“Cash is good and I need it, but I think I’ll leave the handling of bricks to the Portuguese.”
Chapter XI. How I Competed
with Patrick Henry and was made
Aware of an Uneconomical Waste
of the Eighth Letter of the Alphabet.
How I Condensed all my
Studies into an Oration. How the
Populace Greeted my Rehearsal.
Striking the Top Pitch
BY the middle of the year I had obtained such a grip on study that I was bold enough to incorporate two extra subjects in the week’s routine. Besides that, I conceived the idea of reading English history outside of class and then securing permission to pass an examination on it, a scheme in which the teacher acquiesced. I felt that I must make up for lost time and hungrily, voraciously threw myself at the privilege which fortune had brought me. I began to realize in my own mind what men called “enthusiasm in his work.” Every day seemed to me a momentous day of opportunity: a day in which I might atone for the educational privilege I had missed up to my twentieth birthday. When I saw Aborn, stately, gifted, and on his way towards his Master’s degree at twenty, I was made to realize how long a road I had before me and how energetic I should have to be in order to get anywhere in education from my elementary and preparatory studies. So I put in my studies an investment of interest and patient attention which I had put in no other work that I had ever done.
The most outstanding interest that I had was the class in oratory. This class met on the top floor, under the rafters, in a room directly off from the chapel. It resembled the studio of a poor artist with its gray northern skylight and little windows high above the bare floor. The class included young men and women. Nearly all were preparing for religious work, as ministers, missionaries, and evangelists. One student, a shock-haired young Westerner with “temperament” and “personality,” who generally sat in the pose of an actor, was planning for the career of a public reader.
After the preliminary weeks of physical gymnastics and throat clearing, and after we were able to say “Oh!” without making the flame of a candle flicker, we began on the real excitement of speaking Orations; I began with the traditional Patrick Henry, of course, and naturally, after long and patient rehearsals in my room credited myself with the fact that if the author of that thriller should chance to come into the oratorical studio on the morning when I planned to recite it before my professor, he would feel that his forceful utterance had passed into no mean mouth!
The morning on which I was scheduled to speak duly arrived and with it an increase in my confidence that I should do well with it: the confidence without which no orator yet—in school—ever did much. I stood out before the class, struck my pose—left foot at an angle from the right and slightly in front with the weight on the right foot to maintain balance—and attempted to recreate the atmosphere, the thrill, and the historic eloquence of the Virginia Convention where the oration had had its birth, before the innumerable army of school lads had passed it on from generation to generation. Applause greeted my effort and I sat down in a flush of happiness. However, the professor, after crediting me several points of excellence, brought up a criticism that plunged me into a sweat of guilty self-consciousness. He said,
“Mr. Priddy, why is it that you aspirate your words so? I know you were born in England, but you have been in this country for some time now. There were several places in the oration where you placed ‘h’s’ where they should not have been placed, and where you left them off when they should have been retained!”
It was the first time in my whole life that anybody had called my attention to that fault. I said,
“Will you please give me samples, sir?”
“Well,” replied the professor, consulting his tablet, “you said ‘w’ile’ instead of ‘while,’ and ‘Hi’ instead of the pronoun ‘I.’ And ‘w’at’ instead of ‘what,’ and ‘Forbid it, Halmighty God,’ and you declaimed that passage, ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?’ became ‘His life so dear hor peace so sweet has to be bought hat the price of chains and slavery?’”