Part 7

"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh to me," I said.

"The little girl is ten, you say?"

"Yes."

"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"

"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.

"Still you are taking her away from us."

I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.

"What do you mean--taking her away?"

"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work. Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I believe you have established the point that one can learn best from within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each day."

I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of her--lifting her apart from the many?

There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on, the job would be done more and more completely.

"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. Quest, that is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"

The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential imagination?"

"But children have it," I said.

WILD GEESE

I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is one of the tragedies of being city-bred.

Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined, because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings. Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.

It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of ducks--darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.

Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory, they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance of the soul.

Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some time really to go to sea.

Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet. Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose yesterdays are lives.

* * * * *

Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I mentioned the flying wedge.

"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the waiting-room.

I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay, and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black powder.

Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.

Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of wanderlust when he observed the geese that he kept on going without return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:

"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back mabe. Steve."