Part 24 (1/2)
_By_ G. HUMPHREY From _The Bookman_ _Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead, and Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by George Humphrey._
The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of students at Oxford since the war began.
”You have no idea,” he was saying, ”how strange it is to lecture to a cla.s.s of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty.
This morning, for instance....”
”Well, Dean,” I put in, ”after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.”
The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light.
”Listen,” he began, ”you remember the pa.s.sage where a father was trying to carve a picture of his son's death?”
”_Bis patriae ma.n.u.s cecidere_,” I quoted. ”Twice the hands of the father fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?”
He nodded. ”_Bis patriae ma.n.u.s cecidere_-twice the father's hands fell to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a considerable familiarity with what one might call Phnix-Latin, the kind that is only called into being when 'Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman' dies.
He had all the pedant's love for the language. Often he would exchange tags with me when I met him in the street.
”'_Quomodo es?_ How are you,' he would laugh in the tiny general store, to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress.
”'_Bene, domine_,' was my grave answer,-'Very well, sir.'
”Soon he became very popular in the village, though he was regarded as something of a crank. It appeared that he was of the old days when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the French. Of his private affairs we could learn nothing, except that he had married young and that his wife had died at the birth of a son. When he was questioned about his early life, he would affect not to understand-'_Je ne comprend pas, m'sieu_'-this and a shrug of the shoulders was all that we could get out of him.
”Well, the old fellow prided himself on his excellent eyesight, and in the fairly frequent air raids, he refused to go into shelter, preferring instead to remain lying down on the hill outside the village, where he would watch the hostile aeroplane pursued by our guns until it became a speck in the distance toward London. Then he would trudge back again.
”'The pigs are gone,' he would rea.s.sure us in our cellars, shaking his fist at the sky. 'Ah the _cochons_! _Sus Germanicus!_' and we would crawl out again into G.o.d's air, pleased to see him and knowing that there was no longer any danger even if the 'all clear' signal had not yet sounded. For he was always right. He knew from bitter experience.
”One day I saw him in conference with the little knot of sailors that presided over our anti-aircraft defences. He was pointing to the sky rather excitedly and telling them in his broken English something about aeroplanes and 'it is necessaire that they pa.s.s so,' at the same time indicating a track of sky.
”'What is it?' I asked the petty officer.
”'He's got an idea for bringing down the Germans,' explained the man, twitching his thumb rather contemptuously toward my old friend. 'He says they always pa.s.s over that point above the headland before they turn to London. I never noticed it myself, but there may be something in it.
I'll tell the captain.'
”'_En hostes_,' cried the old man in Latin to me, pointing to the place.
'Behold the enemy. It is quite necessaire that he pa.s.s by here what you call the landmark, is it not? The German precision, _toujours_ the same.'
”I laughed and took him by the arm, down to the village, marvelling at the intense hatred with which he spat out the words. 'The German pigs,'
he muttered as we went along. 'They have my country.'
”Soon after there came another raid. We heard the gunfire, without paying much attention to it, so customary had it become. When the safety siren was heard, we all went back to our occupations as usual. I wondered why the old fellow had not appeared, and began to grow anxious, thinking he might have been killed. I was just setting out to look for him when I caught sight of him running toward me over a ploughed field, stopping every other moment to pick up his battered black hat, and looking, even at a quarter of a mile, as if he was full of news of some kind. When he came within a hundred yards or so, still running, he shouted something at me, raising his hands to the sky and then pointing to the earth.
”'_Fuit Ilium_,' I heard. 'Troy is fallen. The German is destroyed. They have him shot, so,' and he brought his arm from above his head to the ground in a magnificently dramatic sweep.
”'What is it?' I asked as I reached him.
”Perspiring and mopping his face with the tricolor handkerchief that some would-be wag had given him, he told his tale. The gunners had taken his advice, and fired at the spot he told them, and a German aeroplane had actually been brought down.