Читать книгу Letters from a Son to His Self-Made Father - Charles Eustace Merriman - Страница 6

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Pierrepont, about to forsake Harvard, supplies

his father with some reasons for agreeing

with him that a post-graduate

course is not advisable.

Cambridge, June 4, 189—

My Dear Father:

No, you certainly need not get out a meat ax to elaborate your arguments against my taking a post-graduate course. What you have already said makes me feel as if a ham had fallen on me from the top of Pillsbury's grain elevator. There I go again with my similes derived from trade! It's exasperating how home associations will cling to a fellow even after four years of college life! But it's worse when these stock-yard phrases bulge out in polite conversation. It's a case of head-on collision with your pride, when you are doing your very neatest to impress some sugar-cured beauty that you are the flower of the flock, to make a break like a Texas steer. The social circle was pretending to tell ages the other night. When it came my next, a pert little run-about, in a cherry waist and a pair of French shoes that must have come down to her from the original Cinderella, spoke up.

"And you, Mr. Graham, how old are you?"

"I was established in 187—" I said, with one of my fervid I'll-meet-you-in-the-conservatory-after-the-next-dance glances. But I never added the odd figure. Everybody laughed. Fortunately they thought I intended a joke. I'll bet you a new hat—if you are still sporting your old friend you need one—that you couldn't say "born." I caught the "established" from you.

I trust my education will do all that you hope for my advancement in business. I've read somewhere—perhaps in one of your meaty letters—that "good schooling is good capital." It may be, but the chances for investment are pretty poor hereabouts. Money is certainly more generally current. It may be the root of all evil, but I've noticed that it is a root that some very good people plant in the sunniest corner of their intellectual garden and keep well watered. While it may not be true that every man has his price, I note that many of those who do are ready to cut rates and give long time with discounts.

With your customary capacity for banging the spike on its topknot, you diagnose my future correctly. I admit that I'm "not going to be a poet or a professor." Even the Lampoon rejects my verses—though I am bound to say that if I wrote such hogwash as your street-car ad-smith grinds out, I would never dare criticise Alfred Austin again—while as for the professorial calling, there is nothing I could possibly teach except anatomy. We have had a splendid course in that at the various Boston amphitheatres, and the fellows say I'm way up on the subject. But I hardly think it serious enough for a life calling, so, as you so pleasantly intimate, I believe I will accept your offer to join fortunes with the packing-house. I think I know enough of Latin to decline pig—and I always do when it's our label—but circumstances of a strictly pecuniary nature make it advisable for me to close with you at once. Better an eight-dollar job and six o'clock dinner than a post-graduate course and free lunch. While I'm not prepared to admit that my soul soars to the azure at the thought of being a pork packer, perhaps it is just as well. When I was a boy my ambition oscillated between keeping a candy store and being a hero. Now candy makes my teeth ache and I've seen two or three heroes.

I spent some time thinking what I had better do about meeting your desire that I desert literature for liver, but your last letter soldered my aspirations into a pretty small can. My chum doesn't like pork or relish my imminent intimate connection with it. Every day for a month he's asked me whether I had decided. To-day I answered him with a story that Deacon Skinner used to tell about a young minister he once knew. He was parson of a small country church that paid a pretty skimpy salary, mostly in vegetables his flock could not eat themselves. There was precious little marrying and everybody that died seemed to be on the funeral free list. Altogether it was a case of labouring in a vineyard that had gone to seed, and the young preacher was more often full of inspiration than of roast turkey and fixin's. But an empty stomach made a clear head and the eloquence of his sermons would have given Demosthenes a hard run for first money.

You can't always hide away talent so that it can't be dug up, and one Sunday the outlook committee from a fashionable church came down to D— and listened to the minister. His text that day happened to be one of those which permit of much oratory without enough orthodoxy to set the soul into convulsions. The sermon made a hit with a regular Harvard "H" and in a day or two the pastorate of the Wabash avenue church, whose steeple is nearer heaven than the majority of the congregation are likely to get, was offered to the young man, who told the committee that he must weigh the matter carefully.

