The Abbot is now seventeen. He is doing well at Columbia. Classes and routine there are mere externals. The Abbot is living a life far more real than appears—a life that few men in America have learned how to live. He has actually arrived at the conviction of the unfathomable riches that lie within. Many occultists and a few great artists have a working knowledge of this kind. We hoped the Abbot could remain at Stonestudy, but his parents wanted some letters after his family name as well as before. Our young man was enjoined to make the best of it. As a matter of fact, he is putting on a lot of brain things that work admirably with the inner activity which we made much of in our work together. In another book,[14] I told of the Abbot's awakening—how we called him from mysterious regions of silence and mystification, to a more or less adequate expression of material facts. Here was a boy almost overshadowed by his own soul at times, inclined to be half out of the body and not altogether present in the mind, when moving among the sordid affairs of the world—a lad who knew the arrangement of planets and the flow of meteoric matter better than the geography of our own continent; who swung very readily back into memories of other lives, mainly monastic, rather than into the episodes of his own kid-days. I forget just how it was that we first sensed the giant in this boy. In any case, we struck one. The ordinary training that I would give an American youth to breathe the soul of him, was not at all necessary with the Abbot. Rather, pressure was exerted from the first to make him come down into our world, to make him be one of us, to make him see streets and alleys, doorsteps and servant-stairs. They have succeeded better at Columbia in this regard than we were able to do, but the wonder and satisfaction of it all is, that the aroused mystic, the aroused artist, has not receded—but dominates his days and work. I understand that he is considered a sensation in a literary way. He is not different from his fellows. It is part of our ethics to belong where we happen to be; to do the things that others do, better, if possible, than the customary performance; to begin after that to be our inimitable selves. It is our ideal to move about the world, not to attract attention, to be quiet and calm and efficacious, to be helpful and humorous and wise, to furnish the swift, unerring word or hand or lift in the midst of affairs; to deny ourselves to no one; to hold ourselves superior to no one; to strive laughingly toward the big workmanship, to become Players after the essential apprenticeship, to win the Laugh at last, and that perfect consummation which only comes with utter and instant detachment when the task is accomplished.
The Abbot was sprawled in a Study shadow one summer afternoon, when I suddenly saw him in relation to big sea-tales. Usually we tale-tellers carry our packs. I saw the Abbot with a sea-chest that day. His was not the way of the Arabian fires and the Assyrian camel paths—the word-spinner's usual evolutionary line. He came overseas with his narratives.... I saw him in the next few years making a circle around all the capes, touching all the ports of Asiatic and insular water fronts—a bit of Conrad, a bit of Melville, a bit of Stevenson ... a most sumptuous sea-chest full of shells, corals, coins and trinkets from all the Islands; feather of a woman's fan perhaps, here and there, silks hazy from sea water, crooked knives from Malay Isles, whale-bone and shark's teeth, pearl of the mollusk, a bit of ambergris—just a top tray of the Chest! Deep mystic parchments farther within, a corner for the sacred writings of all the world, a small type mill, a great wad of white paper, the rest mainly traces of a long glide across the ocean floors. I have learned to go very slow in building a matrix of my own thought about any young man's mind, yet I told the Abbot that day what I saw for him—how he was bound to do the big sea-tales, how we were sick of steam, sick already of the big hydroplanes, sick of all that hurries, all that explodes, all that has the taint of gas; that the world presently would be so sick of noise and explosions and show and speed, that professional soothers would be in great demand, like the Japanese masseurs who wait upon the sleepless; that