up to the elbows. His hands and arms shone with wet redness; his grey beard was spattered. Now he threw a lump of clay, pressed it sharply on the eye of the wheel, and crouched and cuddled over it like a beast over a bone. His hands seemed to merge in the lump as he gripped it, and set his wrists, arms, and shoulders to the work.

"That's called 'truing the ball,'" he explained; "but I call it ' taming the ball.""

Charlie turned fast, the potter's wheel whirled, and for a moment the clay spluttered and fought, as it seemed, while Mr. Body, with his face bent near enough to catch the splashes, laughed.

"Tis the last struggle to be free!" he said; "the untamed clay fights the potter like that, just for a moment, till he feels the grip grows tight on him and he knows he's met his master. But don't you think anybody can beat him. If you was sitting here, he'd fight and beat you again and again." In an instant the lump was steadied, dragged up to a cone, and pressed down again to a ball that every bubble of air might be expelled and the whole welded to an obedient mass.

"Now it's tame and broken," said the potter, "and in go my thumbs."

He began to model.

"You see the piece in your mind's eye first and work according," he said. "You see it standing before you as clear as those vases on that board. A man like Mr. Easterbrook can build a model as he goes, and turns his fancies into clay as they come into his head; and he's told me that often and often he'll dream a pot finer than any that ever he's thrown and come red hot to the wheel to make it; but the dream's gone, and he can't turn it into a living pot. Now I'm building a vase."

His thumbs were hollowing the heart of the clay, and he began to lift it. It rose to his touch, rounded, hollowed, billowed magically, expanded here to the belly of the vase, narrowed above to its neck, then opened again like a blossoming flower, and turned over daintily to make the lip. The clay revolved, fast at first, slower as the piece came near its finishing, for the boy at the big string-wheel watched its progress and worked at his handle accordingly. Body's shining red hands hovered, darted, turned and twisted, touched and pressed.

They were never still for an instant. Round the pot and into it, they went, now suffering the thin clay lip to run between his fingers, now taking the whole palm to the face, now working within, and all the while slowly and subtly lifting the clay to its limits. He talked while he worked.

"There's things a potter can tell, and there's things he cannot," he said; "and one thing that you cannot is how you know the clay's drawn up to its fulness, and running as thin as you dare to let it. To know when to stop when you're potting like this without gauges is an instinct; but them that don't find it come quick to them, will never make potters."

The vase reached completion, and a glistening thread of light, fine as a gossamer, ascended on its rounded breast-the tiny rising of the clay between the potter's fingers.

""Tis done!" said Mr. Body. Then the wheel grew still; he took his wire, cut the pot away, and lifted it carefully to its place on the board beside him.

""Twill dry a while below, and then come back again to Mr. Godbeer," explained the old man. "Such work as this goes to him, and he smoothes and fines and takes my meaning with all his cleverness, and puts the finishing touch to the shape; but the master's pots never have touch of lathe upon them. He won't suffer it, for he hateth the lathe. It kills out the soul and spirit of a piece, in his opinion, and makes all pots equal-like the Socialists would have all men. But the paying public like for all to be suent and finished, and the shop-people know it. That's where Mr. Easterbrook's different from common men. He'd sooner see what you might call a great pot, even if it was faulty, than just a common every-day thing like these I'm making."

The Sunday on which Porter was to serve Mr. Easterbrook arrived, and he reached the works an hour before the master. The ordeal made him anxious, but not nervous, for he knew that he could not fail.

He went aloft, marked the master's clay waiting for him under wet cloths, and revolved the wheel once or twice to see that all was ready. Then an idea occurred to him, and he set about cleaning the

trough and making the wheel brighter and smarter far than Mr. Easterbrook was accustomed to find it. For Thomas Body attached no importance to such trifles, and liked the red clay spattered about his work as well as his person.

Easterbrook arrived, and he and Porter ascended to the wheel. George Easterbrook perceived that Harvey had been at pains to make all clean for him, but he did not comment on the fact. He allowed minor evidences of this sort to accumulate without revealing that he had observed them; but they were recorded, not forgotten. He took off his coat, turned up his sleeves, and drew on a great overall. Then he went to a private locker and produced therefrom a few of his own tools of wood and metal, with a large diagram. It represented the various fundamental shapes of the classic vase: the great rounded amphora and hydria; the narrower, up-springing lecythus; the wide-mouthed crater and cantharus; the cylix, flattened to a dish; the lebes on its pedestal; the circular araballus; the jug-shaped œnochoe.

"That's

"There-look at those closely," said Mr. Easterbrook. the scale on which a potter plays his music. They include everything that can be made on a wheel. The forms slide into each other, and the combinations of these forms are more in number than the stars, because they depend upon a limitless thing; and that's the imagination of man."

Harvey had taken off his coat and turned up his sleeves. Now he regarded the outlines without speaking.

"In them you see almost every great, fine form that Nature can show you," explained the potter. "You might think that the world was full of beautiful outlines outside these; you might think on the calf of a man's leg; the turn of a girl's cheek, or the lines of a hunting-cat or coursing greyhound; or you might reckon there was greater beauty to be got by the seeing eye from the waves, or the cliffs, or the clouds in the sky, or the shapes of the leaves and the boughs; or the flame in the fire, maybe; or the smoke curling out of a man's pipe. You might say in your first ignorance, Harvey, that these pictures here are far short of the stir and bustle of living and moving forms that fill the earth; but you'd be wrong. The men that made these things saw better and keener and farther than any eyes that have looked out at the world since their time.

They were the most reasonable beings that the world has known; and they let nothing escape them that was worth keeping-from the twist of a shell to the shoulder of a mountain. You shall read about them in course of time. They were called the Greeks. Mr. Pitts tells that he has read here and there that all Greek art is dead, and the spirit that made it is dead; but only very silly folk can hold to that. Because their discoveries about the secrets of beauty go to the root, and only those who think the secrets of ugliness are better worth finding out will say that the Greek spirit is dead. However, to Mr. Pitts you must go if you want to learn about art."

The boy listened; but one word in this harangue had appealed to him with a force greater than all the rest, and that was his own Christian name. Until now Easterbrook had never called him "Harvey." To-day he did so, the word slipping out naturally in the midst of his discourse. And Porter knew, from his own experience, that one does not speak to a person by a name, if only a nickname, until one has often thought of the person by that name. He was gratified—indeed, mightily pleased. It seemed that the inciIdent drew him nearer to the master.

Now the potter worked, while Harvey Porter responded with every nerve instinct alert to do himself credit.

Even he could see the difference between George Easterbrook's methods and those of Thomas Body. Here was no less reverence for the medium, but greater power over it. There was mystery and magic in this man's potting. The strength behind the delicacy was concealed, for the clay twined and curled, and seemed sentient and happy in his hands. It responded without visible cause, for Mr. Easterbrook's manual labors were less in evidence than Body's. Body appeared to be doing a difficult thing well; Easterbrook made a difficult thing look childishly easy. His pots seemed to ascend and grow like flowers off the wheel, while those of Thomas were the result of a process of labored building. The clay now rose and fell as easily as a sea-wave; it expanded, contracted, swelled, shrank, bellied to an amphora, spired to a narrow vase, then sank again, opened to a cylix or narrowed to an cnochoe. And all the time it seemed to breathe and palpitate until, the last touch given, the wheel slowed and stilled, and the stately thing born of earth and water stood created and ready for the ordeal of fire.