X
As for the Acacias, in that queer old courtyard—distinctly exotic creatures, aristocrats in the company of those palpable sons of the soil, the caducous orchard trees—I still wonder how they ever came there. Their rôle in the life of the small-boy school seems to have been that of a butt for cockshies, and thus passively to foster a notable precision in the use of those small river pebbles with which the playground was covered. A game, deeply favoured by the young scholars ‹but not recognized by the authorities› when Acacias were “in,” consisted in the bringing down of some selected bunch of fragrant, creamy flowers from its lofty station with the minimum number of pebbles. The feat was the subject of wager, the stakes stated and paid in steel nibs. Nibs—in the tongue of the aborigines, becs-de-plume—were accepted as currency and legal tender. It would be truly interesting to find out how this particular token of exchange came to be established among the youthful communities of French elementary schools. Be it as it may, the convention was hallowed by tradition “whereof the memory of boy ran not to the contrary.”
GARLANDS AND ACACIAS
When, however, the pale yellow, incense-smelling, honey-tasting racemes were “out,” the devoted Acacia became the object of other, slightly different, balistic attentions. The boys, be it stated, were regularly released from the durance of bench and desk every hour for some ten minutes ‹a commendable system with seven to ten year-olds› during which the courtyard became clamorous as any aviary. During these short intervals of recreation, too short to allow of any settled games, a favourite occupation was the adorning of the inaccessible branches with long streamers of coloured paper, previously manufactured at home—guirlandes by name. These guirlandes, some twenty or thirty feet long, were wound with sedulous care round a suitable stone, leaving a small length as trailer; the apparatus was then cast up in a parabola over the tree-top. If the indirect fire was successful the trailer caught in the leafage, unrolling the remainder and releasing the ballasting stone. The most successful shot was, of course, that which left the streamer properly entangled on the topmost boughs. Each boy had his chosen and declared colour, or mixture of colours; and the trophy remained, flaunting his achievement “in its own tincts” as long as wind or rain permitted. It afforded the small breast a distinct satisfaction when, reaching the school of a morning, the boy could see his pennant still flying in the breeze....
Such is the strength of the association of ideas that I never could come upon a roadside plantation of Acacias in the hot plains of Hungary—where the tree is used as commonly as in France the Poplar, that inevitable feature of the great highways—without adorning it in imagination with the multi-coloured guirlandes of my first school.
If there was no reasonable accounting for the presence of Acacias at the Institution Delescluze, the great Poplar, on the other hand, that raised its height in the very centre of the cour, had a well-authenticated history. A relic of Revolution days, it was then in its eighth decade, in the strength of its age; having been planted, at the same time as hundreds of others, as a Tree of Liberty—Populus, emblematic of sans-culotte ascendancy—at the time when the royal Bastille, emblem of another form of tyranny, was laid low.
For some cryptic reason, by the way, the democratic Poplar, which had subsisted through many changes of régime, and had become undoubtedly too ornamental a mark of antiquity to be destroyed, was never honoured by the flights of our banderoles. Perhaps it was a result of political prejudice, which in France characteristically affects the views even of scholars at the hornbook stage of life. Or perhaps it was that the old Peuplier was the site of the disciplinary punishment known as piquet—the playground equivalent of our nursery “corner.”
GLAMOUR OF YORE