Hanover, 1904
On April 1, 1904, Gorgis Cornelius Gustavius Burden Squeers,
Doctor of Divinity (purchased for less than $2.00), celebrated his eighteenth
birthday in the company of all his friends. In other words, he celebrated
alone. Yet, that was okay by him. Because now, he was a man of some means. Here
is how he got his real financial start.
Lil Gorgeous, as his mother always called him, much to his
annoyance, had inherited a little too much of his father’s psychological DNA. That
pompous and oily Most Reverend Cornelius Augustus Ramses Squeers, DD, was a
natural born liar, cheater and overall mediocrity. There was no devious scheme
for separating good folk from their money that Cornelius was below attempting.
There was no honour, however insignificant or dubious, he did not wish to
devour or purchase.
The Reverend Cornelius covered up his inadequacies by the
skillful invention of a false persona which he acted out with all the art and
deception of a well practiced sociopath. Lil Gorgeous, by the age of twelve,
had learned to out-Squeers the senior Squeers, whose love and attention for his
only son were meted out in quantities so small, they could not have been
discovered with the best of microscopes.
Lil Gorgeous applied himself to sociopathy with all the zeal
of a true believer. As soon as he could walk, he would deliberately knock over
his mother’s prized vases. At age four, he was already stealing coins from her
purse. He secretly urinated in his father’s morning apple juice once a week. By
age eight, he was supplementing his meagre allowance with tribute from his
frightened peers. There was nothing he could not take down by burning it,
whether it be a stray dog or a perfectly good woodshed. It pained him to say
anything which remotely resembled the truth. He thrived on a diet of lies and
malice. He was unwelcome in every home in Cauliflower Corners, even though he
had never been caught red handed in anything he perpetrated.
At the age of nineteen,
Gorgis could see clearly that he had no future in his hometown. Armed with a
Doctor of Divinity bought from the same mail order degree mill as the one his
father had used to acquire his own bogus credentials, Gorgis set his sights on
the bigger game to be fleeced in Hanover, the County Seat located thirty two miles
to the south. Hanover was just far enough away from Cauliflower Corners that
the stench of his homegrown reputation had not yet travelled that far.
After installing himself in a boarding house whose guests’
belongings looked promising, Gorgis set about scouring the town for further opportunity.
By ingratiating himself with the right people, he found out soon that what was
lacking in Hanover was a finishing school for young men and women of ambition
and breeding who were not quite ready to conquer the wider world. The
University of Toronto lay beckoning a few hundred miles away, but parents were
reluctant to send their children off to the great metropolis without a little
worldly preparation. Enter Gorgis Cornelius Gustavius Burden Squeers and his
fantasy resume: Dance Master, Rhetorician and Logician, Philosopher, Expert in
Manners and Elocution, Doctor of Divinity, Pro Tem Lecturer in Metaphysics at
the University of Toronto.
Gorgis knew that the greater the exaggeration, the less
likely the questioning to follow. No one in Hanover thought to investigate his
claims to excellence in so many fields of human endeavour. “We have a prodigy
here” the town folk surmised. “He’s
practically one us.” "Hometown boy making good.” “How fortunate we are to
have such genius in our presence”. All these tropes were happily repeated by the
members of the Exalted Daughters of the Grand Empire at every opportunity. The
stamps of approval from every local club and organization competed with each
other to be the next imprimatur to grace Dr. Gorgis Squeers’ perfection. The
path to fortune was now being paved. Gorgis, in his magnanimity, decided that his
boarding house roommates would not be overly unburdened of their belongings,
given his newfound road to potential riches.
Our self-contented sociopath lost no time in signing up the
lambs whose places in his new school could only be guaranteed with a deposit,
in cash, of the full tuition for the year: a princely sum of $100, non-refundable.
In the first week of inscription, thirteen of Hanover’s finest youths were
enrolled. Two large spaces above the Imperial Bank were rented out for a year
to serve as classrooms, with the rent payable on the last day of the lease.
