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consider the future.
"Dr. Welles has given orders to lock the gates during school hours and we're
supposed to get back to our studies. Turn off those lessons, Robin; we've got
to talk this all over. Max, will you switch on the lights? It's gloomy here."
"I should think we've talked about it enough," said Gerard. "I'm sick of
Mundy's name. I'm sick of the whole fuss. Can't we forget it and get back to
work?"
"In one way, we could," Tim answered. The thing is, I want to tell you
something. Tomorrow, I'm going back to the MacArthur School, and I want to ask
all the rest of you to go either to that school or, still better, to scatter
among the other big public and parochial schools of the city."
This bombshell was more shattering than Mundy's had been. Aghast, the children
burst out in protests.
"You mean to close this school?"
"Go back to the grades?" Tim, you can't desert us like that!"
"Dr. Welles will never let you do it!" The grownups will be sick!" To break up
our group!"
"I know how you feel," said Tim. "I know what you think. But I've been facing
it and that's the only way. That's how it has to be, for me at least. We did
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better when we stayed in hiding than when we locked ourselves up in this ivory
tower. Let me speak, will you, Jay? I tell you I have thought it all out. You
can talk when I've had my say."
"Give him a hearing," said Max.
"I don't want to talk about Mundy any more than you do. But there're two
things to say about his talk. One is that people heard it and they'll never
forget it. We all yelled him down all those on our side but it won't be
forgotten. Bits of it will be coming up against us as long as we live. We can
deny everything until we're blue in the face, but down in the minds of those
who heard him, suspicion will remain, and fear, and hatred. Down on the
irrational levels where no proof, evidence, logic, or reasoning can ever
reach, some of it will be alive in spite of all that our friends and allies
can do."
"He's right," said Stella.
"I'm afraid that's true," agreed Jay.
"And the other thing is," Tim continued, "that in all that jumble of lies and
nonsense and false reasoning and jealousy and ignorance, warped and distorted
as it was, there was some truth."
"If you mean those totally irrelevant misquotations about things being
revealed to little ones " began Marie angrily.
"Or that we hid behind pen names "
"Or that God-"
"Be quiet a minute, can't you?" cried Tim. This is hard enough to have to say.
But I am going back to the grade school because intelligence is not enough. It
isn't even the most important thing."
"If you're going to talk religion " Fred began, but Tim shook his head.
"No," he said. "Psychology. None of this would have happened if we had not cut
ourselves off from the world and from almost everybody in it. As long as we
lived like other kids, nobody hated us, nobody feared us, nobody was against
us. Some of you said, and the magazines and things said, that I saved us from
real trouble by talking to the crowd. But it wasn't what I said or what I did,
it was that somebody knew me. Some of them knew Miss Page and some knew Dr.
Welles. But if you strangers to town, and the other strangers who will come,
shut yourselves up here and live inside this fence, nobody will know you. And
if I shut myself up here with you, nobody will know me. If they don't learn to
know us all, and like and trust and have faith in us, all this stuff Mundy has
put into their minds will blow up again some day against us. It must have been
floating around in other minds for quite a while, more or less smoldering, and
he heard these suspicions and fears. He made the most of what he heard, and
then some, but he didn't invent it all. All he did was stew it together awhile
and let it explode."
Murmurs of protest, murmurs of assent, came from the children but they waited
for him to go on.
"So I figure it that we've got to go down to the regular schools, and mix
every day with the rest of the kids. I don't want people who have known me all
my life to forget me and believe lies against me, to see me as a stranger, a
menace, a monster. If I had stayed in my own school and my Scout troop and
gone to the other kids' houses after school and met their folks, nobody would
have listened to any such stuff about me. So I'm going back and take up where
I left off. And I think the rest of you ought to get yourselves known around
town, not as a solid bloc at one school, but one or two in each school, to
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