The Little Lady of the Big House. Джек Лондон
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and stumbled, it was not because he feared to be cracked, but because, when he took a chance on being cracked, he wanted, as he told John Chisum himself, “an even break for his money.”
It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from Chicago, that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then, so careful was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though unburdened by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and, fearing his estate might be distributed among remote relatives who might possibly inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he was still alive and that he would return home in several years. Also, he ordered them to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.
But Young Dick’s feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or road-kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the spirit of research. He had merely the human boy’s curiosity about all things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and classified it.
His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-birds in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions, there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more, and to go on seeing.
At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but at the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.
Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed a second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.
He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking straight to the point.
“It’s this way,” he said. “I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends like you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I want to do in it. I didn’t come home because of a sense of duty to anybody here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of duty to myself. I’m all the better from my three years of wandering about, and now it’s up to me to go on with my education – my book education, I mean.”
“The Belmont Academy,” Mr. Slocum suggested. “That will fit you for the university – ”
Dick shook his head decidedly.
“And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But my mind’s like acid. It’ll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach, or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I’ll hire my coaches myself – hire and fire them. And that means money to handle.”
“A hundred a month,” Mr. Crockett suggested.
Dick shook his head.
“I’ve taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in San Francisco. I don’t care to handle my business affairs yet, but I do want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as I see fit, for what I see fit.”
The guardians looked their dismay at one another.
“It’s ridiculous, impossible,” Mr. Crockett began. “You are as unreasonable as you were before you went away.”
“It’s my way, I guess,” Dick sighed. “The other disagreement was over my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then.”
“Think of our position, Dick,” Mr. Davidson urged. “As your guardians, how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free hand with money.”
“What’s the Freda worth, right now?” Dick demanded irrelevantly.
“Can sell for twenty thousand any time,” Mr. Crockett answered.
“Then sell her. She’s too large for me, and she’s worth less every year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking around the Bay, and that won’t cost a thousand. Sell the Freda and put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is that I’ll misspend my money – taking to drinking, horse-racing, and running around with chorus girls. Here’s my proposition to make you easy on that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The moment any of you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw out the total balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side line I’m going to get a business college expert to come here and cram me with the mechanical side of the business game.”
Dick did not wait for their acquiescence, but went on as from a matter definitely settled.
“How about the horses down at Menlo? – never mind, I’ll look them over and decide what to keep. Mrs. Summerstone will stay on here in charge of the house, because I’ve got too much work mapped out for myself already. I promise you you won’t regret giving me a free hand with my directly personal affairs. And now, if you want to hear about the last three years, I’ll spin the yarn for you.”
Dick Forrest had been right when he told his guardians that his mind was acid and would bite into the books. Never was there such an education, and he directed it himself – but not without advice. He had learned the trick of hiring brains from his father and from John Chisum of the Jingle-bob. He had learned to sit silent and to think while cow men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And, by virtue of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with professors and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he listened to their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely asking a question, merely listening to the best they had to offer, content to receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that would help him to decide what sort of an education he would go in for and how.
Then came the engaging of coaches. Never was there such an engaging and discharging, such a hiring and firing. He was not frugal in the matter. For one that he retained a month, or three months, he discharged a dozen on the first day, or the first week. And invariably he paid such dischargees a full month although their attempts to teach him might not have consumed an hour. He did such things fairly and grandly, because he could afford to be fair and grand.
He, who had eaten the leavings from firemen’s pails in round-houses and “scoffed” mulligan-stews at water-tanks, had learned thoroughly the worth of money. He bought the best with the sure knowledge that it was the cheapest. A year of high school physics and a year of high school chemistry were necessary to enter the university. When he had crammed his algebra and geometry, he sought out the heads of the physics and chemistry departments in the University of California. Professor Carey laughed at him… at the first.
“My dear boy,” Professor Carey began.
Dick waited patiently till he was through. Then Dick began, and concluded.
“I’m not a fool, Professor Carey. High school and academy students are children. They don’t know the world. They don’t know what they want, or why they want what is ladled out to them. I know the world. I know what I want and why I want it. They do physics for an hour, twice a week, for two terms, which, with two vacations, occupy one year. You are the top teacher on the Pacific Coast in physics. The college year is just ending. In the first week of your vacation, giving every