Short Story: “The Watch and the Windrose”

Once upon a time there was a mechanical watch who fell in love with a rose of the winds. She would visit him at all hours of the day, and she would grace him with her winds in accordance with his hours. Her cold dry tramontanes teased him at midnight and kept him cool at noon; her brisk wet levantes made him worry for his movement in the witching hour and in midafternoon; her siroccos and ostros and libeccios through dawn and through dusk warned him of the dangers of day or of night; at breakfast and dinner her easygoing ponentes entertained him at table and her stiff self-confident mistrals sent him to work or to sleep.

So much love had the watch for the windrose that he tried to be like her as much as he could. He would try his hands at measuring not time but speed and distance, and the results would be multicolored charts that people found difficult to read; he would reach into himself and rearrange his workings and turn himself into a weathercock, but he would still only be the receptor of her winds, still would not become her winds himself.

“Why do you want to become me?” she asked him.

“Is not real love a desire to imitate the person one loves?” he asked her.

“Is it? I don’t know love except from you. I am only the winds.”

“How is it,” he asked, “that you are so unbound by form? You blow here and there, and the whole sky and all who inhabit it greet you and pass through you and around you. Try as I might, rearrange myself as I might, I am metal and glass and gems; gems and glass and metal thus limit my beauty.”

“Why do you think that a beauty that is limited should destroy itself in order to become a beauty that is unlimited?”

“Why do you not think so?” the mechanical watch asked, wroth now, but not at her. He had just now realized that certain things, certain motives, certain desires of his did not admit of explanation, and he hated so to realize.

“It endangers the limited to pursue the unlimited.” The windrose was quoting an old, old book in saying this; her gregales and levantes and siroccos had picked up the scent of the book far, far away, and over seas and mountains that scent had come, had been done from Chinese into Sabir and long ages later from Sabir into English, and had sprung up in her mind now as something to share with the watch by way of warning. The anger on his face—his second hand was whirling and reeling—reminded her of her own most tempestuous rages, and she knew full well with how much fear and remorse she looked back on her own simouns and cyclones.

“There is danger in all things,” said the watch, calming down. Speaking to the windrose always had a way of becalming him in the end, even if it was as a typhoon that the conversation began. And he knew in saying this that he was not a mechanical watch any longer, although what he was now he did not know, and he did not think that he was on his way to being a windrose.