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<h1><span style="font-size: 173%">Book III—Lena Lingard</span></h1>
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<h2><span style="font-size: 144%">I</span></h2>
<p id="p0719"><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-variant: small-caps">At</span></span> the University
I had the good fortune to come immediately under the influence of a
brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had arrived in
Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as head of
the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in
Italy. When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my
course was arranged under his supervision.</p>
<p id="p0720">I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but
stayed in Lincoln, working off a year’s Greek, which had been my
only condition on entering the Freshman class. Cleric’s doctor
advised against his going back to New England, and except for a few
weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln all that summer. We played
tennis, read, and took long walks together. I shall always look back
on that
time of mental awakening as one of the happiest in my life. Gaston
Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that
world everything else fades for a time, and all that went before is as
if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of the figures
of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.</p>
<p id="p0721">In those days there were many serious young men among
the students who had come up to the University from the farms and the
little towns scattered over the thinly settled State. Some of those
boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer’s
wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and
underfed, and completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice.
Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer
school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic
young men just out of graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of
endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college
that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before.</p>
<p id="p0722">Our personal life was as free as that of our
instructors. There were no college dormitories;
we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms with an old
couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their children
and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near the
open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study.
The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes,
even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered
them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they
are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed
directly in front of the west window which looked out over the
prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had
made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark,
old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome,
the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he
was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a
photograph of the Tragic Theater at Pompeii, which he had given me
from his collection.</p>
<p id="p0723">When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered
chair which stood at the end of my table, its high back against the
wall. I had bought it with great care. My instructor sometimes looked
in upon me when he was out for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he
was more likely to linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable
chair for him to sit in, and if he found a bottle of
Bénédictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about
small expenditures—a trait absolutely inconsistent with his
general character. Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and
after a few sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of
Lincoln, which were almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those
of Black Hawk. Again, he would sit until nearly midnight, talking
about Latin and English poetry, or telling me about his long stay in
Italy.</p>
<p id="p0724">I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and
vividness of his talk. In a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even
for his classroom he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial
anecdotes. When he was tired his lectures were clouded, obscure,
elliptical; but when he was interested they were wonderful. I believe
that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have
sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to
his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal
communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together,
fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet,
and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never
forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the
solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind
blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the
flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung
mountains. He had willfully stayed the short summer night there,
wrapped in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path
down the sky until “the bride of old Tithonus” rose out of
the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It
was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.</p>
<p id="p0725">I remember vividly another evening, when something
led us to talk of Dante’s veneration for Virgil. Cleric went
through canto after canto of the “Commedia,” repeating the
discourse between Dante and his “sweet teacher,” while his
cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long fingers. I can
hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for
Dante: “<em class="tei tei-emph"><span style="font-style: italic">I was famous on earth with the name
which endures longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the
sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have
kindled; I speak of the Æneid, mother to me and nurse to me in
poetry.</span></em>”</p>
<p id="p0726">Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I
was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a
scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things.
Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked
land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of
yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my
mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the
places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out
strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against
the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I
begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my
memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened
within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my
new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped
to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.</p>
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