CHAPTER XVI
Which hints at an Age of Gold
Increasinggood fortune came with sundry little successes; and gradually the pressure of want was eased, and the attic became a place of comfort and small luxuries.
Caroline Baddlesmere realized that for the boy the ordinary public school life was not only beyond her means, but that it would now be a sheer waste of time. She therefore, foreseeing that thereby as many good mid-day meals would be assured to the big man under witness of her own eyes, and the small fee helpful to him besides, induced Eustace Lovegood to furbish his mathematics and give the boy a couple of hours of them four or five mornings of the week; and Betty, taking the big man’s hand at the conference, shyly slid into the arrangement.
Lovegood’s affection for the boy and girl gave him complete command of their attention; and his large scrupulousness, wide humanity, and great-heartedness had an even mightier educational force upon them both than the clear wits he brought to bear in luring them along the gritty path of the dry philosophy of numbers. In his hands geography and geology became a romance—an education in themselves; and science a glittering enchantment. He directed their reading in literature and history and government and statesmanship and social laws, which he put before all else for the training of the good citizen. Indeed he had only to guide—for they were greedy readers. He laid the classics at their feet, making them read good translations first, giving them a clear idea of the author’s relation to the times in which he wrote, and persuading the youngsters, after the mathematics were done in the morning, to run through some pages of the Latin or the Greek with him “to keep up the tune.”
The boy’s wits awoke at once, roused as they had never been roused, to an eager curiosity about the very things that at school had but irked him and been an unmitigated weariness to him. He now found that the thing to be expressed was the important thing, whereas formerly, in the schoolroom, ranged in a row of some score of indifferent yawning others, he had been whipped into regarding the way of saying it as of the only interest—nay, the sole interest of the schoolmaster.
To his profound astonishment, he found that these old booksmeantsomething—that they were not exquisite torture-racks, appointed by some vague, hated, and arbitrary governance over them, for the mere racking of their wits in the cracking of the nuts of grammar—that it was what these old fellows had seen and known and felt and thought that was worth the thinking and the puzzling out, andnotthe machinery of their thought.
So that what had aforetime gone in at one ear and out at the other now lodged in the brain and painted pictures in the imagination that none might rub out.
The boy had groaned over his Xenophon, until “Thence he advanced parasangs and stathmoi” had become the refrain of boredom as repulsive as the epileptic drivel of Revelation. He now discovered that the book contained one of the mighty adventures of the world. He stepped it out with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Cyrus’s march, listened to the camp scandals of the years ago, thrilled by the perplexities and endurance and dangers and hair’s-breadth escapes of the questionable undertaking; followed the great and dogged retreat; took a part in the passing incidents, hunting the bustards, tiring them down, and finding “the flesh of these birds very delicious.”
He dawdled before Troy with the Homeric heroes, fought with them, listened to their gossip, bathed with them, sacrificed with them.
The Latin tongue revealed other emotions than the frenzy of doubt as to whether Caius and Balbus should build unending walls.
To him, Roman Horace, growing fat, unwieldy, laughing at his own disadvantages in subtle Latin verse, lolling about Mæcenas’ villa, became a live acquaintance, as real as the people he rubbed against in the street.
And every day the number of his acquaintance grew.
As real, more definite than the swarm of boys with whom he had played at school, became Charlemagne and Clovis and Capet, Simon de Montfort, and Bastard William of Normandy and the First and Third Edwards of England, and Cromwell and Chatham and the men of the French Revolution. The very hours of the day, seasons of the year, became frequented with the association of the great dead, so that in the after-years of his manhood, at the break of day it almost seemed that there stole across the years, back over the edge of the drowsy world, out of old pilastered Greece, the hushed image of that festival drawing to its end when Socrates rises from the symposium, the last of his mighty boon companions, drawing his garments about him as he passes out from them that he has outstayed, where they lay adrowse and overcome with wine on couch and floor—in such strange fashion giving to the decaying genius of Greece the new ideals that were to prepare the civilized world for the coming of its Christ—a strange uncouth figure in a wondrous mist of dawn.
The twilight became haunted with the drowsy music of Grey’sElegy, sounding to some mystic fugue played with Handelian dignity upon the aerial organ of the winds.
The history of the mightiest people the world has seen leaped into life again, seen through the gossip eyes of them that had watched its pageant pass, its comedy and its tragedy—Pepys and Boswell, and the splendid gossips of their day—or in the mighty music of Carlyle’s colossal and glowing imagination, of Oldmixon, of Macaulay and of Green.
In fact, the big gentle man taught the boy and girl the great aim of education—to know; to educate themselves; to have self-reliance; to establish a code of conduct; in a word, to form character. For, he pointed out to them, the good of the community is the highest human aim, and knowledge of this world the only basis on which to build conduct towards that end.
And, the morning’s work done, he would counsel exercise, taking them himself sometimes to Booksellers’ Row, walking beside them, with the great black cloak and theatrical strut, striking a little out of their way towards Soho, before they swung round into the Strand, to drag out Netherby to their frolics; and the four of them, making down their beloved Strand, would haunt the Row by hours, poring over the stalls of the second-hand booksellers, garnering their rare pennies to thrilling purchases in the glorious dingy dusty narrow old picturesque alley of splendid treasure.
Indeed, Netherby Gomme did not lack bodily exercise in these days, for the boy and girl considered no junket complete without him. So Noll and Betty and he would go for walks to Chiswick, down the river to Hampton Court, stroll the Strand and gaze into the print-shops that lay thereabout, loiter on Westminster Bridge and wander in the Abbey; haunt the picture-galleries and live in the pits of theatres, getting passes at times from the kindly bohemians to dress circles—and sometimes Julia would come, her long day’s work being done.
And there was surely no better audience than they. They had the true theatric instinct—the right theatre spirit. They were in their seats as soon as the opened doors would let them enter. The tuning of the fiddles was exquisite music to their ears—an essential part of the drama. Every moment was precious to them. They would as lief have missed the rising of the great curtain, sweeping upwards with ecstatic jerk into the flies, as have gone out before the last act, or worn their hats to spoil the delight of others. For them the Theatre held something of a sacred pleasure—the dear pleasaunce of populous cities.
Ah, the golden age! the days of the wide unquestioning delight in all things that is the eternal theatre of the childhood of the world—for, thank God, Fancy fills the very gutters of the street-children with faery. There is a world of delight enwrapped about a rag doll—when the world is young.
They were glad to be alive.
And as they took their pleasures, so they took their serious moods, taking the best from all that came. They would dawdle into the churches, leaving early when the parson was dry—Protestant and Papist, High and Low. Particularly the RomanCatholic, drawn by the æsthetic beauty of the Service, and charmed by its exquisite symbolism—for they were children when all is said, questioning nothing that was established, accepting everything, believing in belief. And the lank awkward Netherby Gomme perhaps the simplest-hearted child of the three.
Alas! that there should loom ever at the end of all things the threat of change! And that the young feet, with restless skip, should go so eagerly to meet it!
The three went down to Burford Bridge one day—there having been much careful garnering of sixpences to that end.
They burst into the old inn—to be rebuffed.
The jolly old landlady was gone—their friend the ostler wholly vanished—no trace of him.
There was hint of sellings-up, and broken fortunes, and sad flitting from the old home.
Strange faces smiled these things down upon them indifferently, indulgently.
No, with headshakings, there were no prize-fighting ostlers that sang like baritone gods, no heroes nor colourable imitation of heroes in the stables—none. Nor indeed anything more romantic than racing touts—lazy rogues that sold the hay and corn when the watchful eye was not upon them....