The Eternal Wonder

  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.

  “I don’t want to criticize this yet,” he said in his usual voice. “You have an excellent idea here—the relation between the creation of science and art—but you’ve dashed it off. I want you to take it back, think it through, and rewrite it. Yes, it’s already well done, but you can carry it much further—complete it. Then when you’ve finished the creative work, we’ll criticize it together, you and I. If it’s as good as I think it will be, we might even get it published in a magazine where I publish some of my own stuff.”

  “Wouldn’t it help me to hear your preliminary criticism, sir?”

  “No. There must be no criticism during the creative process—not even self-criticism, Rann. Creation and criticism are antithetical and cannot be carried on at the same time. Remember that. You’re a creator, Rann. Of that I now have no doubt. I envy you. Leave criticism to me. I’m a critic by nature, and a damn good teacher as a result.”

  He smiled and handed the sheets back to Rann. Then he stood up.

  “Your mother will be wondering where the hell you are. I am responsible for delivering you safely into her hands. It’s midnight. How the hours fly when one is—interested!”

  He followed Rann to the door of the hall. There he paused, his hand on the knob. Still a few inches shorter, Rann, the boy, looked up and met the dark and tragic eyes of the man. Yes, tragic was the word. Sharpe’s eyes were filled with sadness, though his lips smiled as he looked down upon the young and wondering face. Suddenly leaning forward, he kissed Rann’s cheek.

  “Good night—good night,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Good night, my dear!”

  “DID HE LIKE YOUR THEME?” his mother asked. She did not usually wait for him to come home because she knew he did not like it. It made him uneasy, or at least less free if he thought of her sitting there by the fire in the living room, waiting for him. But tonight she was there.

  “It’s only in rough form,” he said. “I have to do some more thinking on it.”

  “What’s it about?” she asked.

  “I can’t explain,” he said shortly, and then, in apology, “I’m tired—we had a real session.”

  She rose. “You’d better go straight to bed. Good night, son.”

  “Good night,” he said, and then, hesitating, he kissed her cheek as usual.

  Each night he kissed her cheek with increasing reluctance, a childhood habit he wished he could break without hurting her. While his father lived, he had kissed them both, but now he wanted to be done with it. He went to his own room in confusion with himself. He did not want to kiss his mother, but he still felt on his own cheek the touch of the man’s lips—Donald Sharpe, his teacher and, he had taken for granted, his friend. The kiss remained there, at once repulsive and exciting. What did it mean? He knew that in some countries, in France, for example, men kissed men and it was merely a greeting. But this was not France. And he had never seen a man kiss a man. He, of course, was not yet fully a man, but he was fifteen, he was growing tall and he had to shave once in a while. He could not accept the kiss as casual. It was too unusual. He felt half-shy, half-pleased, but puzzled. Of course he knew things, his father had talked to him, but he had scarcely listened—he’d been interested at the moment in some project he had begun with turtles’ eggs. He had found the eggs one Sunday when he and his father had walked, as they usually did on Sundays, outside the town in the fields. It had been spring and they had stopped at a pond and he brought the eggs home and hatched them in the garage, three of them at least, but the turtles had died.

  He bathed now as usual before he went to bed and, lying full-length in the lusciously hot water, he surveyed his changing body with a new interest that he could not understand. It was the same body he washed every night, but tonight he was different. He felt a new life in his body, a sensitivity, an awareness, not yet an emotion but an awareness. Did the kiss mean some sort of love? Could this be possible? A sign of friendship, perhaps? But did men kiss when they were friends? In college he had no friends, since he was always so much younger than the others.

  However his mind wandered, it kept returning to Donald Sharpe. He saw himself sitting in that library facing the man he so admired. He saw Sharpe’s face, handsome in a delicate, vivid fashion; he heard the melodious voice, the rapid brilliant speech. Then he saw himself at the door and felt again not only on his cheek but throughout his whole body the touch of Sharpe’s lips. Alarmed, enticed, and half-ashamed, he got himself out of the tub abruptly and dried himself with quick, harsh rubbing of the big towel. In bed, his pajamas buttoned and the string fastened about his waist, he turned on the bedside light and took up the book he was reading, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, by John J. O’Neill. The powerful figure of Tesla absorbed him until he slept.

  The next morning he felt a new impetus to rewrite his theme and make it as perfect as possible. His professor felt something special toward him, and he longed for Sharpe’s praise and further criticism.

