HAROLD'S SOUL, II
You, mothers and fathers [said this particular advertising folder which I found in my morning's mail], do you know what goes on in the soul of your child?
I, for one, know very little of what goes on inside of Harold. My information on the subject would hardly furnish material for a single university extension lecture on child psychology. It is an imperfect, unsystematised knowledge based on accidental glimpses into Harold's soul, odd flashes of self-revelation, and occasional questions the boy will put to me. I don't know whether Harold is more reticent than the average boy in the second elementary grade, but in his case it does no good to cross-examine. He grows confused, suspicious, and afraid. He resents the intrusion of my rough fingers into his sensitive world of ideas. So I do not insist on detailed accounts of how the boy passes his time in class or at play; for what are time and space and grammatical sequence to the child? I am content to wait, and now and then I make discoveries.
Harold and I were discussing one day the rather important question, raised by himself, from what height a man must fall down in order to be killed. It began, I think, with umbrellas and how they behave in a high wind. From that we passed on to parachutes and balloons and the loftier mountain tops. We dwelt for some time upon the difficulties and dangers of mountaineering.
"Once there was a man," said Harold, "who used to drive six mules up a mountain."
"Six mules," I said. "How do you know?"
"A bishop told me," he said.
The sense of utter helplessness before the closed temple of Harold's private life oppressed me. Let alone his soul, I found that I did not even know how the boy was spending his time and who his associates were. Fortunately, in this case it was a bishop; but it might have been some one much worse.
And why had Harold never spoken of his friend the bishop until our talk of parachutes and mountain climbing brought forth his perfectly matter-of-fact statement? Was it indifference on Harold's part? Was it studied reticence? I thought with a pang of self-accusation how I would have behaved, after meeting a bishop; how I would have turned the conversation at the dinner-table to the declining influence of the Church; how I would have found a way of comparing the Woolworth Building with ecclesiastical architecture; how I might have steered a course from golf to bridge and from bridge to chess; always ending with a careless allusion to what the bishop said when we met.
There was, as it turned out, a simple explanation for Harold's statement. A notable conclave of bishops and laymen had been in session for some days in our neighbourhood, and one of the visiting dignitaries had addressed the school children at the opening exercises one morning. I say the explanation is simple, though it is largely my own hypothesis based on Harold's words as I have given them above; but I believe my supposition to be true. With regard to the six mules up a steep mountain I am not so sure; but probably it was a missionary bishop who entertained the children with an account of his experiences in Montana or British Columbia. What else the bishop told them Harold could not say. He admitted, regretfully, that the bishop used long words.