the sick world would want to read of long, loose, lazy days under canvas, of the few ports left where they haven't set up recruiting offices;—that the world would be in desperate need of sunlight and surf and wide swinging seas—that he must be one of those to usher in the old romance of the sailing craft again. I told about his sea-chest better than I have told it here, but the Abbot's eyes didn't bulge. Presently, however, he began to grow that way.... His Saturdays and Sabbaths now are spent, not in Morningside Heights, but down among the shipping and across the harbour, where the big world tramps hang out. You will see these things in his letters. I have several of his yarns here, but I am not going to run any of them in this book. They are good yarns, but too intrinsically big yet for the handling of a boy of seventeen. He has too much calibre for his brain so far to carry ten thousand words to superb consummation. I want to spring a big tale presently. I have a lapful of his random letters from days spent down on the water front, and nights under the study lamp: Dear Old Wasp: Morning mists over the lake, the Pelee coming up out of them. Just had a night with John and a corking good run of work. We've been watching the sun go down from Lynster's[15] back lately, and breathing the planetary heave under the stars, with the milky way dipping to the lake before us. This inland place is heavy to take. The weight of agriculture is like a blanket over all. It takes three or four pages to bore up through the cuticle. Me for a get-away to the world soon—to feed up on the hum of feet and voices and cars.... Blackbirds are beginning to blacken the mornings and nights again; touch of Fall and Pine-smoke this morning. Real itchings in the ankles—to you! A wonderful synthesis for us all when we meet up again.... I'd like to roam the world with John. He is a grand pal. Could joke over an oven made out of a tomato-can, as well as eat from a banquet table.... #/
A day or two later: ... Black forces strong around Stonestudy last night.... About eight-thirty I rode over on Lynt, to sleep with John. Decided to have a debauch with tea. While I worked on, he gathered the cups and tea and electric tea-kettle together and got things going. He called for me to come and make the tea. He was seated in the big chair with a tableleaf in front of him, and on that was the tea-kettle, boiling.... One leg slipped, and the whole boiling collection went in his lap.... A prince, the way he stood it. The bunch was just coming back from town. Penel' rushed over, and the next was a turmoil right, cries, olive oil, lint, rags, confusion of voices and footsteps—too many people and the little guy sort o' lost his control—but it all came back again. Almost any minute I am looking for the laugh from him. All night I was with him. Penelope, the finished heroine as always. One could see the shades of pain pass over John's face time and again. His nerves jump—but his mouth and eyes are certainly getting a grand hue of steel.... Yours right along.
Another: Hazy summer about. Blue over the lake with shadows deepening in the distance. Crops drying beneath the sun. Leave it at its height—am headed back for Columbia—where I'll let time shape the winds for farther "going." School is not harmful to one who is himself. I'll take philosophy, and then be over to tell you who stole your washboard.... It is no struggle, no test, for one to be lit among his own as we are. One's depth of listening is best tested in crowds. We've got to separate—go out and change the continents into tablelands of democracy. War seems settling on the world for years longer, but there is a bigger order coming out of the incredible chaos. Each must see God and worship through his work to shape the master beauty. Every one's art breaks new roads which lead to one place. Stories are coming freer every day—I've gotten across. Don't know whether it's the best thing for me. But I've done it, and that's what I wanted to know. It is all preparation. Results are beginnings. I look back now on the summer of '14. It was heaven. It was peace. To look at the cottage lights and hear the voices of rowers through the dusk was a breath from God. It was peace, it was relaxation, a deep resting of tissue for turmoil. Depth and mastery to you.
