Читать книгу Letters from a Son to His Self-Made Father - Charles Eustace Merriman - Страница 4

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Pierrepont Graham, a newly fledged Freshman

at Harvard, writes his father, John, in

Chicago, how he and the University

are getting along together.

Cambridge, Oct. 10, 189—

Dear Father:

I know you will accuse me of lack of the business promptness which is the red label on your brand of success, but I really couldn't answer your letter before. I have been trying to reconcile your maxims of life with the real thing, and I had to get busy and keep so. Reconciliation has not yet come, leastwise not so as you would notice it.

I'm glad Ma got back safe to the stock-yards, for when she left Cambridge that morning she didn't quite feel as if she would. I thought she had too large a roll to be travelling around the country with, and convinced her that she ought to leave all but $8 and her return ticket with me. Its a great thing to have a good mother.

I have already taken quite a course in art, fitting up my new flat; the fellows go in quite strong for art here, and it really is one of the most expensive courses in the curriculum, for although the photographers make special rates to the students, models come high.

You will be glad to hear that I shook the room in College Hall that Ma picked out for me, and by extraordinary luck secured a small apartment of five rooms and bath in one of the big dormitories. The dingy hole in "College" was so horribly noisy that I found it impossible to do my best work. The building was fairly infested with "pluggers," whose grinding made day and night hideous. Here I can work in peace and get a raft of culture from my art studies and other beautiful surroundings. I have had the bill for fitting up forwarded to you. Please settle within thirty days, or I shall be terribly disturbed in my course.

Tell Ma not to worry about my over-studying. I have too much inherited common sense for that. It's a wise pig that knows when he is being crammed for John Graham's lightning sausage developer; I've heard the squeal. As for under-study—well, as Kip says, that's another floor to the building.

I fail to find education as "good and plenty" at Harvard as you seem to think it. Some of it may be good, but it certainly isn't plenty, and it isn't passed around with the term bills. There's a fellow in our dormitory—one of the "pluggers" who escaped from College Hall—who is hot after education, and they say he has to dig for it. I haven't dug yet, although I had a spade given me last night. Unfortunately, what I needed just then was a club.

You will be pleased to hear that I have already added several extra elective courses to my studies. I am especially interested in the topography course, in which we are making a careful study of Boston streets. I am glad to say that I am making rapid strides in the same. For this no text-books are required, but the experimental apparatus is quite expensive. On our last tour of inspection we all required lanterns. I paid $10 and costs for mine, and it stood me $5 more to square things with the driver of the herdic for a window broken while making a particularly interesting experiment.

I feel that I am learning rapidly. I know the value of money as never before. Money talks here quite as much as in Chicago; not so loudly, perhaps, but faster. As you have always advised me to be sociable, I find it pretty lively work keeping up my share in the pecuniary conversation, especially as in all our little gatherings there are always several fellows whose money doesn't talk even in signs.

Taking it by and large, as you say so often, Harvard seems all right, although the fellows say the term hasn't really opened, as there's nothing doing yet in the legitimate drama in the Boston theatres. They have a queer custom of colloquial abbreviation here—they call it "leg. drama," or "leg. show." Curious, isn't it?

If you value my peace of mind, dear father, don't write any more educated pig stories to me. Such anecdotes strike me as verging close on personalities. In fact, the whole pig question just now hits me in a tender spot. Even the pen I am using makes me shudder. I hate to look a gift hog in the mouth, but I wish you had made your money in coal or patent medicine, or anything that wasn't porcine. Fact is, I've got a nickname out of your business, and it'll stick so that even your boss hogman, Milligan, couldn't scald it off.

You see, I board at Memorial Hall with about 1199 other hungry wretches, and let me tell you that your yarns about old Lem Hostitter and his skin-bruised hams wouldn't go for a cent here. Memorial is the limit for bad grub, and thereby hangs a curly tail. The other day at dinner, things were so rotten that an indignation meeting was held on the spot, and a committee of investigation was appointed to go to the kitchen and see what kind of vile stuff was being shovelled at us.

