The Chair Of
Philanthromathematics
By O. Henry
"I see that the cause of Education has received the princely gift of more
than fifty millions of dollars," said I.
I was gleaning the stray items from the evening papers while Jeff Peters
packed his briar pipe with plug cut.
"Which same," said Jeff, "calls for a new deck, and a recitation by the
entire class in philanthromathematics."
"Is that an allusion?" I asked.
"It is," said Jeff. "I never told you about the time when me and Andy Tucker
was philanthropists, did I? It was eight years ago in Arizona. Andy and
me was out in the Gila mountains with a two-horse wagon prospecting for
silver. We struck it, and sold out to parties in Tucson for $25,000. They
paid our check at the bank in silver--a thousand dollars in a sack. We loaded
it in our wagon and drove east a hundred miles before we recovered our presence
of intellect. Twenty- five thousand dollars doesn't sound like so much when
you're reading the annual report of the Pennsylvania Railroad or listening
to an actor talking about his salary; but when you can raise up a wagon
sheet and kick around your bootheel and hear every one of 'em ring against
another it makes you feel like you was a night-and-day bank with the clock
striking twelve.
"The third day out we drove into one of the most specious and tidy little
towns that Nature or Rand and McNally ever turned out. It was in the foothills,
and mitigated with trees and flowers and about 2,000 head of cordial and
dilatory inhabitants. The town seemed to be called Floresville, and Nature
had not contaminated it with many railroads, fleas or Eastern tourists.
"Me and Andy deposited our money to the credit of Peters and Tucker in the
Esperanza Savings Bank, and got rooms at the Skyview Hotel. After supper
we lit up, and sat out on the gallery and smoked. Then was when the philanthropy
idea struck me. I suppose every grafter gets it sometime.
"When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get
scared and wants to return part of it. And if you'll watch close and notice
the way his charity runs you'll see that he tries to restore it to the same
people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case, take, let's say, A. A made
his millions selling oil to poor students who sit up nights studying political
economy and methods for regulating the trusts. So, back to the universities
and colleges goes his conscience dollars.
"There's B got his from the common laboring man that works with his hands
and tools. How's he to get some of the remorse fund back into their overalls?
"'Aha!' says B, 'I'll do it in the name of Education. I've skinned the laboring
man,' says he to himself, 'but, according to the old proverb, "Charity covers
a multitude of skins."'
"So he puts up eighty million dollars' worth of libraries; and the boys
with the dinner pail that builds 'em gets the benefit.
"'Where's the books?' asks the reading public.
"'I dinna ken,' says B. 'I offered ye libraries; and there they are. I suppose
if I'd given ye preferred steel trust stock instead ye'd have wanted the
water in it set out in cut glass decanters. Hoot, for ye!'
"But, as I said, the owning of so much money was beginning to give me philanthropitis.
It was the first time me and Andy had ever made a pile big enough to make
us stop and think how we got it.
"'Andy,' says I, 'we're wealthy--not beyond the dreams of average; but in
our humble way we are comparatively as rich as Greasers. I feel as if I'd
like to do something for as well as to humanity.'
"'I was thinking the same thing, Jeff,' says he. 'We've been gouging the
public for a long time with all kinds of little schemes from selling self-igniting
celluloid collars to flooding Georgia with Hoke Smith presidential campaign
buttons. I'd like, myself, to hedge a bet or two in the graft game if I
could do it without actually banging the cymbalines in the Salvation Army
or teaching a bible class by the Bertillon system.
"'What'll we do?' says Andy. 'Give free grub to the poor or send a couple
of thousand to George Cortelyou?'
"'Neither,' says I. 'We've got too much money to be implicated in plain
charity; and we haven't got enough to make restitution. So, we'll look about
for something that's about half way between the two.'
"The next day in walking around Floresville we see on a hill a big red brick
building that appears to be disinhabited. The citizens speak up and tell
us that it was begun for a residence several years before by a mine owner.
After running up the house he finds he only had $2.80 left to furnish it
with, so he invests that in whiskey and jumps off the roof on a spot where
he now requiescats in pieces.
"As soon as me and Andy saw that building the same idea struck both of us.