This to John: The thought of your scarred legs has been with me on the borderland of sleep for many nights, also our hours together on the pine needles. To-night, with the sun falling sadly over the iron mills, I walked along the Heights and cast an eye down into brilliant Harlem. The voices of the bargemen, the wheeze of tugs, the low growl of outpassing vessels, an occasional curse from a freighted barge, came up with the hum of the city. There seemed to be some goddess entwined with sea-weed standing over the ocean of structures. She held a finger to her lips for silence, and pointed to the Lord knows where—well, where I felt a tumult to go, to satisfy some hot quest.... I was lost to the multitude of faces that sent up a passionate and incomprehensible hum ... savour of youth singing in the veins. Presently a drizzle drove me back to the room.... I reached up and flicked out the lights.... In an apartment across the street lives an old man who always comes to his window at dark and gazes up and down the streets. His head is grey—his eyes are deep and old. The light from his shaded reading lamp falls in a pool of dim yellow about his carpet. Sometimes he turns out the lamp, and leaves the fire-place alone. Sometimes his head falls forward on his chest, and he dreams—I suppose, of boundless seas, for he was once a sea-captain. His wandering days are over—no more quest. The houses rise to his eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea.... He means old days, but we—we must never grow old; we must live and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me up with the Pacific in your letters—the big sunlight—the colour of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. I have a dry palate for it all. Fill me—eye and ear and soul. Yours deep in those scars——
Dear Old Man: The Hudson is very still this morning; a few battleships have swung out with the tide; gulls seem to be forever passing up and down the river in white eddies; smoke from the factories rises straight and white. The morning sun strikes like a sledge upon the Palisades. How grand that old river is, and how untiring in its endless ebb and flood—almost like a solar system in the serene way it deals with human traffic. A great new sense of words has come over me lately. At the very birth of language lies a chest of rich obsolete words—quite like a Spanish treasure chest, with its doubloons, bezoar stones and "pots of Arica bronze." The artists go treasure hunting in language, and a few do startle the world with their wealth. The live-long day seems to me now like a shuttle driving back and forth, weaving from soul to matter, a golden fabric. This word-chest means much to me because it deals with the sea. Lift up the lid, and tucked away in those little drawers lies the seaman's religion in bits of turquoise, in coils of fish line and hooks, in pink sea-shells, perhaps in an old violin, or in a few stray books of Carlyle, Goethe, Dante and Melville's Moby Dick. The point is we all bungle along through our world-term somehow; we have our work and religion and pleasures and tales in a camphor-wood chest with a brass band around it. Sometimes we bring out the violin and make God-awful discords, calling it music of the sea; we brighten people's eyes with our bits of turquoise; terrorise them with the philosophy that Carlyle and Goethe and Moby Dick have given us; we make them feel that endless wroom, wroom, wroom of the ocean that is washing in our souls. Yes, we must first learn the futility of life before we can live. The war teaches this lesson well, but won't it be great when everybody is singing over his golden shuttle and laughing? Won't it be great when the chastened New Race springs up, like green shoots at the passing of winter? Won't it be great when the world has grown serene and wise enough to sit down beside a blazing bark fire, with the shadows of pine trees about, or near the dim breakers, and consider it profitable to talk about the stars? ... There are times when one feels he must be alone—when he wants to be connected with nothing—when he wants to go to a distant and high altitude, and there boil his pot of alchemy—there, where the air is dust free, and the incense of one's devotion goes straight up. He must listen and listen, until he believes that he hears the stars humming in their courses; then the sun drawing like a magnet, then a crescendo of song up to a deafening roar,—that all things, all stars, are headed towards one point of balance among that whole mass of sapphires we see above. Man, but the joy of telling tales, of recording the warmth of human hearts, of loving men and their ways—to fill out a morning with that golden shuttle! One has but to sit and the sun on the walls and the shadows in the corners, or if at night, the flame on the stones of the hearth turn to words!... The old sea is full of that. The heart within her breast sounds the footfalls of quest; the ecstasy of life tears in her storm and in still hours she sits in her glitter.... Some day we shall be together on the blessed Pacific coast. We shall have bookshelves and packages of dates, bottles of cream and combs of honey. We shall work with that rugged lunge of mountains in our products; and that endless and insistent wroom, wroom, wroom of the ocean in all. Listen, here is a day as we shall have it: The sun lifting up the depth of Canyon shall awake us. After we have cooked and eaten of crisp toast and honey and coffee, we shall go to our desks and bring out a most rigid problem in mathematics,[16] and dwell perhaps for an hour in drawing all forces of thinking into play—awaking the mind—shaking off that inertia of body. After that we shall penetrate the thing which we wish to work upon that particular morning. We shall see its functions and logical action, then begin the shuttle and weave back and forth with that pliancy that sees the deepest of metaphysics in an old man lighting a pipe or loitering over a pork-pie. To top the morning, we'll have a meal of milk and dates. The afternoon shall mean an isolation with the books—perhaps on the sand with the sun tanning our backs. Both healthfully and mentally an efflux of soul. At about five in the afternoon comes the humming calm—the poise of mind and soul and body. Another meal of the simple foods and once more, production, as the sun goes into the sea—giving one's soul the might and expanse that the planets use in weaving their ways. Perhaps, at ten or eleven we shall reach up, switch out the electric bulb and open the door. That shall be a day mastered. Side by side, we'll walk over to the cliff at whose base mumbles the mighty Pacific. We shall pass no words—the earth'll be good to feel and smell. We'll honour the still night of stars. That day is a privilege to earn—our bodies must suffer and become scarred and jostled by the currents of people, and cursed upon by foul mouths. All pleasant presently. We must know the heart of a bartender as we would want to know the heart of the Christ. Do you know that Masefield was a bartender? The secret of the real artist is sanity. One must grow hair the medium length—keep a well muscled and full lunged body—and if chronic fishermen should happen in on us for a meal we must be able to argue that a hickory pole is better for a pound-net than pine; or if a devout pastor—that we would much rather praise God's work outside on the beach....
