“He walks very fast, doesn’t he? Almost running? He’s very thin but strong. And he had a little clipped mustache, hadn’t he?”
“How did you know?” his mother cried. “He did have a mustache when we first met, and I didn’t like it, and he shaved it off and never let it grow again.”
“I don’t know how I know, I don’t know how I see, but I know so well that I see.”
His mother looked at him wistfully and in awe, and she waited.
“Sometimes,” he went on almost unwillingly, “I think it is not good.”
“For example?” she inquired when he paused.
“Well, in school, for example, especially in math, the teachers thought I was cheating when we were doing mental arithmetic. But I could see. I wasn’t cheating.”
“Of course not,” his mother said.
He did not notice it then, and it was not until years later that he thought of it, but from this time on his mother told him no more of his father. She devoted herself to him, usually in a silence that was almost awe. She paid heed to his food, preparing him the most nourishing meals she could devise, and was anxious that he had sufficient sleep. But he forgot her. His mind was crowded with visions of creations. His thoughts were always of creations. But he ate voraciously, for his body was beginning to grow very fast. Until now he had been a boy of medium height. Suddenly, or so it seemed to him, he was nearly six feet tall, though he was not yet thirteen. He was so tall that it seemed to him he got in his own way. There was one advantage to this extreme height. It made him less conspicuous at the college. His face was still a boy’s face, but his bones were gangling, and he was as lean as a big bird, and still he held his head high.
HIS PROBLEM WAS THE ETERNAL question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. He felt restrained and repressed. He sat in his college classes, holding himself in, forbidding himself the luxury of impatience with the slowness, the meticulousness of his teachers.
“Oh, get on,” he muttered under his breath, his teeth clenched, “get on—get on.”
He envisioned what they meant before they had finished a point. His imagination obsessed him. The very atmosphere was floating with ideas. He had so many ideas in the course of a day that he bewildered himself. How could he bring them into focus? What was this imagination of his, continually busy with creation but uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable? At least, he did not yet know how to control it and could not know until his will directed and compelled him to control his imagination.
So far as he could discover, none of his classmates suffered as he did. He had no friends, for mere friendliness, and he was by instinct eagerly friendly, did not mean friendship. He felt, at times, that he was in a desert alone, a desert of his own making merely because he was as he was. He had long ago outgrown his mother and he had almost ceased to think of his father. He was totally absorbed in the problem of himself and what direction he should give himself. He lived in absolute loneliness for most of his time at college.
One day in his third year, a chance remark of his professor in psychology class caught his attention.
“Most people,” the professor said, “are merely adaptive. They learn as animals learn—a chimpanzee rides a bicycle, a mouse follows a maze. But now and then a man is born who is more than adaptive. He is creative. He may be a problem to himself, but he solves his problems through his imagination. Once his problems are solved, his mind is free to create. And the more he creates, the more free he is.”
A sudden light broke across Rannie’s mind. He sought out the professor after the class, lingering until every other student had left the classroom.
“I’d like to talk with you,” he told the professor.
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” the professor said.
“I SHAN’T BE HOME THIS evening,” he told his mother. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sharpe. He’s expecting me. I may be late—it depends.”
“Depends on what?” his mother asked.
She had a quiet, penetrative way of asking questions. He looked at her, thinking not of her but of her question.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t know how the talk will go. If I don’t learn anything from it, I’ll be home early. If I do, I’ll be late.”
He ate his evening meal in the silence of abstraction. They had continued to eat their meals in the kitchen. While his father lived this meal had been the one formal occasion of the day, always set in the dining room. Breakfast was a brief pause at the kitchen table, luncheon a random sandwich, but his father liked the grace of dining at night with a change of garments, a table set with silver and china and a bowl of flowers. The dining room had never seemed too large for the three of them, but alone with his mother it was too large, too empty.
“I don’t know Dr. Sharpe very well,” his mother was saying.
“Neither do I, really,” he replied. “It’s good to have someone young with fresh ideas. I’ve known the other professors all my life, it seems. They’re all right, of course, but—”
His mind took over again and he fell silent. His mother prodded him.
“But what?”
“But what?” he repeated. “Only that I like having something new. Especially if it’s something I am already thinking about.”
“And that is?…”
He glanced at his mother’s questioning face and smiled, half shyly, “I don’t know—creativity, I suppose!”
Half an hour later he was in Donald Sharpe’s small living room. They were alone, for Sharpe was a bachelor and kept his own house, except for a cleaning woman once a week. It was a charming room, decorated with taste and design. Two French paintings, in the style of the Old Masters, hung on facing walls, and on a third, opposite the chimney piece, was a Japanese scroll. An easy chair covered in old gold velvet was on each side of the fireplace. The autumn was late autumn, the evenings were chill, and a wood fire scented the room.
He felt at ease and somehow comforted in this room as he had not been comforted since his father died. The gold velvet chair fitted his lanky body, and he liked its luxurious softness. Donald Sharpe sat opposite him, and on the small table beside him was a tall-stemmed wineglass.
“You’re still quite young, Rannie,” he had said, “but this is such a gentle drink that I don’t think it will count.”
So saying, he had poured a glass of wine for his visitor and Rannie had tasted it and set it down on the table beside his chair.
“You don’t like it?” Sharpe asked.
“Not really,” he replied honestly.
“It’s an acquired taste, I suppose,” Sharpe said.
That was how the evening began. Now it had progressed to solid talk, interspersed with long moments of working silence.
He was a handsome man in a dark way, almost too handsome, not tall, and with a feminine lightness of bone structure. His eyes were his most notable feature, large and dark under clearly marked brows, their gaze penetrative, bold, or stealthy by turns. He continued to speak.
“Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation. But I’m not sure that explains art. Perhaps art is the crystallization of emotion. One has to feel an overflow. I write poetry, for example. But days and months go by—sometimes a year or even longer—when I write nothing, not a line, because I’ve felt nothing deeply enough to crystallize. There has to be a concentration of emotion before I can crystallize it into a poem. I feel a relief, actual relief, emotionally, when I’ve written the poem. I
His voice was beautiful, a baritone flexible and melodious. He leaned forward suddenly and with a total change of manner he put forward a question.
“What is your name—I mean, what do they call you at home?”
“My name is Randolph—Rannie for short.”
