Through the School, by Al Priddy—A Project Gutenberg eBook

Chapter VI. Financial Pessimism
Taken in Hand by Thropper and
Shown in its Real Light. A Turkish
Rug that Smoked. A Poet in
Search of Kerosene. Wonderful
Antics of an Ironing-Board. Economy
at a Tub. Three more Waiting
for it After Brock’s Bath. The
Chemical Reduction of a Cauldron
of Tomatoes into Something Sweet

MY capital of three dollars was very quickly expended. After I had spent the last quarter of a dollar for writing paper and pens, my pockets were as empty as they were the hour I bought my suit from the Jewish merchant. I stood penniless in the first week of my educational career: a realization that brought out every atom of self-distrust, philosophical pessimism and gloomy foreboding. I had been completely dependent upon nickels and half dollars previously. I had not moved without they paved the way. Nothing of enjoyment and privilege had been secured without money. Theatres, games, parties, trips; these had always made their call on my spending money. Now I stood facing an academic career absolutely without a penny and with no possible hope that in the outside world there would ever be any benefactor to forward one. I was stranded. I thought of the students who relied upon monthly checks from home or from friends. I thought of the students who had their own bank accounts which would carry them through the school. I thought, with a kindling of envy, of the students who the previous summer had earned the following year’s expenses. I secured a minimum of comfort from such reflections. They plunged me deeper and deeper into the gulping pit that sucks enthusiasm out of life.

Thropper found me, standing by the window, indulging in such a dispiriting review of my prospects. In his bustling way he shouted:

“Homesick blues, that’s all. You’ve got every symptom showing, Priddy. They’re on you, all right.”

“I’m not homesick, Thropper,” I blurted out. “I have no reason to be homesick. It’s not that at all. I’m fretting about money: that’s all.”

“Wrong there, Thropper.” I half smiled, cheered beyond measure by his banter. “I heard a preacher say that the Bible said, ‘The love of money is the root of evil.’”

“Well,” bluffed Thropper, “what’s the difference? Wherever you find money you find the love of it. They are synonymous.”

“I’m in no danger from either, about this time, Thropper. I haven’t a cent to my name, and as I search the future I don’t see a prospect of any except I give up the University.”

I looked at my roommate in amazement. He was not smiling. In fact, he was looking very seriously at me.

“In the first place,” I explained, “you know that I had but three dollars—three—t-h-r-e-e, three, d-o-l-l-a-r-s, dollars; three dollars—to begin my education with.”

“I don’t think I told you that I shall never expect any help from the outside; that if I stay here I shall have to rely entirely on what I can earn with my own hands.”

“Of course!” I retorted, impatiently. “What else is it for a fellow to be stranded as I am? You surely wouldn’t call it a blessing, would you?”

Then Thropper, without another word, deliberately turned inside out each pocket that he owned and deposited in my hands the following items: A well-worn ink and pencil eraser, a fountain pen, a stub of a Dixon’s indelible pencil, some blurred pencil notes, a half-dozen toothpicks, a crumpled letter, a bunch of keys, a bachelor button, two handkerchiefs, and fifteen cents in two nickels and five coppers.

“There,” he sighed. “That’s all. There’s not a penny in my trunk. The money represents my worldly fortunes—until I go out and earn more. I, too, have to rely upon my own efforts. Shake, Priddy!”

The big-hearted fellow reached for my empty hand and gave it a vigorous shaking.

“You’re not bad off!” he declared. “Let me tell you why. You see,” he went on to explain, “after you’ve got in the swing of things here, you become somewhat of a social or economic philosopher. You’re rich, Priddy!” He smiled benevolently on me.

“Your high and exalted estimate put on money necessary to get you through college. I understand that across the water it is only the rich and the noble who are welcomed to the colleges; that the mass of workers have come to respect education accordingly. At least, that is the idea one gets through the books and magazine articles which have to do with English college life. Whether it is true or not is another matter. Anyway, Priddy, you’ve got to understand that things are different in America. Our colleges are democratic and extremely practical. Now take yourself, for instance; you have come out here regarding it impossible for you to move hand or foot towards your education without money in your pocket. Things are so arranged that you don’t need to give yourself much trouble on that account. You say you’ve got no money and that you ought to get away from here, on that account. That’s the way thousands of plow boys and machine tenders are arguing, only they say, ‘We haven’t any money; therefore we’ve no chance to get to college.’”

“You see this arm,” and Thropper made a sledge-hammer of his right arm, bringing his clenched fist down on his table. “That represents my endowment of good health and strength. How much is that worth, in terms of dollars earned in a year during spare time, Priddy?”

“Sixty-five dollars during school terms last year, outside of vacations: sixty-five dollars earned at odd jobs during Saturdays and odd hours,” he said. “All the spare cash I was called upon to spend. Of course in the summer, by canvassing stereoscopic views, I cleared sixty-seven more, above my expenses. That’s what the arm stands for. Its strength is convertible into cash almost any day that I care to go out and earn it—keeping on with my studies, too, of course.”

“But I’m earning my board by waiting on table,” I urged; “that does not touch my tuition and room rent, Thropper.”

“Which amounts to about thirty dollars outside of board,” he laughed. “You aren’t worth much if you can’t earn that in a year and keep on with your studies, Priddy. I think you’re lucky, that’s what I think, in earning your board so easily. That’s the big item!”

“But what can I find to do? I can’t leave the campus. I have to be around for the meal hours.”