We would fix it up with lights and pen wipers and professors, and put an
iron dog and statues of Hercules and Father John on the lawn, and start
one of the finest free educational institutions in the world right there.
"So we talks it over to the prominent citizens of Floresville, who falls
in fine with the idea. They give a banquet in the engine house to us, and
we make our bow for the first time as benefactors to the cause of progress
and enlightenment. Andy makes an hour-and-a-half speech on the subject of
irrigation in Lower Egypt, and we have a moral tune on the phonograph and
pineapple sherbert.
"Andy and me didn't lose any time in philanthropping. We put every man in
town that could tell a hammer from a step ladder to work on the building,
dividing it up into class rooms and lecture halls. We wire to Frisco for
a car load of desks, footballs, arithmetics, penholders, dictionaries, chairs
for the professors, slates, skeletons, sponges, twenty-seven cravenetted
gowns and caps for the senior class, and an open order for all the truck
that goes with a first-class university. I took it on myself to put a campus
and a curriculum on the list; but the telegraph operator must have got the
words wrong, being an ignorant man, for when the goods come we found a can
of peas and a curry-comb among 'em.
"While the weekly papers was having chalk-plate cuts of me and Andy we wired
an employment agency in Chicago to express us f.o.b., six professors immediately--one
English literature, one up-to-date dead languages, one chemistry, one political
economy--democrat preferred-- one logic, and one wise to painting, Italian
and music, with union card. The Esperanza bank guaranteed salaries, which
was to run between $800 and $800.50.
"Well, sir, we finally got in shape. Over the front door was carved the
words: 'The World's University; Peters & Tucker, Patrons and Proprietors.
And when September the first got a cross-mark on the calendar, the come-ons
begun to roll in. First the faculty got off the tri-weekly express from
Tucson. They was mostly young, spectacled, and red-headed, with sentiments
divided between ambition and food. Andy and me got 'em billeted on the Floresvillians
and then laid for the students.
"They came in bunches. We had advertised the University in all the state
papers, and it did us good to see how quick the country responded. Two hundred
and nineteen husky lads aging along from 18 up to chin whiskers answered
the clarion call of free education. They ripped open that town, sponged
the seams, turned it, lined it with new mohair; and you couldn't have told
it from Harvard or Goldfields at the March term of court.
"They marched up and down the streets waving flags with the World's University
colors--ultra-marine and blue--and they certainly made a lively place of
Floresville. Andy made them a speech from the balcony of the Skyview Hotel,
and the whole town was out celebrating.
"In about two weeks the professors got the students disarmed and herded
into classes. I don't believe there's any pleasure equal to being a philanthropist.
Me and Andy bought high silk hats and pretended to dodge the two reporters
of the Floresville Gazette. The paper had a man to kodak us whenever we
appeared on the street, and ran our pictures every week over the column
headed 'Educational Notes.' Andy lectured twice a week at the University;
and afterward I would rise and tell a humorous story. Once the Gazette printed
my pictures with Abe Lincoln on one side and Marshall P. Wilder on the other.
"Andy was as interested in philanthropy as I was. We used to wake up of
nights and tell each other new ideas for booming the University.
"'Andy,' says I to him one day, 'there's something we overlooked. The boys
ought to have dromedaries.'
"'What's that?' Andy asks.
"'Why, something to sleep in, of course,' says I. 'All colleges have 'em.'
"'Oh, you mean pajamas,' says Andy.
"'I do not,' says I. 'I mean dromedaries.' But I never could make Andy understand;
so we never ordered 'em. Of course, I meant them long bedrooms in colleges
where the scholars sleep in a row.
"Well, sir, the World's University was a success. We had scholars from five
States and territories, and Floresville had a boom. A new shooting gallery
and a pawn shop and two more saloons started; and the boys got up a college
yell that went this way:
"'Raw, raw, raw, Done, done, done, Peters, Tucker, Lots of fun, Bow-wow-wow,
Haw-hee-haw, World University, Hip, hurrah!'
"The scholars was a fine lot of young men, and me and Andy was as proud
of 'em as if they belonged to our own family.
"But one day about the last of October Andy comes to me and asks if I have
any idea how much money we had left in the bank. I guesses about sixteen
thousand. 'Our balance,' says Andy, 'is $821.62.'
