Invitation to Life E-Book

Eric Knight

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Women  were wondering how large leg o’ mutton sleeves could be (and still remain not too ultra) and with great newspaper publicity Grant’s Tomb was dedicated on Riverside Drive, New York.
With headlong haste humans moved in the direction of the Klondike, where, it was said, gold could be found; people asked each other if it wasn’t horrible to think of the one hundred and fifty French socialites, mostly women, who had been burned to death while watching these new-fangled cinematographic pictures at the Charity Bazaar in Paris.
A man named S. A. Andree, with notable courage, went up in the air in a balloon at Spitzbergen and started for the North Pole; a person styled an “anarchist” cut short the life of Premier Canovas del Castillo in Spain and a man named Azcarraga became the next premier; in the interests of civilization men with the latest weapons of warfare moved on lesser frontiers in India, suppressing natives, thereby leaving Waziri, Fulah and Afridi widows to mourn for the suppressed.

Leseprobe

Invitation

to

Life

ERIC KNIGHT

(1897-1943)

1934

© 2022 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383834328

TO

WINIFRED HILDA

who knows nothing about it

PART ONE

“In notes by distance

made more sweet.”

—COLLINS.

1

W

omen

were wondering how large leg o’ mutton sleeves could be (and still remain not too ultra) and with great newspaper publicity Grant’s Tomb was dedicated on Riverside Drive, New York.

With headlong haste humans moved in the direction of the Klondike, where, it was said, gold could be found; people asked each other if it wasn’t horrible to think of the one hundred and fifty French socialites, mostly women, who had been burned to death while watching these new-fangled cinematographic pictures at the Charity Bazaar in Paris.

A man named S. A. Andree, with notable courage, went up in the air in a balloon at Spitzbergen and started for the North Pole; a person styled an “anarchist” cut short the life of Premier Canovas del Castillo in Spain and a man named Azcarraga became the next premier; in the interests of civilization men with the latest weapons of warfare moved on lesser frontiers in India, suppressing natives, thereby leaving Waziri, Fulah and Afridi widows to mourn for the suppressed.

Ships’ guns spoke as sailors of the Powers bombarded the Greeks, battling the Turks, on the island of Crete. Lifeless bodies lay among the sugar fields of Cuba as Spanish soldiers passed on their way; and the Germans seized Kiau-Chau after two missionaries had been most basely murdered.

Burning against injustice, General Morales led a revolt against President Barrios in Guatemala; the world seemed to be going to pot in Austria, where Count Badeni found the government paralyzed; strikers hoped against hope in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Hamburg, while a goodly number of adult persons spent many hours becoming expert in knocking a little ball about in a game named ping-pong.

In France a few brave men were working to gain revision of sentence for Alfred Dreyfus, while the world blithely whistled something about Tararara-boomdeay and how sweet Daisy looked on a bicycle built for two, and decided that this man, Albert Chevalier, was “a card”.

2

I

n

the beginning there were tears—scalding drops that came with the vague tragedies of childhood. They left shiny runnels on his cheeks that smarted and burned.

There were tears when Peter, the golliwog, couldn’t be found; tears when he woke up at night and found himself so horribly alone in the vastness of his cot; tears when cook sang the sad song about the boy in blue who died on the battlefield; tears when the first remembered Christmas morning broke without those counterpanes of snow which stories and pictures had promised; tears when nurse announced that he was grown up at last and henceforth would walk of afternoons instead of being pushed in the perambulator. Saddest of all were the tears when Emily, the maid, scolded him for some vague sin and vowed she loved him no more. Not to be loved was misery-tragedy—and Tregan cried.

Pain of tears was alleviated on the day that Tregan discovered that the drops were salty. By putting out his tongue he could touch the runnels on his cheeks. The saline tang was piquant. This was the first time that warmth of profound discovery left only academic interest in woes. It wasn’t to be the last.

The deep and tearful sadnesses of infancy became less devastating as his faculties grew. He found it great fun to take clinical case-notes on the strange affairs in the life of Llewellyn Tregan. When he was taken to church for the first time, he was warned not to cry. He found nothing sad there. It was fun. Everyone sang—much louder than cook did in the kitchen. Even his father sang. His father never sang at home. He sang in church. That was strange. His father sang from behind his big moustache.

