Child and Country Part 5

I sat here recently with a little cla.s.s of six young people ranging in age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain, tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place; the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a t.i.the of its tissue.

The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.

The boy next had not done well in school. The word _dreamer_ was designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me--the mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of almost phenomenal reproduction--and yet he had listened sleepily. Of course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual, in cla.s.ses of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded schools.

I had been one who thought my own work most important--to the exclusion even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere--tension wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had he only known it.

The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands, regard the bow of sh.o.r.e-line from the East window--the Other Sh.o.r.e--for a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.

However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the sh.e.l.ls and waves, what ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood--the backward and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere--in short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all life--vibration. He arose and started up the bank.

"Don't go yet," the little girl called.

"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."

There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was Summer. The smell of the land was there--the perfume of the Old Mother herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose--the blend of all that springs into being.

"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant, but the breath of all--as if old Mother Nature were to pa.s.s, and you winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like mignonette--not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but when the wind brings it."

He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his pa.s.sages. Here was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Sh.o.r.e was faintly glorified in her morning veil.

"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not yours until you express them. And the things _you_ express, as I expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can do it."

She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.

The Old Man forgot her in a moment.

That was the real beginning.

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 att.i.tudes 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 att.i.tude 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 compet.i.tive 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 sh.o.r.e 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 "h.e.l.lo," 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.