13
THE ABBOT
The Abbot is now seventeen. He is doing well at Columbia. Classes and routine there are mere externals. The Abbot is living a life far more real than appears—a life that few men in America have learned how to live. He has actually arrived at the conviction of the unfathomable riches that lie within. Many occultists and a few great artists have a working knowledge of this kind. We hoped the Abbot could remain at Stonestudy, but his parents wanted some letters after his family name as well as before. Our young man was enjoined to make the best of it. As a matter of fact, he is putting on a lot of brain things that work admirably with the inner activity which we made much of in our work together.
In another book,[14] I told of the Abbot's awakening—how we called him from mysterious regions of silence and mystification, to a more or less adequate expression of material facts. Here was a boy almost overshadowed by his own soul at times, inclined to be half out of the body and not altogether present in the mind, when moving among the sordid affairs of the world—a lad who knew the arrangement of planets and the flow of meteoric matter better than the geography of our own continent; who swung very readily back into memories of other lives, mainly monastic, rather than into the episodes of his own kid-days.
I forget just how it was that we first sensed the giant in this boy. In any case, we struck one. The ordinary training that I would give an American youth to breathe the soul of him, was not at all necessary with the Abbot. Rather, pressure was exerted from the first to make him come down into our world, to make him be one of us, to make him see streets and alleys, doorsteps and servant-stairs. They have succeeded better at Columbia in this regard than we were able to do, but the wonder and satisfaction of it all is, that the aroused mystic, the aroused artist, has not receded—but dominates his days and work. I understand that he is considered a sensation in a literary way.
He is not different from his fellows. It is part of our ethics to belong where we happen to be; to do the things that others do, better, if possible, than the customary performance; to begin after that to be our inimitable selves. It is our ideal to move about the world, not to attract attention, to be quiet and calm and efficacious, to be helpful and humorous and wise, to furnish the swift, unerring word or hand or lift in the midst of affairs; to deny ourselves to no one; to hold ourselves superior to no one; to strive laughingly toward the big workmanship, to become Players after the essential apprenticeship, to win the Laugh at last, and that perfect consummation which only comes with utter and instant detachment when the task is accomplished.
The Abbot was sprawled in a Study shadow one summer afternoon, when I suddenly saw him in relation to big sea-tales. Usually we tale-tellers carry our packs. I saw the Abbot with a sea-chest that day. His was not the way of the Arabian fires and the Assyrian camel paths—the word-spinner's usual evolutionary line. He came overseas with his narratives.... I saw him in the next few years making a circle around all the capes, touching all the ports of Asiatic and insular water fronts—a bit of Conrad, a bit of Melville, a bit of Stevenson ... a most sumptuous sea-chest full of shells, corals, coins and trinkets from all the Islands; feather of a woman's fan perhaps, here and there, silks hazy from sea water, crooked knives from Malay Isles, whale-bone and shark's teeth, pearl of the mollusk, a bit of ambergris—just a top tray of the Chest! Deep mystic parchments farther within, a corner for the sacred writings of all the world, a small type mill, a great wad of white paper, the rest mainly traces of a long glide across the ocean floors.
I have learned to go very slow in building a matrix of my own thought about any young man's mind, yet I told the Abbot that day what I saw for him—how he was bound to do the big sea-tales, how we were sick of steam, sick already of the big hydroplanes, sick of all that hurries, all that explodes, all that has the taint of gas; that the world presently would be so sick of noise and explosions and show and speed, that professional soothers would be in great demand, like the Japanese masseurs who wait upon the sleepless; that the sick world would want to read of long, loose, lazy days under canvas, of the few ports left where they haven't set up recruiting offices;—that the world would be in desperate need of sunlight and surf and wide swinging seas—that he must be one of those to usher in the old romance of the sailing craft again.
I told about his sea-chest better than I have told it here, but the Abbot's eyes didn't bulge. Presently, however, he began to grow that way.... His Saturdays and Sabbaths now are spent, not in Morningside Heights, but down among the shipping and across the harbour, where the big world tramps hang out. You will see these things in his letters. I have several of his yarns here, but I am not going to run any of them in this book. They are good yarns, but too intrinsically big yet for the handling of a boy of seventeen. He has too much calibre for his brain so far to carry ten thousand words to superb consummation. I want to spring a big tale presently. I have a lapful of his random letters from days spent down on the water front, and nights under the study lamp: