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The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy, a novel by George W. Peck |
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Chapter 25 |
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_ CHAPTER XXV THE BAD BOY GROWS THOUGHTFUL--WHY IS LETTUCE LIKE A GIRL?-- KING SOLOMON A FOOL--THINK OF ANY SANE MAN HAVING A THOUSAND WIVES--HE WOULD HAVE TO HAVE TWO HOTELS DURING VACATION--300 BLONDES--600 BRUNETTES, ETC--A THOUSAND WIVES TAKING ICE CREAM--I DON'T ENVY SOLOMON HIS THOUSAND. "What you sitting there like a bump on a log for?" asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as the youth had sat on a box for half an hour, with his hands in his pockets, looking at a hole in the floor, until his eyes were set like a dying horse. "What you thinking of, anyway? It seems to me boys set around and think more than they used to when I was a boy," and the groceryman brushed the wilted lettuce and shook it, and tried to make it stand up stiff and crisp, before he put it out doors; but the contrary lettuce which had been picked the day before, looked so tired that the boy noticed it. "That lettuce reminds me of a girl. Yesterday I was in here when it was new, like the girl going to the picnic, and it was as fresh and proud, and starched up, and kitteny, and full of life, and as sassy as a girl starting out for a picnic. To-day it has got back from the picnic, and, like the girl, the starch is all taken out, and it is limber, and languid, and tired, and can't stand up alone, and it looks as though it wanted to be laid at rest beside the rotten apples in the alley, rather than be set out in front of a store to be sold to honest people, and give them the gangrene of the liver," and the boy put on a health commissioner air that frightened the grocery man, and he threw the lettuce out the back door. "You never mind about my lettuce," said the grocery man, "I can attend to my affairs. But now tell me what you were thinking about here all the morning?" "I was thinking what a fool King Solomon was," said the boy, with the air of one who has made a statement that has got to be argued pretty strong to make it hold water. "Now, lookahere," said the grocery man in anger, "I have stood it to have you play tricks on me, and have listened to your condemned foolishness without a murmur as long as you have confined yourself to people now living, but when you attack Solomon--the wisest man, the great king--and call him a fool, friendship ceases, and you must get out of this store. Solomon in all his glory, is a friend of mine, and no fool boy is going to abuse him in my presence. Now, you dry up!" "Sit down on the ice box," said the boy to the grocery man, "what you need is rest. You are overworked. Your alleged brain is equal to wilted lettuce, and it can devise ways and means to hide rotten peaches under good ones, so as to sell them to blind orphans; but when it comes to grasping great questions, your small brain cannot comprehend them. Your brain may go up sideways to a great question and rub against it, but it cannot surround it, and grasp it. That's where you are deformed. Now, it is different with me. I can raise brain to sell to you grocery men. Listen. This Solomon is credited with being the wisest man, and yet history says he had a thousand wives. Just think of it. You have got one wife, and Pa has got one, and all the neighbors have one, if they have had any kind of luck. Does not one wife make you pay attention? Wouldn't two wives break you up? Wouldn't three cause you to see stars? How would ten strike you? Why, man alive, you do not grasp the magnitude of the statement that Solomon had a thousand wives. A thousand wives, standing side by side, would reach about four blocks. Marching by fours it would take them twenty minutes to pass a given point. The largest summer resort hotel only holds about five hundred people, so Sol would have had to hire two hotels if he took his wives out for a day in the country. If you would stop and think once in a while you would know more." The grocery man's eyes had begun to stick out as the bad boy continued, as though the statistics had never been brought to his attention before, but he was bound to stand by his old friend Solomon, and he said, "Well, Solomon's wives must have been different from our wives of the present day." "Not much," said the boy, as he see he was paralizing the grocery man. "Women have been about the same ever since Eve. She got mashed on the old original dude, and it stands to reason that Solomon's wives were no better than the mother of the human race. Statistics show that one woman out of every ten is red headed. That would give Solomon an even hundred red headed wives. Just that hundred red headed wives would be enough to make an ordinary man think that there was a land that is fairer than this. Then there would be, out of the other nine hundred, about three hundred blondes, and the other six hundred would be brunettes, and mabe he had a few albinos, and bearded women, and fat women, and dwarfs. Now, those thousand women had appetites, desires for dress and style, the same as all women. Imagine Solomon saying to them. 'Girls, lets all go down to the ice cream, saloon and have a dish of ice cream.' Can you, with your brain muddled with codfish and new potatoes, realize the scene that would follow? Suppose after Solomon's broom brigade bad got seated in the ice creamery, one of the red headed wives should catch Solomon winking at a strange girl at another table. You may think Solomon did not know enough to wink, or that he was not that kind of a flirt, but he _must_ have been or he could never had succeeded in marrying a thousand wives, in a sparcely settled country. No, Sir, it looks to me as though Solomon in all his glory, was an old masher, and from what I have seen of men being bossed around with one wife, I don't envy Solomon his thousand. Why, just imagine that gang of wives going and ordering fall bonnets. Solomon would have to be a king, or a Vanderbilt to stand it. Ma wears five dollar silk stockings, and Pa kicks awfully when the bill comes in. Imagine Soloman putting up for a few thousand pair of silk stockings. I am glad you will sit down and reason with me in a rational way about some of these Bible stories that take my breath away. The minister stands me off when I try to talk with him about such things, and tells me to study the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the deacons tell me to go and soak my head. There is darn little encouragement for a boy to try and figure out things. How would you like to have a thousand red headed wives come into the store this minute and tell you they wanted you to send carriages around to the house at 3 o'clock so they could go for a drive? Or how would you like to have a hired girl come rushing in and tell you to send up six hundred doctors, because six hundred of your wives had been taken with cholera morbus? Or--" "O, don't mention it," said the grocery man, with a shudder. "I wouldn't take Solomon's place, and be the natural protector of a thousand wives if anybody would give me the earth. Think of getting up in a cold winter morning and building a thousand fires. Think of two thousand pair of hands in a fellow's hair! Boy, you have shown me that Solomon needed a guardian over him. He didn't have sense." "Yes," says the boy, "and think of two thousand feet, each one as cold as a brick of chocolate ice cream. A man would want a back as big as the fence of a fair ground. But I don't want to harrow up your feelings. I must go and put some arnica on Pa. He has got home, and says he has been to a summer resort on a vacation, and he is all covered with blotches. He says it is mosquito bites, but Ma thinks he has been shot full of bird shot by some water melon farmer. Ma hasn't got any sympathy for Pa because he didn't take her along, but if she had been there she would have been filled with bird shot, too. But you musn't detain me. Between Pa and the baby I have got all I can attend to. The baby is teething, and Ma makes me put my fingers in the baby's mouth to help it cut teeth. That is a humiliating position for a boy as big as I am. Say, how many babies do you figure that Solomon had to buy rubber toothing rings for in all his glory?" And the boy went out leaving the grocery man reflecting on what a family Solomon must have had, and how he needed to be the wisest man to get along without a circus afternoon and evening. _ |
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