For long years he had gone about his affairs and practiced his craft alone and unobserved. Then, shortly after a great crop failure and time of famine, a boy started appearing, watching him, spying on him, adoring him, and generally skulking about — one who was drawn to rainmaking and the Master. With a strange, sorrowful tug at his heart he sensed the recurrence and reversal of the great experience of his youth, and at the same time had that austere feeling, at once constricting and stirring, that afternoon had set in, that youth was gone and noonday passed, that the blossom had become a fruit. And to his own surprise he behaved toward the boy exactly as old Turu had once behaved toward him. The stiff rebuff, the delaying, wait-and-see attitude, came of its own accord; it was neither an imitation of his deceased Master nor did it spring from moralistic and pedagogic considerations that a young man must be tested for a long time to see whether he is serious enough, that initiation into mysteries should not be made easy, and similar theories. On the contrary, Knecht simply behaved toward his apprentices the way every somewhat aging solitary and learned eccentric behaves toward admirers and disciples. He was embarrassed, shy, distant, ready for flight, fearful for his lovely solitude and his freedom to roam in the wilderness, to go hunting and collecting alone, to dream and listen. He was full of a jealous love for all his habits and hobbies, his secrets and meditations. There could be no question of his embracing the timid youth who approached him with worshipful curiosity, no question of helping him overcome this timidity by encouraging him, no question of his rejoicing and having a sense of reward, appreciation, and pleasant success because the world of the others was at last sending him an emissary and a declaration of love, because someone was courting him, someone felt drawn to him, and like himself called to the service of mysteries. On the contrary, at first he felt it merely as a troublesome disturbance, infringement on his rights and habits, loss of his independence. For the first time he realized how much he prized that independence. He resisted the wooing and became clever at outwitting the boy and hiding himself, at covering his tracks, evading and escaping. But what had happened to Turu now happened to him also: the boy’s long, mute courtship slowly softened his heart, slowly, slowly wore down his resistance, so that the more the boy gained ground, the more Knecht learned to turn to him and open his mind to him, approve his longing, accept his courtship, and eventually come to regard the new and often vexatious duty of teaching and having a disciple as inevitable, imposed by fate, one of the requirements of a life of thought. More and more he had to bid farewell to the dream, the feeling and the pleasure of infinite potentialities, of a multiplicity of futures. Instead of the dream of unending progress, of the sum of all wisdom, his pupil stood by, a small, near, demanding reality, an intruder and nuisance, but no longer to be rebuffed or evaded. For the boy represented, after all, the only way into the real future, the one most important duty, the one narrow path along which the Rainmaker’s life and acts, principles, thoughts, and glimmerings could be saved from death and continue their life in a small new bud. Sighing, gnashing his teeth, and smiling, he accepted the burden.
