The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American Jew

by Gilbert W. Gabriel

The school was comfortable enough. It was a huge, barn-like affair, built in the previous generation and hardly ever repainted since then, to look at it. The towers at either end of it had tin and battered battlements, and the flanks of steps which went up the hill on which it stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds of boys who had marched upon them, each succeeding year. It was so with the stairs all through the building: each step had a shallow, smooth cup which years of treading had ground out. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's antiquity.

There was a large parade ground at the back of the building. Its grass was brown and mealy, and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side, jutted up from the center of it like a long, lone fin.

In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall, stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged by the British in Revolutionary days—but it may have been only a fable. I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson has its Revolutionary oak—but, at the time, it made a deep impression on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches against my dormitory window.

This dormitory, to which I and my belongings repaired, was a long, narrow, whitewashed room, crowded with iron cots and intruding wardrobes. At night, when the bugle had blown taps and the lights were dimmed, there was a ghostly quality to the rows of white and huddled figures that lay the length of the room. There was never absolute quiet. Sometimes some little boy would be sobbing, sometimes two of the older ones would be telling each other the sort of jokes that daylight forbids—and sometimes it would be the heavy, asthmatic breathing of the proctor who was there to keep charge.

Of the boys themselves I could not judge at first. I was too young to judge, at that: but I was not too young that I could not realize they were not of the same sort as I had known in the city. There I had known the pupils of a public school, poor, rough, almost always hard workers, eager for whatever seemed fair and quick and democratic. But these boys were of wealthy parents, most of them. There were only a few of them who held scholarships, and these did jobs so menial and embarrassing that, even under the most ideal conditions, they must have suffered in the opinions of the rest of the school. As a matter of fact, we were a brutal little crowd of snobs, and made life miserable for these poorer scholars who must sweep the halls and wash dishes.

I do not think all military schools are like the one I attended. I hope not. I gained from my year there much in the way of physical development—but that is all. For every inch of muscle that I put on I lost something worth incalculably more: honesty and cleanliness of mind and what little shred of self-reliance I possessed. Somehow or other, it seemed to me that I had reached the lowest rung of boyhood here—and, as I look back upon it, I know that I was not much mistaken.

I wrote to ask my aunt to take me away. She refused to come to see me—but scribbled a few empty lines to accuse me of homesickness, and to assure me I should soon be rid of it.

We did much more drilling than studying. Though nearly all of us intended to go to college, our school day was confined to about three hours at the most—and under teachers who were always surly, sneering and uncouth. The standard of work in the classroom was very low. At first I did not have any trouble at all in leading the entire school in scholarship; but gradually, under the careless and relaxed conditions, I grew unambitious, lazy—and found myself failing among a class of boys who, I secretly knew, were my mental inferiors. It is so much a matter of competition, of environment.

Of friends I made few: even of those schoolboy friends who are your "pals" one day, your sworn enemies the next. I had one or two sentimental encounters with a brewer's son—a great, beefy ox of a boy who lorded it over all of us because he kept his own private horse in the town livery stable and had his room furnished with real mission furniture. But he had no use for me when he realized that I was a Jew, and took particular pains to transfer me from the company of which he was first sergeant into the band.

The band, so-called in spite of the fact that it was composed of only fifes, drums and bugles, was a sadly amateurish thing. The little knowledge of music that I had was just so much more than that possessed by any other member of the organization. As a result I soon rose to the magnificence of cadet drum-major, an office which involved a tall, silvered stick and a shako of sweltering bear-skin. Thus, my military training consisted mostly of learning to twirl the baton; and when semi-annual examinations resulted in disaster for me, I was reduced to the humility of a private without having gained more than the knack of sending a silvered rod in rapid circles about my stiff and sorely-tried thumb.