XXVDAGO

For-ty year on when a-far and a-sunder.For-ty year on when a-far and a-sunder.

For-ty year on when a-far and a-sunder.

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AT the suggestion of Gorgas, Leopold became a member of the staff of “Top-o’-the-Hill.” Of all the old group that used to make rendezvous of the Levering house, Leopold and Blynn were the only two who kept up the relationship; but both men were rather intermittent visitors. Leopold—everyone said “Leopold,” possibly because of the impossible surname, Hayim—called punctiliously upon Mrs. Levering, although Mrs. Levering saw little of him. Gorgas and he spent the time exercising their French. He was a silent, grave man, with a far-off friendly smile; and, once enticed, he could talk out of a rare life. On festival occasions he could always be counted upon for a plaintive song.

“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle! He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides, he’s English. That will givesucha tone!”

What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.” Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the “new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:

In Charge:Mr. Allen BlynnHolden and JenaMiss Keyser LeveringThe Warren SchoolAssociates:Mr. Hayim LeopoldHarrow and CambridgeMr. BardekNaples and BordeauxMiss Gorgas LeveringSchool of Applied Arts

“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print it.”

“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.

“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.

“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This listof names is just advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’ ‘Cambridge’—why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You watch.”

“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect. Ofcourse,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come, jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are too wise.

“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds, and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and he say, nothing—nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy. ‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.

“And the children! First they are afraid—theybelieve then all the papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know what happens the day before it was yesterday.

“And t’en t’ey sendderechildren to him and make beeg stories how great is that man!

“Oh, put the dead insect on the hook, my friend: or there will be no little pupils and we will be so hungry to teach t’at we fall on each other and teach.”

It was precisely as Kate had predicted. She seemed to know exactly where to drop her printed bait. By August she had closed the doors and had engineered a waiting list, for they were resolved the first year to begin with small numbers.

“We’ll pay you your wages and have something besides for improvements,” she announced to Blynn.

Of all that enthusiastic lot of teachers he was the only one who could not afford to give his time without salary. It hurt him to take that money, but his good sense showed him that there was no other way out. It was shame of the sort that Bardek thought so strange, and it must be downed. He reflected with some grimness that while the others were giving energy, joy, and enthusiasm to the work, he was offering all that and something much harder to give, his pride as an independent man.

Top-o’-the-Hill“Top-o’-the-Hill”

“Top-o’-the-Hill”

To no one he spoke of this. In spite of his innocence and in spite of the face which, as Bardek claimed, he wore for the most part “on the outside,” Blynn could mask a hundred worries back of his Pestalozzian smile. Yet Gorgas knew. She had pieced together his jests and his half-uttered opinions.

They had worked all day together on a baseball diamond and were celebrating the conclusion by a picnic supper on the grounds of “Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“Mein guter Kamarade,” she whispered, “you mustn’t feel bad about that fool salary.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he smiled.

“Yes, you do,” she nodded wisely. “I’m onto your curves, old chap. I’ll just have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I’ve a scheme, too; better than anything Kate gets off.Now—mustn’t it be grand?”

“Phew!” he affected seriousness. “It must be a corker. Let’s hear it.”

“Here? Wouldn’t that be funny,” she asked herself aloud. “Wouldn’t that betoofunny!” The idea amused her. “Oh, no,mon capitaine, not here before all these folks. It’s—it’s private. Yes,” she mused, “it’s quite private.... You must let me have an interview. I’ve been trying to have one with you ever since June.”

“Why, my dear child!” he was surprised. “We’ve been together nearly every blessed day, taken walks together and all that!”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve tried to say it—and couldn’t. But I’m going to dive in soon. That’swhat I came to your house for, in June; you remember when you were teaching the Croft boy? If he hadn’t been there I’d have done it then. Hush!” she raised a finger. “They’re coming back. Not a word.... It’s partly abouthim.” She nudged toward Leopold.

That was an exasperating way to end a conversation, characteristic of Gorgas—just like an exciting continuous story. “It’s partly abouthim.” About Leopold?

Leopold had never ceased his subtle interest in Gorgas since the night of their first conversation in French. He was both French and English, and, back of that, the Oriental. He seemed ever ready to do two contradictory things; to leap into the breach and seize the enemy by the throat, or to stand, courageous as the day, and undisturbed take every shock. One of these—the French or the English—might have won out and given him a positive emotional character, but the persistent Hebrew, trained to keep emotions in check, to pass them in review before hard, good sense, held the two contrary horses together and dominated from the driver’s seat. One needs a mixed metaphor to describe Leopold.

There was much more to Leopold than that—what forked, straddling biped can be summed up in a phrase?—he had the smile of compassion and the hovering sadness of those who have looked upon the world from afar off, who have travelled sympathetically among peoples and have seen the splendid futility of the life effort.

