The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music.
The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat.
As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature.
Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty.
His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.
“The mountains,” observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, “have been the traditional seat of Liberty.”
Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges.
He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.
During this season of Eliza’s absence he roomed with Guy Doak.
Guy Doak was five years his senior.
He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness.
His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida.
Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish’s belly, with somewhat unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than his upper.
He was foppishly neat in his dress.
People called him a good-looking boy.
He made few friends.
To the boys at Leonard’s this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for girls.
He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him.
Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence.
He did not laugh loudly.
He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic.
His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist.
They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition.
Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller’s mould of infantile cynicism.
He was occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels.
He was wise.
Above all, he was wise.
It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne.
So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement.
Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice fellow — sharp, obstinate, unsubtle, and pleased with his wit.
They lived on the first floor at Leonard’s: at night, by a roaring wood fire, they listened carefully to the great thunder of the trees, and to the stealthy creaking foot-steps of the master as he came softly down the stairs, and paused by their door.
They ate at table with Margaret, John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John Dorsey, junior, nine, and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard’s Tennessee nephews — Tyson Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen, foulmouthed and sly, and Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen, with a bumpy face, brown merry eyes, and a quick temper.
At table they kept up a secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden movement, fleshing a fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said the blessing, and choking with smothered laughter.
At night, they tapped messages on floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering conventions in the windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds as John Dorsey stormed down on them.
Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school alive.
He had less than twenty students the first year, and less than thirty the second.
From an income of not more than $3,000 he had to pay Miss Amy, who had left a high school position to help him, a small salary.
The old house on its fine wooded hill was full of outmoded plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it at a small rental.
But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a considerable yearly restoration.
The Leonards were fighting very stubbornly and courageously for their existence.
The food was scant and poor: at breakfast, a dish of blue, watery oatmeal, eggs and toast; at lunch, a thin soup, hot sour cornbread, and a vegetable boiled with a piece of fat pork; at dinner, hot biscuits, a small meat loaf, and creamed or boiled potatoes.
No one was permitted coffee or tea, but there was an abundance of fresh creamy milk.
John Dorsey always kept and milked his own cow.
Occasionally there was a deep, crusted pie, hot, yolky muffins, or spicy gingerbread of Margaret’s make.
She was a splendid cook.
Often, at night, Guy Doak slid quietly out through the window on to the side porch, and escaped down the road under the concealing roar of the trees.
He would return from town within two hours, crawling in exultantly with a bag full of hot frankfurter sandwiches coated thickly with mustard, chopped onion, and a hot Mexican sauce.
With a crafty grin he unfoiled two five-cent cigars, which they smoked magnificently, with a sharp tang of daring, blowing the smoke up the chimney in order to thwart a possible irruption by the master.
And Guy brought back, from the wind and the night, the good salt breath of gossip in street and store, news of the town, and the brave swagger of the drugstore gallants.
As they smoked and stuffed fat palatable bites of sandwich into their mouths, they would regard each other with pleased sniggers, carrying on thus an insane symphony of laughter: