The Impatient Watchmaker

It has been wet and windy here at the ranch. Now that the power is back on, we wanted to post the next in our series of short stories by Andrew and his younger sister Edie's Dad, Addison Ward.

The Impatient Watchmaker

by Addison Werner Ward

Once there was a watchmaker whose thoughts outran the clock. He could think only of what came next, and spent his days grumbling at the slowness of time. At breakfast he thought of his morning’s work, but once at his workbench he began to wish it were lunch time; at lunch he brooded on the afternoon, yet all afternoon he longed for dinner; his dinner went untasted while he dreamt of his warm bed, and in bed he rolled and tossed waiting for morning. All week he looked forward to Sunday and on Sunday he thought only of the week to come. His wife sometimes teased him about his impatience, but he would smile a wan smile and glance at the clock, hoping that it was time to do something else.

One afternoon as the watchmaker was waiting for dinner he had an idea.

“The reason I am impatient,” he said to himself, “is because time goes so slowly. But watchmakers are time’s masters, not its slaves. If I speed up the clock, time will go faster and I shall not have to wait so long for my dinner.”

So he took a tiny screwdriver and began to tinker with the kitchen clock, tightening screws and winding springs until the hands were spinning wildly. As he looked at it the hour hand moved from two to three and from three to four and from four to five and from five to six. The watchmaker laughed with delight. “Wife!” he called, “it is time for dinner!”

When the watchmaker’s wife saw the clock with its whirling hands she gave her husband a very odd look. “As you wish,” she said. “Since the clock says six I will make your dinner. But it seems to me we have just finished lunch.” Before long she sat before the watchmaker a plate heaped with roast beef, potatoes, and green beans. But just as he was taking his second mouthful the watchmaker glanced at the clock and saw that the hour hand had reached eleven. “Bed time!” he cried in dismay, and jumped up from the table.

“How can it be bedtime?” asked his wife. “Ten minutes ago it was supper time, and furthermore the sun is still shining, and besides I am not the least bit tired.” But the watchmaker would only point to the clock, whose whirling hands had now reached eleven-thirty. To bed they went, but the racing clock gave them no time for sleep. In less than two hours its hands said that it was time to get up. And so, although the sun was just beginning to set, the watchmaker dragged himself from his warm bed.

This was only the beginning of the watchmaker’s trouble. He gulped down his breakfast in order to get to work on time, but he had hardly arranged his tools before the clock said it was time to stop for lunch. He raced from place to place in a desperate effort to keep up with the whirling hands of the clock, yet hurry as he would he was always late. Before the sun rose again he had been in and out of bed four times, had eaten four breakfasts, four lunches and four dinners and had made eight attempts to get to work. As for his wife, the meals followed each other so closely that she had no time to wash the dishes from one before it was time to begin preparing the next. When she could stand it no longer she complained to her husband.

“I am tired of rushing about because the clock tells me to,” she said. “From now on I shall get up when the sun rises and go to bed soon after the sun sets. I shall eat breakfast when I get up, dinner just before I go to bed, and lunch halfway in between. If you do not wish to have your meals when I do, I shall leave you a big pot of soup to eat whenever you want it.”

After that the watchmaker’s life grew lonely as well as frantic. He saw his wife only at the odd times when their schedules overlapped, and even then he scarcely had time to talk with her. While she worked calmly from sunrise to sunset and slept peacefully from sunset to sunrise, he dashed about, gulping down soup, crawling in and out of bed, starting and stopping work, trying to cram a day’s work into two hours.

To make matters worse he quarreled with his customers, claiming to have worked for “four hours” when they thought he had worked for one.

As time passed the watchmaker grew lonelier and hungrier.

“It was better being impatient,” he thought. “I shall slow the clock down again.” But somehow there was never time. No sooner would he get ready with his screwdriver than a glance at the clock would tell him it was time to drop his tools and run off to do something else. He could no more fix the clock than he could eat or sleep in peace.

One night as he crawled into bed the watchmaker looked at his sleeping wife and burst into tears. “I am growing old four times as fast as everyone else,” he said sadly. “Every day in her life is four days in my life, and every year will be four years. At the end of ten years I shall be forty years older than I am now and my wife will still be a young woman while I am a tired old man.”

Thinking these sad thoughts the watchmaker fell asleep. It was the first real sleep he had had since he speeded up the clock. When his wife awoke soon after sunrise she saw him sleeping and tiptoed quietly out of the bedroom. From time to time she peeped in during the day, and always she found him sleeping. He slept so long that at last the clock ran down and stopped because there was no one to wind it.

At last the watchmaker woke and called his wife. “What time is it?” he asked when she stood beside his bed.

“What time would you like it to be?” his wife asked.

“I am terribly hungry,” said the watchmaker. “I should like it to be supper time.”

“Very well,” said his wife, and going to the kitchen she moved the hands of the clock until it said six. Then she prepared her husband’s favorite dinner: lamb chops, tomatoes and sweet corn.

While the watchmaker was eating his dinner he glanced nervously from time to time at the clock. “Don’t worry,” his wife said, “the clock has stopped and we shall leave it that way. It will be six o’clock until you want it to be later.”

