The Eternal Wonder (9 page)

Hours passed while he listened, now and then asking a question, but all the while yielding to the fascination of the man. The clock on the mantelpiece striking midnight startled him.

“Oh, I must go home—I still have a theme to finish for your class tomorrow, sir!”

Sharpe smiled. “I’ll give you an extra day. You’ve given me a pleasant evening. It’s not often that I have a listener who knows what I am talking about.”

“You’ve clarified my own wondering and thinking, sir.”

“Good! You must come again. A teacher keeps searching for the ideal pupil.”

“Thank you, sir. The search is mutual.”

They clasped hands, and Sharpe’s hand strangely felt hot and soft. It surprised him and he withdrew his own hand quickly.

When he reached home, his mother was sitting up for him in the kitchen.

“Oh, Rannie, I was wondering—”

“I’ve had a wonderful evening. I’ve learned a lot. And—Mother!” He paused.

“Yes, Rannie?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Rannie anymore.”

“No? Then what? Randolph?”

“Just Rann—with two
n
’s.”

“Very well—if you wish. I’ll try to remember.”

“Thanks, Mother.”

She looked at him strangely, nevertheless, as though she were pondering a question. But he put off questions.

“Good night, Mother,” he said, and was gone.

He was sleepless. Donald Sharpe had awakened his whole being. The question now focusing itself in his mind was himself. What was he, artist or scientist? He felt the impulse, the urge, the necessity to create somehow compelling him—but to what? How could he know what to do when he did not know himself or who he was? How was this to be discovered? He felt a mighty impatience with going to school. What was the use of learning about the past, and of studying what other people had done? Yet was it not helpful to know what they had done? Galileo, for example, had been everything—musician, painter, scientist. But had he learned all this in school or had he learned by himself and for himself?

He was kept awake by his own questions. Around him the house was dark and silent. Downstairs in the dining room the old grandfather clock, which had belonged to his Dutch great-grandfather on his mother’s side, twanged out the early morning hours, one and two and finally three. The moon sank below the horizon before dawn brought him to sleep. It was a troubled sleep, broken by confused dreams. But the confusion was dominated by the recurrent appearance of Donald Sharpe.

When he woke in the morning, the sun was streaming through the eastern window of his room. He woke in a strange and quiet peace, altogether different from the turmoil of the night. This peace, as he lay enjoying it, savoring its rest, centered about Donald Sharpe. He relived again the hours that had passed so quickly the night before. Not since his father’s death had he enjoyed anything as much as the evening. Indeed, perhaps he had never had such enjoyment before; the stretching of his mind to meet Sharpe’s had been stimulated by the charm of the man, his youth, his maturity, even his physical beauty stirred the very soul, an attraction beyond any person he had ever known. And this attraction was to a living person, someone who might become, perhaps already was, his friend. He had never had a real friend. Boys of his own age might be partners in sports and casual occupations, but he had met none with whom he could talk on terms of equality. Now he had a friend!

The certainty ran through his blood, an elixir of joy. He sprang out of bed and rushed to meet the day, a shower, clean clothes, an enormous breakfast. He had not been hungry for days. Now he could scarcely wait to get to his breakfast. His first class of the morning was with Donald Sharpe.

“YOU MUST PAY HEED
TO
your conscious mind,” Donald Sharpe said.

He stood before his class, a hundred or more students sitting before him, rising tier upon tier until the last row under the ceiling. He spoke to them all, but Rann, seated in the middle seat of the first row, met his warm, half-caressing gaze.

“Feed it and then heed it,” Sharpe said, smiling. “The subconscious mind is different. Feed it by not heeding it. Let the subconscious mind be as free as a hummingbird in a flower garden. Did you ever watch a hummingbird? No? Next time watch! A hummingbird is the swingiest of birds. It darts here, there, everywhere, tasting this flower and that, trying one garden and another. So with your mind! Let it be free. Read anything, everything, go everywhere, anywhere, know something about everything and all you can about as many things, as many people, as many worlds, as you can. Then when you pose a problem, heed your subconscious mind. Wait for it to draw out of its stores the information you need, upon which you can base your decision. Sometimes the information you need will express itself in a dream while you sleep, or even in a daydream. I believe in daydreaming. Don’t let your parents—and teachers—tell you that daydreaming is idleness. No, no—it gives the subconscious mind a chance to speak. Newton pondered gravity in many daydreams until one day a falling apple triggered his subconscious mind and told him that gravity was an interplanetary force. Two brothers—the Montgolfiers—were daydreaming before a fire they had lit on a chilly evening and they noticed that the hot air carried bits of paper up the chimney—why not a balloon of hot air to carry a man into the sky?

