Читать книгу Now I Remember: Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist - Thornton Waldo Burgess - Страница 14

Table of Contents

In 1891 in a class of nine I graduated from the Sandwich high school. I did not know then, for I had dreams of college, that it was to be my alma mater. Looking back, I find it of interest that of the six boys and three girls in that graduating class, two boys were to become authors of books, one a successful newspaperman, in time dean of the political reporters at the State House, one a local news reporter, and one of the girls a successful teacher in the local schools. Of these only one had the benefit of a college education.

Mother was unable to attend the graduation exercises, a bitter disappointment to both of us. In the years ahead she was to have a very large and vital part in such success as I attained. It was her faith, her never-failing encouragement, her constant self-denial that made possible our independence on a very meager income. Alas, she was not to live to share in the honors that ultimately came to me. Much as these have meant to me, and still do, they would have meant infinitely more could I have shared them with Mother.

The summer and winter following graduation I worked in a village grocery store, taking my turn on the delivery wagon far out in the country in all sorts of weather. The following summer I tried a business venture of my own. With rented horse and wagon I peddled fresh fruit obtained from a wholesale house in Boston. I just about broke even. But I had dividends of a sort. There was a lot of leftover fruit to eat, and I always was fond of fruit. Meanwhile Mother kept on with her candy business insofar as health permitted.

After long and prayerful consideration we agreed that our mutual dream of a college education for me must be given up. There were no visible opportunities for a business career in the home town. We had to face the hard fact that I must find a place for myself out in the world at large. The mere thought made us both homesick. I was of a somewhat bashful and retiring disposition, definitely not a go-getter.

Grandfather offered to finance a term at a commercial school in Boston. A retired successful country merchant, the dear old man could see little if any practical value in higher education. A school of business training was a wholly different matter. He was glad to help with that. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done had he had the prescience in those early days to foresee my inborn distaste for practical business and inability to grasp its fundamental principles.

Be that as it may, our household goods were shipped to Somerville, a suburb of Boston, where Mother and I started housekeeping in a small apartment. That winter I commuted to Boston by horsecar, the electric trolley not having reached Somerville. Enrolled in a well-known business school, I spent the winter trying to master bookkeeping and learning to hate figures, of which I never was overly fond. Nor did my handwriting grow appreciably more like the beautiful penmanship I desperately but vainly endeavored to copy.

The net result was that at the end of the term I became the unhappy cashier and more unhappy assistant bookkeeper in a well-known Boston shoe store. The salary paid for my carfare and lunches and required no bookkeeping to keep track of.

A hectic summer followed. There were three partners in the business, all baseball fans. When home games were scheduled it was an almost daily occurrence for one or another of the partners to grab a five-dollar or larger bill from the till and rush off to the game, forgetting to leave a memorandum if I happened to be elsewhere. I would go home to fret and worry over the shortage in the day’s account until the next day discreet and diplomatic inquiries would straighten the matter out. At the end of each month the books must be balanced and this meant an evening or two of extra work without overtime pay. There was, however, an allowance of fifty cents for supper. I learned at that time how much can be squeezed out of half a dollar. It was worth learning.

Sometimes when there was a shortage of salesmen I helped out on the floor. There I made another discovery—I disliked selling as much as I did trying to get the same answer twice to a column of figures. In short, the unpleasant fact that I was a misfit in the business world was rubbed into me rather painfully every day, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. I knew of no other activity that might permit me to make a happier living. I knew beyond any doubt what I didn’t want to do, but got no glimmer at all of what I might like to do. All through the years since, I have had a deep and understanding sympathy for the boy who has not yet found himself when he starts out in the world.

Mother was not well enough to continue housekeeping. We were obliged to give up the apartment and she went to Springfield to live with her sister. For the first time we were parted. It was difficult and saddening for both. I secured a small hall bedroom in a private home in Somerville and of course continued to work in Boston. Those were lean days, lonesome days, to a considerable degree dark days. The period of distrustful seeking to find the as yet undiscovered self usually is a time of darkness.

About this time I began writing bits of verse, rhymes if you please, for my own amusement. From early years I had been a great reader and fond of poetry, but I do not recall that in school days I was much given to producing the doggerel that so often is a phase of adolescence. I do recall that in those early days I did some alleged humorous verses that were published in a house organ of a Boston concern that employed a cousin of mine, my first appearance in print.

Now in these days of floundering uncertainty I found a form of relief in turning rhymester, in seeking self-expression in verse. Forest and Stream, a well-known sporting periodical, published some verses of mine to a four-pound trout that I had yet to catch. Then Recreation, at that time in its early struggling days, gave an illustrated two-page spread to my “When the Scoters Fly.” In each case the honorarium was a complimentary copy of the magazine. But that was compensation enough—it was recognition; I saw my name in type as an accredited author.

Business depression resulting in curtailment of help cost me my job. For weeks I lived on little, daily scanned the wanted columns in the papers, and made the rounds of the employment agencies. Somehow a copy of a small paper called Brains, devoted to advertising, fell in my hands. On impulse I bought a couple of inches of space in its columns and therein advertised in verse my services as a writer of advertising copy in verse:

Save Time, Labor

and Trouble