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."
It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the lane together.... She took a seat by the door--she takes it still, the same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell back upon the theme of all themes to me--a man's work, the meaning of it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered the ultimate heresy--that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top, the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and integrating the life that lasts.
I have said this before in this book--in other books. I may say it again. It is the truth to me--truth that the world is in need of. I am sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is production. Handling the production of others in some cases is production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.
The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own early essay classes. Old friends were here again--Introduction, Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change the entire order and impulse of their craft.
She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not penetrated it. I was afraid to open the throttle anywhere, lest she break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.
"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.