“And not only scientists, but artists use the subconscious mind. Coleridge dreamed his poem
Kubla Khan
before he wrote it, which he did the moment he woke—and forgot when a friend interrupted him, alas! Our modern artists, some of them, use the subconscious mind before it is directed into its crystal form—example: James Joyce in literature, Dalí
in art—interesting, but perhaps too literal to convey meaning. The subconscious mind has to be pressured by need, by demand, before it will focus and produce the necessary information in organized form. This is the method of art.”

Rann raised his hand and Sharpe nodded.

“Doesn’t a scientist have to imagine, or dream, as much as an artist does—perhaps more? Because he knows so definitely what he wants to achieve.”

“He knows,” Sharpe said, “and therefore his search among his dream materials is directed. But sometimes it is not. Sometimes his focus comes out of wonder. Wonder—then ask why! That’s a technique too—though a technician is not a pure scientist. Yes, I’d say a real artist and a pure scientist are related. Matter of fact, most top scientists are also musicians, painters, and so forth, as you will discover when you come to know them.”

“Can artists be scientists?” Rann asked.

Question and answer sped between them like lightning and thunder.

“Yes,” Sharpe said firmly. “Not basically in dream stuff, but artist imagination lays hold on any effect as material. Electronic sound produces a new kind of music, new color formations affect painters. The artist receives the new material, makes it his own, and through it expresses his reactions, his feelings.”

“I see a difference between scientists and artists,” Rann declared.

“Tell me,” Sharpe commanded.

“Scientists invent, discover, prove. Artists express. They don’t have to prove. If they are successful—”

“That is, if they communicate—,” Sharpe interpolated.

“Yes,” Rann said.

“Right,” Sharpe replied. “You and I must talk about this further. Stay after class a moment.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Class dismissed.”

To Rann, lingering at his desk, he said almost abruptly, “I have a committee meeting tonight. Come over tomorrow night about eight. If you have your theme finished, bring it to me.”

“Yes, Dr. Sharpe,” Rann said.

For a reason he could not explain he felt almost rebuffed, and he went away puzzled to the point, almost, of wound.

“YOU’RE NOT EATING,”
HIS MOTHER
said.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “I’ve never known you not to be hungry. Do you feel sick?”

“No,” he said.

“Has something happened today?”

“I went to my classes as usual, but I have a theme to write tonight. I keep thinking about it.”

“What’s it about?”

Her persistence drove him near to anger. “I don’t know yet.”

“What class is it for?”

“Psychology II.”

“That’s Dr. Sharpe.”

“Yes.”

She reflected briefly. “There’s something about that man I don’t like.”

“Perhaps you don’t know him well enough.”

“He wasn’t a special friend of your father’s.”

“Were they
not
friends?”

“I don’t remember that I ever heard him speak of Donald Sharpe.”

“They weren’t in the same department.”

“That’s another thing. It would have pleased your father if you’d chosen his department—English.”

“Father always wanted me to choose for myself.”

He tried to keep irritation out of his voice, for he loved his mother in the depths of his being. On the surface of his life, his daily life in this house that he had shared with her as long ago as he could remember, she was beginning to irritate him in ways that made him ashamed and puzzled. He had always loved her wholeheartedly and simply with childhood love. Now his love was tinged with a sense of repulsion that was almost physical. He did not like to know that he had been formed in her womb, from whence he had emerged red with her blood. Especially he hated to hear her advocate breast-feeding when she spoke with young faculty wives in pregnancy.

“I nursed my baby,” she would declare.

It sickened him to think of himself ever as a baby sucking at her full breasts, and that she was in fact a very pretty woman, her smooth fair hair scarcely gray, and blue eyes gentle, and her features finely cut, the mouth especially soft and tender. Her very prettiness added to his conflict about her. It seemed unnecessary, even unwise, for a mother to be so pretty that other people remarked on it, and since his father’s death, especially, that men liked to talk with her, young or old they liked her, and this roused in him a cold sort of jealousy, for his father’s sake.

