“Signorina, Signorina!” she calls. “The fountain is a circle. I can see a pebble that is a circle, too. I see many circles!”
So the children learn through the exercise of the senses.
But Margherita?
All this time she has flitted from one task to another. She found an outlined picture of clover leaves and colored it with dainty pencil strokes, making the leaves deep green and the background paler, and handling her pencil with careful skill. Then she took a box of white cards on which are mounted great black letters, cut from fine sandpaper. Holding each card in her left hand, she traced the form of the letter with her right forefinger, closed her eyes, traced its form again, repeated the letter’s name to herself in a whisper, sat silently a second.
As the Signorina directress moves from child to child, smiling encouragement, showing Bruno’s baby brother’s clumsy fingers how to slip a button through a buttonhole, helping Joanina to find a new form, the square, she watches Margherita.
“This may be a white day in the child’s mind growth,” she thinks, but she does not suggest, or hurry the miracle. She only waits, hopes, watches.
Silence is written on the blackboard. Three hours have passed in which over thirty children, barely out of babyhood, have worked incessantly at many different occupations, have moved gracefully and with complete freedom about the room, have changed occupations as often as they wished, have not once quarreled. But now, out of the ordered disorder, comes a marvelous hush. No word is spoken, but one baby after another, glancing the written sign, drops back with closed eyes into a hushed silence in which the whir of bird wings in the garden, the fluttering of casement hangings, the far-away sound of a bell are audible. Even Bruno’s baby brother struggles not to make a clattering noise with his little chair. No one has said to this two-year-old, “Be still.” Rather, has he been inspired to feel stillness.
Out of the restful calm of the room comes the whispered call of the Signorina: “Bruno, Piccola, Maria, Joanina, Margherita!” Lightly, noiselessly, joyously the children come and huddle in a hushed group about the directress. She has called to the soul of each child, she has commended them for their self-taught lesson in control.
As the work with the didactic materials is taken up again, Margherita sits in a little chair for a space, quiet, reflective. Her lips move, her fingers trace signs in the air and on the table before her. The Game of Silence has helped this four-year-old with her spirit unfolding. Now, with a sudden impulse, she darts to the blackboard, seizes a piece of chalk, writes.
“Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”