So far as I knew, I said, it was.
“Well, well; let’s not pry too deeply. So you want to learn. Why?”
“Why?” The question was too big for an answer, yet an answer of some kind was expected. “I guess because there’s nothing else so important.”
“Wrong,” he said triumphantly, “wrong and illusory. Since nothing is ultimately important there can be no degrees involved. Books are the waste-product of the human mind.”
“Yet you deal in them,” I ventured.
“I’m alive and I shall die too; this doesnt mean I approve of either life or death. Well, if you are going to learn you are going to learn; there’s nothing I can do about it As well here as another place.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Gratitude, Hodgins”—he never then nor later condescended to the familiar “Hodge” nor did I ever address or even think of him except as Mr Tyss—“Gratitude, Hodgins, is an emotion disagreeable both to the giver and to the receiver. We do what we must; gratitude, pity, love, hate, all that cant, is superfluous.”
I considered this statement reflectively.
“Look you,” he went on, “I’ll feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type and give you the run of the books. I’ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you must You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four years—if you persist in thinking it’s learning you want—or you can learn nothing. I’ll expect you to do the work I think needs doing; any time you don’t like it youre free to go.” And so our agreement, if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an agreement, was made within ten minutes after he met me for the first time. For six years the store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer, teacher and father to me. He was never my friend. Rather he was my adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to those qualities which he himself would have scorned. I detested his ideas, his philosophy and many of his actions, and this detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting ahead of my story.