So they dared go as far as that—to appoint to the high office of sheriff of the county a man such as Deputy Jenney! The thought was not without its pleasant facets. If she had forced them to take such a step it must mean she was reckoned as dangerous.... She hugged that thought to her breast.
CHAPTER XV
EVAN BARTHOLOMEW PELL was thinking. He had been thinking for hours, and according to present rate of progress, it would be hours more before he arrived at a conclusion. He had found an interesting subject—one discovered rather later in life than by most people, but, perhaps, all the more interesting for that reason. The subject was himself.
It is a fact that never until to-night had he thought about himself as the ordinary run of human beings think. When he had given consideration to himself it had been a sort of aloof, impersonal consideration. He had often thought about Evan Pell’s mind—as one thinks of a warehouse—and much consideration had been given to filling it with intellectual merchandise. No consideration whatever had been given to moving away any of that merchandise out of the warehouse and distributing it.
His requirements had been of the simplest—food, shelter, and an opportunity to lay in intellectual goods, wares, and merchandise. With pleasure he had been unacquainted, and hence felt no desire to possess it. Sorrow was unknown to him. On the whole, he was rather like a chess-playing automaton, except that his range was somewhat wider and more complicated.
But now he had discovered himself as an individual. The discovery was wholly due to Carmel Lee. He had fallen in love with her, which was a monstrous thing, but potent to prepare the soil of his mind for undesired crops. Then she had spoken to him about himself with frankness and logic. He was not disturbed by the frankness, but his antecedents rendered him apt to perceive the logic. That had impressed him. What was the use of himself, anyhow? Such was the question he considered. His object was acquisition, not dissemination. Had he been mistaken in choosing that object? This led further. What were human beings for? Why had people to be born, and to live? He recognized the necessity of utility. Was he inutile?
It was ten minutes after midnight when he admitted he was inutile, or nearly so. What followed? There followed immediately a disagreeable sensation, a sense of humiliation. He, a representative, undoubtedly, of the highest order of human beings, was not useful. Members of much lower orders were useful. The ditch digger was useful; the man who collected the garbage was useful. In that event diggers and garbage men must be of more value to the world than himself.
This was intolerable. He could not allow such a state of affairs to persist, but the method of abolishing it was not manifest. Mentally he tabulated the attributes of such patently useful things as he could remember, looking for their lowest common denominator. It appeared to be something like what Carmel Lee declared it to be—namely, improving some aspect of life upon this planet. If one could touch any phase of life and render it more efficient, he was useful. He wondered what aspect of life he could improve. And then he came to the most important and far-reaching discovery of his life. This discovery came at exactly ten minutes past one in the morning.... In order to find how one might be useful to life, one must know life! That was the discovery, and it quite overturned his conception of how he would live and die.
Inexorably his mind forced him to a corollary. In order to know life, one must know human beings. He elaborated on this. It meant mingling with human beings, taking part in their lives, watching and comprehending the significance of the ramifications of their actions and emotions. It was something one could not derive from books, unless, as he had heard vaguely, works of fiction depicted these things with some degree of verity. But he never read fiction.
All of this led to another alarming discovery. This came at two o’clock in the morning. It was this—that learning, simply as learning, was not worth a tinker’s dam. Of course this is not his phraseology, but it expresses his thought. Learning stored in the mind’s warehouse is like gold not taken from the mine. It is no good even to the possessor. You have to mine and smelt gold before it takes on a measurable value. It has to be put into circulation in some form. The same was true, necessarily, of knowledge.