My Antonia

At 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.

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.

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 endeavour, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before.

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 Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.

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 Benedictine 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.

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 wilfully 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.

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:  `I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honours most.  The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the “Aeneid,” mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.’

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.