The Story of a Child Part 14

CHAPTER XLIX.

We left the mountains at the beginning of October, but my home-coming was marked by a very painful circ.u.mstance--I was sent to school! I went, of course, only as a day scholar; and it goes without saying that I was never allowed to go and come alone lest I should get into bad company.

The four years that I spent at the university, as a day scholar, were as strange and as full of odd experiences as any of my life. But, notwithstanding, from that fatal day my history becomes much less interesting as a narrative.

I was taken to school for the first time, at two o'clock in the afternoon, upon one of those glorious October days, so sunny and peaceful, that is like a reluctant and sad leave-taking of the summer-time. Ah! how beautiful it had been in the mountains, in the leafless forests and among the autumn-tinted vines!

With a crowd of children, all talking at the same time, I entered the torture chamber. My first impression was one of astonished disgust because of the hideousness of the ink-stained walls, and of the old benches of s.h.i.+ny wood defaced by the penknife carvings of countless school-boys who had been so inexpressibly miserable in this place.

Although I was a stranger to my new companions they treated me with the greatest familiarity (they used thee and thou in addressing me) and gave themselves patronizing airs that were almost impertinent. Although I observed my school-mates timidly and furtively I thought them, for the most part, exceedingly ill-mannered and untidy.

As I was twelve and a half I entered the third cla.s.s; my tutor considered me advanced enough to keep up with it if I chose to do so, although I myself felt that I was scarcely equal to the task. The first day, for the purpose of qualifying, we had to write Latin exercises, and I remember that my father awaited, with some anxiety, the outcome of the examination. When I told him I was second among fifteen I was surprised that he attached so much importance to a matter of so little interest to me. It was all one to me! Broken hearted as I felt, how could I be affected by such a trifle?

Later, indeed, at no time, did I feel the impetus that the desire to excel brings with it. To be at the foot of the cla.s.s always seemed to me the least of the ills that a school-boy is called upon to endure.

The weeks following my entrance were extremely painful to me. I felt my intellect cramping rather than expanding under the multiplicity of the lessons and the tasks imposed; even the realm of my young dreams seemed closing against me little by little. The first dismal, foggy weather, and the first gray days added a greater desolation and sadness to my already overwrought feelings. The uncouth chimney-sweeps had returned, and their yearly autumn cry was again heard in the streets. Theirs was a cry that in my earlier years wrung my heart and caused my tears to flow.

When one is a child the approach of winter, with its killing gloom and cold, seems to awake in him inexplicable forebodings bespeaking the end of all bright and beautiful things; time goes so slowly in childhood that we appear not to be able to antic.i.p.ate the inevitable reawakening that comes in the spring to all things.

No, it is only when we are older, and would seem, therefore, to be more impressionable to the changes of the seasons, that we regard winter merely as an incident having its rightful place among the other incidents of life.

I had a calendar and I marked off upon it the slowly pa.s.sing days. At the commencement of my first year of college life I was oppressed by the thought of the months of study stretching before me, and by the prospect of the interminable months that must come and go before we reached the Easter vacation that was to give us a respite of eight or ten days from the dreadful schoolroom grind and ennui; I seemed to lose all my courage, and at times I was almost overwhelmed with despair at the prospect of the long and dreary days that went so slowly.

In the meantime cold weather, really cold weather set in and aggravated my sorrows. Oh! the daily journey to school upon those frigid December mornings, where for two deadly hours the only warmth we obtained came from the inadequate coal fire, and before me the torture of returning to my home in the face of the icy winter wind! The other children frolicked and ran and pushed each other, and they slid upon the ice when it chanced that the water in the gutters was frozen over. As for me I did not know how to slide, and, besides, sports such as the other boys indulged in, I considered highly undignified. I was always escorted to and from school very sedately, and I felt the humiliation of being conducted. I was sometimes laughed at by my school-mates with whom I was not at all popular; and I had a disdain for those who, like myself, were in bondage. I had scarcely an idea in common with them.

Even Thursdays I had to give to the preparation of lessons that took the entire day. The written tasks, absurd exercises, I scrawled off in the most careless and illegible handwriting.

And my disgust for life was so great that I no longer took the least bit of pains with myself; often now I was scolded for looking so unkempt, and for having dirty, ink-stained hands. . . . But if I continue in this strain I will succeed in making my recital as tedious as were the school-days of my youth.

CHAPTER L.

Cakes! Cakes! My good hot cakes! The old cake woman had resumed her nightly tour, and again we heard her rapid footsteps and her shrill refrain. Always at the same hour, with the regularity of an automaton, she went by our house. And the long winter recommenced in the same manner as had the preceding ones, and as were similarly to begin the following two or three years.

Our neighbors, the D-----s, accompanied by Lucette, always came at eight o'clock Sunday evenings, and another neighbor visited us also upon this same evening. These latter brought with them their little daughter Marguerite, who gradually insinuated herself into my affections.

That year Marguerite and I brought the Sunday winter evenings, over which the thought of the tasks of the morrow brooded sadly, to a close with an entirely new amus.e.m.e.nt. After the tea, when I felt that the party was about to break up, I would hurry little Marguerite into the dining-room, and there we rushed madly about the round table and tried to catch or tag each other,--we played furiously. It goes without saying that she was usually caught immediately and tagged very often, and I scarcely ever; it therefore fell out that it was almost always her turn to chase me, and she did it desperately. We struck the table with our bodies, and yelled, and carried on our play with the greatest imaginable uproar. We succeeded in turning up the rugs, in disarranging the chairs, and in making havoc of everything. We soon tired of our play, however,--the truth is I was too old to care greatly for such frolics.