"'What!' says I, with a kind of a yell. 'Do you mean to tell me that them
infernal clod-hopping, dough-headed, pup-faced, goose-brained, gate-stealing,
rabbit-eared sons of horse thieves have soaked us for that much?'
"'No less,' says Andy.
"'Then, to Helvetia with philanthropy,' says I.
"'Not necessarily,' says Andy. 'Philanthropy,' says he, 'when run on a good
business basis is one of the best grafts going. I'll look into the matter
and see if it can't be straightened out.'
"The next week I am looking over the payroll of our faculty when I run across
a new name--Professor James Darnley McCorkle, chair of mathematics; salary
$100 per week. I yells so loud that Andy runs in quick.
"'What's this,' says I. 'A professor of mathematics at more than $5,000
a year? How did this happen? Did he get in through the window and appoint
himself?'
"'I wired to Frisco for him a week ago,' says Andy. 'In ordering the faculty
we seemed to have overlooked the chair of mathematics.'
"'A good thing we did,' says I. 'We can pay his salary two weeks, and then
our philanthropy will look like the ninth hole on the Skibo golf links.'
"'Wait a while,' says Andy, 'and see how things turn out. We have taken
up too noble a cause to draw out now. Besides, the further I gaze into the
retail philanthropy business the better it looks to me. I never thought
about investigating it before. Come to think of it now,' goes on Andy, 'all
the philanthropists I ever knew had plenty of money. I ought to have looked
into that matter long ago, and located which was the cause and which was
the effect.'
"I had confidence in Andy's chicanery in financial affairs, so I left the
whole thing in his hands. The University was flourishing fine, and me and
Andy kept our silk hats shined up, and Floresville kept on heaping honors
on us like we was millionaires instead of almost busted philanthropists.
"The students kept the town lively and prosperous. Some stranger came to
town and started a faro bank over the Red Front livery stable, and began
to amass money in quantities. Me and Andy strolled up one night and piked
a dollar or two for sociability. There were about fifty of our students
there drinking rum punches and shoving high stacks of blues and reds about
the table as the dealer turned the cards up.
"'Why, dang it, Andy,' says I, 'these free-school-hunting, gander- headed,
silk-socked little sons of sap-suckers have got more money than you and
me ever had. Look at the rolls they're pulling out of their pistol pockets?'
"'Yes,' says Andy, 'a good many of them are sons of wealthy miners and stockmen.
It's very sad to see 'em wasting their opportunities this way.'
"At Christmas all the students went home to spend the holidays. We had a
farewell blowout at the University, and Andy lectured on 'Modern Music and
Prehistoric Literature of the Archipelagos.' Each one of the faculty answered
to toasts, and compared me and Andy to Rockefeller and the Emperor Marcus
Autolycus. I pounded on the table and yelled for Professor McCorkle; but
it seems he wasn't present on the occasion. I wanted a look at the man that
Andy thought could earn $100 a week in philanthropy that was on the point
of making an assignment.
"The students all left on the night train; and the town sounded as quiet
as the campus of a correspondence school at midnight. When I went to the
hotel I saw a light in Andy's room, and I opened the door and walked in.
"There sat Andy and the faro dealer at a table dividing a two-foot high
stack of currency in thousand-dollar packages.
"'Correct,' says Andy. 'Thirty-one thousand apiece. Come in, Jeff,' says
he. 'This is our share of the profits of the first half of the scholastic
term of the World's University, incorporated and philanthropated. Are you
convinced now,' says Andy, 'that philanthropy when practiced in a business
way is an art that blesses him who gives as well as him who receives?'
"'Great!' says I, feeling fine. 'I'll admit you are the doctor this time.'
"'We'll be leaving on the morning train,' says Andy. 'You'd better get your
collars and cuffs and press clippings together.'
"'Great!' says I. 'I'll be ready. But, Andy,' says I, 'I wish I could have
met that Professor James Darnley McCorkle before we went. I had a curiosity
to know that man.'
"'That'll be easy,' says Andy, turning around to the faro dealer.
"'Jim,' says Andy, 'shake hands with Mr. Peters.'"
|