To Jane: Your letter this morning after a long, wonderful run of work. This is really the highest day I've had—real rugged work—bronze moving pictures before me—faces—open shirts on sunburnt breasts—and, of course, the eternal sea. Your letter came like a sudden bag of sunlight emptied into a mist. The water became blue and the promontories sharp like ink lines. And about Steve. I understand all. The draft explains his not writing. And this war—it's like a maelstrom rising higher and higher. Next summer for certain, possibly this Christmas, it means I go. But rather than go as a private I'm going to enlist voluntarily in the aviation corps. Flying only would have as much thrill as doing the climax of a story. That's like the sea. And I'm not panicky or worried about it. I feel in some unconscious way that the balance of the cosmos demands it. God, nobody should drag now! It's just like a marshfire that grows and grows to let the new green shoots come under in spring. It's like a big song. I would not go to fight Germany, or France or England or America. I'd go because it's a cleanser. One must play with the song of many feet and express with the original song. One must flash pictures to the many eyes of their own being. Oh—it's a song, the whole thing! And I'm looking forward to it. Only the ones such as John and Tom shall escape. Don't you see the joy, the peace, the grandeur in owning a scar, in being bled white? The first year of the war, England was black with mourning. Now, she is white.... The work is on me with talons. I am looking only at the impossible heights—of a portrayal of life—the rugged life in endless volumes. I have made an oath silently with myself that in three years I shall do a book.... The work comes now just as if I were to sit down before a fire-place with shadows and light around stones, and were to grow interested, with stars low on the horizon like live sparks. And friends? A foolish question! I mean that I must be alone in the formative thrall of work. I did want your letter. But forget pity. That is a thing that stifles soul. I do not ask, by all the stars, I do not ask for anything. The highest of all things to you all. And Steve? He has too much of the Song to be trodden or be lost or be ground in mud. You are all friends—but I must be alone now. The work is rising....
To John: There ain't no sun beatin' in my doorway, and there ain't none of your sacred seas and canyons around; but there is a socialist's riot in the street below—kerosene torches a-going—one shaggy haired enthusiast is standing on a soap box and is wagging his jaw in an athletic way.... How's the fire burning under your type-mill? What's the brand of smoke it gives up—poetry, action, lumps of granite or ladles of ocean? I'm all lit up in this place here—because things are moving—real issues are gathering—and the pulse of living is so close that I can almost feel it occasionally. Last Saturday, went to a place called Rockaway—and oh man—rocks—rugged grey and eroded—surf bitten—gnarled, twisted—and they tossed the sea's white jaws about like bits of cotton. Real sea coast it was—with a little smack in the purple way, her sails bellied, her mouth lapping the brine—an old fisherman browsing around the shores for clams while his wife hauled up the nets, basketed the cod and upturned their boat. Put an extra stick under the machine and line a few of your aphorisms.
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