But on the way home Tregan cried. They were walking home, walking many miles—or so it seemed to Tregan with his short steps and long perspectives of childhood. It seemed sad to have a world so vast—such a terribly large and empty world. He cried. His father carried him. The memory always persisted, half-dimly—his father carrying him, the rough shoulder of a tweed coat scratching against his cheeks that smarted from the tears and the sea breeze, the pungent smell of the rough fabric. It was strange, the smell of that fabric. It became so all-absorbing that he forgot to cry any more. With his whole being entranced in the smell of tear-stained tweed, he fell asleep.

Later in life the picture of his father almost faded from his memory and finally there was little left but the intangible memory of a smell—a mixed smell of Russian leather and wet tweed impregnated with woodsmoke.

Many years later a girl gave him a Russian leather wallet. Whenever he carried it the curious odor welled over the floodgates of memory, stabbed vividly into the past and recalled a father who sang from behind his moustache in church.

There was almost the same childish impression of his mother—the smell of perfume as she bent over his cot late one night, the touch of a heavily dotted veil on his face as she kissed him.

“I don’t want to wake him,” she had said in a low voice to someone in the darkness.

Tregan, with the guile of a child, had pretended to be asleep. Later he wished he hadn’t. Soon after she was gone. He was told that she was dead.

Not long after that his father vanished from his small ken too. Tregan didn’t see him again for many years. His father was abroad. That was what his mother’s aunt told him sternly. He felt somehow that it was a terrible sin to have a mother dead and a father abroad.

Then both parents began to be part of the forgotten. There were letters from his father—epistles bearing large and strange postage stamps. Then his parents went entirely from his mind. He lived with his mother’s relatives and they were sufficient unto the day. Only very occasionally the disturbing thought half-smouldered in the back of his brain that there was something strange hanging over him.

As he grew up, all that died down and he began to discover many things. Very early he discovered that, as a Tregan, he was a little important in the village. He also discovered that his accent was different from that of the village boys about him. This he took as another mark of strangeness—something to be looked on with shame—so he tried to talk like the village boys and the housemaids. One day he used a dialectic word at the dinner table to which he had just been promoted. His great-uncle ordered him to the kitchen to eat with the servants. Tregan learned quickly. After that he spoke correctly at home; but once across the threshold he broadened his vowels and zoomed his sibilants to his heart’s content.

As he grew up his childhood in Devon became a halcyon affair. It was full of the glamour and mystery that a sensitive child can imbue into life. He peopled the countryside with pixies and smugglers. He read a story of American Wild West life. After that the tangled moor became a prairie, each cliff was a bluff, every spinney a trackless forest, all the gorse patches were cottonwood.

It was pleasant—childhood. Infancy had been tears over tragic reality; boyhood was the joy of escape. There were days in summer with the moor baking in the sun. He used to lie flat, his face pressed close to the earth. The rich smell of dry bracken would almost intoxicate him.

In the autumn there was the fog that swept up noisomely from the coast to bring the premature evenings. Then the windows would glow kindly through the mist, the sheep-bells would tinkle dolefully, far off a dog would bark, a mother would stand at her door in the village and call for her child, the boys would halloo to one another through the drifting curtains. It was a sweet interlude that lasted until grownups brought tragedy again. He was sent away to school.

At the village school he had been quite content. He had weltered in the comfort of being one of many instead of being a child among grownups. He had learned prisoner’s base, collected birds’ eggs, eaten raw turnips and fought sod fights. All this his mother’s relatives had viewed with alarm. They sent him away to a “gentleman’s school.”

3

D

r. Rex’s Academy

for the Sons of Gentlemen is gone now, along with many others of kindred calibre. Their passing is mourned by gouty old gentlemen with memories that work best under the influence of sherry.

It was a poor place, badly furnished and evilly mastered. The desks were carved with dirt-engrained initials, mute testimony of the years of hopeless scholars who had dinted the surface of education and passed on to a badly taught manhood.

The classrooms smelled of acidy ink. When the sun struck through the half-clean windows thousands of dust-motes swirled in silver sarabands in the rays—danced their brief dance and then passed into the oblivion of shadow.

Tregan always watched the dust-mote dance on sunny days. They whirled especially well in the early morning light while Dr. Rex read the matutinary Bible lesson. This, known to the boys as “scripsha”, was the “fine moral and spiritual atmosphere” of which Dr. Rex’s Academy boasted so highly. Dr. Rex was firmly in favor of it. It impressed parents, it cost nothing, and it gave Dr. Rex a chance to hear his own voice booming unctuously. He would read sonorously from the nicer parts of the Bible (skipping such reprehensible books as Leviticus), pronouncing his words lovingly and long. He was never conscious that few of the children understood anything of his teachings about God, who, it seemed to most of the boys, was merely a rather unsporting aide to all the teachers in general and to Dr. Rex in particular—a sort of stool-pigeon who could spy on you even in the dark.

Sometimes, while the morning lesson went on and the dust-motes whirled and spun, Tregan would wonder whether Dr. Rex really communed with God in person and whether when he, Tregan, grew up he too would converse with the same Jehovah. He would wonder vaguely and grow sleepy. The monotone of the headmaster would lull him. He never became aware that Dr. Rex was reading of stirring doings—that the Old Testament was a glorious saga of the laws, lives and battles of a hardy race that the world has never stamped to extinction; or that the New Testament contained fairly accurate and often beautifully written life accounts of a gentle teacher of philosophy who actually walked with the fishermen of Galilee. Tregan never suspected that. So he was always highly relieved when Dr. Rex droned:

“ ’Pete wimmie!”

Then Tregan, with the rest, would gabble in unison:

“Ah father—charten He’n—load be thy name—thy kingham come—thy will be done—’nearth—stizzen He’n—givvus stay ah daily bread—givvus ah trespsiz—zweefagivoses tresps again stuz—leeders notinter temtash’n—liverous f’meevil—thine skingham—paah, glor’—frevverendeavor—Amen.”

After these morning prayers had imbued the boys with an understanding and love of the Holy Trinity, the school settled down to the mystery of something called “lessons”.

In these there was never any attempt to interest the boys in the amazing amount of fascinating and palatable knowledge which a grownup can reveal to a youngster. There was history, according to which the world began with the landing of the Romans in 55 B. C. and which continued on until some unknown and misty era which would be reached, no doubt, in a higher and equally unknown classroom.

And then there were “sums”. It was sums that taught Tregan his first scorn for grownups.

Sums were puzzling things which consisted of determining how many boys got how many apples if you changed the number of boys and number of apples each time. The early and easy ones would ask how many apples each boy got if there were nine apples and three boys.

Grownups answered that question, Tregan discovered, by writing down the figure 9. Then they placed reversed parentheses about it, wrote the symbol 3 before it and a similar symbol 3 after it, placed another 9 under the first one, drew a line under it and then put a zero under the last nine. By some system of unexplained orientation, the second 3 was the “ansa”.

Tregan never quite solved this very first mathematical formula. He would close his eyes for his sums and let them solve themselves. There he would see the three boys standing in the sun. He would play with the idea. One of the boys might have red hair and a freckle on his nose—the second might be Smith Minor with his ears sticking out—the third could be young Hawkins with his blond cowlick. There they were standing in a neat row in the sunlight. There before them were the nine apples, each gleaming red (Tregan liked them red) and suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support. Three boys, nine apples, turn on the switch—and presto! You saw the apples moving of their own accord, the boys stretched out their hands. And each boy got three apples—it couldn’t be otherwise—for there were three apples resting in each boy’s hand, one on top of the other. It was all so simple.

Thus Tregan, seeing this picture in a few seconds, was always able to get the answers to his sums almost as soon as they were stated; but he always failed miserably in the examinations because he couldn’t remember (or wouldn’t learn) how to draw the lines and curlycues and boxes that were demanded. In examinations all he could do was to write down the answers. And it seems that the sole virtue of “sums” was the procedure.

By thus missing the first principles of arithmetic Tregan went through life forced to do his mathematics by visualization—a mishap which later allowed him to do intricate mental problems before most men could have set them down on paper.

Another item in the curriculum which thwarted Tregan’s best endeavor to unravel was “Handy nigh work”. This resolved itself in later years to “Hand and Eye Work”. It consisted solely of filling in printed designs with water colors and was the nearest approach to the finer arts that Dr. Rex’s Academy attained. The paramount virtue of the game was placing the colors exactly within the printed lines. If you could make the finished product look as if it were one of a million impressions that had been run off a printing press, you were a classic Handy-nighist.

The colors were divided into two groups: three primary colors and three secondary. These were used with monotonous regularity and searing proximity. No one ever tried to instill into the boys an understanding love for color. No one ever explained color and light.

And this time Tregan found no short cut; so he went through life with half his visual senses stunted. This fact, however, he was not to know until later years when he heard people talking of colors that he could not see and which he knew he never would see.

In music Tregan fared a little better. The classic educational system of England looked upon music as a sort of decadent Italian effeminacy—something that wasn’t quite the thing for the sturdy young sons of British Gentlemen. True, there was a half-hour period of tonic sol-fa, a system which Tregan never bothered to understand. He went through his entire schooling without ever hearing of the delicacies of Chopin, the grandeur of Beethoven or the gigantic emotional lithographs of Wagner. It is doubtful whether, during his school years, he ever heard the names mentioned, and most certainly he never learned to read a note of music. Fortunately he had a good soprano voice and a superlatively accurate ear which defied the worst efforts of his masters. In the morning chapel he sang, joyfully and irresponsibly, altos of his own improvisation and soon worked out a weird and complex system of arrangements, based partly on mathematical sequences and partly upon his accurate ear, which enabled him to play on the organ. In his last term he would climb to the organ loft and improvise for as long as he was allowed. However, the “competent staff” of the Rex Academy never had the slightest inkling of this unusual aptitude and facility. So no report on musical leanings was ever made to his aunt and uncle. For his own part, Tregan went through his schooling considering it just another of those queer earmarks which are best hidden from the so-public gaze of the public school.

In his reading Tregan was much more fortunate; but this was not a direct result of Dr. Rex and his school or of his home life. In his strict Quaker home the literary fare had been limited to Pilgrim’s Progress, a teetotalist propaganda book entitled Buy Your Own Cherries, and a Sunday School weekly.

It remained for the penny dreadfuls of the era to reveal to Tregan the intoxication of the printed word. Although they were verboten the boys managed to smuggle into the Academy those admirable literary concoctions, product of fecund minds, whose characters dashed weekly through series of picturesque and hair-raising exploits. With the principals of one weekly output, an American, Englishman and Negro known as Jack, Sam and Pete, Tregan roamed round the world, into the steaming jungles of India, over the South African veldt and into the fastnesses of the Australian bush. With Deadwood Dick and a valiant of an earlier day, who rejoiced in the title of Silvershot, he thundered after herds of bison on the western plains and shot redskins from the saddle at full gallop. Under the spell of still another paper-backed narcotic, he stole over Hounslow with Tom King and Blueskin, while Dick Turpin, mounted on the pirouetting Black Bess, called in his ringing voice: “Stand and deliver!”

It is safe to say that Tregan learned more history and geography in the stolen hours with these illegal serials than in all the rest of his schooling combined. At least, at the age of ten he could have given you a fairly complete account of the western portion of the United States, the navigability of the Athabaska River, the topographical characteristics of Uganda, the methods used in washing and mining gold, the dress and habits of the men who blazed the Chisholm Trail, the speech and manners of the inhabitants of London during the century when Turpin reigned over the roads, the life and customs of the natives of India and Tasmania, the military system of the Zulus under Chaka and the proper procedure to be followed in erecting an Eskimo igloo—and these facts, most undoubtedly, were never taught in Dr. Rex’s Academy for the Sons of British Gentlemen. Dr. Rex’s men specialized on dates, not knowledge.

4

F

ortunate

was Tregan when Alan Keithley came to the Academy to exert a brief but refreshing influence upon the few score stifled children.

Keithley was one of those clear-faced and mentally sound young men which every country in the world turns out at times—and which each nation rejoices in considering as typical of her own product. Had he been a German or a Scandinavian he would have skied, hiked with a rucksack and entered the army. Had he been American he would have been a thoroughly sound catcher on his college nine, a trustworthy tackle or guard on the varsity squad, and would have gone on into life as a minor official in a Wall Street concern. Being an Englishman he played a sturdy game on the Rugby field as fullback, held a straight bat on the cricket pitch, and found himself at twenty-three with no satisfactory field of future endeavor. It is because she offers so few opportunities for the Alan Keithleys that Britain is able to send such steady streams of capable and healthy young men to God-forsaken stations in the extremely remote and just as extremely unhealthy spots of the world.

Grasping at a straw Keithley took an assistant master’s post at Dr. Rex’s Academy, where he spent many hours chucking yorkers to the young cricket hopefuls (thereby becoming something after the manner of a godhead) and some few minutes speaking blunt truths at the master’s table (thereby becoming something of a hated rara avis to the browbeaten staff).

When, on one half-holiday, Keithley wandered far from the institutional aura of the school and found Tregan belly-down in the coarse grass on a clifftop, reading one of the forbidden paperbacks, the boy looked at the master with an expression much akin to that which both were to see later on the faces of German prisoners brought back in a sudden and bloody raiding party.