The news spread through the village instantly, as it always does—for any country town has Marconi beat to a custard on wireless telegraphy—and on the afternoon of the day on which the call to the new field of labor came, the young minister's parishioners inaugurated a special pilgrimage to find out the prospects. The first arrival was a woman. (Strange, isn't it, that for all a woman takes so long to dress, she can always give a man a killing handicap and beat him from scratch to the scene of a scandal or a bargain sale?) She was ushered into the parlor by the clergyman's little girl. No one else seemed to be visible. The Mother Eve in her wouldn't let the visitor wait long, so she put the little girl in the quiz box.

"I've heerd tell, Cicely, that your pa's been asked to go to a big church up to the city."

"Yes'm," answered Cicely, discreetly.

"Well, child, tell me, hev you heerd him say if he's a-goin'?"

"No, mam, I haven't."

"Nor your mother neither?"

"No, mam."

"Waal, my dear, you must know somethin' abaout it. Dew you think he's a-goin' to leave us?"

The child squirmed about uneasily and twisted her fingers.

"Speak right out naow, that's a good girl. Be he a-goin' to go or stay?" urged the inquisitor.

"I don't know, mam, really. Papa's in his study praying for Divine guidance."

"Where's your mother?"

"Upstairs packing the trunks."

I simply mention this in a general way, father, and would note in addition that in the absence of mother the janitor has helped me do my packing. I decided it was best to agree with you, for I realize that it never pays a man to act like a fool; there are too many doing it as a regular business. While I should have liked a post-graduate course, with an elective or two from Radcliffe, I realize that the difference between firmness and obstinacy is that the first is the exercise of will power and the second of won't power. Give me a little vacation in Europe and I'll come home and let you can me as devilled ham if you want to.

I don't want to brag about myself, but I'll bet you'll be surprised in me. We've all been cured of bragging by a New Yorker in my class who spends all his spare time proving why Gotham should be the only real splash on the map. To hear him, you'd think the good Lord moved the sun up and down simply to accommodate New York's business hours. A fellow from Dublin who's here studying home rule took him down the other day. Gotham was boasting of New York's high buildings when Dublin spoke up.

"Hoigh buildings, is it? Begorra, we've buildings in Dublin so tall that we have to put hinges on the four upper stories."

"What in the world is that for?" asked Gotham.

"To let the sun by so it can reach New York, av coorse."

By the way, you say that some men learn all they know from Life. If you refer to the New York publication, you must have met some very gloomy and dyspeptic individuals of late. I'm not of that sort, nor, on the other hand, am I bound up in books, although, if I do say it, I have the finest set of the Decameron in college, and am considered quite an authority on the poetry of Rabelais. While on the subject of literature, I ought to state that the extra $100 in this month's expense account is for initiation fee and dues in the new Reading Club that a lot of us seniors have organized. We have for our motto Lord Bacon's great phrase "Reading maketh a full man," and it is wonderful to see how accurately the old philosopher hits our case. Owing to lack of accommodations here, we usually meet in some Boston hotel where we are safe from interruption. You would laugh to see how hot some of the fellows get arguing fine points. The other night I become so exercised myself discussing Schenck's "Theory of Straights" that I walked plumb into a pier glass, thinking I was up against another chap. I think the hotel man stuck us on the damages, but the Club chipped in and paid like little men. Despite such occasional drawbacks, the club meetings are very popular. In fact, we have full houses every time we get together.

The Son in College.

Yes, that being elected president of my class was a good thing, for at last I can get my name on programmes and things without any reference to pigs tacked to it. But I don't know as it proves any overwhelming popularity on my part, for it was a dull season and I just slid in. Of course I would have liked to be marshal, but as I hadn't made any home runs and you wouldn't let me kick goals through your check-book, I was put on the mourners' bench so far as that ambition went.

I am glad to be able to write you the cheerful news that I shall graduate; up to last week there seemed to be considerable doubt about it in certain high quarters not far removed from Prexy's mansion. But I went over to see one of the influential overseers, a Boston Brahmin with moss on his front steps, and plead with him. I was finally obliged to promise him that you would leave Harvard $100,000 by your will if he would see that I graduated. Of course it's a pretty stiff price, but as you won't have to pay it you ought not to mind. Besides, dad, think of the pleasure to Ma and the girls to have one real Commencement in their lives. It's cheap all round.

Your affectionate son,

Pierrepont.

P.S. If my dream comes out and I get a diploma, I'll bring it home. It may be useful to you as a by-product. It's sheepskin, you know.

LETTER NO. IV.