ONE winter afternoon as I approached Quarles’ room, to take him for a walk, I heard a loud voice raised in angry altercation, as I thought. I paused on the dormitory stairs, and there came to my ears the blind student’s voice, raised high, as if he were spitting fire. I hurried to his door and entered the room to see what the quarrel between my friend and his enemy could be.
“Priddy, sit down!” quoth Quarles, pausing in his strange heat of jargon. “Listen,” and then, standing in the center of the room, he declaimed this strange-sounding sentence:
“Eipo ti deta kall, in orgitze pleon!” and attended it with a fierce and angry thrust of his fist, as if he were thrusting red-hot bolts down the unwilling throat of a helpless foe.
“Well, of all the strange jumbles, Quarles!” I exclaimed, “what is the baby talk, please?”
“Soo de athlios ge taut oneiditzon, a soi oudeis os ouxi tond oneidiei taxi!” he continued, scowling frightfully and staring with his expressionless eyes as if he would have his stored up wrath break through to flash like fierce lightning on the pride of his unseen opponent.
“Taxi?” I mused, “that means automobile riding at ten dollars a minute—what is the rest?”
“It’s Greek,” he explained, sitting down. “I am the blind Prophet Teiresias, in the Greek drama ‘King Œdipus,’ to be given by the college. Let me translate!”
He sprang to the middle of the floor, and, in English, attended by the same angry gestures, he declaimed to the scoffing King whom he was warning:
“‘Shall I speak something more, to feed thy wrath?’” and then he paused to explain, “and when you called it baby talk, I recited the line which I am to use when the King slanders me for being blind, ‘O miserable reproach, which all who now behold thee, soon shall thunder forth on thee!’ and,” went on Quarles, “you are to know, if you do not know it now, how that later the King does blind himself with hot irons and fulfils the prophecy I hurl at his coward lips!”
“Horrible, it must be!” I shuddered. “What a dark tragedy to lighten a college stage!”
“But,” mused Quarles, “think of the achievement, in these days, when the college critics are charging the college with immersing itself in practical concerns so as to forego the classics. My work is cut out for me, Priddy,” he went on. “If they are to have a real blind man for Teiresias, they must also have fair acting of the lines, for it is all to be given in Greek, not a word of English; for barbarians like you, who will probably be mystified, there will be an English line-for-line translation.”
“Oh,” I retorted, “I have studied some Greek. I have read the New Testament!”
Quarles laughed,
“That is only the introduction to Greek. Listen!”
He stood before me and recited the fluid, rounded, Greek lines of the blind Prophet, as he leaves the King,
“You will have to have a clear brain for the storing of so much pure, classic speech, Quarles,” I said. “Come out for a walk over the four-mile road with me and you may talk King Œdipus to me till I faint!”
So, arm in arm, over the ruts of the four-mile road, which first took us up a steep hill and then around to the west through some dark, cool woods, the blind student and I walked, and talked of the Greek tragedy in which he was to play so realistic a part.
So Arm in Arm the Blind Student and I Walked
On our way back, as we neared the campus, Quarles said:
“Priddy, have you ever met ‘Squeem’ Hirshey? I’ve got to see him before supper, if you’ll take me to him. He’s one of the old men of the chorus, in the play, and wants me to help him with pronunciation.”
“No, I haven’t met him,” I said.
“A poor Georgian,” explained Quarles, “lives in a stuffy bit of a room with an Irish family, down at The Alley; you know where that is, of course.”
So while we walked in the direction of “Squeem’s” lodging, Quarles gave me full information about this student, one who lived in the back-waters of college life.
“In some unaccountable way,” said Quarles, “Squeem managed to get a decent preparatory education in the South, in a place where most of the people lived in huts. Missionary education, I think. However, he came here, passed entrance exams all right, and was awarded a couple of scholarships that bring him in about a hundred and fifty dollars a year. He tells me that he manages to get enough work to support him: that he earns his room rent with the Gibboneys by doing chores, though what chores such a poor family can have for him to perform, I cannot understand. He cooks his own meals on an oil stove, and, for that purpose tries never to go over seventy-five cents a week for his food. As for clothes, well—he patronizes ‘Eddie’, the old clothes-man, and manages to get cast-off shoes and clothes at ridiculously low prices. A suit for four dollars and a decent pair of shoes, not much worn, for fifty cents!”
“I must have seen him,” I explained, “but of course, I cannot place the name. A queer one, too; reminds one of Dickens’ Squeers, the ugly schoolmaster.”
Quarles smiled.
“That name was tacked on a year ago, when he was a Freshman. It seems that he kept himself to his room and never mixed in things, sort of a timid, bashful chap, but full of energy when it comes to study. A down-at-the-heels fellow, I have heard him called. Well, he was squeamish about everything, and it was natural for the Freshies to tack him with ‘Squeem’ and by that name he will always be known to the future generations of college men.”
“Here’s the alley!” I announced, after a few minutes more of talk. We had passed down an outlying road where, on the very outskirts of the village, stood a row of cheap tenements. Between these, at an angle, lay an alley filled with ashes, tin cans and broken bottles. This alley led up to two ill-looking shanties, so small that by comparison with the houses farther in the town they seemed no more than half-ruined doll houses.
“It’s the blackest house,” whispered my companion. “Go around to the rear. His room is up the back stairs.”
As we rounded the black shanty the sound of gurgling and churning reached our ears, and then, back of a line of flapping, wet clothes, we came on a middle-sized, but excessively gaunt youth, wearing an oil-cloth apron, such as we wore in the chemistry classes when we performed experiments, with a bib that fitted close to his neck. He wore under it a ragged, red sweater, and was churning a washing machine full of clothes, while, at his back, a stout, red-faced Irishwoman was engaged in taking clothes from a basket and hanging them on lines. Hanging from a row of nails on the outside of the house were all shades and colors of students’ laundry bags. Underneath them, wriggling in a broken and dirty clothes basket, lay a six-months-old baby, sucking a soiled thumb and apparently finding it nourishing.
