Chapter 5

Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again) had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other, but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference, however. I had no fewer _good_ mornings than formerly; and yet, any heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged there.

She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:

"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves as below. It might happen that in a few years--this relation might be changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one. I sit in the midst of you--telling you from day to day of the things I have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan. My first years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days, for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in relation to the long life--the importance only of one bead on the endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight moment--that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned to tell."

I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent generations did not possess, and from the absence of which much deformity and sorrow has come to be.

The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face--a mistake of meaning impossible.

Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul--if the expression can be forgiven.

I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in relation to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis, and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house closes upon the growing child--that more and more as the years draw on, the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are given to utter remains unexpressed.

I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles and the words of even a child significant.

I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening genius is the thing that has made immortal--shoemakers, blacksmiths and the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.

8

THE ABBOT

He was a still boy--the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him.... One day his father said to me:

"I have to buy everything you write for him."

"Well, well," said I.

I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward, because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.

This generation behind us--at least, the few I have met and loved--is not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to wait. It is most convincing, to have events clean up a fact which you misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the boy's father--a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came over to dinner one day, and I said:

"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."

It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days. Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.

"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."

"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said--about you coming to me for a time?"

"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know what it would cost."

I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There was a chance to talk with his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of weather and country.

"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to deal with so many."

"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.

It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.

"That's why I want him," said I.

"But the thing is, we don't want him--a----"

"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come true--even if they are little ones----"

"Yes."

I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations, without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived in my heart, and those who were searching my books to find out were in the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by not asking for anything in the way of money.

However, the thing came to be.

My first idea was to take him alone--the little girl coming in the morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both. I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at first some sort of recognition that I was talking--but none came, neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with years.

I tried afresh each day--feared that I was not reaching him. I told him the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at this time and, though I detected something in the work more than he showed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and unlit--like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed, it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I said:

"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."

I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me--it came back like a phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days later--just to be sure. The result was the same.

I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his belongings, when called upon to do something with his hands for another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind. One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces them.

However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little, the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving--that he could grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the ground--that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant, however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters of fact and technicality.

Finding that he listened so well--that it was merely one of the inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me--I, of course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first, but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and there were two.

As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost trembling:

"I had a wonderful night."

The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst of great happenings.

"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.

"It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.

His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called his paper--

A VOICE THROUGH A LENS

Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream. I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy containing the nebular theory, and another that told about the planetary chain.

The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory, but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical form but in another--the first time I have ever lost my physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes still on.

As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...

I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold. As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the eye-piece. As I looked around the heavens to find the great spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the way. Follow me."

I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not making any indication of steps, but the close connection of the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This no doubt is a complicated affair to you."

"Yes."

"Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any clearer."

I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was covered with animals of every description--a mass, a chaos of animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in battle, the next two showed the development of these men--gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did not see.

I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I heard the voice again:

"I suppose you are still amazed."

"Yes."

"Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."

When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills, also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I heard the voice again:

"You must go now, tell the people what you saw, and some other night you will see the globe of spirituality more closely."

I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about the seventh globe some time again.

9

THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL

The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:

"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it. She's the noblest girl I know."

That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to me at the time and set me to thinking.

"How old is she?"

"Seventeen."

"What is she interested in?"

"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."

"You might ask her to come."

I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the end of a week he remarked:

"She is coming."