I had scarcely any feeling save one of melancholy in spite of the wild sport I indulged in, for over me hovered the chilling thought that in the morning the usual round of dry and laborious lessons would begin.

My furious revel was simply a way of prolonging that day of truce, of making it count to its very last moment; it was an attempt to divert my thoughts by making plenty of noise. It was also my way of hurling a defiance at those tasks that I had left undone. My negligence troubled my conscience and disturbed my sleep, and caused me finally to look over, hastily and feverishly, by the feeble light of a candle, or by the cold gray light of early dawn, the neglected lessons, before the coming of the despised hour in which I betook myself to school.

There was always a little consternation in the parlor when the sounds of our merriment reached those gathered there; it must have been particularly distressing to our parents to hear that we were amusing ourselves otherwise than with our duet sonatas, and to find that we preferred noise and discord to the "Pretty Shepherdess."

And for at least two winters, at about half-past ten every Sunday evening, we indulged in that romp around the dining-table. My school was of little value to me, and the tasks imposed of even less benefit; I always went to work reluctantly and in the wrong spirit, and that lessened and extinguished my power and stupefied me. I had the same unfortunate experience when I came in contact with school-mates of my own age, my equals; their roughness disgusted me, and I repulsed all the efforts they made to be friendly. . . . I never saw them except in cla.s.s, under the master's rod as it were; I had already become a little being too peculiar and set in my ways to be modified greatly by contact with them, and I therefore held aloof, and my eccentricities accentuated themselves.

Almost all of them were older and more developed than I; they also were more crafty and more sophisticated; in consequence there sprung up amongst them a feeling of contempt and enmity for me that I repaid with disdain, for I felt sure that they were incapable of comprehending or following the flights of my imagination.

With the very youthful peasants in the mountains, and the fishermen's children on the Island, I had never been haughty; we had understood each other after the fas.h.i.+on of children who are primitive and therefore fond of childish play; and upon such occasions I had a.s.sociated with them as if they were my equals. But I was arrogant in my behavior to the boys at school, and they had good reason to consider me whimsical and priggish.

It took me many years to conquer that arrogance, to act simply and like other people in the world; and especially it was difficult for me to realize that one is not necessarily superior to his fellows because he is (to his own misfortune often) prince and conjurer in the realm of fancy.

CHAPTER LI.

The theatre wherein was enacted the "Donkey's Skin," very much amplified and more elaborate, had now a permanent place in my aunt Claire's room.

Little Jeanne, more interested in it since the additions to the scenery and the text, came over oftener; she painted backgrounds under my direction, and the moments I enjoyed most were those in which I impressed her with my great superiority. We had now a box full of characters, each with a name and a role; and the fantastic processions were made up of regiments of monsters, beasts and gnomes made out of plaster and painted with water colors.

I recall our delight and enthusiasm when we tried for the first time the effect of a scenic background which we had made to represent the "void of heaven." Delicate rosy clouds, bespeaking the dawn, floated over the blue expanse that was softened and paled by the gauze hanging in front of it. And the chariot of a silken-haired fairy, drawn by two b.u.t.terflies and suspended on invisible threads, advanced towards the centre of the scene.

But in spite of our efforts our work was never finished, for we took no account of limitations; every day we had new ideas and ever more and more wonderful projects, and the great comprehensive representation was deferred from day to day, was postponed to a future that never came.

Every undertaking of my life will be, or has already been, left unfinished and incomplete as was that little play of the "Donkey's Skin."

CHAPTER LII.

Among those professors who seemed, during my school-days, so severe, and indeed almost cruel to me, the most terrible without any exception were the "Bull of Apis" and the "Big Black Ape" (I had nicknames for all of them). I hope should they read this they will understand that I am writing from the child's view-point. Should I meet them to-day I would, in all probability, humbly tender them my hand and ask their pardon for having been such an unmanageable pupil.

Oh! the Big Ape especially, how I hated him! When from the height of his desk these words fell upon my ear: "You will do a hundred lines; I mean you, you little sap-head!" I could have flown at his face like an enraged cat. He was the first to arouse in me those sudden and violent outbursts of rage that characterized me as a man, outbreaks which could scarcely have been foreseen in a child of my sweet and patient disposition.

I would be doing myself a great injustice in saying that I was altogether a bad scholar, I was, rather, an unequal and erratic one; one day at the head of my cla.s.s, the next day at the foot; but on the whole I maintained a fair average, and at the end of the year I received the prize for translation--I won no others however. It surprised me that every one in the cla.s.s did not receive the prize that I had won without great effort, for translation was extraordinarily easy for me. On the other hand I found composition very difficult, and narration still more so.

Little by little I deserted my own work-desk, and in my aunt Claire's room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the "Big Ape"; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness, and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through--in short I once more live over those dread school-days.

Aunt Claire was more than ever my resource during those hard times; she always looked up words for me in the dictionary, and often she took upon herself the task of writing for me, in an a.s.sumed hand, the exercises exacted by the "Big Ape."

CHAPTER LIII.

Bring me, please, dear, the second . . . no, the third drawer of my chiffonier.

It is mamma who is speaking; she is busying herself with the drawers of the chiffonier which every day, for many years, she had asked me to bring to her,--sometimes she pretends to need them merely for the purpose of pleasing me by requiring my services. It was one of the things that I was able to do for her when I was very little: to carry to her one or another of those tiny drawers. It was an honored custom in our household for a long time.

At the time of my life of which I am now writing it was in the evening, at dusk, after my return from school, that I busied myself carrying the little chiffonier drawers. I usually found mamma seated in her accustomed place near the window chatting or embroidering, her work basket was before her, and the bureau, whose different compartments she required from time to time, was situated some distance away, in an anteroom.