“You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty. This morning, for instance....”
“Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.”
The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light.
“Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying to carve a picture of his son’s death?”
“Bis patriae manus cecidere,” I quoted. “Twice the hands of the father fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?”
He nodded. “Bis patriae manus cecidere—twice the father’s hands fell to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a considerable familiarity with what one might call Phœnix-Latin, the kind that is only called into being when ‘Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman’ dies. He had all the pedant’s love for the language. Often he would exchange tags with me when I met him in the street.
“‘Quomodo es? How are you,’ he would laugh in the tiny general store, to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress.
“‘Bene, domine,’ was my grave answer,—‘Very well, sir.’
“Soon he became very popular in the village, though he was regarded as something of a crank. It appeared that he was of the old days when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the French. Of his private affairs we could learn nothing, except that he had married young and that his wife had died at the birth of a son. When he was questioned about his early life, he would affect not to understand—‘Je ne comprend pas, m’sieu’—this and a shrug of the shoulders was all that we could get out of him.
“Well, the old fellow prided himself on his excellent eyesight, and in the fairly frequent air raids, he refused to go into shelter, preferring instead to remain lying down on the hill outside the village, where he would watch the hostile aeroplane pursued by our guns until it became a speck in the distance toward London. Then he would trudge back again.