  “TESLA,” SHARPE SAID, “was of course the real genius—not Edison, although Edison was the better businessman and was clever at publicity. But Tesla was the creator at the most authentic pitch. He was a finely educated man, and Edison was not. Tesla had a profound knowledge of the past. It was at his service. When he established his own laboratory—it took him a while to realize he must have control of his own work—the whole world was astounded at all that poured out of it, the amazing inventions, the absolute proof that his complete alternating-current system had immense advantage over Edison’s direct-current system. There’s never been anything like it in importance—at least in the field of electrical engineering. Edison’s system could only serve an area about a mile in diameter, while Tesla’s system could transmit for hundreds of miles. … Are you listening to me, Rann?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, but he was not. He was watching the mobile, handsome face opposite him. The fire burned between them, he on one side of the fireplace and Sharpe on the other. Outside, an early snowstorm wrapped the house in silence. There was no wind. The snow fell thickly, silently.

  “The real problem,” Sharpe continued, “was to find a man whose mind was large enough to comprehend and put to use the discoveries and inventions of a genius as great as Tesla’s. Westinghouse was that man.”

  He put down the sheets of
Rann’s thesis. “It’s a strange truth,” he said, musing, “that every genius has to find his complement, the man who understands and can put to use what the creator creates. We don’t seem to find creativity and its practical application in the same person.”

  He looked, half-smiling, at Rann’s eager, listening face.

  “What a beautiful boy you are,” he said softly. The sheets slipped from his hands to the floor. “I wonder what we are to be to each other, you and I! Do you ever dream of love, Rann?”

  Rann shook his head, entranced, shy, suddenly almost afraid—but of what?

  Sharpe stooped and collected the sheets. He put them neatly together and placed them on the table beside his chair. Then he went to the wide window at the far end of his study and looked out. A streetlamp shone dimly through the all-but-impenetrable snow. He drew down the shade. “You had better spend the night with me,” he said, returning to his chair. “Your mother will worry about your walking so far in this storm. So shall I. You may have my guest room. That’s where my younger brother stays when he comes to visit me.”

  “I’ll have to telephone my mother,” Rann said.

  “Of course. There’s the telephone, on my desk. Tell her my Filipino houseman will give us a good dinner.”

  He took up the sheets and glanced over them one by one, seeming not to hear the conversation.

  “He’s invited me to stay because of the storm. But will you be all right, Mother?”

  “Oh yes,” his mother said, almost gaily. “Mary Crookes is here. She came in an hour ago—she was shopping and simply couldn’t get home through the storm. She was just breathless when she reached our house. I’d asked her to stay, anyway. It’s really not safe to be out alone in such a storm. The wind is beginning to blow a gale. I’ll feel safe about you if you’re with Dr. Sharpe. Good night, darling—see you tomorrow.”

  Rann hung up the receiver. “By chance she has a friend with her—someone who lives on the edge of town and came in to shop and got caught in the snowstorm.”

  “Splendid,” Sharpe said absently as though he did not hear.

  “I’ve been looking over this paper again. You’ve done a brilliant job—really exciting. Ah, I hope I can be useful to you! I’m so sure you’ve a rare quality, Rann—I can’t tell exactly what direction it will take. I don’t know your center of interest. That’s what makes a creator—to have an eternal, unchanging interest in something and the capacity for dedication to it—a life interest, something you know you were born to do.”

  “I want to know everything first,” Rann said.

  He caught Sharpe’s look, a look yearning and strange, half-shy and half-bold.

  “There is so much I don’t know,” Rann continued.

  “There’s so much I don’t know about you,” Sharpe retorted. He turned away and seemed absorbed in straightening the pages he held in both hands. “For example—your father is dead. Your mother is a shy woman. How are you to know anything about—let’s say—sex? You’re in for a great deal of temptation, my boy—women being what they are today—anything goes when they see a handsome young man. I wonder if you know how to protect yourself. It would be so disastrous to your development if you should imagine yourself in love with some girl—or woman, even, for it’s more likely that a brilliant young mind is drawn to an older woman—well, the disaster would be the same. And you’re so vulnerable, dear, with your extraordinary imagination! If I can save you from something like that, merely by being your friend—”

  “I don’t know any girls,” Rann said bluntly. “As for older women—” He shook his head. This discussion was distasteful to him.

  Sharpe laughed. “Well, just let me know when and if, and I’ll come to your rescue!”

  HE WENT TO BED THAT NIGHT with a warm sense of comfort and of mental and spiritual stimulation. Not since his father’s death had he spent such an evening. Perhaps never had he spent such an evening, for Sharpe had a sense of humor that even his father had lacked. Moreover, Sharpe had traveled in many parts of the world, in remote parts of India and China, in Thailand and Indonesia, and he had tales to tell of experiences amusing or perilous. He had spoken again and again of love.

  “Those ancient people understand the arts of love as we will not in a thousand years. We are a very crude people, dear boy. Perhaps ‘simple’ would be a kinder word. As for sex, we have only a primitive notion of its full expression as a means of communication between two persons. Boy plus girl equals sex—that’s about as far as we go. We know nothing of the subtle interplay between two minds, two personalities, the art of physical approach and caress between two persons, whatever their sex. Sex itself is nothing—the lowest animals practice it. It is ennobled only by those who understand it as the Asians do—sex refined by centuries of experience, by poets and artists.”

