Kabanata Kabanata 35 · Chapter I

At the university I had the good fortune to come immediately under the

influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had

arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work

as head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his

physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in

Italy. When I took my entrance examinations, he was my examiner, and my

course was arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,

working off a year’s Greek, which had been my only condition on

entering the freshman class. Cleric’s doctor advised against his going

back to New England, and, except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too,

was in Lincoln all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long

walks together. I shall always look back on that time of mental

awakening as one of the happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced

me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything

else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not

been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of the figures of my old life

seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among the students who

had come up to the university from the farms and the little towns

scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came

straight from the cornfields with only a summer’s wages in their

pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and

completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors

were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded

ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of

graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of expectancy

and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head

from the prairie only a few years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no

college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took

rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married

off their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of

town, near the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for

students, and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My

bedroom, originally a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large

enough to contain my cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room

my study. The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my

clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I

considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects

when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped

table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over

the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I

had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark,

old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome,

the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he

was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph

of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me from his

collection.

When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood

at the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it

with great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was

out for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to

linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit

in, and if he found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of

cigarettes he liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered,

parsimonious about small expenditures—a trait absolutely inconsistent

with his general character. Sometimes when he came he was silent and

moody, and after a few sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the

streets of Lincoln, which were almost as quiet and oppressively

domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again, he would sit until nearly

midnight, talking about Latin and English poetry, or telling me about

his long stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In

a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no

platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired, his

lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested

they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being

a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of

imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much

in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw

his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a

figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image

that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before

one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall

never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the

solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind

blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the

flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung

mountains. He had wilfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped

in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path down the

sky until ‘the bride of old Tithonus’ rose out of the sea, and the

mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It was there he caught the fever

which held him back on the eve of his departure for Greece and of which

he lay ill so long in Naples. He was still, indeed, doing penance for

it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of

Dante’s veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of

the ‘Commedia,’ repeating the discourse between Dante and his ‘sweet

teacher,’ while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his

long fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet

Statius, who spoke for Dante: ‘I was famous on earth with the name

which endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the

sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have

kindled; I speak of the “Aeneid,” mother to me and nurse to me in

poetry.’

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived

about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never

lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt

to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures

scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the

new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from

me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my

own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now,

like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for

an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto

and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with

other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those

early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they

accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive

in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive

anywhere else, or how.