Upon a mellow September afternoon three years after the newspapers had
announced the death, in Richmond, Virginia, of Elizabeth Arnold, the
popular English actress, generally known in the United States as Mrs.
Poe, the ancient town of Stoke-Newington, in the suburbs of London,
dozing in the shadows of its immemorial elms, was aroused to a mild
degree of activity by the appearance upon its green-arched streets of
three strangers--evidently Americans. It was not so much their
nationality as a certain distinguished air that drew attention upon the
dignified and proper gentleman in broadcloth and immaculate linen, the
pretty, gracious-seeming and fashionably dressed lady and especially the
little boy of six or seven summers with the large, wistful eyes and pale
complexion, and chestnut ringlets framing a prominent, white brow and
tumbling over a broad, snowy tucker. He wore pongee knickerbockers and
red silk stockings and on his curls jauntily rested a peaked velvet cap
from which a heavy gold tassel fell over upon his shoulder.
The denizens of old Stoke-Newington gazed upon this prosperous trio with
frank curiosity; the reader has already recognized John Allan and his
wife, Frances, and little Edgar Poe--their adopted child.
The sun was still hot, and the refreshing chill in the dusky street,
under its arch of interlacing boughs, was grateful to the tired little
traveller. As he moved along, clinging to Mrs. Allan's hand, his big
eyes gazing as far as they might up the long, cool aisle the trees made,
the hazy green distance invited his mystery-loving fancy. The odors of a
thousand flowering shrubberies were on the air and he felt that it was
good to be in this dreaming old town--as old, it seemed to him, as the
world; and there was born in him at that moment, though he could not
have defined it, a sense of the picturesquesness, the charm, the
fragrance, of old things--old streets, old houses, old trees, old turf
and shrubberies, even--with their haunting suggestions of bygone days
and scenes.
They passed the ancient Gothic church, standing solemn and serene among
its mossy tombs. In the misty blue atmosphere above the elms the fretted
steeple seemed to the boy to lie imbedded and asleep, but even as he
gazed upon it the churchbell, sounding the hour, broke the stillness
with a deep, hollow roar which thrilled him with mingled awe and
delight.
Ah, here indeed, was a place made for dreaming!
In the midst of the town lay the Manor House School where the scholarly
Dr. Bransby, who preached in the Gothic church on Sundays, upon
week-days instructed boys in various branches of polite learning--and
also frequently flogged them. This school was the destination of the
three strangers from America, for here the foundations of young Edgar's
education were to be laid during the several years residence of his
foster-parents in London, in which city the boy himself would pass his
holidays and sometimes be permitted to spend week-ends.
The ample grounds of the school were enclosed from the rest of the town
by a high and thick brick wall, dingy with years, which seemed to frown
like a prison wall upon the grassy and pleasantly shaded freedom
without. At one corner of this ponderous wall was set a more ponderous
gate, riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged
iron spikes. As the boy passed through it he trembled with delicious awe
which was deepened by the ominous creak of the mighty hinges. He fancied
himself entering upon a domain of mystery and adventure where all manner
of grim and unearthly monsters might cross his pathway to be wrestled
with and destroyed. The path to the house lay through a small parterre
planted with box and other shrubs, and beyond stretched the playgrounds.
As for the house itself, that appeared to the eyes of the boy as a
veritable palace of enchantment. It was a large, grey, rambling
structure of the Elizabethan age. Within, it was like a labyrinth. Edgar
wondered if there were any end to its windings and incomprehensible
divisions and sub-divisions--to its narrow, dusky passages and its steps
down and up--up and down; to its odd and unexpected nooks and corners.
Scarce two rooms seemed to him to be upon the same level and between
continually going down or up three or four steps in a journey through
the mansion upon which Dr. Bransby guided him and his foster-parents,
the dazed little boy found it almost impossible to determine upon which
of the two main floors he happened to be. It was afterward to become a
source of secret satisfaction to him that he never finally decided upon
which floor was the dim sleeping apartment to which he was introduced
soon after supper, and which he shared with eighteen or twenty other
boys.
The business of formally entering the pupil about whom the Allans and
Dr. Bransby had already corresponded, in the school, was soon
dispatched, and once more the iron gate swung open upon its weirdly
complaining hinges, then went to again with a bang and a clang, and the
little boy from far Virginia, with the wistful grey eyes and the sunny
curls was alone in a throng of curious school-fellows, and in the
dimness, the strangeness, the vastness of a hoary, mysterious mansion
full of echoes, and of quaint crannies and closets where shadows lurked
by day as well as by candle-light. Alone, yet not unhappy--for Edgar the
Dreamer was holding full sway. With the departure of his foster-father,
all check was removed from his fancy which could, and did, run riot in
this creepy and fascinating old place, and at night he had to comfort
him the miniature of his mother from which he had never been parted for
an hour, and which he still carried to bed with him with unfailing
regularity.
He had always known that his mother was English-born, and somehow, in
his mind, there seemed to be some mystic connection between this ancient
town and manor house and the green graveyard in Richmond, with its
mouldy tombstones and encompassing wall.
