Youth Without God Read Free

come in useful, I thought—and thank your stars you’ve got your health into the bargain. Touch wood. But happiness? No, happiness I’ve missed. No one, really, is happy.
    I sat down at my table and uncorked my bottle of red ink: it got onto my fingers and I was annoyed. Somebody ought to invent an ink which would put an end to stained fingers …
    No, I can’t call myself a happy man.
    Don’t be so silly, I said to myself. You’ve got a safe jobwith a pension at the end of it. Isn’t that something in these days, when nobody knows what to-morrow holds? How many fellows would almost give an arm to be in your shoes? For what a tiny percentage of candidates for the teaching profession succeed in getting good posts in the end! Be thankful that your post is in a county high school, where you can grow old and senile without a moment of real worry. Why, you might live to be a hundred—the oldest inhabitant of the Fatherland! Then, on your birthday, you’d have your photo in the illustrated newspapers. “He is still in possession of all his faculties,” you would read beneath it. That’s where the pension would come in! Think it over, and count your blessings.
    I did: and I began working.
    Twenty-six blue copy-books lay before me—I’ve twenty-six boys in my charge, fourteen-year-olds; for yesterday’s geography lesson they wrote me an essay. Geography and history are my subjects.
    Outside, the sun was brilliant. It must have been fine in the park! Well, work’s work. Must get on correcting the essays and put down the marks in my register even though I know how meaningless these marks are.
    The subject set for the essay was this: “Why do we need colonies?” … Yes, why do we need colonies? Let’s hear what they’ve got to say.
    The first pupil whose book I opened had a name beginning with B. Bauer. Franz Bauer. There are no A’s in my class, but to balance that there are five B’s. Curious, that—so many B’s in a class of only twenty-six. But two of them are twins. Automatically I ran down the list of names in my register, to discover again that the B’s are no distance from the S’s. There are four S’s, three M’s, two each beginningwith E, G, L, and R, but only one to represent F, H, N, T, W, and Z. Names beginning with A, C, D, I, O, P, Q, U, V, X, Y do not figure on my list.
    Now, Franz Bauer, why do we need colonies?
    “We need colonies,” he had written, “because we need numerous raw materials; without raw materials we cannot keep our home industries working at high pressure. This would have disastrous consequences: our workmen, here at home, would once more be without work.” Quite true, my dear Bauer. “The workers are not the only party concerned: the whole of the nation is involved. The workers are ultimately a part of that whole.”
    Well, ultimately, that’s a great discovery, isn’t it, I thought. And it occurred to me at that moment how often to-day the most ancient platitudes are disguised as up-to-the-minute slogans! Or have they always been?
    I don’t know.
    But I knew I’d got to get on with my task of correcting twenty-six essays—essays packed with false theories and distorted conclusions. Wouldn’t it be nice for us if the very meaning of words like “false” and “distorted” were unknown to us—but there, they are only too familiar, and they go strolling arm in arm and singing their vain lays.
    I must be careful: I’m a State employé. It wouldn’t do for me to venture the tiniest criticism. Even if silence irks me—what good could one man do? He must keep his anger to himself. I mustn’t lose my temper.
    Get on with your correcting. You want to go to the cinema to-night.
    Well, what’s this that N’s written? I found myselfreading:“All niggers are dirty, cunning, and contemptible.” What rubbish! Cross it out.
    I was on the point of writing in the margin, “An unsound generalization,” when I pulled myself up. Hadn’t I recently heard this very