The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 3

It came at the end of my year in high school. That last month is always a rebellious one. The spring weather, the sense of approaching vacation make gamins of the quietest of us.

Mr. Levi had been absent from the room for a little while. Geoghen in that time had left his seat, hobbled up to the dais and opened the teacher's desk. This bit of boldness drew a crowd of laughing boys to the front of the room. They rummaged the desk, overturning and scattering its papers, tumbling books to the floor.

Suddenly one of them stooped and picked up a book which lay sprawled with its pages open. There was an immediate shouting, coa.r.s.e and repellent to hear.

The book of Mr. Levi's which they had found, was a Hebrew prayer book.

Geoghen took it from the other boy. He held it open and up close to his leering face. Then slowly, with the others in his trail, he began to march around the room, making believe to sing a heathenish jargon which he must have thought to resemble Hebrew, twisting his face grotesquely to seem like a Jew's, making lewd gestures--breaking off now and again to shriek with laughter at the comicality of it all.

Then suddenly Mr. Levi returned.

He charged into the line, spun Geoghen about and tore the book from his hands. Geoghen reached for it, as if loath to let go of so much fun--his face impudent, grossly humorous--and Mr. Levi knocked him down.

I shall never forget how the teacher looked. His pale face, paler than ever, gleamed as if it were cut smooth out of marble. The eyes flashed with a n.o.ble fury. The mouth had stopped its twitching and was drawn taut, and his teeth showed at the corners of it. And when he struck at Geoghen his whole slender tenseness seemed to be thrown into the blow.

The crippled lad lay there for a moment, stunned. Then he got unsteadily to his feet and picked up his crutch. A stream of profanity began to come from his mouth. I don't think any of us had ever heard such talk before. All the obscene things which the lowest sc.u.m of humanity can pick up in the course of living years in the gutter, he spat out at Mr.

Levi.

But the teacher had gone back to his dais and desk and stood facing him silently, calmly, a look of mild reproach taking the place of the anger in his eyes. He let Geoghen have his miserable say, and then silently pointed to the door and motioned to him to get out. And Geoghen went.

That wasn't the end of it, though. For, within a week the newspapers had taken up the incident and enlarged it, exaggerated it--and Geoghen's father who, it seems, was a political va.s.sal of the alderman of this district, had managed to have Mr. Levi brought before the Board of Education for an investigation.

Mr. Levi had no show in that trial. He told his story truthfully. I remember that, according to the newspapers, he made scarcely any effort to defend himself. He merely explained that he had caught this boy defiling the traditions of the Jewish faith, mocking what was most sacred to him, and that he was indeed sorry that, in order to wrest the book away from his impure hands, he had had to strike and knock down a crippled pupil.

The newspapers called Mr. Levi a dangerous and cruel fanatic, the Board of Education decided that he was incompetent, and Mr. Levi--his face paler than ever, his manner more mild and saddened--announced to us on the last day of school that he would not be with us in the next year.

I felt somehow that I would have liked to say goodby to him, but I was afraid that he would ask me why I, in his absence on that terrible day, had not prevented Geoghen from doing what he did--and my conscience made a coward of me. I had a foolish idea, besides, that he did not like me.

Any man who cared so much for his religion would not be able to respect a boy in my position. It was all very unfortunate--I was sorry for him, to be sure--but I must not sympathize too much with him.

I told my aunt of the affair, of course, and she shuddered with distaste.

"What a fearful lot of ruffians they must be!" she sighed. "And worst of all, a Russian Jew for a teacher!"

I spent the summer at a Y. M. C. A. camp on the Maine coast. There were no other Jewish boys there, but my aunt had managed to have me placed on the roll-call somehow. I was glad enough of it. I did not want another summer at a fas.h.i.+onable hotel in her and other ladies' company.

Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the camp. They were a good, rough-and-ready sort who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking songs on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew brown and muscle-bound and manly.

Such teasing as I had from them was good-natured, and I suppose I should have taken it in the same spirit. But I had none of their a.s.surance, was like a stranger in a strange land--and came out of the summer with a still deeper shrinking from contact with other boys.

High school began again, went on and on from lagging month to month, and soon enough was over for a second year. But this time my aunt had been as much aroused as she could be to the baffling condition of my mind and spirits. I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I had learned to bear it with greater patience, but it still galled and depressed me.

Only, after that evening when I stood outside the synagogue, I had some dim conception of what the inevitable cure would have to be.

At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve specialist a second time. He insisted that I must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the unsympathetic quality of our home life.

This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. She had now a legitimate excuse for s.h.i.+pping me off to a fas.h.i.+onable boarding school of some sort. For days she made a feverish study of monogrammed and photogravured catalogues from various schools in the East. It was upon a military school on the upper Hudson that her choice finally fell. And I am sure that this was due to the expensive appearance, the coat of arms and Latin motto of the catalogue's cover.

What ever it was, her choice was made. She talked a good deal of splendid uniforms, of flags unfurled to the sunset--and fired me with a l.u.s.t for the new chapter in my life.

V

THE MILITARY ACADEMY

My introduction to military school was hardly auspicious. I was now sixteen years old--nearly seventeen. I did not look that old, however; the commandant of the school, in examining me, took me for much less and a.s.signed me to a room with a boy of twelve.

At seventeen, our age is a most important item. We think so, anyhow. And this incident dampened my spirits most disproportionately. Especially when I discovered that this roommate was to be the only other Jew in the school. It seemed to me a very pointed and personal insult.

He was a meek little boy, though--meeker even than I. And all through that first night he wept aloud, smothering his tears upon his pillow and crying for his mama--and for _kartoffel salat_. It was a Friday night, I remember, and it must have been a Sabbath custom in his house to have potato salad for supper. At any rate he kept me awake long into the night.

And once, taking savage pity on him, I got up and went over to him in my bare feet and nightgown, and told him brusquely how satisfied he ought to be to have a mother at all; that both my father and mother were dead, and I should never see them again, no matter how homesick I grew or how long I waited for their coming. This silenced him on that score, but he went on whimpering for the _kartoffel salat_.

The next day I screwed up my courage to complain to the commandant. He was a very tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought through the Spanish and Boer wars and now, in times of peace, was reduced to teaching the manual of arms and simple drill formations to young sons of the rich. He was the most pompous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever met. One could see it on his handsome face.

He heard my complaint through. Then, because, being an ignorant "plebe,"

I had forgotten to salute him, he made me perform that act and retell the whole story word for word. But he could not change my room until I had agreed to take a cot in the general dormitory--this being reserved for students who paid less tuition.

"You may write your aunt," he said stiffly, twirling his long mustaches, "that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be more--er, more congenial."

I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I had the plague! I felt sorry for myself.

I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on the corner and pa.s.sed me an occasional lofty jest--and a thousand other things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness.

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 gra.s.s 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 scholars.h.i.+ps, and these did jobs so menial and embarra.s.sing 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 sn.o.bs, 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 a.s.sure 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 cla.s.sroom was very low. At first I did not have any trouble at all in leading the entire school in scholars.h.i.+p; but gradually, under the careless and relaxed conditions, I grew unambitious, lazy--and found myself failing among a cla.s.s of boys who, I secretly knew, were my mental inferiors. It is so much a matter of compet.i.tion, 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.

At that, I was glad to return to the ranks. There had been plenty of criticism of the fact that a "plebe" should have risen so quickly to an officers.h.i.+p. And, of course, as Jewish boys always do, I imagined that the demonstration was just another evidence of race prejudice.