“You see I was right,” she said. “You know far more than any of the students entering high school, and yet you can’t pass the examinations. It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy. You need the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you. You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you, I’d go to night school. A year and a half of it might enable you to catch up that additional six months. Besides, that would leave you your days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living by your pen, you would have your days in which to work in some position.”
But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when am I going to see you?—was Martin’s first thought, though he refrained from uttering it. Instead, he said:—
“It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. But I wouldn’t mind that if I thought it would pay. But I don’t think it will pay. I can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It would be a loss of time—” he thought of her and his desire to have her—“and I can’t afford the time. I haven’t the time to spare, in fact.”
“There is so much that is necessary.” She looked at him gently, and he was a brute to oppose her. “Physics and chemistry—you can’t do them without laboratory study; and you’ll find algebra and geometry almost hopeless without instruction. You need the skilled teachers, the specialists in the art of imparting knowledge.”
He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least vainglorious way in which to express himself.
“Please don’t think I’m bragging,” he began. “I don’t intend it that way at all. But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a natural student. I can study by myself. I take to it kindly, like a duck to water. You see yourself what I did with grammar. And I’ve learned much of other things—you would never dream how much. And I’m only getting started. Wait till I get—” He hesitated and assured himself of the pronunciation before he said “momentum. I’m getting my first real feel of things now. I’m beginning to size up the situation—”
“Please don’t say ‘size up,’ ” she interrupted.
“To get a line on things,” he hastily amended.
“That doesn’t mean anything in correct English,” she objected.
He floundered for a fresh start.
“What I’m driving at is that I’m beginning to get the lay of the land.”
Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.
“Knowledge seems to me like a chart room. Whenever I go into the library, I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is to teach the student the contents of the chart room in a systematic way. The teachers are guides to the chart room, that’s all. It’s not something that they have in their own heads. They don’t make it up, don’t create it. It’s all in the chart room and they know their way about in it, and it’s their business to show the place to strangers who might else get lost. Now I don’t get lost easily. I have the bump of location. I usually know where I’m at—What’s wrong now?”
“Don’t say ‘where I’m at.’ ”
“That’s right,” he said gratefully, “where I am. But where am I at—I mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart room. Well, some people—”
“Persons,” she corrected.
“Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along without them. I’ve spent a lot of time in the chart room now, and I’m on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to, what coasts I want to explore. And from the way I line it up, I’ll explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. The speed of a fleet, you know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers is affected the same way. They can’t go any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and I can set a faster pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom.”
“ ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone,’ ” she quoted at him.
But I’d travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit spaces and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were giants. They knew how to express what they thought, and felt, and saw. Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw noble and beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth. But he would cease sleeping in the sun. He would stand up, with open eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of making words obedient servitors, and of making
