Part 13

"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.

Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty. We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he returned it to me.

"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."

When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger." There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful sense.

The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about Fichte. The old German is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the Universe." The next day I read her paper--and there was a beam in it.

I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two papers--held the substance of the whole matter--stumbled upon as usual. We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his positions, writing to his countrymen--a wanderer, an awakened soul. And this brought us the hosts of great ones--the Burned Ones and their exaltations--George Fox and the Maid of Domremy--the everlasting spirit behind and above mortal affairs--the poor impotency of wood-fire to quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed--and all our hearts burned.

"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the skies. All things that are done--let them alone. The undone things challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions which have not yet found substance--is already prepared for the workmen of to-day to bring into matter--all great poems and inventions for the good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake. Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.

"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the great, the impossible tasks. But the mind must be entered by the Light--the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."

That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with The Abbot--that he was dynamic within and required only the developed instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we all deeply missed her presence from the Study.

Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she brought me the following which told the story in her own words of something she had met:

WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN

Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with me the things I am struggling to explain.

I like to look back at those times when everything to me was new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to school.

There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul. The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came to learn.

At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was accused of copying; that was the first wound. How I would have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is trusted.

At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends. Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is hard for such a one to love his neighbour.

The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.

The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing well that the teacher would praise his perfect reflection. Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.

Unless the school can trust children, show them that they should also be interested in their less fortunate school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A child had much better remain at home, a simple but whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and wise books.