CHAPTER XVI
Which hints at an Age of Gold
Increasing good fortune came with sundry little successes; and gradually the pressure of want was eased, and the attic became a place of comfort and small luxuries.
Caroline Baddlesmere realized that for the boy the ordinary public school life was not only beyond her means, but that it would now be a sheer waste of time. She therefore, foreseeing that thereby as many good mid-day meals would be assured to the big man under witness of her own eyes, and the small fee helpful to him besides, induced Eustace Lovegood to furbish his mathematics and give the boy a couple of hours of them four or five mornings of the week; and Betty, taking the big man’s hand at the conference, shyly slid into the arrangement.
Lovegood’s affection for the boy and girl gave him complete command of their attention; and his large scrupulousness, wide humanity, and great-heartedness had an even mightier educational force upon them both than the clear wits he brought to bear in luring them along the gritty path of the dry philosophy of numbers. In his hands geography and geology became a romance—an education in themselves; and science a glittering enchantment. He directed their reading in literature and history and government and statesmanship and social laws, which he put before all else for the training of the good citizen. Indeed he had only to guide—for they were greedy readers. He laid the classics at their feet, making them read good translations first, giving them a clear idea of the author’s relation to the times in which he wrote, and persuading the youngsters, after the mathematics were done in the morning, to run through some pages of the Latin or the Greek with him “to keep up the tune.”
The boy’s wits awoke at once, roused as they had never been roused, to an eager curiosity about the very things that at school had but irked him and been an unmitigated weariness to him. He now found that the thing to be expressed was the important thing, whereas formerly, in the schoolroom, ranged in a row of some score of indifferent yawning others, he had been whipped into regarding the way of saying it as of the only interest—nay, the sole interest of the schoolmaster.
To his profound astonishment, he found that these old books meant something—that they were not exquisite torture-racks, appointed by some vague, hated, and arbitrary governance over them, for the mere racking of their wits in the cracking of the nuts of grammar—that it was what these old fellows had seen and known and felt and thought that was worth the thinking and the puzzling out, and not the machinery of their thought.
So that what had aforetime gone in at one ear and out at the other now lodged in the brain and painted pictures in the imagination that none might rub out.
The boy had groaned over his Xenophon, until “Thence he advanced parasangs and stathmoi” had become the refrain of boredom as repulsive as the epileptic drivel of Revelation. He now discovered that the book contained one of the mighty adventures of the world. He stepped it out with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Cyrus’s march, listened to the camp scandals of the years ago, thrilled by the perplexities and endurance and dangers and hair’s-breadth escapes of the questionable undertaking; followed the great and dogged retreat; took a part in the passing incidents, hunting the bustards, tiring them down, and finding “the flesh of these birds very delicious.”