XVI
The Spring grew ripe. There was at midday a soft drowsiness in the sun. Warm sporting gusts of wind howled faintly at the eaves; the young grass bent; the daisies twinkled.
He pressed his high knees uncomfortably against the bottom of his desk, grew nostalgic on his dreams. Bessie Barnes scrawled vigorously two rows away, displaying her long full silken leg. Open for me the gates of delight. Behind her sat a girl named Ruth, dark, with milk-white skin, eyes as gentle as her name, and thick black hair, parted in middle. He thought of a wild life with Bessie and of a later resurrection, a pure holy life, with Ruth.
One day, after the noon recess, they were marshalled by the teachers—all of the children in the three upper grades—and marched upstairs to the big assembly hall. They were excited, and gossiped in low voices as they went. They had never been called upstairs at this hour. Quite often the bells rang in the halls: they sprang quickly into line and were marched out in double files. That was fire drill. They liked that. Once they emptied the building in four minutes.
This was something new. They marched into the big room and sat down in blocks of seats assigned to each class: they sat with a seat between each of them. In a moment the door of the principal’s office on the left—where little boys were beaten—was opened, and the principal came out. He walked around the corner of the big room and stepped softly up on the platform. He began to talk.
He was a new principal. Young Armstrong, who had smelled the flower so delicately, and who had visited Daisy, and who once had almost beaten Eugene because of the smutty rhymes, was gone. The new principal was older. He was about thirty-eight years old. He was a strong rather heavy man a little under six feet tall; he was one of a large family who had grown up on a Tennessee farm. His father was poor but he had helped his children to get an education. All this Eugene knew already, because the principal made long talks to them in the morning and said he had never had their advantages. He pointed to himself with some pride. And he urged the little boys, playfully but earnestly, to “be not like dumb driven cattle, be a hero in the strife.” That was poetry, Longfellow.
The principal had thick powerful shoulders; clumsy white arms, knotted with big awkward country muscles. Eugene had seen him once hoeing in the schoolyard; each of them had been given a plant to set out. He got those muscles on the farm. The boys said he beat very hard. He walked with a clumsy stealthy tread—awkward and comical enough, it is true, but he could be up at a boy’s back before you knew it. Otto Krause called him Creeping Jesus. The name stuck, among the tough crowd. Eugene was a little shocked by it.
The principal had a white face of waxen transparency, with deep flat cheeks like the Pentlands, a pallid nose, a trifle deeper in its color than his face, and a thin slightly-bowed mouth. His hair was coarse, black, and thick, but he never let it grow too long. He had short dry hands, strong, and always coated deeply with chalk. When he passed near by, Eugene got the odor of chalk and of the schoolhouse: his heart grew cold with excitement and fear. The sanctity of chalk and school hovered about the man’s flesh. He was the one who could touch without being touched, beat without being beaten. Eugene had terrible fantasies of resistance, shuddering with horror as he thought of the awful consequences of fighting back: something like God’s fist in lighting. Then he looked around cautiously to see if anyone had noticed.
The principal’s name was Leonard. He made long speeches to the children every morning, after a ten-minute prayer. He had a high sonorous countrified voice which often trailed off in a comical drawl; he got lost very easily in revery, would pause in the middle of a sentence, gaze absently off with his mouth half-open and an expression of stupefaction on his face, and return presently to the business before him, his mind still loose, with witless distracted laugh.
He talked to the children aimlessly, pompously, dully for twenty minutes every morning: the teachers yawned carefully behind their hands, the students made furtive drawings, or passed notes. He spoke to them of “the higher life” and of “the things of the mind.” He assured them that they were the leaders of tomorrow and the hope of the world. Then he quoted Longfellow.
He was a good man, a dull man, a man of honor. He had a broad streak of coarse earthy brutality in him. He loved a farm better than anything in the world except a school. He had rented a big dilapidated house in a grove of lordly oaks on the outskirts of town: he lived there with his wife and his two children. He had a cow—he was never without a cow: he would go out at night and morning to milk her, laughing his vacant silly laugh, and giving her a good smacking kick in the belly to make her come round into position.
He was a heavy-handed master. He put down rebellion with good cornfield violence. If a boy was impudent to him he would rip him powerfully from his seat, drag his wriggling figure into his office, breathing stertorously as he walked along at his clumsy rapid gait, and saying roundly, in tones of scathing contempt: “Why, you young upstart, we’ll just see who’s master here. I’ll just show you, my sonny, if I’m to be dictated to by every two-by-four whippersnapper who comes along.” And once within the office, with the glazed door shut, he published the stern warning of his justice by the loud exertion of his breathing, the cutting swish of his rattan, and the yowls of pain and terror that he exacted from his captive.
