Foes | Page 7

of ancient history. Looking through the
west window, he saw that Alexander had taken his geometry out
through the great rent in the wall. Book and student perched beneath
the pine-tree, in a crook made by rock and brown root, overhanging the
autumn world. Strickland at his own desk dipped quill into ink-well and
continued a letter to a friend in England. The minutes went by. From
the courtyard came a subdued, cheerful household clack and murmur,
voices of men and maids, with once Mrs. Jardine's genial, vigorous
tones, and once the laird's deep bell note, calling to his dogs. On the
western side fell only the sough of the breeze in the pine.
Jamie ceased the clocklike motion of his body to and fro over the
difficult lesson. "I never understood just what were the Erinnys, sir?"
"The Erinnys?" Strickland laid down the pen and turned in his chair.
"I'll have to think a moment, to get it straight for you, Jamie.... The
Erinnys are the Fates as avengers. They are the vengeance-demanding
part of ourselves objectified, supernaturalized, and named. Of old,
where injury was done, the Erinnys were at hand to pull the roof down
upon the head of the injurer. Their office was to provide unerringly
sword for sword, bitter cup for bitter cup. They never forgot, they

always avenged, though sometimes they took years to do it. They
esteemed themselves, and were esteemed, essential to the moral order.
They are the dark and bitter extreme of justice, given power by the
imagination.... Do you think that you know the chapter now?"
Jamie achieved his recitation, and then was set to mathematics. The
tutor's quill drove on across the page. He looked up.
"Mr. Touris has come to Black Hill?"
Jamie and Alice worshiped interruptions.
"He has twenty carriers bringing fine things all the time--"
"Mother is going to take me when she goes to see Mrs. Alison, his
sister--"
"He is going to spend money and make friends--"
"Mother says Mrs. Alison was most bonny when she was young, but
England may have spoiled her--"
"The minister told the laird that Mr. Touris put fifty pounds in the
plate--"
Strickland held up his hand, and the scholars, sighing, returned to work.
Buzz, buzz! went the bees outside the window. The sun climbed high.
Alexander shut his geometry and came through the break in the wall
and across the span of green to the school-room.
"That's done, Mr. Strickland."
Strickland looked at the paper that his eldest pupil put before him. "Yes,
that is correct. Do you want, this morning, to take up the reading?"
"I had as well, I suppose."
"If you go to Edinburgh--if you do as your father wishes and apply
yourself to the law--you will need to read well and to speak well. You

do not do badly, but not well enough. So, let's begin!" He put out his
hand and drew from the bookshelf a volume bearing the title, The
Treasury of Orators. "Try what you please."
Alexander took the book and moved to the unoccupied window. Here
he half sat, half stood, the morning light flowing in upon him. He
opened the volume and read, with a questioning inflection, the title
beneath his eyes, "'The Cranes of Ibycus'?"
"Yes," assented Strickland. "That is a short, graphic thing."
Alexander read:
"Ibycus, who sang of love, material and divine, in Rhegium and in
Samos, would wander forth in the world and make his lyre sound now
by the sea and now in the mountain. Wheresoever he went he was clad
in the favor of all who loved song. He became a wandering
minstrel-poet. The shepherd loved him, and the fisher; the trader and
the mechanic sighed when he sang; the soldier and the king felt him at
their hearts. The old returned in their thoughts to youth, young men and
maidens trembled in heavenly sound and light. You would think that all
the world loved Ibycus.
"Corinth, the jeweled city, planned her chariot-races and her festival of
song. The strong, the star-eyed young men, traveled to Corinth from
mainland and from island, and those inner athletes and starry ones, the
poets, traveled. Great feasting was to be in Corinth, and contests of
strength and flights of song, and in the theater, representation of gods
and men. Ibycus, the wandering poet, would go to Corinth, there
perhaps to receive a crown.
"Ibycus, loved of all who love song, traveled alone, but not alone. Yet
shepherds, or women with their pitchers at the spring, saw but a poet
with a staff and a lyre. Now he was found upon the highroad, and now
the country paths drew him, and the solemn woods where men most
easily find God. And so he approached Corinth.
"The day was calm