The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom Iwas brought up was called Densmore Academy,a large,square building of a then hideous modernity,built of smooth,orange-red bricks with threads of black mortar between them.One reads of happy school days,yet I fail to recall any really happy hours spent there,even in the yard,which was covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell.I think of it as a penitentiary,and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance to this impression.
I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my incarceration.
All of value,had its teachers known anything of youthful psychology,of natural bent,could have been put into me in three.At least four criminally wasted years,to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education!Chalk and chalk-dust!The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map,Italy a man's boot which Idrew painfully,with many yawns;history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things,no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man,but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map,weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again."On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army--"where?What does it matter?One little chapter of Carlyle,illuminated by a teacher of understanding,were worth a million such text-books.Alas,for the hatred of Virgil!"Paret"(a shiver),"begin at the one hundred and thirtieth line and translate!"Ican hear myself droning out in detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless journey of the pious AEneas;can see Gene Hollister,with heart-rending glances of despair,stumbling through Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room with chalk-rubbed blackboards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch.And I graduated from Densmore Academy,the best school in our city,in the 80's,without having been taught even the rudiments of citizenship.
Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse,which bit by bit we painfully dissected.We never glimpsed the living,growing thing,never experienced the Spirit,the same spirit that was able magically to waft me from a wintry Lyme Street to the South Seas,the energizing,electrifying Spirit of true achievement,of life,of God himself.Little by little its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no spark of it left alive.Many years were to pass ere it was to revive again,as by a miracle.I travelled.Awakening at dawn,I saw,framed in a port-hole,rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the sapphire;the seas Ulysses had sailed,and the company of the Argonauts.
My soul was steeped in unimagined colour,and in the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of Greece,is focussed the meaning of history,poetry and art.I was to stand one evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the strait peaceful now,flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees;to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost....In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed,a Socrates,a Homer and a Phidias,an AEschylus,and a Pericles;yes,and a John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the waters....
I saw the Roman Empire,that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed crimson with blood to appease her harlotry,whose ships were laden with treasures from the immutable East,grain from the valley of the Nile,spices from Arabia,precious purple stuffs from Tyre,tribute and spoil,slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed;and yet whose very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot not of,preserved to the West by Marathon and Salamis.With Caesar's legions its message went forth across Hispania to the cliffs of the wild western ocean,through Hercynian forests to tribes that dwelt where great rivers roll up their bars by misty,northern seas,and even to Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall....
IV.
In and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of sunlight flits the spirit of Nancy.I was always fond of her,but in extreme youth Iaccepted her incense with masculine complacency and took her allegiance for granted,never seeking to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised over her.Naturally other children teased me about her;but what was worse,with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration for what in after life are called the finer feelings,they teased her about me before me,my presence deterring them not at all.I can see them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:--"Nancy's in love with Hugh!Nancy's in love with Hugh!"A sufficiently thrilling pastime,this,for Nancy could take care of herself.I was a bungler beside her when it came to retaliation,and not the least of her attractions for me was her capacity for anger:fury would be a better term.She would fly at them--even as she flew at the head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced;and she could run like a deer.
Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook!Masculine strength,exercised apologetically,availed but little,and I have seen Russell Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and weeping.She never caught Ralph;his methods of torture were more intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's,but she was his equal when it came to a question of tongues.
"I know what's the matter with you,Ralph Hambleton,"she would say.