  When they parted for the night he had withdrawn somewhat shyly, lest Sharpe kiss his cheek again. But Sharpe had not done so. He had merely put out his right hand.

  “Good night, dear boy. Sleep well in that vast old bed that belonged to my great-grandfather in Boston. By the bye, you’ll find the bath salts in your bath very refreshing. I put a bottle there for you. I use them myself—something I discovered in Paris last year. Dream sweetly, dear boy. Breakfast is at eight—just right for our nine o’clock class—if we can stagger through the snow in the quadrangle!”

  He had tried the bath salts in his hot tub almost with embarrassment, unaccustomed to the heretofore feminine aspects of such pleasures, and had been surprised at the strong bittersweet fragrance that made him feel clean and stimulated. The soap, too, was unfamiliar, an English soap, generous with foam so that he soaped even his hair. When he was saturated with the hot fragrant bath he rubbed himself dry with an enormous brown towel and put on, somewhat hesitatingly, the white silk pajamas laid out on the bed. The silk against his skin, the smoothness of linen sheets when he drew the soft, light blankets over him, surrounded him with a sense of luxury. A wood fire burned under the white painted mantelpiece.

  “I told my houseman to light a fire for you—it’s to sleep when the wood falls into embers,” Sharpe had said. “Besides, that room is large enough to be chilly on a snowy night like this—”

  There was no chill now, however, and he put out the bedside light and lay watching the fire die while the snow beat softly against the windows and piled high upon the outer sills. He wanted to lie long awake so that he might think over all that Sharpe had talked of during the evening. He had felt his world enlarging, a wonderful world that he had seen heretofore only through books. But Sharpe had been everywhere himself. He had trod the streets of Indian bazaars, had lived in small inns in Japanese villages, had climbed Fujiyama and gazed into its sleeping crater. Yet later, on the isle of Oshima, he had looked into a living volcano and had felt the crust of earth tremble beneath his feet.

  “Five days later the whole edge upon which I stood cracked off and fell into the smoking abyss,” Sharpe had said.

  His memory, always ready to present the total picture of whatever his thought summoned, roamed in kaleidoscope about the world. Why did he stay here in this little town, a dot upon the map, his life buried in books, when reality waited for him everywhere in the world? Time enough for books when he grew too old to wander!

  “You need to know everything,” Sharpe had said. “Whatever you can find in books is all to the good. Books are a shortcut to total knowledge. You can’t learn everything by your own experience. Use experience to test what you have already learned in books—”

  But why shouldn’t he write books from experience? All his life he had read books. “I don’t remember when you learned to read,” his mother loved to tell him fondly. “I think you were born knowing how to read.”

  To write books—that would give meaning and purpose to all that he might experience! When he was five, he had wanted to learn to play the piano, and he played it well now, bu
t it was not his work. Composition, perhaps, might be, but not merely to play the works of others, however great, and he had composed music just as he had written poetry. But books, solid books, putting into permanent and lasting form what he knew by experiences and could therefore communicate. He saw books, already written, standing in a stately row upon a shelf, living their own life long after he was dead. With this solemn and imposing vision clear in his mind, he drifted into sleep. The coals in the fireplace died to ashes and outside the snow continued to fall.

  HE WAS WAKENED, SLOWLY AND GENTLY sometime in the night, by a hand stroking his thighs and moving, ever so slowly, ever so gently to his genitals. At first he thought it a dream. He was beginning to have strange new dreams, not often, for his rapid and extraordinary physical growth, combined with his incessant reading and studying, his obsession with learning everything as quickly as possible, had consumed his energy. But he wakened suddenly when he felt his body respond to the moving hands. He sat up abruptly, and by the light of a newly lighted fire, he was face-to-face with Sharpe. They stared at each other for a long instant, Sharpe smiling, his eyes half-closed. He was wrapped in a red satin robe.

  “Leave me alone!” Rann muttered between his teeth.

  “Do I frighten you, dear boy?” Sharpe asked softly.

  “Just leave me alone,” Rann repeated.

  He pushed Sharpe from him and wrapped the blanket about his lower body.

  “I introduce you to love,” Sharpe said gently. “There are many kinds of love. All love is good. I learned that in India.”

  “I am going home,” Rann said sternly. “Kindly leave the room so that I can dress.”

  Sharpe stood up. “Don’t be absurd. The snow is two feet deep.”

  “I’ll walk it.”

  “You are being childish,” Sharpe said. “We were talking of experience. All evening—we were talking of the necessity of experience. When I offer it to you in the form of a sophisticated love, as old as Greece itself and of Plato, you are afraid. You want to run home to your mother.”