It was generally believed that Leopold was rich. Headmitted a competence, but his life was simple. Ah! Blynn had a swift thought of comprehension. Leopold was to furnish the salary! That was it. Wise little Gorgas had thought to dissipate a man’s pride in being self-supporting by shifting the source of income from a stock-company to a person! Women will never understand that side of man, he mused; the fierce hatred of leaning upon another. In illness women are meek and saintly; when men become sick and incapacitated they grow unbearable, their maimed spirits cry out against the very charity that would make them whole. Women live in dependence without shame. They take furs and carriages and spending money from their fathers. Even a boy of sixteen begins to rebel. He cannot take things, even from fathers; he must earn.

Over the sprightly little fire Blynn told them of Diccon.

“You know how mean I felt because I had to leave him in the lurch,” he said. “Well! Diccon was just fine about it. He said he suspected that turn of affairs all along and had prepared for it.

“What a loyal chap that Diccon is! He said his only interest was in having the post officially tendered me; he really didn’t care what I did with it. He said just what you remarked the other day, that the election would make my name valuable anywhere else I went. I told him about ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ He said, ‘Bully! It’ll be a great go. Put me on the trustees, will you?’”

“Let’s!” suggested Gorgas. “I like Diccon. He’s got sense. We haven’t.”

“What!” they shouted.

“We’re dreaming,” she nodded wisely. “We need his kind to prevent us soaring right up in the air like a balloon and—”

“And go bust, eh?” continued Bardek.

“Just that,” said Gorgas. “We need ballast badly.”

They could hardly eat, these dreamers, until the new idea had been incorporated. A board of advisers was drawn up to give ballast: it included Diccon, and the rector of Grace Church, the butter-and-egg man, others of the tennis-court group, and three influential “mothers.”

“We’ll get out a second edition of the prospectus,” Kate smiled her satisfaction. “That front page will look slick! We’ll charge ’em two hundred next year.”

Bardek brought the Italian laborers to the picnic supper. They demurred mightily at first, but Gorgas won them by a neat speech of invitation in Italian. How their eyes glistened, not for the good things to eat, although that must have touched them, but for the sound of that rich Italian speech.

“They are so hungry for words,” laughed Bardek; “the sound of your own language in a strange land—ah! that is sweet. One day I pass an ol’ woman wit’ bundle of sticks and she say, ‘Dam t’ose t’ings; t’ey won’t stay on my ol’ head’; but she say it in Czech, the clicking-clacking Czech which my mother spoke to me.” He burst into a strange rattle of exclamations. “That is the sweet Czech, my friends. It sounds not so sweetto you, eh? No? Your ear it is not right. Suppose you was in the middle of China and could never go to your home and, quick, you hear little children wit’ high American voice sing in the evening,

‘Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,Mulberry bush, mulberry bush,Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,So early in the morning.’

‘Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

Mulberry bush, mulberry bush,

Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

So early in the morning.’

“Ach! Gott, would you not cry?

“I did cry and hug that ol’ woman and tell her in her own Czech that I be long-gone son. And she believe me! I make her say, ‘Dam t’ose sticks,’ five, ten times and give her silver dollar for each time she speak. Ach! if she do not go mad after that! Somewhere in America is a crazy woman, all her life-time singing and shouting, ‘Dam t’ose sticks!’”

“We’ve caught you at last, Bardek,” Gorgas cried. “You are Czech! That’s what you are!”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “I am cosmopolitan. My mother, she was Czech when I was boy; but before t’at she was many t’ings; and after, many t’ings. I am cosmopolitan,” he claimed again. To Leopold and to Gorgas he spoke in French, to Blynn he made his remarks in German, and to the Italians he talked in their own tongue. The verytimbreand rhythm of his voice changed with each language; he had the music of each in his head.

“Ask Caproni, here,” he boasted, “if I am not Italian.”

Gorgas inquired in their language.

“Him?” their eyes opened in surprise at the question. “Oh, but, yes, milady. He is grand signor, Italian gentleman. He has lived in Milan, Napoli, everywhere, even in our own Sicily. Italian? Oh, but yes. French? You would make fun, milady? He speak French as we in Sicily speak French; ah! he talk Italian from the heart.”

While Gorgas translated, Bardek sat transfigured.

“You see!” he shook his great, round head in pride.

“And I would take oath you are French,” Leopold remarked quietly. “You have tones and nuances of the Loire—”

“Oh, yes, I have lived on the Loire,” he admitted, “and also in Brittany.” For example, he shifted back and forth between the patois of the north and south of France.

“I say again that I am cosmopolitan,” he averred. “The Bohemian belongs to all countries. In New York city is a Bohemia which New York city does not know. There we talk all languages and listen to the pulses of the world. New York is a little place, full of the small thinkings of little places. It has great pride and wonderful industry—just like little places—but of the doings of the great world, it knows everything too late. Long before the big wars the Bohemia of New York city knows what is to be, and prepares; one day New York city wake up and scream the stale news. So wit’ everyt’ing.

