Coffee and Repartee Read online

  V

  "When you get through with the fire, Mr. Pedagog," observed the Idiot,one winter's morning, noticing that the ample proportions of theSchool-master served as a screen to shut off the heat from himself andthe genial gentleman who occasionally imbibed, "I wish you would let ushave a little of it. Indeed, if you could conveniently spare so littleas one flame for my friend here and myself, we'd be much obliged."

  "It won't hurt you to cool off a little, sir," returned theSchool-master, without moving.

  "No, I am not so much afraid of the injury that may be mine as I amconcerned for you. If that fire should melt our only refrigeratingmaterial, I do not know what our good landlady would do. Is it true, asthe Bibliomaniac asserts, that Mrs. Smithers leaves all her milk andbutter in your room overnight, relying upon your coolness to keep themfresh?"

  "I never made any such assertion," said the Bibliomaniac, warmly.

  "I am not used to having my word disputed," returned the Idiot, with awink at the genial old gentleman.

  "But I never said it, and I defy you to prove that I said it," returnedthe Bibliomaniac, hotly.

  "You forget, sir," said the Idiot, coolly, "that you are the one whodisputes my assertion. That casts the burden of proof on your shoulders.Of course if you can prove that you never said anything of the sort, Iwithdraw; but if you cannot adduce proofs, you, having doubted my word,and publicly at that, need not feel hurt if I decline to accept all thatyou say as gospel."

  "You show ridiculous heat," said the School-master.

  "Thank you," returned the Idiot, gracefully. "And that brings us back tothe original proposition that you would do well to show a littleyourself."

  "Good-morning, gentlemen," said Mrs. Smithers, entering the room atthis moment. "It's a bright, fresh morning."

  "Like yourself," said the School-master, gallantly.

  "Yes," added the Idiot, with a glance at the clock, which registered8.45--forty-five minutes after the breakfast hour--"very like Mrs.Smithers--rather advanced."

  To this the landlady paid no attention; but the School-master could notrefrain from saying,

  "Advanced, and therefore not backward, like some persons I might name."

  "Very clever," retorted the Idiot, "and really worth rewarding. Mrs.Smithers, you ought to give Mr. Pedagog a receipt in full for the pastsix months."

  "Mr. Pedagog," returned the landlady, severely, "is one of the gentlemenwho always have their receipts for the past six months."

  "Which betrays a very saving disposition," accorded the Idiot. "I wish Ihad all I'd received for six months. I'd be a rich man."

  "'IF YOU COULD SPARE SO LITTLE AS ONE FLAME'"]

  "Would you, now?" queried the Bibliomaniac. "That is interesting enough.How men's ideas differ on the subject of wealth! Here is the Idiotwould consider himself rich with $150 in his pocket--"

  "Do you think he gets as much as that?" put in the School-master,viciously. "Five dollars a week is rather high pay for one of his--"

  "Very high indeed," agreed the Idiot. "I wish I got that much. I mightbe able to hire a two-legged encyclopaedia to tell me everything, andhave over $4.75 a week left to spend on opera, dress, and the poor buthonest board Mrs. Smithers provides, if my salary was up to the $5 mark;but the trouble is men do not make the fabulous fortunes nowadays withthe ease with which you, Mr. Pedagog, made yours. There are, no doubt,more and greater opportunities to-day than there were in the olden time,but there are also more men trying to take advantage of them. Labor inthe business world is badly watered. The colleges are turning out moremen in a week nowadays than the whole country turned out in a year fortyyears ago, and the quality is so poor that there has been a generalreduction of wages all along the line. Where does the struggler forexistence come in when he has to compete with the college-bred youthwho, for fear of not getting employment anywhere, is willing to work fornothing? People are not willing to pay for what they can get fornothing."

  "I am glad to hear from your lips so complete an admission," said theSchool-master, "that education is downing ignorance."

  "I am glad to know of your gladness," returned the Idiot. "I didn'tquite say that education was downing ignorance. I plead guilty to thecharge of holding the belief that unskilled omniscience interferes verymaterially with skilled sciolism in skilled sciolism's efforts to make aliving."

  "Then you admit your own superficiality?" asked the School-master,somewhat surprised by the Idiot's command of syllables.

  "I admit that I do not know it all," returned the Idiot. "I prefer to gothrough life feeling that there is yet something for me to learn. Itseems to me far better to admit this voluntarily than to have it forcedhome upon me by circumstances, as happened in the case of a collegegraduate I know, who speculated on Wall Street, and lost the hundreddollars that were subsequently put to a good use by the uneducated me."

  "From which you deduce that ignorance is better than education?" queriedthe School-master, scornfully.

  "For an omniscient," returned the Idiot, "you are singularlynear-sighted. I have made no such deduction. I arrive at the conclusion,however, that in the chase for the gilded shekel the education ofexperience is better than the coddling of Alma Mater. In thesatisfaction--the personal satisfaction--one derives from a liberaleducation, I admit that the sons of Alma Mater are the better off. Inever could hope to be so self-satisfied, for instance, as you are."

  THE SCHOOL-MASTER AS A COOLER]

  "No," observed the School-master, "you cannot raise grapes on a thistlefarm. Any unbiassed observer looking around this table," he added, "andnoting Mr. Whitechoker, a graduate of Yale; the Bibliomaniac, a son ofdear old Harvard; the Doctor, an honor man of Williams; our legal friendhere, a graduate of Columbia--to say nothing of myself, who wasgraduated with honors at Amherst--any unbiassed observer seeing these, Isay, and then seeing you, wouldn't take very long to make up his mind asto whether a man is better off or not for having had a collegiatetraining."

  "There I must again dispute your assertion," returned the Idiot. "Theunbiassed person of whom you speak would say, 'Here is this gray-hairedAmherst man, this book-loving Cambridge boy of fifty-seven years of age,the reverend graduate of Yale, class of '55, and the other two learnedgentlemen of forty-nine summers each, and this poor ignoramus of anIdiot, whose only virtue is his modesty, all in the same box.' And thenhe would ask himself, 'In what way have these sons of Amherst, Yale,Harvard, and so forth, the better of the unassuming Idiot?'"

  "The same box?" said the Bibliomaniac. "What do you mean by that?"

  "Just what I say," returned the Idiot. "The same box. All boarding, alleschewing luxuries of necessity, all paying their bills with difficulty,all sparsely clothed; in reality, all keeping Lent the year through.'Verily,' he would say, 'the Idiot has the best of it, for he isyoung.'"

  And leaving them chewing the cud of reflection, the Idiot departed.

  "I thought they were going to land you that time," said the genialgentleman who occasionally imbibed, later; "but when I heard you use theword 'sciolism,' I knew you were all right. Where did you get it?"

  "My chief got it off on me at the office the other day. I happened in amad moment to try to unload some of my original observations on himapropos of my getting to the office two hours late, in which it was myendeavor to prove to him that the truly safe and conservative man wasalways slow, and so apt to turn up late on occasions. He hopped aboutthe office for a minute or two, and then he informed me that I was an18-karat sciolist. I didn't know what he meant, and so I looked it up."

  "And what did he mean?"

  "He meant that I took the cake for superficiality, and I guess he wasright," replied the Idiot, with a smile that was not altogethermirthful.