Chapter Six

   It would not be until just after Christmas that Toby would see the girl with the big brown eyes again. He was in fact pursuing another romantic interest, insofar as his puzzled soul was capable of such an enterprise, realizing that he and Rosalind were probably just good friends. Besides, he had come back to the campus for a fifth year primarily because he felt he needed more experience of university life, that he owed this to himself as a writer, so he was soaking up all the life he could get. The thoughts of journalism in Toronto had moved on, and he could not imagine any place in the world of more lively interest than his old alma mater. He was surprised that he had not returned to the novel he had been writing in the spring, but he had his column and whatever other stories came his way, friends he had made the year before, some new arrivals on the campus since, and always the inescapable drive to learn yet another folk song. In the summer before the bush job, when he worked as a journalist and took a course in creative writing, he had happened upon a couple of Harry Belafonte records in the fraternity house where he was staying. He had studied these and used them well over the following year, including his time in the woods. But by the time he came back to the city the Kingston Trio was doing well and widely, and then Pete Seeger himself had come to the campus and not only electrified the crowd in the big old room where Toby had studied first year physics, but had demonstrated to Toby that there was much more to fretted instruments than chording. How in the hell does he do that? Toby had wondered, and got no answers about picking from the Muse. His inspirations then were mostly about the words of songs. Friends of his, a married couple with a basement flat close to the gates that opened on to the university endowment lands, had a further new record, the best of them all, the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. Pete Seeger again, along with a very solid other three. Toby listened carefully, every time he dropped in to visit. He got the words, he got the chords. He had to assume that he just wasn't a picker, that his fortune was in his voice. At least he could sing for his supper, and strum out something underneath that carried the process. And once in a while he could even write a song.
  
    He had no inspiration about the Law. And the second year room didn't even have a decent view. That is to say it utterly lacked the incredible views of the first and third year rooms and the library. Howe Sound, the entrance to Burrard Inlet, the mountains. Was there a university in the world, a law school in the world, that could boast such an outlook over land and sea? Being able in those months, past and present, to brood over such a scene had done nothing for the law, only made him more of a poet, had helped him be more of a poet. He'd had no need to 'wander lonely as a cloud', because all that a cloud could hope to see had lain before his eyes. Still, he appreciated knowing something of the law. It ran much of the world, had a reason to exist. His fellow students were basically a noble lot. Mostly male. Predominantly male. Only a handful of women, and all but one of them older than he. Any girls other than Rosalind that had caught his eye came from other faculties, and most of those haunted the same scribblers' basement that he did. They were excellent company on a day-to-day basis, because they not only read, they had accepted the challenge to the mind created by writing.

    But in a mid-autumn interlude of the mind, when he had been quite lifted above and beyond any of these feminine objects of interest, he had found himself praying for a wife.
 
     For someone, however, whose soul had already known so much attention, for so long, from the Almighty, it was an odd prayer. At least in part. The first section was reasonable enough, because he really did feel that he'd had enough adventures for a single young man and it was time he moved toward settling down and raising a family. This was not the first time he'd thought along these lines, but the intensity of the interest had definitely shot up. But the second section, while it added to this new intensity, was very strange. From the experiential point of view it was utterly illogical, because he'd always had faith and a steady series of events to prove it, and yet because he had yet to undertake the simple introductions to philosophy that any seminarian or freshman in a confessional college is used to, it did make a little sense to a patient and understanding guardian angel. Toby still thought too much like a mere humanist. He believed in God - although he lacked the dialectical skills to prove His existence - but as a writer, how could he demonstrate that existence to others, i.e. his often apparently unbelieving fellow students? He found it possible to accept, wholeheartedly, the principle that if God gave him a good wife, He must exist. He would accept this as proof that everyone else would have to accept as well, and if they didn't, or couldn't, he no longer had any responsibility toward them. He could love his own generation, and acknowledge his debt to its contribution to his sense of life, but he had no interest in being its slave. But on the other hand, having as yet to take on a study of moral theology, he did not actually understand that human respect was a vice, not a virtue.

    So his inspiration toward the prayer had to come through the back door, as it were. acting not so much as an instrument of orthodox logic, but as forecast that the future mother of his children was just around the corner, and proof that it was most definitely a family he had in mind, not a romantic affair.