“Hello, Quarles!” greeted the washerman, in great embarrassment at our discovery of him, “I didn’t expect you!” A Southern drawl was evident in his speech. He was about to take off his apron, when the Irishwoman, throwing a frown of dissatisfaction in my direction, growled:
“Mister Hirshey, an’ don’t you be lavin’, mind you. Them things’ve got to be done. You can talk while you work; but work you must, and the young gentlemen can go hang till you’ve time, if they care!”
Squeem’s waxen cheeks, which seemed before to have no signs of blood about them, flushed, and he said, apologetically, as he resumed his churning,
“Only ten minutes more, Quarles. We can talk, and then we can go to the room.”
I was introduced to the student and recognized in him the one whom I had passed on the campus, time and time again in the winter, with his shivering body fitted to ill-measured clothes, and his goose-fleshed wrists and ungloved hands hanging like dead weights from below his coat sleeves.
Ten minutes later, after I had watched the Southerner dip out the dripping mass of laundry and put it through the wringer, we were conducted into the dark kitchen with its odor of cabbage, and ascended by a wabbly stairway to the loft, one half of which was given to Squeems for his abode. A greasy, sour odor of cooking permeated the room. It was lighted by two narrow panes of glass fitted to a makeshift frame, and covered by a curtain of imitation tapestry, with the design of a red Swiss house half buried amid gray bushes and a row of stiff, brown poplars. A cot bed stood in a corner with a bundle of warm quilts in confusion on it, for evidently our host had little skill in his housekeeping. A packing case, on end, with the open side towards us, had been skilfully transformed into book shelf, storage place and desk. A short row of text books was ranged on the packing case. Besides a kitchen chair there was no other seat, save a tin-covered trunk from which Squeem had to take a few dishes, an oil stove and a bread tin,—his dining apparatus,—before it could be utilized for a seat.
The following half hour was spent by Quarles and the Southerner in the pronunciation, the translation, and oratorical interpretation, not only of the chorus part of the play, which would be sung, but of the Blind Prophet’s thrilling lines, which Quarles recited before Squeem with even more spirit than he had to me, for, he explained, as we left the house:
“That poor fellow may be in the back-waters of college, but he’s got a really excellent mind. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him come near to leading his class in scholarship. I like him—that Squeem,” and then my blind companion quoted, with great impressiveness, “‘Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon his throne, a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his ... originality.’”
Then the night of the Greek play arrived in which Quarles and his strange friend were to appear.
My wife and I sat in the gallery, in Assembly Hall, amongst the vast throng of spectators.
A dark, green curtain covered the stage. The white interior of the hall, with soaring ceiling panels, dotted with flaming rows of electric lights, the paintings on the gallery walls of presidents and benefactors of the college, the ushers in evening dress, fine, manly samples of youth, the well-dressed women in their opera costumes: all this was a glorious show to look upon, in itself. But when a group of gowned students took their places, in chairs, near the stage, and were followed by the orchestra, and the musical director,—then the programs fluttered, expectantly, even in the hands of the professors and invited guests from other colleges, who had come to enjoy the literary treat of the much-heralded play.
The leader, with a gentle tap on his rack, brought the musicians into position. A stroke of the wand in the air, and the instruments began with the introductory theme, a droning chant, with wild whisperings in the background, as the violins tried to paint for our senses the chatter of the fierce Fates that were to hound King Œdipus to his horrid death, in payment to their stern laws for his unconscious sin.
Then, as the haunting prelude paused on a wailing minor, as if to tell us that forever and forever man’s despair should continue—under the rule of the Fates, the lights in the hall were darkened, amidst a silence. There was a pause, and then, as the heavy curtains were drawn aside while the drums crashed forth a suggestion of impending strife, we looked upon a marvelous palace front in ancient Boeotian Thebes. Austere gloom, the fluted, pillared doorway with the brazen door bespoke, though the sky was tinted as if for a sunrise, or sunset. Then before our eyes, in that ancient world was unfolded the grim lesson that even unconscious sin must pay at last the uttermost farthing.
Quarles, transformed into a bearded, led prophet, spake his lines with heart-ringing pathos. But as for “Squeem” among the bearded men, who chanted their parrotish gossip, I could not distinguish him.
Heaps on heaps of color were massed on the stage, with a studied effort to inflame the imaginations of the audience. When it seemed that the finest effects of grouping and harmonies of color had been obtained, other actors would suddenly appear and make the splendor of the setting pass belief.
Word by word, gesture by gesture, chant by chant, we followed the dismal but dramatic tale from its air of glory and freedom into the darker shadows of dread which Teiresias foretold. Moods of king and queen, of the old men who stood by the temple, of the priest and the shepherd changed slowly and steadily from scoffing to belief, from belief to alarm, from alarm to fear, from fear to resistance, from resistance to submission, from submission to final reparation. Woven into the shudderings of the old men, witnesses of death and grewsome penalties, were the musical whisperings, to keep our minds upon the unseen spirits of the vengeful gods who were directing the grim tragedy until all the sobs that men and women could give were ended, until the last dreg of a tear remained, and until only the merest whisper of a cry could sound in the chambers of a suffering heart!
We went into the night, from it, feeling that our hearts had been smitten heavy blows, that our life had fastened itself to leaden anchors. The terrible reality, the magnificence of Fate, the classic splendor of sufferings in epic girth had been staged before us.
Teiresias’ words hung in the air, everywhere, even under the dark sky outside: