Through the school: The experiences of a mill boy in securing an education

BY the middle of the year I had obtained such a grip on study that I was bold enough to incorporate two extra subjects in the week’s routine. Besides that, I conceived the idea of reading English history outside of class and then securing permission to pass an examination on it, a scheme in which the teacher acquiesced. I felt that I must make up for lost time and hungrily, voraciously threw myself at the privilege which fortune had brought me. I began to realize in my own mind what men called “enthusiasm in his work.” Every day seemed to me a momentous day of opportunity: a day in which I might atone for the educational privilege I had missed up to my twentieth birthday. When I saw Aborn, stately, gifted, and on his way towards his Master’s degree at twenty, I was made to realize how long a road I had before me and how energetic I should have to be in order to get anywhere in education from my elementary and preparatory studies. So I put in my studies an investment of interest and patient attention which I had put in no other work that I had ever done.

The most outstanding interest that I had was the class in oratory. This class met on the top floor, under the rafters, in a room directly off from the chapel. It resembled the studio of a poor artist with its gray northern skylight and little windows high above the bare floor. The class included young men and women. Nearly all were preparing for religious work, as ministers, missionaries, and evangelists. One student, a shock-haired young Westerner with “temperament” and “personality,” who generally sat in the pose of an actor, was planning for the career of a public reader.

After the preliminary weeks of physical gymnastics and throat clearing, and after we were able to say “Oh!” without making the flame of a candle flicker, we began on the real excitement of speaking Orations; I began with the traditional Patrick Henry, of course, and naturally, after long and patient rehearsals in my room credited myself with the fact that if the author of that thriller should chance to come into the oratorical studio on the morning when I planned to recite it before my professor, he would feel that his forceful utterance had passed into no mean mouth!

The morning on which I was scheduled to speak duly arrived and with it an increase in my confidence that I should do well with it: the confidence without which no orator yet—in school—ever did much. I stood out before the class, struck my pose—left foot at an angle from the right and slightly in front with the weight on the right foot to maintain balance—and attempted to recreate the atmosphere, the thrill, and the historic eloquence of the Virginia Convention where the oration had had its birth, before the innumerable army of school lads had passed it on from generation to generation. Applause greeted my effort and I sat down in a flush of happiness. However, the professor, after crediting me several points of excellence, brought up a criticism that plunged me into a sweat of guilty self-consciousness. He said,

“Mr. Priddy, why is it that you aspirate your words so? I know you were born in England, but you have been in this country for some time now. There were several places in the oration where you placed ‘h’s’ where they should not have been placed, and where you left them off when they should have been retained!”

It was the first time in my whole life that anybody had called my attention to that fault. I said,

“Will you please give me samples, sir?”

“Well,” replied the professor, consulting his tablet, “you said ‘w’ile’ instead of ‘while,’ and ‘Hi’ instead of the pronoun ‘I.’ And ‘w’at’ instead of ‘what,’ and ‘Forbid it, Halmighty God,’ and you declaimed that passage, ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?’ became ‘His life so dear hor peace so sweet has to be bought hat the price of chains and slavery?’”

I felt angry at myself, chagrined. There trooped into my guilt-smitten consciousness the innumerable times I must have put ‘h’s’ where they had not belonged and left them off where they should have been retained.

“Nobody ever told me—about it before, sir!” I exclaimed.

“This is just the place to get rid of the habit,” replied the professor. “I am here to help you. I think that when you get rid of that habit you will make a fair showing in public speech. Now that you are aware of it, you will be on your guard.”

I made known my discovery at the waiter’s table at noon, and instantly my friends poured out for my consideration a whole museum of sentences I had originated in their hearing and over which they had secretly smiled. It seems I had said, “’Ave you got your ’at, Brock?” and “Will you ’ave another Hegg, please?” and “Look hout for this ’ot water!” When the waiters saw that I took the criticism in good part and was eagerly anxious to rid my speech of that defect, they were instant and sometimes severe in their criticisms; with the result that in a very short while I gained the advantage over my “h’s” and somewhat tamed them.

With the mastery of my “h’s” and the daily discipline in the oratorical class came an overmastering desire to make a public speech. I thought that if I could accomplish that I should vindicate myself so far as I had gone in my education. It should be the first milestone in my school career. The opportunity was given in a proposed oratorical contest to be held in the village church. I took Thropper into my confidence as I prepared my original oration. Into this I tried to exemplify every admirable rule of rhetoric and every stern rule of logic and every manner of long, short, periodic, balanced, and climactic sentence I was then learning in Rhetoric. I marshalled historical allusions, read widely in the library hour after hour. Then, when I had put myself through this profitable discipline and had typewritten my manuscript—the final triumph of my educational career thus far—I was ready for rehearsals. After I had practised alone and as the evening of the contest drew near, I asked Thropper if each evening after supper he would accompany me into the woods and listen while I delivered my oration. He consented, cheerfully enough. That same evening he accompanied me to the pastures in the rear of the University. I poised myself seriously on a stump, while Thropper stood with his back to the wind in a waiting attitude. I had not delivered more than two paragraphs of my speech before there came a yell from behind me and a half-dozen students ran shouting, applauding and screaming before me. When the crowd of interrupters had exhausted their animal spirits, I said to them, addressing them from the stump,

“I’ve a good mind to invite you to stand out there near Thropper and listen!”

“Why not?” they demanded.

“If you can’t address a bunch of farmers like these,” smiled Thropper, “you won’t be able to stand up in church before three hundred people and give it. Go ahead!”

I did, and the result was that the students rallied about me at the end, carried me on their shoulders, shouting, mockingly,

“Hail to the new Webster!” and to show their approval of me, they sat me astride a rail and would have given me a ride home on that conveyance had not Thropper prevented it.

The evening of the contest arrived and with it the seating of seasoned, experienced, graceful, prize-winning orators, in comparison with whom I knew I should not and could not under any stretch of the imagination be placed. I wanted to give a speech in public, that was the height to which my expectancy went, but, of course, I had to set before me the prizes that were offered and be prepared for “accidents.” When my turn came and I faced that illimitable sea of white faces, I felt my feet slip from under me while I seemed to float above this conscious world. Then I picked out an interested face in the far, far corner of the church. At him I threw my strident voice, determined to make him hear what I had to say. The result was, in Thropper’s words, “Priddy, it seemed that you placed your pitch on top of the highest mountain in the world, and after that it was a scream, that’s all, old fellow. That was due to inexperience.”

But this failure was atoned for when the judges especially commented on the “careful thought,” “the good English,” and “the excellent form of the written oration” and when they marked me in second place on the literary side of the matter, I felt repaid with my first adventure into public speech. I felt that I had vindicated the struggles I had set before me, through the long years, to go through the school.