She came to feel that talking to Father, when they were alone together, was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up. Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figure things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn’t know where she had begun nor how to stop the wild whirl racing around in her head. But now, with Father to hang on to, she could unravel those twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get at them.
One day, as she washed the breakfast dishes for Father to wipe, she noticed how the daffodils Aunt Mattie had brought were reflected in a wet milk-pan. It made her think a poem, which she said over in her head to make sure it was all right, and then repeated to Father,
“The shining tin usefulness of the milk-pan
Is glorified into beauty
By the presence of a flower.”
Father listened, looked at the golden reflection in the pan, said appreciatively, “So it is,” and added, “That’s quite a pretty poem, especially the last phrase.”
Helen knew it was pretty. She had secretly a high opinion of her own talents. Why had she said it aloud except to make Father think what a remarkable child she was? She washed the dishes thoughtfully, feeling a gnawing discomfort. It was horrid of her to have said that just to make Father admire her. It was showing off. She hated people who showed off. She decided ascetically to punish herself by owning up to her conceit. “I only told that poem to you because I thought it would make you think what a poetic child I am,” she confessed contritely. “It wasn’t really that I thought so much about the flower.”
She felt better. There now! Father would think what an honest, sincere child she was!
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That was showing off too! As bad as the first time! She said hastily, “And I only owned up because I thought it would make you think I’m honest and didn’t want to show off!”
This sort of tortuous winding was very familiar to Helen. She frequently got herself into it and never knew how to get out. It always frightened her a little, made her lose her head. She felt startled now. “Why, Father, do you suppose I only said that, too, to make you. …” She lifted her dripping hands out of the dishwater and turned wide, frightened eyes on her father. “Oh, Father, there I go! Do you ever get going like that? One idea hitched to another and another and another; and you keep grabbing at them and can’t get hold of one tight enough to hold it still?”
Lester laughed ruefully. “Do I? Nothing but! I often feel like a dog digging into a woodchuck hole, almost grabbing the woodchuck’s tail and never quite getting there.”
“That’s just it!” said the little girl fervently.
“I tell you, Helen,” said Lester, “that’s one of the reasons why it’s a pretty good thing for anybody with your kind of mind, or mine, to go to college. If you try, you can find out in college how to get after those thoughts that chase their own tails like that.”
“You can?” said Helen, astonished that other people knew about them.
“I suppose you think,” conjectured Lester, hanging up the potato-masher, “that you’re the only person bothered that way. But as a matter of fact, lots and lots of people have been from the beginning of time! You’ve heard about the Greek philosophers, haven’t you? Well, that is really about all they were up to.”
There was a pause, while Helen wiped off the top of the kitchen table.
Then she remarked thoughtfully, “I believe I’d like to go to college.”
It was the first time she had ever thought of it.
Oh, no, it was not always recipes they talked about on Saturday mornings!
And on Saturday nights, as he reached for some book to take to bed with him, Lester’s hand not infrequently fell on an old, rubbed, shabby volume which fell open at the passage,
“The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood whether busy or at rest,
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us—cherish—and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!”
From here on, Lester always felt a great tide lift him high. …
“Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
It was to the shouts of those children, to the reverberation of those mighty waters that the paralyzed accountant often slipped quietly from his narrow, drudging life into the “being of eternal silence.”
XVI
One of the most embittering elements of Lester’s old life had been the absence of any leisure when he could really think—consider things consecutively enough to make any sort of sense out of them. He seemed to himself to live perpetually in the mental attitude of a man with his watch in one hand and a heavy valise in the other running for a train which was already overdue. How much value would the judgment of such a