So the watchmaker and his wife talked and ate and drank and talked some more until at last they both were yawning. “Oh dear,” said the watchmaker. “Now I’m tired.”

-—oOo—-

Gargoyle

Andrew's father, Addison W. Ward (1930-1965), was a Princeton graduate who became a literature professor. In doing so he found his calling. He was a prolific writer, and taught at Yale and Oberlin University in Ohio. He was a passionate jazz clarinetist, and loved to sail and split wood. And he liked to do things well. He was much loved and is sorely missed. 


This is one of his short stories. It is our guess it was written while he was teaching in Paris in the early 50’s, before Andrew was born.

The Gargoyle who Hated Tourists

by Addison Werner Ward

At the very top of a tall cathedral tower there squatted a gargoyle of incredible ugliness. His aspect combined the brute violence of the ape, the lechery of the goat, the stealth of the cat, and the cruelty of the eagle, while his heavy grinning lips suggested vices too sinister for any sub-human species. His nose had been imperfectly restored in the nineteenth century, but this, like the marks of time and the weather, only enhanced the horror of his appearance. He was the showpiece of the cathedral; postcards bearing his likeness could be purchased from the sexton, and every able-bodied visitor made the long climb up worn stone stairs to view him at close range.

It was the peculiarity of this gargoyle that he detested tourists. Leaning out over the parapet, he had watched the cluttered medieval town of his youth change slowly into an airy city of wide, tree-lined avenues; he had watched the dingy industrial suburbs sprawl over the green fields, and had seen the horse and carriage give way to the motor car. And with every change, he noted in disgust, the number of visitors to his lonely perch increased. “Haricots verts!” he cried in his quaint medieval speech, “It was bad enough when they brought sketch-books, but now everyone one of the cochons has a camera, and they’re forever snapping them at me! They get fatter and louder every year. And they all make the same joke about the relative I remind them of. Coquilles Saint Jacques! I’ve had enough!”

The final outrage came when the local Chamber of Commerce decided to illuminate the cathedral at night. A particularly bright spotlight was trained directly in the gargoyle’s face, and he was unable to sleep. He could not see the street below, but he felt the eyes of crowds of tourists peering up at him and it made him desperate. “Probably coach tours,” he groaned, “with guides explaining in three languages that all of me but the nose is genuine thirteenth-century. Fleurs du Mal!”

The façade of the cathedral was being cleaned at this time. The cleaning had begun before the last stones of the apse were in place, and the workmen no sooner finished one of the towers than they moved their scaffolding to the other, so that for seven centuries one or the other of them had been obscured by a criss-crossing of pipes and boards. This year, by a lucky chance, they were working on the gargoyle’s tower, and the scaffolding reached to within three feet of his parapet. One night after the spotlights had finally been extinguished and all the tourists were safely back at their hotels, he climbed cautiously down to the ground. The great square in front of the cathedral was deserted, and for the remaining hours of the night the gargoyle paced the dimly-lighted streets, humming medieval drinking songs to himself, and savoring the pleasures of anonymity.

When morning came and the streets began to fill with people he was surprised and delighted to find that he could pass unnoticed. Out of sheer mischief he stopped a workman, leered fiendishly into his face, and demanded the time in a demonic cackle. The man muttered an answer and hurried by. "Folies Bergères!” exclaimed the gargoyle. “But of course this is a poor quarter of town, inhabited by people of no culture. Near the opera house I would be recognized and apprehended before I had walked two blocks.”

But as the day wore on he grew uneasy. He found a newspaper and read it with mounting indignation, first the headlines, then the inner pages, and finally even the obituaries and sporting results. There was no mention of his disappearance. Was it perhaps a trick to throw him off guard? His efforts to attract attention became frantic; he stopped anyone carrying a camera and asked long, pointless questions about the cathedral; he jumped on the counter of a travel agency, struck his famous pose, and demanded a ticket to the underworld; he leaned conspicuously against travel posters and made weird hooting noises at passers-by.

The results, however, were unexpected. In the course of the afternoon he was mistaken for a famous politician, a black-marketer, an American novelist, and a peanut-vendor. One man asked how his lawsuit was going; another tried to repay a small loan. Near the opera house he was offered the role of the commandant in a new production of Don Giovanni. In a café the waiter greeted him warmly and asked if he wanted his usual aperitif; before he had time to reply a young man wearing a beard introduced himself and demanded, with deferential firmness, that he read the manuscript of a new play. While he was resting in a park a well-dressed woman sat down on the end of the bench; she stared intently at a nearby group of children and said in a toneless voice, “Gaston, Charles knows. We must do something.” The gargoyle excused himself and slouched away.

That night he walked again. It was an uneventful night, though he did have a brief and unsatisfactory conversation with a naked girl he discovered standing coyly in a fountain. Her flesh was a beautiful dark grey color, and he could imagine how cold and hard it would be to the touch. But she laughed a mocking, eighteenth century laugh at his elaborate compliments and called him a relic of an age of prejudice and superstition. Around midnight he had a disturbing thought which made him hurry to the cathedral square. He had remembered the plaster cast they had made ten years before when it was first noticed that his horns were weathering badly and his left talon was cracked. When he arrived he half expected to find his own hideous features staring down at him. But it was all right: his place was empty. Something was different, though. His gaze wandered over the great façade and then, with a shock, he saw. The scaffolding had been moved to the other tower.

