Finally they reached Malvern, where they had to part, Jack to the preparatory school and Warnie to the college, each on a separate path. Jack headed into what was now his third school.
Jack settled into Cherbourg quickly, now accustomed to finding his way amid taunting boys and strict headmasters. As usual, he counted the days until winter holiday.
One afternoon halfway through the semester, Jack walked into an empty, dusty schoolroom lit only by the sunshine bursting through the dirty windows and onto a desk. There Jack spied a magazine called The Bookman.
Resting under a spotlight of sun, the magazine pages lay open as an invitation.
Another story!
Jack approached it with the kind of anticipation he always had for new adventures, with a casual glance as he pulled at his collar. He glanced down and everything stopped: his fidgeting, his thoughts, and his preoccupation and boredom, because there, for the first time, he read the lyrics to a Wagner opera about Norse mythology.
At the world-ash-tree once I wove
when far and wide from the stem outbranched
a wondrous verdant wood.
A quickening ran from Jack’s head to his heart—it was that feeling again, the one he’d once felt when his brother had brought him the biscuit tin, the irrepressible emotion he’d felt when reading about Squirrel Nutkin and the experience of autumn, the emotion he feared had died with his mother and again in the desert of Wynyard School.
Jack called it joy.
He picked up the magazine and did more than read the operatic words of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods—he experienced them; he sensed them; he was immersed in them. Though he already loved Celtic and Greek myths, Norse mythology was new and astounding. This was Asgard and a Valkyrie. This was a grand story about gods of the north, and young Jack found himself enchanted, waking from a kind of life-oblivion that had lately surrounded him, a spell of sleep.
*
When the dinner bell clanged through the hallways of the schoolhouse, Jack looked up from Wagner’s mythic tale with astonishment. He was still in Cherbourg, still a boy reading a book, still in the so-called real world. The desire that had been so intense while reading the story of the Norse gods was gone.
What would Jack do to get it back?
Almost anything at all.
He stared out the window and wondered how to feel it again—that remote, that severe, that thrilling desire that Wagner’s opera had brought to him. The feeling was bigger than desire and still without a word to explain it, and it flooded his heart.
And was fleeting, gone so very fast.
He’d not yet heard the music of the opera, merely read its story.
And yet as he wandered the stark hallways of Cherbourg, moving from class to class, avoiding sports games, avoiding the flagging and taunts of the Bloods—the cruel, self-appointed rulers of the school who were like the bloodthirsty dark elves of the opera—his mind brimmed with images of the Norse myths: fauns and dryads, river gods and talking beasts, dwarfs and gnomes and elves.
Jack took himself to the library and browsed until he found every book on Norse mythology he could find. He dusted them off, found hidden corners of Cherbourg where he could read, immersed himself in what he called “the Northernness.” He found the Mythos of the Norsemen, Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race, and Northern Antiquities.
Autumn approached the edges of winter, and Jack found a book of poetry by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, the pages drenched in Irish folklore. Jack took the book to his room and read until he fell asleep, the lines soothing his homesick heart as a cough began deep in his chest and a fever raged beneath his skin and behind his eyes. The coming sickness was a cruel reminder of the dreadful night when Jack burned with illness and his mother hadn’t come to him; instead, Father had arrived with the terrible news.
This time, though, Jack lay in his residence hall cot, unable to move, desiring nothing more than sleep and solitude. Yet school beckoned, the headmaster raged, and boys taunted. Finally the stern headmaster with unsmiling lips and greasy hair stood over Jack’s bed.
“Clive, I believe it best that you return home, that you recuperate where you can’t infect the other boys.”
Jack looked up from his pillow, his head so heavy and his fever raging. He barely understood the headmaster. A nurse arrived and put pills on Jack’s tongue, then packed him up, bundled him in his scratchy coat and traveling clothes, and scurried him to the train station.
Feverish delirium blurred the journey to Ireland, usually full of camaraderie with his brother and a sense of anticipation for the holidays.
Finally at home in Little Lea, Jack tumbled into his own bed. His recuperation was long and punctuated by quiet afternoons reading with his father, but also with large swaths of time alone. Jack slowly recovered. The noise and chaos of Cherbourg faded, and the world outside his bedroom window felt full of possibility.
But mostly Jack read Norse mythology to his heart’s content.
When Jack again sensed the world’s edges without the soft padding of fever, when his chest no longer ached, he began taking long walks in the garden. Winter came early and dark, and the pathways that led through the hedges wove under the bare branches of the maple and alder trees and the brown leaves of the hornbeam. He’d always enjoyed the view from the top of Little Lea’s lawn with sweeping views to the bay, but now it was different. Now, since reading the Norse stories, everything of the land felt . . . mystical.
He wandered the garden, imagining scenes from Wagner’s story. There behind the hedge, Mime might meet Sieglinde. There around the bend, Siegfried might be listening to a bird or an elf. Jack became so immersed in the story world that he glimpsed it out of the corner of his eye in the real world.
One late afternoon, the sickness having ebbed and nearly gone, and Christmas holiday and Warnie’s return approaching, Jack found he had come to love nature for itself and not just as a stage for Wagner’s astonishing story. The gardens of Little Lea were no longer just a place for Siegfried and a dwarf to rise from the mists. Now nature itself, as itself, enchanted Jack. And just as Jack had this momentous thought, a figure darted from behind the hornbeam hedge.
A dwarf?
A gnome or elf?
Or Balder or Thor?
Jack stopped flat in his tracks, the sun weak through winter’s low clouds, and his eyes scanned the familiar garden. He shook his head.
It hadn’t been real.
Or had it?
That feeling of joy arrived again, and it felt like a desire even greater than the very thing he desired. He felt as if pure Northernness washed over him, took him over completely. He imagined open spaces, twilight, solitude . . . a place far away; a place he could not yet find.
*
The days passed as they do. Months later summer arrived, and with it, freedom. The trees opened sleepy branches with green and greener foliage, the sun warmed the waving heather grasses and the tops of the brothers’ shoulders, the waves of Belfast Lough sparkled like they were lit from within.
Father had sent Jack and Warnie, now fourteen and sixteen years old, off with their bags to visit their aunt, Helen, who lived in the countryside of Dundrum. Near the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, her home was nestled on acres of land as wild as the stories they loved. She wasn’t strict; Helen allowed the boys to wander without supervision, to read to their hearts’ content, and to be free of the constraints of school. With family enough to satisfy and freedom enough for the imagination, Jack and Warnie loved Helen and loved Dundrum.