* * * * *
Not until the next morning was the new pupil ushered into the
school-room--the largest room in the world it seemed to the small,
lonely stranger. It was long, narrow and low-pitched. Its ceiling was
of oak, black with age, and the daylight struggled fitfully in through
pointed, Gothic windows. Built into a remote and terror-inspiring corner
was a box-like enclosure, eight or ten feet high, of heavy oak, like the
ceiling, with a massy door of the same sombre wood. This, the newcomer
soon learned was the "sanctum" of the head-master--the Rev. Dr.
Bransby--whose sour visage, snuffy habiliments and upraised ferule
seemed so terrible to young Edgar that on the following Sunday when he
went to service in the Gothic church, it was with a spirit of deep
wonder and perplexity that he regarded from the school gallery the
reverend man with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy
and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and
so vast, who, with solemn step and slow, ascended the high pulpit.
Interspersed about the school-room, crossing and recrossing in endless
irregularity, were benches and desks, black, ancient and time-worn,
piled desperately with much bethumbed books, and so beseamed with
initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures and other
multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have lost what little of original
form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket
with water stood at one extremity of the room and a clock, whose
dimensions appeared to the boy to be stupendous, at the other.
But it was not only Edgar the Dreamer who came to Manor House School,
who passed out of the great iron gate and through the elm avenues to the
Gothic church on Sundays, and who regularly, on two afternoons in the
week, made a decorous escape from the confinement of the frowning walls,
and in company with the whole school, in orderly procession, and duly
escorted by an usher, tramped past the church and into the pleasant
green fields that lay beyond the quaint houses of the village. Edgar
Goodfellow was there too--Edgar the gay, the frolicsome, the lover of
sports and hoaxes and trials of strength.
Upon the evening of the young American's arrival, his schoolmates kept
their distance, regarding him with shy curiosity, but by the recess hour
next day this timidity had worn off, and they crowded about him with the
pointed questions and out-spoken criticisms which constitute the
breaking in of a new scholar. The boy received their sallies with such
politeness and good humor and with such an air of modest dignity, that
the wags soon ceased their gibes for very shame and the ring-leaders
began to show in their manner and speech, an air of approval in place of
the suspicion with which they had at first regarded him.
When the questions, "What's your name?"--"How old are you?"--"Where do
you live?" "Were you sick at sea?"--"What made you come to this school?"
"How high can you jump?"--"Can you box?" "Can you fight?"--and the like,
had been promptly and amiably answered, there was a lull. The silence
was broken by young Edgar himself. Drawing himself up to the full height
of his graceful little figure and thumping his chest with his closed
fist, he said, "Any boy who wants to may hit me here, as hard as he
can."
The boys looked at each other inquiringly for a moment--they were
uncertain, whether this was a specimen of American humor or to be taken
literally. Presently the largest and strongest among them stepped
forward. He was a stalwart fellow for his years, but his excessively
blond coloring, together with the effeminate style in which his mother
insisted upon dressing him, caused the boys to give him the name of
"Beauty," which was soon shortened into "Beaut," and had finally become
"the Beau."
"Will you let _me_ hit you?" he asked.
"Yes," replied Edgar. "Count three and hit. You can't hurt me."
As "the Beau" counted, "One--two--three"--Edgar gently inflated his
lungs, expanding his chest to its fullest extent, and then, at the
moment of receiving the blow, exhaled the air. He did not stagger or
flinch, though his antagonist struck straight from the shoulder, with a
brawny, small fist.
The rest of the boys, in turn, struck him--each time counting
three--with the same result. Finally "the Beau" said,
"_You_ hit _me_."
Edgar counted, "One--two--three"--and struck out with clenched fist, but
"the Beau" not knowing the trick, was promptly bowled over on the
grass--the shock making quick tears start in his forget-me-not blue
eyes.
The boys were, one and all, open and clamorous in their admiration.
"Pshaw," said young Edgar, indifferently. "It's nothing. All the boys in
Virginia can do that."
"Can you play leap-frog?" asked "Freckles"--a wiry looking little
fellow, with carotty locks and a freckled nose, whose leaping had
hitherto been unrivalled.
"I'll show you," was the reply.
Instantly, a dozen backs were bent in readiness for the game, and over
them, one by one, vaulted Edgar, with the lightness of a bird, his brown
curls blowing out behind him, as his baggy yellow thighs and thin red
legs flew through the air.
"Freckles" magnanimously owned himself beaten at his own game.
"Let's race," said "Goggles"--a lean, long-legged, swathy boy, with a
hooked nose and bulging, black eyes.
Like a flash, the whole lot of them were off down the gravel walk, under
the elms. Edgar and "Goggles"--abreast--led for a few moments, then
Edgar gradually gained and came out some twenty feet ahead of "Goggles,"
and double that ahead of the foremost of the others.
It was not only these accomplishments in themselves that made the
American boy at once take the place of hero and leader of his form in
this school of old England, but the quiet and unassuming mien with which
he bore his superiority--not seeming in the least to despise the weakest
or most backward of his competitors, and good-humoredly initiating them
all into the little secrets of his success in performing apparently
difficult feats.
It was the same way with his lessons. Without apparent effort he
distanced all of his class-mates and instead of pluming himself upon it,
was always ready to help them with their Latin or their sums, whose
answers he seemed to find by magic, almost.