He had called the school together that day to command it to write him a composition. The children sat, staring dumbly up at him as he made a rambling explanation of what he wanted. Finally he announced a prize. He would give five dollars from his own pocket to the student who wrote the best paper. That aroused them. There was a rustle of interest.
They were to write a paper on the meaning of a French picture called The Song of the Lark. It represented a French peasant girl, barefooted, with a sickle in one hand, and with face upturned in the morning-light of the fields as she listened to the birdsong. They were asked to describe what they saw in the expression of the girl’s face. They were asked to tell what the picture meant to them. It had been reproduced in one of their readers. A larger print was now hung up on the platform for their inspection. Sheets of yellow paper were given them. They stared, thoughtfully masticating their pencils. Finally, the room was silent save for a minute scratching on paper.
The warm wind spouted about the eaves; the grasses bent, whistling gently.
Eugene wrote: “The girl is hearing the song of the first lark. She knows that it means Spring has come. She is about seventeen or eighteen years old. Her people are very poor, she has never been anywhere. In the winter she wears wooden shoes. She is making out as if she was going to whistle. But she doesn’t let on to the bird that she has heard him. The rest of her people are behind her, coming down the field, but we do not see them. She has a father, a mother, and two brothers. They have worked hard all their life. The girl is the youngest child. She thinks she would like to go away somewhere and see the world. Sometimes she hears the whistle of a train that is going to Paris. She has never ridden on a train in her life. She would like to go to Paris. She would like to have some fine clothes, she would like to travel. Perhaps she would like to start life new in America, the Land of Opportunity. The girl has had a hard time. Her people do not understand her. If they saw her listening to the lark they would poke fun at her. She has never had the advantages of a good education, her people are so poor, but she would profit by her opportunity if she did, more than some people who have. You can tell by looking at her that she’s intelligent.”
It was early in May; examinations came in another two weeks. He thought of them with excitement and pleasure—he liked the period of hard cramming, the long reviews, the delight of emptying out abundantly on paper his stored knowledge. The big assembly room had about it the odor of completion, of sharp nervous ecstasy. All through the summer it would be drowsy-warm; if only here, alone, with the big plaster cast of Minerva, himself and Bessie Barnes, or Miss—Miss—
“We want this boy,” said Margaret Leonard. She handed Eugene’s paper over to her husband. They were starting a private school for boys. That was what the paper had been for.
Leonard took the paper, pretended to read half a page, looked off absently into eternity, and began to rub his chin reflectively, leaving a slight coating of chalk-dust on his face. Then, catching her eye, he laughed idiotically, and said: “Why, that little rascal! Huh? Do you suppose—?”
Feeling delightfully scattered, he bent over with a long suction of whining laughter, slapping his knee and leaving a chalk print, making a slobbering noise in his mouth.
“The Lord have mercy!” he gasped.
“Here! Never you mind about that,” she said, laughing with tender sharp amusement. “Pull yourself together and see this boy’s people.” She loved the man dearly, and he loved her.
A few days later Leonard assembled the children a second time. He made a rambling speech, the purport of which was to inform them that one of them had won the prize, but to conceal the winner’s name. Then, after several divagations, which he thoroughly enjoyed, he read Eugene’s paper, announced his name, and called him forward.
Chalkface took chalkhand. The boy’s heart thundered against his ribs. The proud horns blared, he tasted glory.
Patiently, all through the summer, Leonard laid siege to Gant and Eliza. Gant fidgeted, spoke shiftily, finally said:
“You’ll have to see his mother.” Privately he was bitterly scornful, roared the merits of the public school as an incubator of citizenship. The family was contemptuous. Private school! Mr. Vanderbilt! Ruin him for good!
Which made Eliza reflective. She had a good streak of snobbism. Mr. Vanderbilt? She was as good as any of them. They’d just see.
“Who are you going to have?” she asked. “Have you drummed anyone up yet?”
Leonard mentioned the sons of several fashionable and wealthy people—of Dr. Kitchen, the eye, ear, nose and throat man, Mr. Arthur, the corporation lawyer, and Bishop Raper, of the Episcopal diocese.
Eliza grew more reflective. She thought of Pett. She needn’t give herself airs.
“How much are you asking?” she said.
He told her the tuition was one hundred dollars a year. She pursed her lips lingeringly before she answered.
“Hm‑m!” she began, with a bantering smile, as she looked at Eugene. “That’s a whole lot of money. You know,” she continued with her tremulous smile, “as the darkey says, we’re pore-folks.”
Eugene squirmed.