There must have been a rough-house in the culinary cellar, for we heard a tremendous racket in which the crash of crockery and the banging of tin predominated. Pretty soon the committee came back bringing a dozen or so of cans, waving them about and yelling like Indians. When they got near enough for me to see, I shuddered, for on every blessed can of them was your label, father—that old red steer pawing the ground as if he smelt something bad.

Just one table away from me the gang stopped, and a fat senior they call "Hippo" Smith rapped for order. Even the girls in the gallery quit gabbling.

"Gentlemen," yelled the senior, "your committee begs leave to report that it has discovered the abominable truck that has been ruining our palates and torturing our vitals. It's these cans of trichinated pork, unclassable sausages and mildewed beef that have made life a saturnalia of dyspepsia for us, and every one of 'em bears the label 'Graham & Company, Chicago.'"

Then you ought to have heard the roaring.

"Down with Graham & Co.!" "Let's go to Chicago and lynch Graham." "Confounded old skinflint!" the fellows shouted. I turned pale and thought what a narrow escape I was having.

Just then up got little "Bud" Hoover, old Doc's grandson, whom you have always held up to me as a model of truth-telling you know. Bud's a sophomore, and thinks he's a bigger man than old Eliot.

"Here's Graham's son," he piped in his rat-tail-file voice that you could hear over all the rumpus, and pointing right at me, "Ask him about it."

There was nothing for it for me but to get up and defend the family honor. As I was about to speak I saw another fellow running in from the kitchen with a big ham, yellow covered and bearing a big red label,—your label. I had a great inspiration. I felt that ham would prove our salvation.

"Gentlemen, I am the son of John Graham," I said haughtily, "and glad of it, for he has got more dough than this whole blamed college is worth; and, to show that you're all wrong, I'm going to quote something that he wrote me last week. Just you listen:

"'If you'll probe into a thing which looks sweet and sound on the skin to see if you can't fetch up a sour smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.'"

That hit 'em in great shape, and "Hippo" Smith took a big carver and slashed the ham into shoe-strings in about thirty seconds. Then he lifted the bone to his nose and let out a yell that sent all the girls upstairs flying. The other fellows sniffed and bellowed with him.

The next thing I knew the bone landed violently on my neck and the air was full of tin cans, four of which met splendid interference from my head. When I came to I could hear four hundred voices shouting "Piggy, piggy, oowee, oowee oowee," at me, and I knew I had passed through a baptism of rapid fire. They were the "roast beef and blood-gravy boys" you mentioned in your letter, for sure.

The surgeon's bill is $75, which I know you will pay cheerfully for my gallant defense of the house. But I wish you'd put up better stuff. Your label is a dandy, but couldn't you economize in lithographs and buy better pigs? By the way, the fellows have nicknamed you the "Ham-fat Philosopher." The letter did it. But don't feel hurt; I've already almost got used to being called "Piggy" myself.

I am appreciating more and more the golden truths of your cold storage precepts. As you say "Right and wrong don't need to be labelled for a boy with a good conscience." Good consciences must be scarce around here, for on the other side of Harvard Bridge they label wrong with red lights, and I've failed to find a fellow yet who is color blind.

In my pursuit of knowledge I have made the acquaintance of quite a number of the police force. They seem to me to be an undiscerning lot. For instance, I heard one of them say the other day that Harvard turned out fools. This isn't true, for, to my certain knowledge, there are quite a number of fools who have been in the University several years.

I am unable to write at any further length this evening, as I must attend a lecture in Course XIII. on Banks and Banking, by Professor Pharo.

Your affectionate son,

Pierrepont Graham.

P.S. I am trying hard to be a good scholar, and am really learning a thing or two. But I respect your anxiety that I should also be "a good, clean man," and almost every Sunday morning I wake up in a Turkish bath.

LETTER NO. II.