THALIA SELZ
377
perils of Rowena and Rebecca or what Jane Eyre might stumble
upon in the remote recesses of Mr. Rochester's country house.
For he liked to sit back and imagine all his classmates-what
seemed like years and years and years of children in one- and
two-room schoolhouses and ancient three-story brick warrens
with peeling green walls and stinking urinals-thousands of
boys in knickers and girls in pinafores-being marched off to the
Children's Crusade till they got kidnapped and sold into slavery
in "Venice and Marseilles. But gradually the dream changed till
only the boys were kidnapped because Hartford would rush in
with a sword to rescue the girls, and then the dream changed
again so that the boys attacked the girls with swords and spears
(the boys said "a ttackt" and "speahs" because by that time he
was reading in a library with stained glass windows in Brooklyn)
while he fought them all off single-handed with a long pike.
Hartford lea rned French because it was the language of
Stephen, the shepherd boy who led forth the Children's Crusade.
After French it was easy to pick up Italian and Spanish. German
came harder, but it was the language of Nicolas, the child who
gathered twenty thousand other children in Germany to seek the
Holy Sepulchre. And he liked the way German let you put words
together to make other words; he liked that about Greek, too. At
first, he only learned ancient Greek. He went on to Russian and
Latin when he was fifteen , playing around with Sanskrit because
it provided the etymological links to Indo-European and because
he wanted to read the
Vedas
in the original. Also, he thought he
ought
to know Sanskrit because it would make Bengaii accessi–
ble. He learned Hebrew and Arabic and some Gaelic (his moth–
er's people were Irish). Languages varied greatly in difficulty,
but he soon realized that he was using the same system to learn
all of them . He would get a grammar and a dictionary and leaf
through each, trying to see the language as a whole, visually, as
if he were looking at a building and seeing simultaneously its fa–
cade, sidewalls, and roof; its foundations and basement; its floors
and staircases and elevator shafts. It was as though he could see
at one time the groundplan and elevation of the language, going
on later to details of joists and gutters and ornament. Sometimes,
if it were a very simple dial ec t with whose parent language he
was already familiar , he would see it in a flash, could learn it, lit–
erally, in a day.
