THE CHAIR-MAKER
By H. J. MASSINGHAM
HAD not seen my chair-maker for two years. Along the lanes on my way to him the hazels had shaken out a riot of flags. received me as festively. He told me how worried he had
because he had not yet made me the yew armchair I had cred. But there had been an accident, he had been run down a car ; now, too, he was alone, his brother and has two appren- - had gone to the war and nobody wanted any more those chairs adapted from Hepplewhite, Sheraton and the old cabinet-makers' gns. He was not making trumpery stuff (he would not know how do that) but just ordinary wheel-backs and Windsors, and so he got out of the way of making the great chairs, the real chairs, seats from which sages and elders and philosophers might
• ver wisdom, at once meditative and oracular. He sat in one of himself, a Carolean yew-chair, made, he fancied, from a yew had lived a thousand years. But he made just as good ones self, sturdy enough to last a thousand years and with a touch of cate splendour of pattern on the banister-splats. "It's child's r making these Windsors," he said as we drank tea together, "but the old days I used to work on a chair till it was too dark to see, then I'd bring the chair in with me and when I had lit the lamp sit and look at it." He loved it that it was his own, for its utv and because his skill-hunger was satisfied by it.
There had been a land-girl billeted on him, the daughter of a -manager, and be called her William because that was her ourite masculine name. There was something about the place could have told him that), and she had been infected with the ire to make good things. So on his fly-wheel lathe in the long
• Carolean cow-shed next door, which I had never forgotten, she
turned egg-cup sets and shallow bowls out of oak. He showed e them, and the bowls could hardly be distinguished from those it elm made by George Lailey, of Bucldebury Common, the last of he traditional turners. She hated him looking on, and he would tar her turning from a distance and, when she stopped, he knew he was in a fix and off he would go and help her out. "The hughter of a bank-manager! " he said, and there was wonder and ahilaration in his voice. He was a happy man that day, he said, ad he had been very worried about that yew-chair.
After tea he took me to see some Carolean carving. he had un- arered on the side of the open fireplace in the next room of the Wage, and in low relief on the cupboards for spices, salt and what- Ot It was delicate and elaborate work—like his banister-splats- ad he had had to tear away a zareba of match-boarding and wall- oper to get at it. Then we went off to his workshop that I had ace written about. The same astounding litter of what was in the Is and to be in the chairs piled to the very ceiling, so that I imembered asking him, two years ago, how on earth the fowls had Imaged to get in. Here and there a tunnel or runway threaded it sthanked with chairs potential in every stage and process of urPose, bows, backs, seats, stretchers, legs, half-chairs, all-but bats, cliffs of them on either side. Round the workshop ran long ak. en benches not strewn, not even heaped, but smothered 5th tools and appurtenances of the profession of every shape .size, some traditional heirlooms, others made by himself 'chisels, adzes, travishers, spoke-shaves, gouges, clearing-irons, Duble-irons, scrapers, mortizers, beetles, tools enough to seat all le weary of the world. There were more of them hanging on the 4s, though a space on one side was clear for a double row of 44 in paper and wood, with their floral, scroll and curvilinear designs that he had modified from those that had pressed the backs- of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson.
But there was a change, and I sensed it before my old friend blew the dust off the tools he was showing me and before I saw the shavings lying among the tools on the bench, like wormcasts on a lawn. They should have been on the floor, in sacks, on the compost heap, anywhere but on .the bench. A dust had crept over all that gallantry of creation, cinders had choked the furnace of the labour of love, weeds were growing over tht grave of beauty's endeavour. The untidiness of an exacting ardour had been replaced by the'dis- array of an enforced neglect, and the workshop of a recreative tradition was sinking into the litter of Lethe. It was with a bitter naturalness that we began discussing what tools of his, tools he had made, tools he had inherited, I should have for my museum of bygones. He ran his fingers over them with that touch of intimate freedom that only the master-craftsman possesses and only he who has watched him at work can recognise. It was like all the elegiac songs of the madrigalists to see him at it. But his spirit took a bound when I told him that I wanted the right technical and tradi- tional names of every tool and the inevitable and detailed account of its use, and almost boyishly he plunged into the jungle of semi- fashioned chairs to procure me a great yew-bow for my collection.
There was still something to do, yes, and still something to make, my yew armchair, and to this he reverted again and again. He had the very Wood for it, he described the great cylinder of trunk he had bought, and the fine lines of his worn but sensitive face were creased with joyful anticipation as he foretold his malaise from its poisonous exhalations. And he was for loading me with tools. "Yes, yes," he said, "exactly the way I used them and what I could do with them." But the adze whose haft was grooved with the pressure of his hands and his father's and his father's father's,—I would not have this. A great English craftsman never thinks of the past as we do, whether in terms of a disdainful progress or nostalgia. For him past and present are one and time is a chain of recreations. I wanted a banister-splat for my chair, which he had adapted from a design of 1780, lyre-shaped with a centrepiece of Prince of Wales feathers, but he wanted me to have one he had made himself for me two years ago, even more intricate. There was no distinction in his mind between the old and the new ; the works of the chair- makers were a single family in the fatherhood of time.
But upon himself the chastisement of time had been heavy since last I saw him. His hair is still black, his face mobile, delicately modelled as it is by nature, and the movements are still nimble of one of the very last of the great race of craftsmen, and perhaps of neolithic man, the Mediterranean sailer who wrought mightily. But his sculptured face was drawn and sunken, his mark of the dust of the workshop. He told me he had been depressed before I turned up to see him, and how worried he had been about that chair, but that now he felt happy again. And, indeed, there was a bond between us. I had made him known to a small section of the world, and from him I had gathered something-of the secret of man's true being and functional purpose on earth and, especially, his right relation to the earth. In the presence of this proud and humble man what was the meaning of progress? I could think of only one kind of progress that applied to him. To reach him I had passed through steep embanked lanes where the hazels were an army with banners, a myriad fluttering wands celebrating the triumph of life. I came to what was once a Chiltern hamlet, then a dumping-ground for villas and now is a military encampment. I passed through it to the retired cottage of the chair-maker, built when the Stuarts were on the throne. In it lived an old-fashioned man whose old-fashioned business was to make for everyday service furniture the like of which we now go to see at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I had to cross a storm-bitter bridge between one kind of beauty and another, the beauty of nature and the beauty of man. There was an organic relationship between them, creative man recreating creative nature, an eternal significance between the abandoned craftsman in his workshop and the green blood rising in the wood- lands and the hazel - hedges waving their victory - flags. Was it perhaps for this purpose that God set Man on earth, that he should render back the beauty and the bounty he received by a beauty and a bounty of his own?
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