They laughed at him, and he drew aside, rather hurt, unable to understand why they did not share his enthusiasm. Then a little girl joined him, listened to his tales of Troy and of how he was going to set out one day to find it.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
The little boy remembered. Years afterwards he returned to her, but she had forgotten and married another.
Desolation came on the home, and the boy was driven to face life in a grocer’s shop. For eighteen hours a day he expended his boyish strength in the services of the grocer, sweeping out the shop, cleaning the windows, doing menial tasks for which he had not the slightest inclination. While customers were demanding salt herrings of him at the counter, he was dreaming of Helen of Troy, and as he patted the butter his thoughts followed the adventures of Ulysses, saw him sailing ’twixt Scylla and Charybdis, heard the sirens calling to his hero.
It was a desperately hard life for the boy. His spirit rebelled, but he could do nothing to escape. He was the creature of circumstance, a grocer’s boy who dreamed of Homer while serving a litre of milk. Continual contact with customers who were rough, crude, uneducated, gradually drove from his mind the little Latin and learning of earlier days. Loving knowledge, he yet had no time to acquire it. What opportunity was there for a boy to learn while working eighteen hours a day?
Schliemann was one of the shop slaves of last century. His life was sheer drudgery all the time, just drudgery and a few hours of sleep for the exhausted frame; no pleasure, no holidays, only work.
Through all his misery sometimes flashed the memories of the happy days when his father used to delight him with the tales of Greek heroes. Somehow, in spite of everything, he retained a glimmer of hope, although he could see no way out of his environment. From dawn to long after dark he was selling food for the body and craving food for the mind. That childish picture of the burning of Troy was as a beacon to him, often nearly overwhelmed, but always flickering up again in his imagination. Buried deep down in him was still the determination to find Troy.
It was growing dusk one day when a drunken miller lurched into the shop, and suddenly began to recite in Greek some passages from Homer. Schliemann was transfixed with amazement. The meaning of the words was lost to him, but the beauty of the lines, their music, entered his soul.
“Say it again,” he said eagerly to the miller.
The miller repeated the passages, and Schliemann, feeling in his pocket for coppers, bought a glass of spirits to reward the drunkard.