Paradise Garden: The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment. Gibbs George

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СКАЧАТЬ best of their class, who taught him boxing and fencing. I had a gymnasium built with Mr. Ballard's consent, and a swimming pool, which kept him busy after the lesson hour. At the age of fifteen Jerry was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds, all bone and muscle. In the five years since I had been at Horsham Manor there had not been a day when he was ill, and except for an occasional accident such as the adventure with the lynx, not one when I had called in the services of a doctor. Physically at least I had so far succeeded, for in this respect Jerry was perfection.

      As to his mind, perhaps my own ideals had made me too exacting. According to my carefully thought out plans, scholarship was to be Jerry's buckler and defense against the old Adam. God forbid that I should have planned, as Jack Ballard would have had it, to build Jerry in my own image, for if scholarship had been my own refuge it had also done something to destroy my touch with human kind. It was the quality of sympathy in Jerry which I had lacked, the love for and confidence in every human being with whom he came into contact which endeared him to every person on the place. From Radford to Christopher, throughout the house, stables and garage, down to the humblest hedge-trimmer, all loved Jerry and Jerry loved them all. He had that kind of nature. He couldn't help loving those about him any more than he could help breathing, and yet it must not be supposed that the boy was lacking in discernment. Our failings, weaknesses and foibles were a constant source of amusement to him, but his humor was without malice and his jibes were friendly, and he ran the gamut of my own exposed nerve pulps with such joyous consideration that I came to like the operation. He loved me and I knew it.

      But nothing could make him love his Latin grammar. He worried through arithmetic and algebra and blarneyed his French and German tutors into making them believe he knew more than he did, but the purely scientific aspects of learning did not interest him. It was only when he knew enough to read the great epics in the original that my patience had its reward. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid held him in thrall, and by some magic eliminated at a bound the purely mechanical difficulties which had fettered him. Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses—Jerry was each of these in turn, lacking only the opportunity to vanquish heroic foes or capture impregnable cities.

      I had not censored the Homeric gods, as Jerry's father had commanded, and my temerity led to difficulties. It began with Calypso and Ulysses and did not even end when Dido was left alone upon the shores of Carthage.

      "I don't understand it at all," he said one day with a wrinkled brow, "how a man of the caliber of Ulysses could stay so long the prisoner of Calypso, a woman, when he wanted to go home. It's a pretty shabby business for a hero and a demigod. A woman!" he sneered, "I'd like to see any woman keep me sitting in a cave if I wanted to go anywhere!"

      His braggadicio was the full-colored boyish reflection of the Canby point of view. I had merely shrugged woman out of existence. Now Jerry castigated her.

      "What could she do?" he went on scornfully. "She couldn't shoot or run or fight. All she did was to lie around or strut about with a veil around her head and a golden girdle (sensible costume!) and serve the hero with ambrosia and ruddy nectar. I've never eaten ambrosia, but I'm pretty sure it was some sweet, sticky stuff, like her." There is no measure for the contempt of his accents.

      "She could swim," I ventured timidly.

      "Swim! Even a fish can swim!"

      I don't know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry's maturer years in which the topic had been woman, I felt a slight tremor go over me. Jerry was too good to look at. I fancied that there were many women who would have liked to see the flash of his eye at that moment and to meet his challenge with their wily arts. In the pride of his masculine strength and capacity he scorned them as I had taught him. I had done my work well. Had I done it too well?'

      "What are women anyway?" he stormed at me again. "For what good are they? To wash linen and have white arms like Nausicaa? Who cares whether her arms were white or not? They're always weeping because they're loved or raging because they're not. Love! Always love! I love you and Christopher and Radford and Skookums, but I'm not always whining about it. What's the use? Those things go without saying. They're simply what are in a fellow's heart, but he doesn't talk about them."

      "Quite right. Jerry. Let's say no more about it."

      "I'm glad there are no women around here, but now that I come to think of it, I don't see why there shouldn't be."

      "Your father liked men servants best. He believed them to be more efficient."

      "Oh, yes, of course," and then, suddenly: "When I go out beyond the wall I'll have to see them and talk to them, won't I?"

      "Not if you don't want to."

      "Well, I don't want to."

      He paused a second and then went on. "But I am a little curious about them. Of course, they're silly and useless and flabby, but it seems queer that there are such a lot of 'em. If they're no good, why don't they pass out of existence? That's the rule of life, you tell me, the survival of the fittest. If they're not fit they ought to have died out long ago."

      "You can't keep them from being born, Jerry," I laughed.

      "Well," he said scornfully, "it ought to be prevented."

      I made a pretense of cutting the leaves of a book. He was going too far. I temporized.

      "Ah, they're all right, Jerry," I said with some magnificence, "if they do their duty. Some are much better than others. Now, Miss Redwood, for instance, your governess. She was kind, willing and affectionate."

      "Oh, yes," he said, "she was all right, but she wasn't like a man."

      I had him safe again. Physical strength and courage at this time were his fetish. But he was still thoughtful.

      "Sometimes I think, Roger" (he called me Roger now, for after all I was more like an elder brother than a father to him), "sometimes I think that things are too easy for me; that I ought to be out doing my share in the work of the world."

      "Oh, that will come in time. If you think things are too easy, I might manage to make them a little harder."

      He laughed affectionately and clapped me on the shoulder.

      "Oh, no, you don't, old Dry-as-dust. Not books. That isn't what I meant. I mean life, struggles against odds. I've just been wondering what chance I'd have to get, along by myself, without a lot of people waiting on me."

      "I've tried to show you, Jerry. You can go into the woods with a gun and an ax and exist in comfort."

      "Yes, but the world isn't all woods; and axes and guns aren't the only weapons."

      "But the principle is the same."

      He flashed a bright glance at me.

      "Flynn told me yesterday that I could make good in the prize ring if I'd let him take me in hand."

      (The deuce he had! Flynn would lose his engagement as a boxing teacher if he didn't heed my warnings better.)

      "The prize ring is not what you're being trained for, my young friend," I said with some asperity.

      "What then?" he asked.

      "First of all I hope I'm training you to be a gentleman. And that means—"

      "Can't a boxer be a gentleman?" he broke in quickly.

      "He might be, I suppose, but he usually isn't." He was forcing me into an attitude of priggishness which I regretted.

      "Then СКАЧАТЬ