History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in Mother’s room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly, insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to sleep, the tædium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave. He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.

And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tædium vitæ was transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert’s imagination was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body, all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him, would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.

The first break in Gilbert’s world came when his mother decided that he and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne’s Wonder Tales, and read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?

But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street. Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he would carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron’s.

To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell. So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter work.

But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that “retire” meant “go to bed,” because he had seen it mean that in a book he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron’s sisters would come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything, and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o’clock, and they all went home for the day.

Transcriber’s Notes

Errors in punctuation have been fixed.

[Page 89]: “large aethestic” changed to “large aesthetic”

[Page 93]: “bright promsises” changed to “bright promises”