“Bravo, Brother Gant! Excellent! Splendid! You are riding a good pony—but a little too smoothly, my boy. You ride a little too well.”
The class sniggered heavily.
When he could stand it no longer, he sought the man out one day after the class.
“See here, sir! See here!” he began in a voice choking with fury and exasperation. “Sir—I assure you—” he thought of all the grinning apes in the class, palming off profitably their stolen translations, and he could not go on.
The Devil’s Disciple was not a bad man; he was only, like most men who pride themselves on their astuteness, a foolish one.
“Nonsense, Mr. Gant,” said he kindly. “You don’t think you can fool me on a translation, do you? It’s all right with me, you know,” he continued, grinning. “If you’d rather ride a pony than do your own work, I’ll give you a passing grade—so long as you do it well.”
“But—” Eugene began explosively.
“But I think it’s a pity, Mr. Gant,” said the professor, gravely, “that you’re willing to slide along this way. See here, my boy, you’re capable of doing first-rate work. I can see that. Why don’t you make an effort? Why don’t you buckle down and really study, after this?”
Eugene stared at the man, with tears of anger in his eyes. He sputtered but could not speak. But suddenly, as he looked down into the knowing leer, the perfect and preposterous injustice of the thing—like a caricature—overcame him: he burst into an explosive laugh of rage and amusement which the teacher, no doubt, accepted as confession.
“Well, what do you say?” he asked. “Will you try?”
“All right! Yes!” the boy yelled. “I’ll try it.”
He bought at once a copy of the translation used by the class. Thereafter, when he read, faltering prettily here and there over a phrase, until his instructor should come to his aid, the satanic professor listened gravely and attentively, nodding his head in approval from time to time, and saying, with great satisfaction, when he had finished: “Good, Mr. Gant. Very good. That shows what a little real work will do.”
And privately, he would say: “You see the difference, don’t you? I knew at once when you stopped using that pony. Your translation is not so smooth, but it’s your own now. You’re doing good work, my boy, and you’re getting something out of it. It’s worth it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Eugene gratefully, “it certainly is—”
By far the most distinguished of his teachers this first year was Mr. Edward Pettigrew (“Buck”) Benson, the Greek professor. Buck Benson was a little man in the middle-forties, a bachelor, somewhat dandified, but old-fashioned, in his dress. He wore wing collars, large plump cravats, and suede-topped shoes. His hair was thick, heavily grayed, beautifully kept. His face was courteously pugnacious, fierce, with large yellow bulging eyeballs, and several bulldog pleatings around the mouth. It was an altogether handsome ugliness.
His voice was low, lazy, pleasant, with an indolent drawl, but without changing its pace or its inflection he could flay a victim with as cruel a tongue as ever wagged, and in the next moment wipe out hostility, restore affection, heal all wounds by the same agency. His charm was enormous. Among the students he was the subject for comical speculation—in their myths, they made of him a passionate and sophisticated lover, and his midget cycle-car, which bounded like an overgrown toy around the campus, the scene of many romantic seductions.
He was a good Grecian—an elegant indolent scholar. Under his instruction Eugene began to read Homer. The boy knew little grammar—he had learned little at Leonard’s—but, since he had had the bad judgment to begin Greek under someone other than Buck Benson, Buck Benson thought he knew even less than he did. He studied desperately, but the bitter dyspeptic gaze of the elegant little man frightened him into halting, timorous, clumsy performances. And as he proceeded, with thumping heart and tremulous voice, Buck Benson’s manner would become more and more weary, until finally, dropping his book, he would drawl:
“Mister Gant, you make me so damned mad I could throw you out the window.”
But, on the examination, he gave an excellent performance, and translated from sight beautifully. He was saved. Buck Benson commended his paper publicly with lazy astonishment, and gave him a fair grade. Thereafter, they slipped quickly into an easier relation: by Spring, he was reading Euripides with some confidence.
But that which remained most vividly, later, in the drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast sea-surge of Homer which beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as did the sea-sound in Gant’s parlor shells, when first he heard it to the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the lost last weary son of Hellas.
Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo—above the whistle’s shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter’s tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall. What dissonance can quench it? What jangling violence can disturb or conquer it—entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like “the apple tree, the singing, and the gold”?
XXIX
Before his first year was ended, the boy had changed his lodging four or five times. He finished the year living alone in a big bare carpetless room—an existence rare at Pulpit Hill, where the students, with very few exceptions, lived two or three to a room. In that room began a physical isolation, hard enough to bear at first, which later became indispensable to him, mind and body.
He had come to Pulpit Hill with Hugh Barton, who met him at Exeter and drove him over in the big roadster. After his registration, he had secured lodging quickly at the house of an Altamont widow whose son was a student. Hugh Barton looked relieved and departed, hoping to reach home and his
