Читать книгу Mr. Achilles - Jennette Lee - Страница 12

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To Mrs. Philip Harris, in the big house looking out across the lake, the passing days brought grateful reassurance.... Betty was safe—Miss Stone was well again—and the man had not come.... She breathed more freely as she thought of it. The child had told her that she had asked him. But she had forgotten to give him her address; and it would not do to be mixed up with a person like that—free to come and go as he liked. He was no doubt a worthy man. But Betty was only a child, and too easily enamoured of people she liked. It was strange how deep an impression the man’s words had made on her. Athens and Greece filled her waking moments. Statues and temples—photographs and books of travel loaded the school-room shelves. The house reeked with Greek learning. Poor Miss Stone found herself drifting into archaeology; and an exhaustive study of Greek literature, Greek life, Greek art filled her days. The theory of Betty Harris’s education had been elaborately worked out by specialists from earliest babyhood. Certain studies, rigidly prescribed, were to be followed whether she liked them or not—but outside these lines, subjects were to be taken up when she showed an interest in them. There could be no question that the time for the study of Greek history and Greek civilisation had come. Miss Stone laboured early and late. Instruction from the university down the lake was pressed into service.... But out of it all the child seemed, by some kind of precious alchemy, to extract only the best, the vital heart of it.

The instructor in Greek marvelled a little. “She is only a child,” he reported to the head of the department, “and the family are American of the newest type—you know, the Philip Harrises?”

The professor nodded. “I know—hide and hoof a generation back.”

The instructor assented. “But the child is uncanny. She knows more about Greek than—”

“Than I do, I suppose.” The professor smiled indulgently. “She wouldn’t have to know much for that.”

“It isn’t so much what she knows. She has a kind of feeling for things. I took up a lot of photographs to-day—some of the later period mixed in—and she picked them out as if she had been brought up in Athens.”

The professor looked interested. “Modern educational methods?”

“As much as you like,” said the instructor. “But it is something more. When I am with the child I am in Athens itself. Chicago makes me blink when I come out.”

The professor laughed. The next day he made an appointment to go himself to see the child. He was a famous epigraphist and an authority in his subject. He had spent years in Greece—with his nose, for the most part, held close to bits of parchment and stone.

When he came away, he was laughing softly. “I am going over for a year,” he said, when he met the instructor that afternoon in the corridor.

“Did you see the little Harris girl?” asked the instructor.

The professor paused. “Yes, I saw her.”

“How did she strike you?”

“She struck me dumb,” said the professor. “I listened for the best part of an hour while she expounded things to me—asked me questions I couldn’t answer, mostly.” He chuckled a little. “I felt like a fool,” he added, frankly, “and it felt good.”

The instructor smiled. “I go through it twice a week. The trouble seems to be that she’s alive, and that she thinks everything Greek is alive, too.”

The professor nodded. “It’s never occurred to her it’s dead and done with, these thousand years and more.” He gave a little sigh. “Sometimes I’ve wondered myself whether it is—quite as dead as it looks to you and me,” he added. “You know that grain—wheat or something—that Blackman took from the Egyptian mummy he brought over last spring—”

“Yes, he planted it—”

“Exactly. And all summer he was tending a little patch of something green up there in his back yard—as fresh as the eyes of Pharaoh’s daughter ever looked on—”

The instructor opened his eyes a little. This was a wild flight for the head epigraphist.

“That’s the way she made me feel—that little Harris girl,” explained the professor—“as if my mummy might spring up and blossom any day if I didn’t look out.”

The instructor laughed out. “So you’re going over with it?”

“A year—two years, maybe,” said the professor. “I want to watch it sprout.”