Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.
“Let me see,” said John Dorsey, turning the pages, “what he gives on this.”
Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene’s desk. Eugene read:
"Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier, Before I bust you on the ear."
He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:
“Du bist wie eine bum-me.”
They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Höher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.
“The mountains,” observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, “have been the traditional seat of Liberty.”
Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.
During this season of Eliza’s absence he roomed with Guy Doak.
Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve
