pencil and paper again. No doubt, if you had asked him, he would have copied out for you what he was writing on another piece of paper, in which he was accustomed to wrap up parcels, and wondered that you cared to pay another twopence for it. But if you sold that piece of paper to-day you would get, not twopence, but hundreds of pounds for it. For on it would be written lines by John Keats, in his own hand. And what you might have found on that piece of paper is this:
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
A minute since, and Lethe wards have sunk.
“Lethe we had in our Homer not long ago. Lethe, the water of forgetfulness. Sometimes I think Blaize and others of you have drunk it.
“ ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness
That thou, light-wingèd dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Dreamest of summer in full-throated ease.”
He read on, occasionally stopping to explain a word; once and again his voice trembled, as it did sometimes when he preached; once it nearly stopped altogether as he came to the lines:
“Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
“In tears amid the alien corn,” he repeated.
The entire informality of these proceedings, the absence of the sense that they were being taught and had got to learn, disarmed the boys, and before this stanza was reached the fact that it was the portentous Head who was reading to them had quite vanished. They were all sitting or lying about at ease on the grass, one or two of them listening intently, the others, for the most part, feeling just lazy and soothed and comfortable. But among the intent listeners was David, and as the Head paused and repeated “alien corn,” he rolled over on to his back, absorbed and lost.
“Golly,” he said quietly to himself. “Oh Golly!” Then he became aware that he had spoken aloud, but scarcely wondered whether the Head had heard or not, so completely did the magic of the words possess him. And in some mysterious way they added to his store of happiness: they became part of him, and thus part of the fact that he was going to Marchester next week, and would see Hughes, that there was a half-holiday this afternoon, that he was in the eleven. Keats’s poem was part of the whole joy of life, it, and its music, and the sense of longing for something he did not know about, which it produced in him. Then his attention was completely diverted by the feeling of a slight vibration in his trouser-pocket, caused by the movements of the Monarch and his wife who were there in their travelling-carriage, and, now that he recollected them, became part of the beneficent joy of things in general. So for fear of their not getting their proper share of the oxygen of the world, he withdrew the box from his pocket, laid it on the grass, and forgot about them again, in hearing of the “foam of perilous seas.”
The Head finished the Ode, and invited questions. Stone wanted to know what Hippocrene was, thinking this an intelligent question, but Ferrers’s inquiry as to what the “magic casements” were earned stronger approbation from the Head, who mysteriously told him that no one could tell till they looked out on to the “perilous seas.” It was not like the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar, this which he had read them, because it could mean different things to different people. Each sentence of the “Commentaries” meant one thing and it was the business of boys to find out, with the aid of a dictionary, what it was. But music and poetry were altogether different: they meant to you what you were capable of finding in them. Then he turned to David, who alone of the class had not asked any questions, intelligent or otherwise.
“Nothing you want to know, Blaize?” he asked.
“No, thank you, sir,” said David. “But would you read it us again, sir, as you do sometimes?”
The Head sat up, clasping his knees with his arms, and without answering David began the Ode again in that extraordinary voice of his, this time not looking at his book. He began in tones so low that it needed an effort to hear him; it boomed out over “charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; it sounded like a breeze at night in the stanza “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet”; again it shook with emotion over the “sad heart of Ruth,” and David felt a lump rise in his throat, a mysteriously blissful misery took possession of him. And when the Head finished he found himself smiling at him with mouth that trembled a little.
There was silence a moment.
“That will do for to-day,” said the Head. “You can go.”
The group rose from the grass with alacrity, for though Keats was all very well, an extra half-hour at the bathing-place, for the lesson had been very short, was even better. But in spite of the permission David lingered.
“Did he write much else, sir?” he said.
The Head handed him the volume.
“You may see for yourself,” he said. “Give it me back when you’ve finished with it.”
David deposited this in his desk in the museum, and then ran after the others to the bathing-place, with lines still ringing in his head, but untying and unbuttoning as he went so as to lose as few seconds as possible before the first heavenly plunge out of the heat and baking sunlight into the cool arms of the water. That, too, on this morning of vivid life was more consciously delicious than ever before, when with a long run he sprang, an arrow of gleaming limbs, off the header-board which he left vibrating with his leap, and burrowed into the cool embrace of the water. Some flower must have opened in his brain to-day, quickening his sense of living, and though no whit less boyish than before, he was far more conscious of the water and the sun, and above all of himself.
He swam and floated and dived, came swiftly up behind Stone, who swam in rather a water-logged manner, and with a firm hand placed suddenly on the top of his head sent him down to the bottom of the bath, and before he came up again, spluttering and more water-logged than ever, was floating with arms and legs spread star-fish fashion, gazing serenely and unconsciously into the sky. Stone concluded mistakenly that it was Ferrers who had done this thing, and raised a storm of splashing in his indignant face, and got ducked again for that, and so precisely flicked with a wet towel when he came out that he cried on the name of his Maker and danced with the shrewdness of the touch. Upon which David, forgetting that his mouth was submerged, laughed, and thereon swallowed so much water that he had to come out and lie face downwards on the grass in order to disgorge it. That was pleasant also, and he lay there on the grass with his forehead on his arms till his back was dry and baked. Then, making a compact parcel of himself with his hands clasped round his ankles, two friends lifted him and swung him into the water again.
Bags the unbathed had brought down some strawberries and newly baked buns, and David, having filled himself up with those things, took to the water again in spite of Ferrers’s warning that if you bathed directly after a heavy meal you got cramp in your stomach and sank like a stone to rise no more. It was necessary to test the truth of this remarkable legend, and it was found to be wholly untrustworthy. . . . And all the time the magic casements and the alien corn wandered fragmentarily in his head.
The first eleven