“But I should not so talk,” he shook his head sadly. “I am no longer cosmopolitan.”

They tried for some time to get him to tell them why. At first he would not speak. Sadness enveloped him. After a while he laughed.

“I am not sorry; it is good,” he said, with characteristic optimism. “In America one cannot be cosmopolitan, I see. America is too strong, it sucks t’ blood out. In Europe I could change my skin and still be—deep—myself, Bardek, Citizen of No Place. Always I could be French and still look on like foreign; or German or Dutch or Spanish or Polish or Italian or anyt’ing. Jus’ so I be in America for long time. Zen somet’ing happen to me. I eat poison grass, or somet’ing. My skin, it does not change; it gets tough.

“Sometimes when I talk French or Italian to my boys or to Miss Gorgas, I must stop and t’ink for the word. Me, Bardek, stop to think! It is terrible, my friend, to have big things bubbling inside and no word at the mout’! And always the English word, it come. And such English! Ach! My boys, dey laugh and make fun—when they t’ink I do not look—and they say, ‘Dago.’ Oof! Sometimes I beat t’em in six languages; but, sometimes, too, I laugh.... ‘Dago!’ It is so.”

A chorus of protests told him how well he spoke English.

Leopold scolded him for his desponding. “It is thinking that counts, my dear Bardek,” he said, “notwords. Greek is a wonderful language, but without Plato or Homer and Aesculus or Sophocles and Aristophanes, it would be a dead instrument. Youthink, my dear Bardek. If you spoke in Pennsylvania-Dutch you would be worth listening to.”

“And your English is better than English,” spoke up the loyal Gorgas. “It is softer and lovelier and beautifully strange.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “I like you to say zat. A good lie, you owe it to a friend, to make him happy. What! You laugh? But it is not sin to lie. You do not read your Bible, my friend. To kill? steal? yes. To bear false witness? yes. But the good Moses was too wise to say, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’... Yet I am ‘Dago,’ jus’ like dese Italian ol’ men.

“Oh, I know; it is right,” he continued. “The Italian, oh, he will come to America and he say, ‘I will live like pig and make much money and go back to my country and live like prince. Yah! He stay wit’ his own people and talk, talk, talk his own speech. He laugh at funny Americans. Yah! Soon he must hide his fine clothes of colors and put on grease-pants and ol’ hat. It is not good to make money when peoples laugh. Yah! And zen he must learn little English, and he speak ‘Dago,’ jus’ like me. Or how can he make the much money, eh? Yah! To his little boys and girls he talk ze good language of his own land; but zey? Ach! Zey will not. In ze house, yes; so not to get ze beatings. But in ze street, là! là!là!là! Gabble,gabble, gabble. Some day zey make fun of daddy and wink and say, ‘Dago!’

“And he is ‘Dago.’ Soon he find himself talking ‘Dago’ in house, even wit’ his wife. Once he fight and beat her and all cry curses—in his own speech? Ah, no; in ‘Dago.’ He call her ‘Dam dog’ and she say to him ‘Go t’ ’ell!’ and zen he is done. His skin cannot change. All his life he is not’ing—he is American.”

It was the strong America seizing on the immigrant and twisting him into a new mold. The children would be Americans, but the old ones, they were wrecked in the process. The Germans became “Dutchmen”; the Irish became “Micks”; the Poles became “Hunkies,” and the Italians “Dagos.”

“But sometimes they go back,” ventured Blynn.

Bardek laughed at the picture his mind conjured.

“Oh, yes, they go back. Là! là!là!là! What a comic! The people of their own land rush out of t’ house to see t’ funny t’ing. Là! là!là!là! The dead clot’es of ragman! The gol’ watch-chain for t’ tie big dog! Zen they talk! It is no language. Perhaps they stay to be comic all their lives? Ah, no. For they get sick for America, where the little boys and girls go to school. They do not rest till zey go back and be once more ‘Dago.’”

The twilight came slowly about them while they lingered over the camp-fire. Some of Bardek’s brooding spirit had infected them; but it did not drive them home. Night began to make its claims for a habitation,and the stars of a fine August evening shone clear, yet they stayed to hear Leopold talk of his boyhood days at Harrow. Finally they joined hands with him and formed the circle about the ebbing fire—as Harrow “old boys” have done for generations—while they sang the Harrow parting song:

Forty year on, when afar and asunderParted are those who are singing today,When you look back, and forgetfully wonderWhat you were like in your work and your play;Then it may be, there will often come o’er youGlimpses of notes, like the catch of a song—Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!Till the field ring again and againWith the tramp of the twenty-two men.Follow up! Follow up!

Forty year on, when afar and asunder

Parted are those who are singing today,

When you look back, and forgetfully wonder

What you were like in your work and your play;

Then it may be, there will often come o’er you

Glimpses of notes, like the catch of a song—

Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,

Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.

Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!

Till the field ring again and again

With the tramp of the twenty-two men.

Follow up! Follow up!

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