“Well what about it, boy?” said Eliza banteringly. “Do you think you’re worth that much money?”
Mr. Leonard placed his white dry hand upon Eugene’s shoulders, affectionately sliding it down his back and across his kidneys, leaving white chalk prints everywhere. Then he clamped his meaty palm tightly around the slender bracelet of boy-arm.
“That boy’s worth it,” he said, shaking him gently to and fro. “Yes, sir!”
Eugene smiled painfully. Eliza continued to purse her lips. She felt a strong psychic relation to Leonard. They both took time.
“Say,” she said, rubbing her broad red nose, and smiling slyly, “I used to be a schoolteacher. You didn’t know that, did you? But I didn’t get any such prices as you’re asking,” she added. “I thought myself mighty lucky if I got my board and twenty dollars a month.”
“Is that so, Mrs. Gant?” said Mr. Leonard with great interest. “Well, sir!” He began to laugh in a vague whine, pulling Eugene about more violently and deadening his arm under his crushing grip.
“Yes,” said Eliza, “I remember my father—it was long before you were born, boy,” she said to Eugene, “for I hadn’t laid eyes on your papa—as the feller says, you were nothing but a dishrag hanging out in heaven—I’d have laughed at anyone who suggested marriage then—Well, I tell you what [she shook her head with a sad pursed deprecating mouth], we were mighty poor at the time, I can tell you.—I was thinking about it the other day—many’s the time we didn’t have food in the house for the next meal.—Well, as I was saying, your grandfather [addressing Eugene] came home one night and said—Look here, what about it?—Who do you suppose I saw today?—I remember him just as plain as if I saw him standing here—I had a feeling—[addressing Leonard with a doubtful smile] I don’t know what you’d call it but it’s pretty strange when you come to think about it, isn’t it?—I had just finished helping Aunt Jane set the table—she had come all the way from Yancey County to visit your grandmother—when all of a sudden it flashed over me—mind you [to Leonard] I never looked out the window or anything but I knew just as well as I knew anything that he was coming—mercy I cried—here comes—why what on earth are you talking about, Eliza? said your grandma—I remember she went to the door and looked out down the path—there’s no one there—He’s acoming, I said—wait and see—Who? said your grandmother—Why, father, I said—he’s carrying something on his shoulder—and sure enough—I had no sooner got the words out of my mouth than there he was just acoming it for all he was worth, up the path, with a tow-sack full of apples on his back—you could tell by the way he walked that he had news of some sort—well—sure enough—without stopping to say howdy-do—I remembered he began to talk almost before he got into the house—O father, I called out—you’ve brought the apples—it was the year after I had almost died of pneumonia—I’d been spitting up blood ever since—and having hemorrhages—and I asked him to bring me some apples—Well sir, mother said to him, and she looked mighty queer, I can tell you—that’s the strangest thing I ever heard of—and she told him what had happened—Well, he looked pretty serious and said—Yes, I’ll never forget the way he said it—I reckon she saw me. I wasn’t there but I was thinking of being there and coming up the path at that very moment—I’ve got news for you he said—who do you suppose I saw today—why, I’ve no idea, I said—why old Professor Truman—he came rushing up to me in town and said, see here: where’s Eliza—I’ve got a job for her if she wants it, teaching school this winter out on Beaverdam—why, pshaw, said your grandfather, she’s never taught school a day in her life—and Professor Truman laughed just as big as you please and said never you mind about that—Eliza can do anything she sets her mind on—well sir, that’s the way it all came about.” High-sorrowful and sad, she paused for a moment, adrift, her white face slanting her life back through the aisled grove of years.
“Well, sir!” said Mr. Leonard vaguely, rubbing his chin, “You young rascal, you!” he said, giving Eugene another jerk, and beginning to laugh with narcissistic pleasure.
Eliza pursed her lips slowly.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll send him to you for a year.” That was the way she did business. Tides run deep in Sargasso.
So, on the hairline of million-minded impulse, destiny bore down on his life again.
Mr. Leonard had leased an old prewar house, set on a hill wooded by magnificent trees. It faced west and south, looking toward Biltburn, and abruptly down on South End, and the negro flats that stretched to the depot. One day early in September he took Eugene there. They walked across town, talking weightily of politics, across the Square, down Hatton Avenue, south into Church, and southwesterly along the bending road that ended in the schoolhouse on the abutting hill.
The huge trees made sad autumn music as they entered the grounds. In the broad hall of the squat rambling old house Eugene for the first time saw Margaret Leonard. She held a broom in her hands, and was aproned. But his first impression was of her shocking fragility.
