And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled.
The way through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be charted for him.
Before he went away she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus.
Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story he had ever read.
The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture of their lives.
All the delayed success that Leonard had dreamed of as a younger man he hoped to realize now.
For him the school was independence, mastership, power, and, he hoped, prosperity.
For her, teaching was its own exceeding great reward — her lyric music, her life, the world in which plastically she built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that gave her spirit life while he broke her body.
In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed.
One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains.
What had lived up to hope?
What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory?
Why had the gold become so dim?
All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul.
She remained.
O death in life that turns our men to stone!
O change that levels down our gods!
If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain?
Who walks with us on the hills?
17
Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school.
Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard’s bloomed like golden apples.
From Leonard he got little — a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built.
Then, a year’s study of the lean, clear precision of C?sar, the magnificent structure of the style — the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliche of pedantic translation:
“Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, C?sar began to arrange his legions in battle array.”
All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the proud clangor of triumph — all that might have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking.
Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and memory.
March 12, last year — three days late.
Cogitata.
Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive.
Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows.
Eighty lines for tomorrow.
They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero.
De Senectute.
De Amicitia. They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor — he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation.
He hated exploration.
He distrusted voyages.
Next year, he said.
And the great names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of Amores, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides.
Nox est perpetua.
“Huh?” drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh.
He was fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch.
Stephen (“Pap”) Rheinhart leaned forward gently and fleshed his penpoint in Eugene Gant’s left rump.
Eugene grunted painfully.
“Why, no,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin.
“A different sort of Latin.”
“What sort?” Tom Davis insisted.
“Harder than Cicero?”
“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, “different.