“As long as you eat my bread, you’ll obey my orders, and your mother’s, too. I don’t want to hear any grumbling. You’ll take that money to the bank, and you’ll get a receipt for it. And you’ll look sharp to get there before three, too. Let it go at that!”
For perhaps thirty seconds, Arnon wisely “let it go at that.” Then human endurance broke down before equally human indignation.
“You talk a lot about my eating your bread,” sniffed the boy. “But it isn’t my fault I eat it. If you’d let me take a job, instead of making me get ready to go to that measly old college, I’d have been eating my own bread by this time.”
“You’d be wasting another man’s time and money instead of mine,” retorted his father. “And you’d be back on my hands inside of a week. No, thanks. You’re going to college—if ever you have sense enough to pass your entrance exams. College may make a man of you. Nothing else will. In the meantime, you’ll do something for your keep, besides sulking. For instance, you’ll take the bazaar’s ninety-eight dollars to the bank, this afternoon. And you’ll do it without any more whining.”
As he stood, jammed with eight other people upon the interurban trolley-car’s back platform that afternoon, Arnon morosely went over in his mind this lunch-table dialogue. He fell to chewing on the unpalatable mess of grievances that had led up to the scene. And he was hot and sick with resentment.
Some conscienceless liar once said that schooldays are the happiest time in life. That same liar would make Ananias or Munchausen look like the original Truthful James. In many ways, the school-years of a growing boy are worse than a term in prison.
They are perhaps a delight to the model youth. But to the average lad they hold more torture than any grown man could endure. It is only the miraculous elastic power of youth that makes them bearable. It is the distorting and falsifying magic of retrospect that gives them their only charm.
A grown man, let us say, is in disgrace. If worst comes to worst, he can vanish; and he can start life, afresh, somewhere else, with a clean slate.
Let a boy fall into disgrace at school or at home. What road of escape is open to him? Not one. He is much more at the mercy of parent and teacher than any convict is at his warden’s mercy. There are strict laws governing the treatment of prisoners by their keepers. But, within normal bounds, no law holds back a teacher or a parent—or both—from making a boy’s life a continuous Hades.