Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

asked a question that she couldn’t answer — or didn’t want to answer. I would pedal on down to Dudley’s house, usually in the evening. He and Eliza would greet me, and we would all chat about nothing for a while. Dudley would have a drink, and Eliza might, too. She would make me cocoa if the weather was cold, lemonade if the weather was warm, and then after a while she would excuse herself, close the pocket door between the living room and dining room, leave through the door to the hall, and close that behind her, and I would be alone with Dudley. There had been a time when I had enjoyed those sessions, when I welcomed the information and advice Dudley gave me, but I had come to enjoy them less and less as I had come to think that I knew more and more. I no longer wanted to know what he thought I ought to do; I wanted to decide for myself. I had become impatient with his counsel. I fidgeted while he spoke, and I rarely did as he advised me to do. I hadn’t want him as a mentor, and he had decided that he didn’t want me as a pupil.

“You’re becoming stubborn, willful, and headstrong,” he had told me at our last session. “I have the clear impression — and clearly it is the impression you want me to have — that you think our talks are no longer of any use to you. You think that I have nothing to teach you. Correct?”

“I think that I can think for myself,” I had said.

“And I think that you have a lot to learn.”

“That may be,” I had said, “but the lot that I have to learn is — ” I had stopped because I didn’t know what to say. If there had been something clever somewhere in my mind that I could have stuck onto the end of my sentence, I hadn’t been able to find it.

“Yes?” Dudley had asked, with a hint of a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

Nothing. I had gotten up out of my chair and left the room. I hadn’t allowed myself to run, though I had wanted to run. I closed the door behind me, and I stood in the front hall for a moment, trying to recover my self-esteem. Eliza had put her head around the corner of the door to the kitchen and looked down the length of the hall at me.

“Peter?” she had said.

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” I had said, and I had let myself out the front door and into the night.

Chapter 5

The Cynical Detective

IF I STILL HAD A LOT TO LEARN, and I did, I felt that I’d come to the right place. In Dudley’s own house I ought to be able to find out what I wanted to know, and Eliza had given me permission to poke and pry.

I sat for a while in the chair that I had sat in so many times before, and when I remembered Dudley’s saying that I had a lot to learn, I said, “That may be, but the lot that I have to learn is not the lot that you can teach me.” It wasn’t clever, and it didn’t seem quite grammatical, but at least I’d found my tongue.

I tried taking Dudley’s place and addressing the other chair as he would have if I had been sitting in it. I let my eyelids droop and allowed my mouth to twist itself into something that was not quite a sneer and could be mistaken for an indulgent smile. He supposes that he has become clever, I thought, and what he would probably describe as cynical, and apparently I am to be the object of this newfound cleverness and soi-disant cynicism. Well, we shall see who wins that contest, but at least he shall know what a cynic is.

“The Cynics,” I told the empty chair, as Dudley had once told me, “are widely misunderstood. Originally, they were a sect of Greek philosophers, flourishing some twenty-three-hundred years ago, who advocated the doctrines that virtue is the only good, that the essence of virtue is self-control, and that surrender to any external influence is beneath human dignity. In our time, as you have doubtless noticed, greed is considered the only good, people have no self-control nor wish to exercise any self-control, and the mass of them happily surrender to any external influence provided that it saves them the effort of thinking for themselves.”

“I wish you’d let me think for myself,” muttered the impertinent boy in the opposite chair.

“Plus ça change,” I went on as Dudley had, ignoring the impertinence. “Even in their day the Cynics were disparaged. Their foremost member, Diogenes, was slandered by Seneca, who claimed that he lived in a tub. The mob nicknamed him ‘Dog,’ which gives us a rather vivid idea of what people thought of him. Revere him, Peter, and wear the label ‘cynic’ proudly, for it is derived from that nasty nickname, kyon in Greek, and today it designates those of us who point the finger at human vanity and pride, who recognize that selfishness is the motivation for every human action, who scoff at claims of disinterest or altruism or love, who ask, always, ‘Cui bono?’ In other words, what the world calls a cynic, a dog, I — and, I hope, you, my boy — would call a reasonable human being.”

When Dudley had finished, he began the business of emptying and cleaning his pipe, and he said to me, “I trust you will remember that.” I resolved to forget it as soon as possible, but despite the passage of time I hadn’t managed to forget it, and sitting in Dudley’s chair had brought it back to me so completely that if I had had someone sitting opposite me I could have delivered the lecture on the Cynics just as Dudley had delivered it to me, word for