The Valley Road Girl, who gave us the title, and helped us to see how the New Race will become in due time the planetary hive, asked not to appear in this book. A letter this morning asks it again. She is in the stress and heat of a series of ordeals, learning what it means suddenly to be parted from friends and the centre of her work. A wise and sensitive young woman—I rather thrill over her sufferings. We don't commiserate; we congratulate, when one is called to a stretch of particularly stiff and solitary going. We know that one must be passionately worthy to take the big-calibred ordeals. There is pain to all births—pain, the precursor of greater joys. Pain is not the expansion of the flower to the sun; that is joy, that comes afterward. Pain is the necessary rupturing of the bud-sheaths before the final unfolding into the new dimension. Pain is within, inarticulate—merely finds a correspondence in some outer cause.
Part of the Valley Road Girl's letter follows:
... It hurt to let that last Lamentation go to you. I thought of the times when I had put up a braver fight, bolstered only with pride. But pride is low now, and still dwindling in the glass. Even the gods withdraw from the pathetic. They love us more when we challenge with doubt than when we implore. The many are God-fearing. They must have some divine power to shift their responsibility upon. They can ask the Flame to cleanse them, but quail at working out their own salvation. I have done some crying out to God, but I am finished. The one good path I have is Work—self-expression every day.
I made another mistake—in looking back. Regret identifies us with the past and impedes progress. Youth is smileless, inclined to regard to-day's struggles as ultimate evil, but gradually we learn that all things pass. To consider everything as in transition, we place ourselves in the very current of growth.... For rapid journeying, we must travel light. We can only carry along the spirit of things—the essence of our joys and lessons. That's what I have from Chapel days.
I blush for many hours since. Sometimes I have felt as if I were on a vast plain and there was no God nor earth nor the quality of love anywhere, but only I—deathless—in long, hideous travail, all life to be tested against this Me!...
How I want to write! Every day more awe enfolds the dream. Days bring me closer to the Town. The war has deepened the hearts of all the young people here, especially the women. Young women are very wonderful to me. They have a certain loveliness of body that comes of girl-whiteness within—thoughtful tenderness about them, and something else, a lightness that may be just youth. It attracts me because I have never felt it.
I do not care if the gods laugh at my ambitions to write. By the very sign that we are victims of matter now, we shall become victors. I want the bottom—down among the deeps of pain, where all the sorrow of the world is my sorrow; all tears, my tears.... I am not ready for the Hive. No compromise. To accept less in one's work than the dream—that is failure.
The Valley Road Girl is eighteen. She has hardly been away from the little town by the lake shore. She is held to it queerly still. I expect her to make the place long-lived in the memory of many novel readers. I see the big book of the country-side about her—a gallery of quaint and curious faces—done with her stern, sweet power. I have seen this big book building about her, as I see the top trays of The Abbot's Sea Chest. These are the days of her sketching and tearing down. Deep draughts of life call to her, deeps of religion, deeps of cosmic memory—and all about is the little town. The meaning has come to her at last. Already she has turned to love the nearest; loving the nearest will unfold the big book and set her free. Six hundred pages I call for—the leisurely vibration, terrible intensity of romantic moments, passion of the fields, the hideous mockery of narrow, brittle lives, the country-wife worn glassy with routine and insane monotony, and the young of the country-side—quick bloom, pure youth falling into coarseness before its form is finished, the real and immortal behind it all. These are her properties. Hundreds of pages have been written and prayerfully destroyed. Thus is she setting herself free.
I have a paper of hers on the spiritual adventures of a smileless child—which I liked much when it came in, more than two years ago. The Valley Road Girl is close to us in all our preparing and building; so that these chapters would be strange without her voice:
... Fire was always terrible, so my first aspirations were caused by fear of hell below. Before that, I had wanted to laugh when told to pray. As I grew, I thought much of the heavenly state, but could find only vague pictures. Recently I asked a country minister his idea of heaven, and he seemed uncertain. He could only assure me that it was a desirable place. Yet children always wonder about their destination, questioning as they journey.
I started early to pray—a grim affair; at first crying out through fear or hurt. God was too awful for such intimacies so I took the Christ figure of the Trinity into my confidence. Just here came a strange transition. It didn't seem sufficient for me to think those prayers: I felt I must state them clearly or my wish might be ambiguous. Even to-day, I find that only expressing a thing simplifies it for me.
If there were acquaintances whose lives were touched with beauty or romance, I prayed for them, but mostly named my wants. I made the discovery that the intensity put forth in holding the image of a desire brings it into the world. Man may call the answer God, but that seems his own power. I have sometimes thought of Will with its divine kindred, Wisdom and Love, as the Three Who stood first before His Face.
To-day we dream, and to-morrow our hands are filled. I remember the early Chapel days when the Old Man would say, "Be careful what you want—you are apt to get it,"—with a great laugh and mystery playing about his words. How truly one comes to realise that. When I started at Stonestudy, the town-people used to ask how we were taught,—if our English and story-structure were principally considered as in the schools. I could only tell them, "Oh, no, not like school!" Then I tried to explain Chapel and they wondered how that manner of education could make us writers. Yet our writing improved with the days. Work, a few weeks old, embarrassed us with its defects.
Then I actually tried to discover just how we were being helped. To a young aspirant, there is awe about an artist; we had come to listen. The same thoughts expressed in homely words wouldn't have quickened us. The Old Man's sentences were rich with figures that clarified everything. We began to see Stonestudy. About this time at home I used to start anything that interested me, "I've got a picture——" Chapel had helped me, as only one can help another, by quickening the imagination.
