Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an automatic “Why don’t you ever stay home?” from Babbitt.
In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus.
“I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” he protested.
“Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ ‘em—These teachers—how do they get that way?”
Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated,
“Yes, I wonder why.
Of course I don’t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there’s things in Shakespeare—not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice.”
Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate.
They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father’s vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin.
With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions.
Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn’t really an authority.
Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion.
But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy.
“I’ll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those.
It’s because they’re required for college entrance, and that’s all there is to it!
Personally, I don’t see myself why they stuck ‘em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state.
Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull.
But there it is, and there’s no talk, argument, or discussion about it!
Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something different!
If you’re going to law-school—and you are!—I never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do—why, you’ll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”
“Oh punk.
I don’t see what’s the use of law-school—or even finishing high school.
I don’t want to go to college ‘specially.
Honest, there’s lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don’t begin to make as much money as fellows that went to work early.
Old Shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he’s a what-is-it from Columbia and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he’s always spieling about the ‘value of languages,’ and the poor soak doesn’t make but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of working for that.
I know what I’d like to do.
I’d like to be an aviator, or own a corking big garage, or else—a fellow was telling me about it yesterday—I’d like to be one of these fellows that the Standard Oil Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound and don’t have to do any work, and you get to see the world and pagodas and the ocean and everything!
And then I could take up correspondence-courses.
That’s the real stuff!
You don’t have to recite to some frosty-faced old dame that’s trying to show off to the principal, and you can study any subject you want to.
Just listen to these!
I clipped out the ads of some swell courses.”
He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education.
The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity.
Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol—no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs.
The text ran: $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING
A Yarn Told at the Club
Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the De Luxe Restaurant?
Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead or-alive shipping clerk in my old place—Mr. Mouse-Man we used to laughingly call the dear fellow.
One time he was so timid he was plumb scared of the Super, and never got credit for the dandy work he did.
Him at the De Luxe!
And if he wasn’t ordering a tony feed with all the “fixings” from celery to nuts!
And instead of being embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to be at the little dump where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing them around like he was a millionaire!
I cautiously asked him what he was doing.
Freddy laughed and said,
“Say, old chum, I guess you’re wondering what’s come over me.
You’ll be glad to know I’m now Assistant Super at the old shop, and right on the High Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence to a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best society and the kiddies getting a first-class education.”
———————————— WHAT WE TEACH YOU
How to address your lodge.