The Blue Flower [20]
though neither of them might know it. Each one's thought of
the other was different from the other's thought of self.
There could not be a complete understanding, a perfect accord.
What was the secret, of which each knew half, but not the other
half?
Thus, with steps that kept time, but with thoughts how
wide apart, we came to the door of the school. A warm flood
of light poured out to greet us. The Master, an elderly,
placid, comfortable man, gave me just the welcome that had
been promised in his name. The supper was waiting, and the
evening passed in such happy cheer that the bewilderments and
misgivings of the twilight melted away, and at bedtime I
dropped into the nest of sleep as one who has found a shelter
among friends.
II
The Hilltop School stood on a blessed site. Lifted high above
the village, it held the crest of the last gentle wave of the
mountains that filled the south with crowding billows, ragged
and tumultuous. Northward, the great plain lay at our feet,
smiling in the sun; meadows and groves, yellow fields of
harvest and green orchards, white roads and clustering towns,
with here and there a little city on the bank of the mighty
river which curved in a vast line of beauty toward the blue
Catskill Range, fifty miles away. Lines of filmy smoke, like
vanishing footprints in the air, marked the passage of railway
trains across the landscape--their swift flight reduced by
distance to a leisurely transition. The bright surface of the
stream was furrowed by a hundred vessels; tiny rowboats creeping
from shore to shore; knots of black barges following the lead of
puffing tugs; sloops with languid motion tacking against the
tide; white steamboats, like huge toy-houses, crowded with
pygmy inhabitants, moving smoothly on their way to the great
city, and disappearing suddenly as they turned into the
narrows between Storm-King and the Fishkill Mountains. Down
there was life, incessant, varied, restless, intricate,
many-coloured--down there was history, the highway of ancient
voyagers since the days of Hendrik Hudson, the hunting-ground
of Indian tribes, the scenes of massacre and battle, the last
camp of the Army of the Revolution, the Head-quarters of
Washington--down there were the homes of legend and
poetry, the dreamlike hills of Rip van Winkle's sleep, the
cliffs and caves haunted by the Culprit Fay, the solitudes
traversed by the Spy--all outspread before us, and visible as
in a Claude Lorraine glass, in the tranquil lucidity of
distance. And here, on the hilltop, was our own life; secluded,
yet never separated from the other life; looking down
upon it, yet woven of the same stuff; peaceful in
circumstance, yet ever busy with its own tasks, and holding in
its quiet heart all the elements of joy and sorrow and tragic
consequence.
The Master was a man of most unworldly wisdom. In his
youth a great traveller, he had brought home many
observations, a few views, and at least one theory. To him
the school was the most important of human institutions--more
vital even than the home, because it held the first real
experience of social contact, of free intercourse with other
minds and lives coming from different households and embodying
different strains of blood. "My school," said he, "is the
world in miniature. If I can teach these boys to study and
play together freely and with fairness to one another, I shall
make men fit to live and work together in society. What they
learn matters less than how they learn it. The great thing is
the bringing out of individual character so that it will find its
place in social harmony."
Yet never man knew less of character in the concrete than
Master Ward. To him each person represented a type--the
scientific, the practical, the poetic. From each one he
expected, and in each one he found, to a certain degree, the
fruit of the marked quality, the obvious, the characteristic.
But of the deeper character, made up of a hundred traits,
coloured and conditioned most vitally by something