Thropper went over to his desk and secured a brown-backed account book, and read off the following list:

“Stacking books in the library, twelve cents an hour. Wheeling Professor Dix’s invalid aunt in wheel chair, twelve cents an hour and dinner. Scrubbing floors in University Hall, twelve cents an hour. Weeding garden, cutting sugar-cane, thawing frozen gas pipes, grading lawn, kneading bread, cleaning black-boards, ringing bell, watchman, running washing-machines, errands, pruning trees, dusting Professor Harvey’s insects; all twelve cents an hour, Priddy. The list of my chores for last year. Possibilities for you, my boy!”

“Thropper, you’d be worth ten dollars an hour in a hospital bracing up discouraged financiers; that you would!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, pleased with what I said. “I’ve been up against it myself, Priddy. I understand, that’s all.”

“Have been up against it?” I gasped. “Thropper, I guess you should put it in the present tense: are up against it. Here is your fifteen cents, your present fortune. What are you going to do about money?”

“Oh, me?” He felt under his table and brought out to view a tin lunch box made to resemble a bundle of school books. “I’ll have that filled on Saturday morning at six o’clock, put on these—” he rumbled behind his clothes-screen and threw a pair of dirty overalls on the floor and a soft, black shirt—“and go to my regular Saturday job in the glass factory. A dollar and fifty for the day; regular as the week comes around. That’s the way I take care of myself, Priddy!”

“No,” he said, “it goes on your bill. But you won’t find it hard to get along without money here,” he said, “there isn’t much that you can buy, outside of clothes and a lecture in the village once in a while. You’ll soon become accustomed to getting along without cash, all right.”

When Saturday morning arrived, it was a distinct surprise to hear Thropper moving in the room first, for he usually had droned while I prepared for the day’s work. I opened my eyes. The alarm clock on the table told me that it was half-past five. I watched my roommate as he donned his working clothes and put on a slouch hat.

“I should think an American would call me a tramp!” he replied. “But you ought to see some of the Bulgarians I have to work with!” He spread out his hands expressively to indicate that whatever the Bulgarians did look like, he had not the rhetoric available at that moment with which to describe them.

There came a knock on the door and in response to Thropper’s cheery “Come in!” there appeared another “tramp” with his lunch box; a tall, high-cheek-boned Southerner, named Tripp, who drawled,

So with a good-bye, Thropper left the room, turning to tell me that if I found time, I might clean up the room—in his absence.

“Be sure and shake the Turkish rugs,” he laughed, pointing to the patches of well-worn carpet that were used for rugs. “When you shake them you’ll find them very Turkish; they smoke!”

By the time the early lunch for the workers had ended, there were seven “tramps” who went to the glass factory with Thropper. Included among them were two students, whom, judged by their excellent dress and their social graces on the campus, I had thought were none other than the sons of wealthy parents.

When the Bible verses had been given at the tables and after the last slice of fried potato had been scraped out of the dish, the students hurried from the room and disposed themselves for work.

As I left the dining-hall, I saw young women with duster caps on their heads, leaning out of dormitory windows shaking rugs; others I found hurrying down to other dormitories with bundles of laundry. When I arrived in Pungo Hall, I was greeted with the thumping of brushes, the clatter of furniture, and the shouts of the men as they called to one another above the clouds of dust that were being hurled from the rooms into the hallway.

A knock came on my door as I started to sweep the room, and Jason, the poet, poking his long neck around the corner of the door-post, asked in the most concerned way imaginable,

“Why—no, I haven’t seen it. What do you do with kerosene? Don’t you burn gas?”

“Oh, bugs!” I blurted with such roughness that it must have made his sensitive and poetic nerves clang.

At eight o’clock a group of students, with clean collars and well-pressed clothes, came down from the University building, each carrying an ironing-board, to be sold in some nearby town. This ironing-board was entirely unlike every other ironing-board invented by man or woman. It was the product of the fertile and practical mind of our mathematical professor; its chief virtues being, as described in the prospectus, that “it stands up like a soldier, kneels down like a camel, and folds up like a jack-knife!” With all its novelty, it was extremely practical and, the agents reported, sold well. A large number of useful citizens are out in the serviceable centres of life, who, if they ever choose a coat of arms will have to adorn their shield with an ironing-board—“rampant,” for to it they owe much of the financial lubrication which smoothed their passage through the school.

Hurrying after the same train were three young women, each armed with a book, on their way to make fifty per cent from literary householders. At different hours of the morning other students went to the village where every sort of task from house-cleaning to raking up dead gardens was undertaken. Evangelical University was at work.

“Your roommate and I have a whole laundry set on shares. Look in my room and you’ll see the irons; the flat-irons.”

The tall German went into the hall, raised his voice in a great, resounding shout:

A few minutes later Brock called to me from his room. When I presented myself before him, I discovered him with his sleeves rolled up, busily engaged in pouring hot water from a kettle over some shirts and handkerchiefs.

“Any white things of yours, handkerchiefs or shirts, Priddy,” he announced, “might just as well go in with mine.”

So we shared the wash that morning. After they had been rinsed, I carried them to the rear of the building and hung them on a double wire line where the gas-laden air from the sheep pastures hummed through them and the sun burned them dry in an hour.

That same afternoon, after having expressed to Brock my desire for extra work in the hours when I was not on duty in the dining-hall, I found myself standing over an immense cauldron under which blazed a hot camp-fire. In the cauldron were bushels of tomatoes and many pounds of sugar. With a long ladle I stirred the concoction until nine o’clock that night, save for the interruption of supper, and by that time I had the satisfaction of seeing it turn from a vivid pink to a dark red until it turned into a tarty, pasty preserve, not unlike strawberry damson in appearance. That night there went on the University records, against my name, “To seven hours’ labor, at 12 cents, .84.” I had paid that much, that week, towards my tuition.