His eagles had flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman playing C?sar.
He craned his head aside and covered his face with his hand.
16
The Spring grew ripe.
There was at mid-day 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 lightning.
Then he looked around cautiously to see if any one 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.