President Irvine had the sensation of being swept out of himself upon strange, sunlit shores. The bleak land of merely intellectual perception lay behind him. Her ardour, her earnestness broke through the habitual restraint of the Anglo-Saxon.
“Let me read you part of my lecture on the new school,” he said, the contagion of her enthusiasm vibrant in his low voice. “Teachers, above all others, have occasion to be distressed when the earlier idealism of welcome to the oppressed is treated as a weak sentimentalism, when sympathy for the unfortunate and those who have not had a fair chance is regarded as a weak indulgence fatal to efficiency. The new school must aim to make up to the disinherited masses by conscious instruction, by the development of personal power for the loss of external opportunities consequent upon the passing of our pioneer days. Otherwise, power is likely to pass more and more into the hands of the wealthy, and we shall end with the same alliance between intellectual and artistic culture and economic power due to riches which has been the curse of every civilization in the past, and which our fathers in their democratic idealism thought this nation was to put an end to.”
“Grand!” she cried, clapping her hands ecstatically. “Your language is a little too high over my head for me to understand what you’re talking about, but I feel I know what you mean to say. You mean, in the new school, America is to be America, after all.” Eyes tense, brilliant, held his. “I’ll give you an advice,” she went on. “Translate your lecture in plain words like they translate things from Russian into English, or English into Russian. If you want your new school to be for the people, so you got to begin by talking in the plain words of the people. You got to feel out your thoughts from the heart and not from the head.”
Her words were like bullets that shot through the static security of his traditional past.
“Perhaps I can learn from you how to be simple.”
“Sure! I feel I can learn you how to put flesh and blood into your words so that everybody can feel your thoughts close to the heart.” The gesticulating hands swam before him like waves of living flame. “Stand before your eyes the people, the dumb, hungry people—hungry for knowledge. You got that knowledge. And when you talk in that high-headed lecture language, it’s like you threw stones to those who are hungry for bread.”
Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts. There was a new light in her eyes, new strength in her arms and fingers, when she rose to go.
“I shall never see the America which is to be,” he said as he took her hand in parting; “it will not come in my day. But I have seen its soul like a free wild bird, beating its wings not against bars, but against the skies that the light might come through and reveal the earth to be.”
She walked down the corridor and out of the building still under the spell of his presence. “Like a free wild bird! like a free wild bird!” sang in her heart.
She had nearly reached home when she became aware that tears were running down her cheeks, but they were tears of a soul filled to the brim—tears of vision and revelation. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the whole earth. She saw the soul beneath the starved, penny-pinched faces of the Ghetto. The raucous voices of the hucksters, the haggling women, the shrill cries of the children—all seemed to blend and fuse into one song of new dawn, of hope, of faith fulfilled.