VI
The venerable faculty of the College of the City of New York, who had charge of my intellectual life for five years, were nearly all of them Tammany appointees, and therefore Catholics. It was the first time I had ever met Catholics, and I found them kindly, but set in dogma, and as much given to propaganda as I myself was destined to become.
For example, there was “Herby.” Several hours a week for several years I had “Herby,” the eminent Professor Charles George Herbermann, editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia and leading light of the Jesuits. He was a stout, irascible old gentleman with a bushy reddish beard. “Mr. Sinclair,” he would roar, “it is so because I say it is so!” But that did not go with me at all; I would say, “But, Professor, how can it be so?” We would have a wrangle, pleasing to other members of the class, who had not prepared their lessons and were afraid of being called upon. (We learned quickly to know each professor’s hobbies, and whenever we were not prepared to recite, we would start a discussion.)
“Herby” taught me Latin, “Tizzy” taught me Greek, and Professor George Hardy taught me English. He was a little round man of the Catholic faith, and his way of promoting the faith was to set a class that was sixty per cent Jewish to learning Catholic sentimentality disguised as poetry. I remember we had to recite Dobson’s “The Missal,” and avenged ourselves by learning it to the tune of a popular music-hall ditty of the hour, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” Hardy was a good teacher, except when the Pope came in. He told us that Milton was a dangerous disturber of the peace of Europe, and that it was a libel to say that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. What a Wycliffite was nobody ever mentioned.
Our professor of history had no dogma, so I was permitted to learn English and European history according to the facts. I was interested, but could not see why it was necessary for me to learn the names of so many kings and dukes and generals, and the dates when they had slaughtered so many human beings. In the effort to keep them in my mind until examination day, I evolved a memory system, and once it tripped me in a comical way. “Who was Lord Cobden?” inquired the professor; and my memory system replied: “He passed the corncob laws.”
But the prize laugh of my history class had to do with a lively witted youngster by the name of Fred Schwed, who afterward became a curb broker. Fred never prepared anything and never paid attention, but trusted to his gift of the gab. He was suddenly called upon to explain the origin of the title, Prince of Wales. Said the grave Professor Johnston: “Mr. Schwed, how did it happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” Fred, called suddenly out of a daydream or perhaps a game of crap shooting, gazed with a wild look and stammered: “Why—er—why, you see, Professor—his mother was there.”