Mary Antin's entry into the Latin School in September was the culmination of her American education and the beginning of a new life. Until then, she had gone to school with her equals, and as a matter of course. Now it was distinctly a feat for her to keep in school, and her schoolmates were socially so far superior to her that her poverty became conspicuous. The pupils of the Latin School, from the nature of the institution, are an aristocratic set. They come from refined homes, dress well, and spend the recess hour talking about parties, beaux, and the matinée. As students they are either very quick or very hard-working; for the course of study, in the lingo of the school world, is considered "stiff." The girl with half her brain asleep, or with too many beaux, drops out by the end of the first year; or a one and only beau may be the fatal element. At the end of the course the weeding process has reduced the once numerous tribe of academic candidates to a cosey little family.

The Decision and the Journey to Mr. Tetlow

The path to the Latin School was not a passive one. When it was debated whether she would be best fitted for college at the High or the Latin School, Mary went in person to Mr. Tetlow, who was principal of both schools, to get the most expert opinion on the subject. She never sent a messenger where she could go herself. It was vacation time, and she had to find Mr. Tetlow at his home. Away out to the wilds of Roxbury she found her way—perhaps half an hour's ride on the electric car from Dover Street. She grew an inch taller and broader between the corner of Cedar Street and Mr. Tetlow's house, such was the charm of the clean, green suburb on a cramped waif from the slums. Her faded calico dress, her rusty straw sailor hat, the color of her skin and all bespoke the waif. But never a bit daunted was she. She went up the steps to the porch, rang the bell, and asked for the great man with as much assurance as if she were a daily visitor on Cedar Street. She calmly awaited the appearance of Mr. Tetlow in the reception room, and stated her errand without trepidation. She was a solemn little person for the moment, earnestly seeking advice on a matter of great importance. That is what Mr. Tetlow saw, to judge by the gravity with which he discussed her business with her, and the courtesy with which he showed her to the door. He saw, too, she fancied, that she was not the least bit conscious of her shabby dress; and she was sure he did not smile at her appearance, even when her back was turned.

The Weight of the First Day at School

The apex of Mary's civic pride and personal contentment had been reached on the bright September morning when she entered the public school. That day she must always remember, even if she lived to be so old that she could not tell her name. To most people their first day at school is a memorable occasion. In her case the importance of the day was a hundred times magnified, on account of the years she had waited, the road she had come, and the conscious ambitions she entertained. She was wearily aware that she was speaking in extreme figures, in superlatives. She wished she knew some other way to render the mental life of the immigrant child of reasoning age. She may have been ever so much an exception in acuteness of observation, powers of comparison, and abnormal self-consciousness; none the less were her thoughts and conduct typical of the attitude of the intelligent immigrant child toward American institutions. And what the child thinks and feels is a reflection of the hopes, desires, and purposes of the parents who brought him overseas, no matter how precocious and independent the child may be. Her father, in his primary quest, had failed; there was left him the compensation of intellectual freedom. If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college! His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that her father led them to school on that first day. He took long strides in his eagerness, the rest of them running and hopping to keep up.

The Contrast with the Old World and the Family's Sacrifice

The entry into the Latin School was not merely a personal achievement but a family investment. Mary's father had not lost a whit of his ambition for her. Since Graduation Day, and the school-committeeman's speech, and half a column about her in the paper, his ambition had soared even higher. He was going to keep her at school till she was prepared for college. By that time, he was sure, she would more than take care of herself. It never for a moment entered his head to doubt the wisdom or justice of this course. And her mother was just as loyal to her cause, and her brother, and her sister. Even the baby cheered her on. When she asked her whether she believed in higher education, she answered, without a moment's hesitation, "Ducka-ducka-da!" Against her she remembered only that one day, when she read her a verse out of a most pathetic piece she was composing, she laughed right out, a most disrespectful laugh; for which she revenged herself by washing her face at the faucet, and rubbing it red on the roller towel. The family's devotion was echoed by Mr. Rosenblum, the poor grocer who gave her her oil. If he had had postage stamps in stock, he would have given her all she needed, and felt proud to think that he was assisting in her important correspondences. And he was a poor man, and had a large family, and many customers who paid as irregularly as they. He ran the risk of ruin, of course, but he did not scold—not them, at any rate. For he understood. He was himself an immigrant Jew of the type that values education, and sets a great price on the higher development of the child. He would have done in her father's place just what her father was doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in debt—anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was, but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry. To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre present for the sake of the opulent future. If there was but one child in a family of twelve who promised to achieve an intellectual career, the other eleven, and father, and mother, and neighbors must devote themselves to that one child's welfare, and feed and clothe and cheer it on, and be rewarded in the end by hearing its name mentioned with the names of the great. So the poor grocer helped to keep her in school for she did not know how many years.