In his instant and unavoidable imagination he saw the process of himself feeding at her breast, and tried not to see it. It had become disgusting to him. He wished that he could have been born in some other way and independently, out of the air, or chemically in a laboratory. As yet he was not attracted to women, and he avoided the memory of Ruthie’s rosy organs, though sometimes, to his surprise, he dreamed of her, although he had not seen her for years, nor Chris, either.

Such facts he put away as he sat at his desk in his own room before his typewriter. His subject, which he wrote in careful capitals, was INVENTORS AND POETS.

“The dreams of poets,” he began, “led to the inventions of scientists. A poet imagines himself in the body of a bird. What is it like to fly above the treetops, what is it like to soar in the sky? If he is only a poet, then he only dreams. But if he longs to make his dream come true, he imagines himself flying somehow just as he is, a man without wings. Yet wings, it is obvious, he must have if he is ever to fly and so he must manufacture wings. He must make a machine which will lift him from the earth. He dreams again but now of such a machine, and with his hands, guided by his dream, he tries until he succeeds in making an airplane. It may not be the same man who finishes the making of the machine. Many men worked on aircraft before one was successful, and the dream itself was as old as Icarus. But the dream came first. Dreamer and inventor both are necessary. They are the creators, the one of the dream, the other of its concrete and final form.”

The thoughts poured into his brain, and his fingers flew to put them down. When the pages were finished—twenty pages, more than he had ever written before—it was midnight. He heard his mother pause at the door, but she did not open the door or even call. She merely paused; he thought he heard her sigh and then she went away. He was growing beyond her direction and she knew it. But then, so did he, and thinking about it as he made ready for bed, he became aware that he might feel lonely, thus separating himself from her as inevitably he must if he were to grow to be himself, except that he had a friend, a guiding friend, a man, Donald Sharpe. Tomorrow he would see him again. He would get up early and correct his theme and without copying it over, he would hand it in. And Donald Sharpe, his friend, his teacher, would say, “Come around this evening, and we’ll talk about it.”

He went to bed and was sleepless in a certain excitement.

“I SHAN’T CRITICIZE THIS, RANN,”
Sharpe said, ruffling the sheets of closely written paper.

“I want you to criticize,” Rann said.

He was aware of Sharpe’s powerful charm, resisted it and then succumbed to it. It was a combination he felt helpless to resist, an aura of the spirit, a scintillating intelligence shining through the dark eyes, a physical presence of attraction. He felt a strange new longing to touch Sharpe’s hands, almost too perfectly shaped for a man’s hands, the skin fine grained and smooth like the skin on his face, the bone structure sculptured and delicate in spite of size.

Sharpe glanced at him over the pages and flushed as his eyes met the boy’s fascinated gaze. He put the papers on the small table beside his chair.

“What are you thinking, Rann?” he asked softly.

“I am thinking about you, sir,” Rann said. He spoke in a daze of feeling that he could not comprehend.

“What about me?” Sharpe asked in the same gentle voice.

“You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever known—and yet I don’t really know you.”

“No,” Sharpe said. “You don’t really know me.”

He rose and came to Rann. He put his right hand under Rann’s chin and tilted his face upward. Their eyes met in a long and silent gaze.

“I wonder,” Sharpe said slowly. “I wonder if we are going to be friends.”

“I hope so,” Rann said.

“Do you know what I mean?” Sharpe asked.

“Not quite,” Rann said.

“Have you ever had—a—friend?”

“I don’t know,” Rann said. “School friends maybe—”

“A girlfriend?”

“No.”

Sharpe let his hand drop abruptly. He walked over to the long French window closed against a light rain that was changing to drifting snowflakes. He stood looking out across the darkening campus, and Rann, watching him, saw his hands clench behind his back. He did not speak, half-afraid to break Sharpe’s silence. Then suddenly Sharpe turned and went back to his chair. His face was pale and set, his lips pressed together and his eyes averted from Rann. He took up the sheets he had laid on the table, and put them together.