The Hill of Dreams | Page 3

Euclid; and
better to talk to his father and mother than to be answering such
remarks as: "I say, Taylor, I've torn my trousers; how much to do you
charge for mending?" "Lucy, dear, come quick and sew this button on
my shirt."
That night the storm woke him, and he groped with his hands amongst
the bedclothes, and sat up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He
had seen himself, in a dream, within the Roman fort, working some
dark horror, and the furnace doors were opened and a blast of flame
from heaven was smitten upon him.
Lucian went slowly, but not discreditably, up the school, gaining prizes
now and again, and falling in love more and more with useless reading
and unlikely knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well enough,

but he preferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle
ages. He like history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste,
Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost,
Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of
the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing
grey. The masters did not encourage these researches; a pure
enthusiasm, they felt, should be for cricket and football, the dilettanti
might even play fives and read Shakespeare without blame, but healthy
English boys should have nothing to do with decadent periods. He was
once found guilty of recommending Villon to a school-fellow named
Barnes. Barnes tried to extract unpleasantness from the text during
preparation, and rioted in his place, owing to his incapacity for the
language. The matter was a serious one; the headmaster had never
heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name of his literary admirer
without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete immunity for
the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to confine his researches
to the Old Testament, a book which the headmaster knew well. As for
Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work decently, and sometimes
doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose. His school-fellows
thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed were very kind to
him in their barbarous manner. He often remembered in after life acts
of generosity and good nature done by wretches like Barnes, who had
no care for old French nor for curious meters, and such recollections
always moved him to emotion. Travelers tell such tales; cast upon cruel
shores amongst savage races, they have found no little kindness and
warmth of hospitality.
He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them.
Barnes and his friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and
anticipation; they were going home to brothers and sisters, and to
cricket, more cricket, or to football, more football, and in the winter
there were parties and jollities of all sorts. In return he would announce
his intention of studying the Hebrew language, or perhaps Provençal,
with a walk up a bare and desolate mountain by way of open-air
amusement, and on a rainy day for choice. Whereupon Barnes would
impart to Duscot his confident belief that old Taylor was quite cracked.
It was a queer, funny life that of school, and so very unlike anything in

Tom Brown. He once saw the headmaster patting the head of the
bishop's little boy, while he called him "my little man," and smiled
hideously. He told the tale grotesquely in the lower fifth room the same
day, and earned much applause, but forfeited all liking directly by
proposing a voluntary course of scholastic logic. One barbarian threw
him to the ground and another jumped on him, but it was done very
pleasantly. There were, indeed, some few of a worse class in the school,
solemn sycophants, prigs perfected from tender years, who thought life
already "serious," and yet, as the headmaster said, were "joyous, manly
young fellows." Some of these dressed for dinner at home, and talked
of dances when they came back in January. But this virulent sort was
comparatively infrequent, and achieved great success in after life.
Taking his school days as a whole, he always spoke up for the system,
and years afterward he described with enthusiasm the strong beer at a
roadside tavern, some way out of the town. But he always maintained
that the taste for tobacco, acquired in early life, was the great life, was
the great note of the English Public School.
Three years after Lucian's discovery of the narrow lane and the vision
of the flaming fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of
great heat. It was one of those memorable years of English weather,
when some Provençal spell seems wreathed round the island in the
northern sea, and the grasshoppers chirp