That was what drew me to the Little Girl—her vivid impression of things. She could make her listener see also. Speaking of children whom school had overwhelmed, she used to tell us of their "lacking eyes" and the world that had crushed them, as the "solid world." ... I think that was the secret of her faith in fairies and Nature's most elusive agencies. I listened doubtfully at first, for school had tampered with my once-ready belief. One had first to trust her words, "If you believe, you will see." And I recalled my early religious experiences, based on "According to your faith, be it unto you."
This is the "really" religion—faith in the hidden world. We conceive its light gradually as the seed pushes its way upward through the soil. All religion that does not make the workshop a Chapel—the place for picturing heaven, is less than we know. I seem to confuse religion with the stimulating of the imagination. It is because they are one to me.
The Valley Road Girl has a beautiful sister who was rather reluctant to come to Stonestudy. She did not think she could ever belong; had no thought ever of writing or taking part in our things, yet none of the young people ever brought us more than Esther. I found the following pages about these two sisters together among the writings of the Little Girl:
... On the floor below lived two girls who came often to visit their beloved friends in the attic. One was a year or so older than the other, and most serious and sober, constantly hunting for her own philosophy and making her own religion, praying for power and vision, fearing lest she fail at the appointed task, suffering over conditions, revolting at times, loving her work and her sister with an everlasting passion. That was the one whom we call the Valley Road Girl.
The other was a perfect giver, born with the thought of her own smallness, unwilling to accept a different point of view on the subject from another. A spirit—wide eyes, frail body, living her life calmly, objecting to nothing, obeying others, loving all, frightening her parents with her absolute goodness. And that was Esther.
When she came at last to Stonestudy, her cushion with the others round the fire had been waiting for many months. For we all knew her; through the Valley Road Girl we knew Esther belonged to us. One Chapel day later, when she remained at home, we wondered how we'd ever manage without her.... Occasionally Esther brought a paper with her and laid it under the black stone—a bit of verse, perhaps a dream, or something deep and mysterious from her soul. One day it was a picture of the Desert, I remember.... Noonday, the white heat of the sun reflected by the sand, the brown of a camel's eyes, the long road to travel—caravans—then night—the sound of low music, women dancing, the red of fires on black oily bodies of slaves.... Esther made us see it all.
There were long days in the woods—spring quickening life in all things. We'd gather moss and violets and talk endlessly, Esther always so free these memorable days, and happy. It was the dance that set her free—her expression through the dance—a dancer's body and soul, her wonderful quality of forgetfulness of self, made her perfect. Literally she could surrender herself to the music, trust it, and be carried in perfect grace and rhythm. We watched her unfold, the beauty of her deepening in every way. Her joy in life grew. She became like a nymph in the pure light of summer....
As was set down in the other book,[17] it was the Little Girl who started these educational proceedings. Less than four years ago I suggested that she remain home from school, and take a stroll with me down the Shore. I was a bit bored at the time, doubtless heavy with the sense of parental care. To my best knowledge, the Little Girl was in no way extraordinary. She does not seem so now. It seemed natural for her to turn in the chapter on "Tom" in this book. I did not think of it as a brimming thing for a child to perform. Incidentally Steve brought in an essay last night on the young lovers and beauty lovers of the New Race, covering matters which I planned as necessary for me to do in this book. Weaving, that's really what a book from the group amounts to—weaving, more and more. From time to time in years to come, I hope to take a few weeks and spin a book.
It is only in matters having to do with actual world-facts that the Little Girl ever reminds us that she is only finishing her second period of sevens. There is no one to whom I go more often for wisdom or consolation. Her comradeship is complete. Others forget the matter of age in relation to her. Her big friendship with the Valley Road Girl overrides four years of growth most formidable in the usual attachment. The soul is out of time and space. The same thing is more emphatically shown in the case of John and The Abbot—nine and seventeen.
The Little Girl reads very little—not nearly so much as I do. She carries no weights. The slightest tendency toward precocity would sicken me of the whole business. This growth and development which I speak of is not intellectual in the acquisitive sense. I take the young minds away from long division examples. One of those a day is plenty. Excessive use of the young brain is dangerous. One should handle brain-tissue with delicacy. One should learn well how to think, so as to escape lesion and avoid rupture of those most delicate fibres. Any strain sounds a warning. The use and development of the brain from outside is only safe so long as the process is joyous. The development of the brain from within is natural and continually felicitous. No two processes are alike—for the Soul perfects the instrument to serve Itself. In due time the brain, thus trained, will bring forth the one perfect and inimitable product. Trained by the world solely from without, its product is a mere standard at best.
I have met absolutely no ill results, not even from the gentle encouragement of the practice of concentration among children. This is stiff brainwork for a time—stiff because the brain must be mastered. But the brain that has learned to listen for the voice of the Master within, is already using the fruits of concentration, and as I have written before, the children master the distractions more easily than developed personalities. One must learn how to think obediently before one can silence the thoughts. One must silence the brain to hear the Soul, but one must be the Soul to silence the brain.
Intellectual children have been brought to me several times. They lack the essential reverence. They wish to show me what they know; their parents goad them into this showing. These are not the new race type that thrills us.... I cannot help you out of a predicament if my hands are full of bundles. I cannot bring to you the one spontaneous utterance that you long for, if my brain is crowded with the things of to-day and yesterday. I place upon the ground my bundles, and give you a hand. I clear my mind of all its recent and immediate acquisitions, and by the very force and matrix of your need (if I am the valuable teacher) I supply, from the infinite reservoir of massed experiences, an intuitional answer that will not leave you as you were.
... God pity the good little brain-pans so heavily piled in public schools, and the brave little memories so cruelly taxed. I want to brush all junk away from them, let their souls breathe, let them become as little children, show them how the greatest workmen and the master-thinkers are great and masterful, simply because they have learned how to become as little children.
