It was not a request. It was a command. And I did say them, and saw a soul's awakening.
Oh, there are people who won't believe that it can be done like that—in a moment. But that boy was ready. He had dreamed and until now no one had ever put the dreams into words for him. He cannot read, has probably never heard a fairy tale—the lore of this region is gruesome and ghostly, rather than lovely and poetic.
Perhaps, 'way back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and he has not known enough to call them bells. However that may be, my verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.
Without knowing anything, he is ready for everything. Perhaps there are others like him. Cousin Patty says there are girls. She insists that the girls need cook-books, not poetry, but I am not sure.
I shall go again to the pines, and teach that boy first by telling him things, then I shall take books. I haven't been as interested in anything for years as I am in that boy.
So, will you think of me as seeing, faintly, the Vision? Your eyes are clearer than mine. You can see farther; and what you see, will you tell me?
And now about Barry. I know how hard it is to have him leave you, and that under all your talk of trumpets blowing and flags flying, there's the ache and the heart-break. I cannot see why such things should come to you. The rest of us probably deserve what we get. But you—I should like to think of you always as in a garden—you have the power to make things bloom. You have even quickened the dry dust of my own dead life, so that now in it there's a little plot of the pansies of my thoughts of you, and there's rosemary, for remembrance, and there's the little bed of my interest in that boy—what seeds did you plant for it?
It is raining here to-night. I wonder it the rain is beating on the windows of the Tower Rooms, and if you are snug within, with Pittiwitz purring and the fire snapping, and I wonder if throughout all that rain you are sending any thought to me.
Perhaps I shouldn't ask it. But I do ask for another letter. What the last was to me I have told you. I shall live on the hope of the next.
Faithfully and gratefully always,
ROGER POOLE.