Part 11

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.