Margaret Leonard at this time was thirty-four years old. She had borne two children, a son who was now six years old, and a daughter who was two. As she stood there, with her long slender fingers splayed about the broomstick, he noted, with a momentary cold nausea, that the tip of her right index finger was flattened out as if it had been crushed beyond healing by a hammer. But it was years before he knew that tuberculars sometimes have such fingers.
Margaret Leonard was of middling height, five feet six inches perhaps. As the giddiness of his embarrassment wore off he saw that she could not weigh more than eighty or ninety pounds. He had heard of the children. Now he remembered them, and Leonard’s white muscular bulk, with a sense of horror. His swift vision leaped at once to the sexual relation, and something in him twisted aside, incredulous and afraid.
She had on a dress of crisp gray gingham, not loose or lapping round her wasted figure, but hiding every line in her body, like a draped stick.
As his mind groped out of the pain of impression he heard her voice and, still feeling within him the strange convulsive shame, he lifted his eyes to her face. It was the most tranquil and the most passionate face he had ever seen. The skin was sallow with a dead ashen tinge; beneath, the delicate bone-carving of face and skull traced itself clearly: the cadaverous tightness of those who are about to die had been checked. She had won her way back just far enough to balance carefully in the scales of disease and recovery. It was necessary for her to measure everything she did.
Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath the sallow minutely pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle—he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces.
She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his life—sends on the battle.
Her hair was coarse and dull-brown, fairly abundant, tinged lightly with gray: it was combed evenly in the middle and bound tightly in a knot behind. Everything about her was very clean, like a scrubbed kitchen board: she took his hand, he felt the firm nervous vitality of her fingers, and he noticed how clean and scrubbed her thin somewhat labor-worn hands were. If he noticed her emaciation at all now, it was only with a sense of her purification: he felt himself in union not with disease, but with the greatest health he had ever known. She made a high music in him. His heart lifted.
“This,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking him gently across the kidneys, “is Mister Eugene Gant.”
“Well, sir,” she said, in a low voice, in which a vibrant wire was thrumming, “I’m glad to know you.” The voice had in it that quality of quiet wonder that he had sometimes heard in the voices of people who had seen or were told of some strange event, or coincidence, that seemed to reach beyond life, beyond nature—a note of acceptance; and suddenly he knew that all life seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she looked directly into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts of men, and that he seemed beautiful to her.
Her face darkened with the strange passionate vitality that left no print, that lived there bodiless like life; her brown eyes darkened into black as if a bird had flown through them and left the shadow of its wings. She saw his small remote face burning strangely at the end of his long unfleshed body, she saw the straight thin shanks, the big feet turned awkwardly inward, the dusty patches on his stockings at the knees, and his thin wristy arms that stuck out painfully below his cheap ill-fitting jacket; she saw the thin hunched line of his shoulders, the tangled mass of hair—and she did not laugh.
He turned his face up to her as a prisoner who recovers light, as a man long pent in darkness who bathes himself in the great pool of dawn, as a blind man who feels upon his eyes the white core and essence of immutable brightness. His body drank in her great light as a famished castaway the rain: he closed his eyes and let the great light bathe him, and when he opened them again, he saw that her own were luminous and wet.
Then she began to laugh. “Why, Mr. Leonard,” she said, “what in the world! He’s almost as tall as you. Here, boy. Stand up here while I measure.” Deft-fingered, she put them back to back. Mr. Leonard was two or three inches taller than Eugene. He began to whine with laughter.
“Why, the rascal,” he said. “That little shaver.”
“How old are you, boy?” she asked.
“I’ll be twelve next month,” he said.
“Well, what do you know about that!” she said wonderingly. “I tell you what, though,” she continued. “We’ve got to get some meat on those bones. You can’t go around like that. I don’t like the way you look.” She shook her head.
He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. It embarrassed and frightened him to be told that he was “delicate”; it touched sharply on his pride.
She took him into a big room on the left that had been fitted out as a living-room and library. She watched his face light with eagerness as he saw the fifteen hundred or two thousand books shelved away in various places. He sat down clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited until she returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before.
When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his, and sat down. She had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard errands; he could be heard from time to time shouting in an authoritative country voice to his live stock.
“Well, tell me boy,” she said, “what have you been reading?”
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book—he rebuilt the story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was excited and eager—she saw at once how abundantly she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus. Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story he had ever read.
The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture of their lives. All the delayed success that Leonard had dreamed of as a younger man he hoped to realize now. For him the school was independence, mastership, power, and, he hoped, prosperity. For her, teaching was its own exceeding great reward—her lyric music, her life, the world in which plastically she built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that gave her spirit life while he broke her body.
In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed. One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul. She remained.
O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with us on the hills?