Maclean Read Online Free PDF Page A

around, three big, awkward farmboys, gawking and marveling in their farmboy way, an English captain had shouted at them, “You men. You men there. What business have you here? Get out where you belong. This isn’t Piccadilly Circus. This isn’t a public house.”
    And they had all saluted and snuck out like children.
    Maclean entered the school past a sign about the ration books, which he didn’t bother to read, and climbed the stairs into the central hall. A couple of trestle tables had been set up at one end, and a line of fifty people or more, mostly women, were trailing back from them. He tacked onto the end of the line behind a fat woman in a silk dress, who looked at him as if she might be getting ready to throw up and stepped up beside the woman in front of her.
    Maclean left her three feet of breathing room and stood gazing around, detaching himself. The walls of the hall were lined with pictures of graduating classes. His mother would be there somewhere. And Miss Audrey Sweet, who had graduated before her calamity plunged her back into the great slough from which she had managed briefly to clamber. He himself was in none of them, though somewhere there would be one that a ghost of him might be in, waiting to step out, as the group dissolved, into the ghost of the life he had never had.
    Latin and Mathematics are a training for the mind.
    He hadn’t known that day when he left school for home that it would be his last day.
    â€œWhat does he need a high school diploma for?” his father shouted at his mother. “The horses can’t read. Neither can the pigs. Maybe he can recite Latin to them. Or Shakespeare.”
    Amo, amas, amat. This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. Neco, necas, necat. Necavi, necavisti, necavit. Necaverunt. For -erunt, -ere is also found, especially in poetry.
    The worst thing was going back to get the stuff from his desk. It was early in March. Overnight the temperature had gone up into the forties. There was water melting and running everywhere, and the light falling now from a different place in the sky seemed all of a sudden in that warm air no longer the hard light of winter.
    He went over around four o’clock when the others would have been gone. But they weren’t all gone, and three of the boys in his grade were standing in the hall. And Cynthia. That was the worst of all. They watched him and didn’t speak. He could tell they had some sense of what was going on. Maybe the word had trickled back somehow from across the river. Maybe they had merely guessed at it because of the days he had already missed, he who was never sick and who never missed days. They were waiting maybe for him to speak, but he was ashamed as if somehow all along he had been in a place where he didn’t belong and had now been exposed for the imposter he was.
    Standing, shunned, behind the fat lady in her silk dress, looking at the long rows of graduation photographs, he could feel it all again. One of the boys once told him a story about a vacant house that had been hit by lightning. The people had moved out, too hurried or too lazy to take the bulbs out of the sockets, but the power had been cut off, so the wires inside were all dead. Then one night, the chimney had been hit by lightning, and for a few seconds all the lights in the house had come on. It was like that. There were all these hidden people there inside him, all those slumbering ghosts, like dark houses with dead wires, and every once in a while something would come like the lightning bolt, and all the dead circuitry of their grief would come to life.
    The principal of the school was Mr. Raymond from one of the old Anglican families in the town. Tall with long, wild hair and wide, dark eyes. The girls adored him. He taught English composition, English literature, and Latin, and he was fond of declaiming poetry. Catullus, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson. And Yeats and Carman, both