§ 3
He lay thinking idly.
“I was talking about blind alleys the other day. Queer that he should have hit on the same phrase....
“Some old sermon of mine perhaps.... No doubt I’ve had the thought before....
“I suppose that one could define education as the lifting of minds out of blind alleys....
“A permissible definition anyhow....
“I wish I could remember that talk better. I said a lot of things about submarines. I said something about the whole world really being like the crew of a submarine....
“It’s true—universally. Everyone is in a blind alley until we pierce a road....
“That was a queer talk we had.... I remember I wouldn’t go to bed—a kind of fever in the mind....
“Then there was a dream.
“I wish I could remember more of that dream. It was as if I could see round some metaphysical corner.... I seemed to be in a great place—talking to God....
“But how could one have talked to God?...
“No. It is gone....”
His thought reverted to the letter of young Burrows.
He began to scheme out the reinstatement of Woldingstanton. He had an idea of rebuilding School House with a map corridor to join it to the picture gallery and the concert hall, which were both happily still standing. He wanted the maps on one side to show the growth and succession of empires in the western world, and on the other to present the range of geographical knowledge and thought at different periods in man’s history.
As with many great headmasters, his idle daydreams were often architectural. He took out another of his dream toys now and played with it. This dream was that he could organize a series of ethnological exhibits showing various groups of primitive peoples in a triple order; first little models of them in their savage state, then displays of their arts and manufactures to show their distinctive gifts and aptitudes, and then suggestions of the part such a people might play as artists or guides, or beast tamers or the like, in a wholly civilized world. Such a collection would be far beyond the vastest possibilities to which Woldingstanton would ever attain—but he loved the dream.
The groups would stand in well-lit bays, side chapels, so to speak, in his museum building. There would be a group of seats and a blackboard, for it was one of his fantasies to have a school so great that the classes would move about it, like little groups of pilgrims in a cathedral....
From that he drifted to a scheme for grouping great schools for such common purposes as the educational development of the cinematograph, a central reference library, and the like....
For one great school leads to another. Schools are living things, and like all living things they must grow and reproduce their kind and go on from conquest to conquest—or fall under the sway of the Farrs and Dads and stagnate, become diseased and malignant, and perish. But Woldingstanton was not to perish. It was to spread. It was to call to its kind across the Atlantic and throughout the world.... It was to give and receive ideas, interbreed, and develop....
Across the blue October sky the white clouds drifted, and the air was full of the hum of a passing aeroplane. The chained dog that had once tortured the sick nerves of Mr. Huss now barked unheeded.
“I would like to give one of the chapels of the races to the memory of Gilbert,” whispered Mr. Huss....