That such a fear should strike a young boy amazed and horrified Keithley. He felt as though he were in contact with some unclean thing—and as though, curiously, he were the less clean. He squatted beside the boy, who gazed at him steadily, meanwhile trying to hide the penny dreadful behind his back.

“Jack, Sam and Pete?” asked Keithley, in an effort to disarm the boy of fear.

Tregan did not answer—he only stared. Long ago he had learned that the ways of masters were strange and devious; that a gentle question was but guile to bring open confession which would be followed by punishment, cold and calloused. Sometimes, Tregan knew, the punishment was preceded by these one-sided orations in which the master, both accuser and judge, argued a complete case before himself, awarded himself the verdict, and appointed himself the executor of swift justice. It was part of the game at Dr. Rex’s Academy to hold thus the sword of punishment over the head of the helpless accused—although none of the masters would have been anything but horrified to hear of the exploits of Count de Sade.

So Tregan looked at the master without answering. Keithley felt the enormous importance of dispelling the horrible fear in the boy. He started talking against time.

“You know, I used to read them all myself,” he said. “I’d read them now, I think, if I had time.”

He hardly knew how to go on in face of the boy’s silence.

“Look here,” he said. “Why are you so afraid?”

The boy was still silent.

“Fear, Tregan,” said the young master, “is a rotten thing—much worse than the crime that inspires it. Don’t ever be afraid like you are now. You can lie and cheat and steal, but as long as you’re not afraid you’re still a man. You don’t learn that in school—but I’d like to teach it. Here you are, Tregan, afraid just because I caught you reading a penny dreadful—and they’re not bad. I used to read ’em.”

The boy half smiled. Perhaps, he thought, old Keithley wasn’t going to get him caned.

“Where are they now?” asked Keithley.

“In Madagascar,” Tregan almost whispered.

“Madagascar! Great place, that!”

“Have you been there, sir?”

“Me? Goodness, no—never been further than Switzerland in my life. Have an uncle out there, though. Writes letters—sends us pictures. Raising coffee—married to a Portuguese woman—she’s very handsome—can’t talk English. He doesn’t ever want to come home again. Rummy fellow.”

They sat quietly for a while.

“What do they raise in Madagascar?” If he could only get the boy talking, Keithley thought.

His ruse worked quickly. The question, more normal in its relationship between master and boy, swept Tregan up in a breeze of interest. Like all youngsters with a keen mind he loved to show off.

“Coffee, sir—you said that. And bananas, pineapples, sugar-cane, cocoanuts, all kinds of fruit. The natives catch fish and dry them in the sun.”

“Where do you get that?”

“It says so in this week’s, sir. They’re on a plantation where they rescue the owner’s daughter from the natives. She falls in love with Jack but he’s never going to marry anyhow—he never does like any of the girls they rescue.”

The boy chattered on while the cool English sun slanted down on the clifftop. The larks climbed, twittering egocentrically, as if to climb to the ultimate height and to sing beyond all capacity of a tiny body was the only matter of importance. The sun slanted lower and lower and the cool wind turned in from the sea.

“Well, young man, we’d better cut back,” said Keithley, finally, tapping his pipe on his boot. “Incidentally, you’d better give me that paperback. I’ll stuff it in my pocket. I’ll give you something else instead. That is, if you like to read.”

“You mean books, sir?”

“Why, yes. Don’t you like to read books?”

“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t like Pilgrim’s Progress much.”

Keithley felt angry—an anger that surged partly against the boy but more against the system that charted such arid educational paths. There it was—the barren answer—and against it the wealth of literature in English, the only art that this foggy island has touched with deep understanding.

“Wait until I light my pipe,” said Keithley. They stood and he thought quickly.

“I don’t want to jaw you, son,” he said, finally, “but try to remember this—if you don’t savvy it now try to remember it later on. These paperbacks are good stuff—no doubt about that. They’re full of life and they’re talking idiom. But there’s so much to read in the world. You wouldn’t get time for it all if you started reading now and went on until blazes. Some day you’re going to be amazed at the number of things you want to read. Then you’ll wish that you had some of the time you spent on Jack, Sam and Pete.

“You’ll find out some day that all books are not like schoolbooks. There are books, thousands and thousands of ’em, that are exciting and vivid and alive. Better even than Jack, Sam and Pete. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do I mean, then?”

“You mean I ought to start reading good books.”

