“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle! He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides, he’s English. That will give such a tone!”
What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.” Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the “new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:
In Charge:
Mr. Allen Blynn
Holden and Jena
Miss Keyser Levering
The Warren School
Associates:
Mr. Hayim Leopold
Harrow and Cambridge
Mr. Bardek
Naples and Bordeaux
Miss Gorgas Levering
School of Applied Arts
“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print it.”
“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.
“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.
“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This list of names is just advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’ ‘Cambridge’—why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You watch.”
“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect. Of course,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come, jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are too wise.
“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds, and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and he say, nothing—nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy. ‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.
“And the children! First they are afraid—they believe then all the papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know what happens the day before it was yesterday.