At eight the next morning he was waiting outside the entrance of the cathedral tower. The doors had not yet opened, and to pass the time he addressed one of the tourists who were beginning to gather, asking him if the climb were really worth the effort. The man burst into violent motion; his shoulders rippled and quaked, and his hands performed a mating dance. “Divina commedia!” he shouted, “Is it worth the climb! Ah, signore, is worth three climbs! Is of course nice view. But the, how to say, the climax, is the gargoyle! Madre di Puccini, what a beast, what a fiend, what a monster!” His hands fluttered to rest on his cheeks and began to pull the skin tight, transforming his face into a mask of such inhuman malice that the gargoyle instinctively drew back a step.

The doors were finally opened and he made his way up at the end of the group, pausing to exchange a few words about early gothic sculpture with the sexton. At the top of the stairs he stopped and snorted with contempt: the tourists had gathered at the wrong corner of the tower. They were lost in admiration of a mild-looking gargoyle named Polyeucte, a pleasant enough fellow, though his head and shoulders were nineteenth-century, and rather routine nineteenth-century at that. The gargoyle slipped silently to his own perch and waited for them to turn around. It was good to be home, he thought as he peered malevolently over the grey city. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that one of the tourists had come over and was training his camera on him; he scowled more fiercely than ever. There was a pause, then he felt a mild and hesitant hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me, sir,” the man said, “would you mind very much? I’d like to get a shot of the Eiffel Tower from up here. It won’t take a minute.”

-—oOo—-

"The Thinker"

Z Nephew's Blog

Our amazing and brilliant nephew is practically done building his first car, with his Dad's help, and blogging the whole process.

Since I'm very tardy in posting this, you should really harken back to the very beginning.

Backyard Bash round-up

Andrew's sister Tiger's new band played at a party in their backyard a couple weekends ago. We went! They were great.










Tim, the pirate, surrounded by adoring young fans...


Andrew hamming it up in Travis' guy-lair.


Nieces Emma and Chloe, caught in the act of pillaging the food table...




Andrew probably talking "ranch" with Travis' dad.


Next band, the Fourfits..








And for your listening pleasure, some Neighborhood Sinners, live:



Thanks Priors for a great day!

New Gardening Blog

Birdwatching, moose visits, exploding mailboxes, and gardening by the moon in Northern Idaho...you'll find it all and more at Andrew's sister's great new blog. Check it out.

(I voted for Mme. Ramotswe, but couldn't help but notice that Hillary's not even an option?)

Finicky Stinx Volume II

A long-awaited new chapter in the Finicky Stinx zany cat adventure series (by my brother Scott) is up now at www.finickystinx.blogspot.com.

Goodbye Charles

A member of the Ranch posse, our friend and beekeeper Charles Martin Simon, aka Charlie Nothing, passed away two nights ago. His health had been declining since around August.

In my last post about him capturing a swarm he was on crutches. At that time he was thinking it was possibly a herniated disk or hip problems. Then they thought it might be Lyme disease. By the time he was hospitalized about a week and a half ago the pain was intolerable. It turned out to be an advanced form of cancer.

He was a wise and unique person, a prolific writer, musician, and inventor. He was very kind and helpful to us. Our fruit trees have been significantly more productive since he brought us his bees.

Our condolences to his family and friends. We will miss him, and the bees he cared for will too.

Mustang Sally

A new play written by my Aunt Linda starts tonight. Can't wait to see it. Break a leg!




The Whitefire Theatre and Artists Unlimited present MUSTANG SALLY

a controversial new play by Linda Felton Steinbaum

"She ventured into forbidden territory... her family tries to pick up the pieces."

Come see the World Premiere of Linda Felton Steinbaum's new play, MUSTANG SALLY, which delves into a topic that is bound to stir up debate.

How does a family deal with the repercussions of an "inappropriate" relationship?
Does society have a double standard when it comes to prosecuting sex offenders who happen to be female?

Playwright Linda Felton Steinbaum has always been drawn to writing about contemporary social issues that she finds confusing or that make her angry. The increasing number of reports about female teachers having relationships with under-aged students prompted her to write MUSTANG SALLY, a 2-act character-driven drama that retains her trademark sense of humor and surprising twists and turns.

"Traditionally, a major function of the theatre has been as a forum for the airing of hot topics in order for its audience to debate their merits out loud.... Hopefully this play will help to trigger a passionate, reasoned and valuable debate concerning a topic we are increasingly seeing in the headlines." says director Arturo Castillo.

six weeks (Oct 13 - Nov 18)

Schedule:
Fridays & Saturdays 8:00 p.m. and Sundays 2:30 p.m.

A new blog in the family

Slammy, our niece in Idaho, a novelist and exotic pet owner, started a blog at Ann's Getaway! Not that we want you to go away....but you really should visit her blog right away.