“Well, not exactly, but something after that manner I suppose. I don’t know whether they’re good books or not. I don’t know what a good book is. The word good means so many things to so many people. But maybe you’ll understand more of this later if you can remember it. At any rate, take this—and come over to my place when you’ve finished it if you like and I’ll give you another.”

Keithley turned and hurried over the quadrangle. Tregan stood looking at a battered pocket copy of Lavengro. That evening he lived the idyll of George Borrow’s gypsies.

The amazing discovery of books deluged the boy. His voracity was as limitless as his taste was catholic. The days that followed saw him ripping through The Vicar of Wakefield with little regard for the good doctor. The Shropshire Lad puzzled him. Pickwick Papers and its verbal cartoon characters hardly touched his consciousness. Unaware of its satire he dismissed Gulliver’s peripatetics as childish. Soldiers Three, Sherlock Holmes, a treatise by Havelock Ellis, and Three Musketeers he romped through with blithe ease. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Hunchback of Notre Dame he read on one Sunday. King Solomon’s Mines fascinated him.

But it remained for Lorna Doone, Westward Ho! and Don Quixote really to hold him. These tales of bold doings submerged him in their atmosphere. His daily life in school became a thing of shadowy fiction. It was a thing to be lived but half-consciously during the impatient hours until he could cut away to Keithley’s room—there to lie prone on a carpet which became in turn a rock overlooking the country of the dour Doones, a tar-seamed deck that burned the bare feet of a bold mariner sniffing the spice-laden breeze of the Spanish main, or that sunbaked Castilian plain where a Don rode with a Sancho.

And while Tregan read, wallowing in new worlds, a storm raged above his head. Keithley was unpopular with the staff in proportion to the reverse regard in which the students held him. So there was a devious whispering from a master to a master, and from him to another one, all of which, of course, finally reached the ear of Dr. Rex, who had never failed to hear a whisper in thirty-four years of schooling. And Keithley was called into the most august, and equally dusty, sanctum of the head.

Did he, Keithley, realize, began Dr. Rex, just what impression was caused by the continual presence in his room of a member of the fourth form?

Keithley, with hardened face, refused to take a short cut. He felt an enormous necessity for making this smug man mouth words which he was skirting as gingerly as a cat walks a puddled pavement. So while Dr. Rex perspired a little and fumed a little and tried devious routes, the young man pushed him toward a precipice of bald statement.

“But of a certainty,” Dr. Rex said, “you must apprehend readily the impression that people will get. A . . . ah . . . thoroughly false one . . . ça va sans dire . . . of course . . . there could be no doubt whatsoever of that.”

And Dr. Rex looked over his glasses as if to imply that he was imbued with an all-encompassing magnanimity for thus giving Keithley the benefit of a doubt.

“But as long as one is in a school,” Dr. Rex went on, “there is always a necessity for . . . ah . . . moral safeguards.”

Keithley, looking upon the mass of cells that lived, moved and had being, just as a worm lives, moves and has being, remarked quietly that he had as yet to discover the particular . . . ah . . . moral safeguard that was shattered by carefully furthering a boy’s pursuit of knowledge in an institute founded exactly for that purpose. Would Dr. Rex speak more plainly?

Dr. Rex oozed a little more perspiration, wished most heartily that he had never started the conversation—wished indeed that he had never engaged this most unpleasant young man who stared so directly and who refused to show himself aware of topics that other masters discussed freely in low tones and often with smug relish. So, finally, Dr. Rex spoke words that tasted badly in his mouth. And Keithley replied with words that sounded hotly in the doctor’s ears. Dr. Rex’s dignity went on the rack, and Keithley’s resignation at the end of the term was tendered and accepted.

5

W

omen

were wondering how large a Merry Widow hat could be without becoming too ultra, and newspapers told how a squadron of warships had been ordered to Tangier to bring back an American named Perdicaris who had been kidnapped by Moroccan bandits.

With headlong haste the Dalai Lama fled from Thibet for India; people asked each other if it wasn’t horrible to think of the nine hundred and fifty people, mostly children, who had been burned to death on the General Slocum in the East River of New York harbor.

A man named Wright, with notable courage, went up in an airplane at Kitty Hawk; in the interests of civilization soldiers armed with latest weapons of warfare moved in Somaliland suppressing the natives, leaving many Somali widows to mourn for the suppressed.

Ships’ guns spoke aboard the Potemkin in the Black Sea as sailors went into revolt and bombarded a city. Lifeless bodies floated on the waters as the German gunboat Panther sank the Haitian gunboat Crète-à-Pierrot for violations committed against a German merchantman.