The Challenge of the Aristocratic School

By all these tokens Mary should have had serious business on her hands as a pupil in the Latin School, but she did not find it hard. To make herself letter-perfect in her lessons required long hours of study, but that was her delight. To make herself at home in an alien world was also within her talents; she had been practising it day and night for the past four years. To remain unconscious of her shabby and ill-fitting clothes when the rustle of silk petticoats in the schoolroom protested against them was a matter still within her moral reach. Half a dress a year had been her allowance for many seasons; even less, for as she did not grow much she could wear her dresses as long as they lasted. And she had stood before editors, and exchanged polite calls with school-teachers, untroubled by the detestable colors and archaic design of her garments. To stand up and recite Latin declensions without trembling was within her reach. The contrast between her world and that of her schoolmates was stark. She lived on Dover Street, intersected near its eastern end by Harrison Avenue, the heart of the South End ghetto. Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides. Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. For although the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, on this one occasion, the cleansing stops at the curbstone. A great deal of the filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often through the windows; and what the ashman on his daily round does not remove is left to be trampled to powder, in which form it steals back into the houses from which it was so lately removed. The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries. And there they stop: at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into the gutter. For there are no parks and almost no playgrounds in the Harrison Avenue district—in her day there were none—and such as there are have been wrenched from the city by public-spirited citizens who have no offices in City Hall.

The Palace of Learning and the Double Life

Mary's entry into the Latin School was part of a larger possession of American institutions. She loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall of the Boston Public Library, watching the people go in and out. Groups of children hushed their chatter at the entrance, and skipped, whispering and giggling in their fists, up the grand stairway, patting the great stone lions at the top, with an eye on the aged policemen down below. Spectacled scholars came slowly down the stairs, loaded with books, heedless of the lofty arches that echoed their steps. Visitors from out of town lingered long in the entrance hall, studying the inscriptions and symbols on the marble floor. And she loved to stand in the midst of all this, and remind herself that she was there, that she had a right to be there, that she was at home there. All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—she and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours. She visited every part of the building that was open to the public. She spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. She repeated to herself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above she was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms she had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of her consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main staircase she did not enjoy for years. She thought the pictures looked faded, and their symbolism somehow failed to move her at first. The Latin School entry set the stage for a double life. She could fill another book with anecdotes, telling how she took possession of Beacon Street, and learned to distinguish the lord of the manor from the butler in full dress. She might trace her steps from her bare room overlooking the lumber-yard to the satin drawing-rooms of the Back Bay, where she drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as their porcelain cups. Her journal of those days is full of comments on the contrasts of life, that she copied from her busy thoughts in the evening, after a visit to her aristocratic friends. Coming straight from the cushioned refinement of Beacon Street, where the maid who brought her hostess her slippers spoke in softer accents than the finest people on Dover Street, she sometimes stumbled over poor Mr. Casey lying asleep in the corridor; and the shock of the contrast was like a searchlight turned suddenly on her life, and she pondered over the revelation, and wrote touching poems, in which she figured as a heroine of two worlds. She went to college, as she proposed, though not to Radcliffe. Receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse, she went to Barnard College instead. There she took all the honors that she deserved; and if she did not learn to write poetry, as she once supposed she should, she learned at least to think in English without an accent. The entry into the Latin School was thus the hinge on which her entire American destiny turned, the point where the promise of the common school became the promise of the college and the literary life.