On August 7, 1904, Kan-O-Korn Collegiate and School of
Aristotelian Excellence was incorporated. Its mission, vision, core values and
a strategic plan, consisting mostly of fluff and, to a lesser degree, puff,
were printed on beautiful glossy paper and handed out personally to the easily
deceived. The document was used for three purposes. The first purpose was to
attract a “teacher” possessing the slightest hint of a passing acquaintance
with any knowledge, however distantly related, pertaining to the school’s
published curriculum. The second was to attract “financial partners” looking to
invest in a promising venture whose returns would be guaranteed in writing,
subject only to Acts of God. The third purpose was to assuage any fears the
subscribing parents might harbour about the legitimacy of, in Gorgis’ words,
“this most superb educational undertaking”.
Within weeks, investors had forwarded to Dr. Squeers account
over $1500 in start up funds. A
“teacher” whose credentials were never verified simply because they did not
matter, was hired at $11 per week, less a commission to be determined at a
future date. The net weekly teaching stipend would be held in trust by the
school until such time as the “teacher” had proven his abilities in a classroom
setting. In the interim, the “teacher” would be allowed a monthly living
allowance of $15.26.
The doors of Kan-O-Korn Collegiate and School of
Aristotelian Excellence were open for business on September 10, 1904, to much
pomp and circumstance. Doctor Gorgis Cornelius Gustavius Burden Squeers
lavished praise upon everyone he was fleecing. His students were “beacons of
promising erudition and untold future glory”. Their parents were “wise and
forward-looking”. According to a specially created hand flyer, “the good Doctor
Squeers would be sharing with the school’s hired teacher, Master Galicio
Ornest, a paragon of plu-perfected pedagogy, the delivery of a curriculum richly decorated with effusive accolades from
every quarter of the learned world”. In short, the BS was so thick, no one
noticed it. All concerned Hanoverians were so busy congratulating themselves on
the superiority of their good fortune in having such august leaders among them
that they failed to see that Gorgis’ shears were already half-way through their
coats.
The first school year, which ended abruptly on December 25,
1904, was a fabulous success: well, a fabulous success from Gorgis’ point of
view at least. For the whole first semester, he kept his students off-balance
by foisting upon them a potion of gobbledygook so opaque that they were too
embarrassed to admit their inability to grasp the ungraspable. He coupled this
ruse with high marks, designed to appeal to their vanity and to the vanity of
their parents, who were regularly kept abreast of their progeny’s stellar
progress and inevitable admission to the University of Toronto. He kept Master
Galicio Ornest happy by raising his monthly allowance to $15.85 and promising
to lower the commission on his salary to “something below the norm sometime
early in the new year”. He kept his
investors happy by declaring a quarterly dividend of 4% on each investment,
payable monthly, commencing January 1, 1905.
What sealed Doctor Gorgis Cornelius Gustavius Burden
Squeers’ joy was the success of the terrible fire which took down the Imperial
Bank along with Kan-O-Korn Collegiate and School of Aristotelian Excellence in
one fell swoop. With a perfectly calculated amount of kerosene, a slightly open
window and a candle lit to allow for a close Christmas Day reading of the Bible
in the comfort of his quiet classroom, Gorgis was able to set the base for his
early retirement. After he had ensured that his escape route was clear, he
knocked over the candle which landed like a well aimed missile into a small
pool of the volatile gas. He yelled “Fire. Help Fire” over and over as he
clamoured down the stairs to the front entrance. As soon as he saw the first
head appear from one of the houses across the street, he tumbled into a heap in
the middle of the street, his fall cushioned by his new raccoon coat. There he
lay, pretending to have passed out, as the fire raged behind him. Gorgis was
pulled to safety. The town folk did all they could to contain the blaze. They
managed to stop the flames from spreading to the next building, but the bank
and the school were beyond saving.
Gorgis recovered slowly under the care of Dr. Carlson and
his wife. They had moved all his belongings from the boarding house and had set
up, in their own home, a guest room in which the unfortunate schoolmaster could
convalesce. Gorgis was in no hurry to go anywhere. All the tuition fees were
non-refundable. His lease for the school was null and void as of September 10,
1904, because of the fire. Therefore, no money needed ever to be paid on that
account. Due to a well-placed clause in the contract of employment with Galicio
Ornest, he owed him nothing further. The investors would get back none of their
initial outlays because they had agreed to forfeit their funds in the case
where an Act of God should cause the school to close for more than two consecutive
months. It would take at least three
months for Gorgis to even think of getting out of bed to fondle all the monies
he had so meticulously extracted from gullible Hanoverians and, with great
foresight, prudently deposited into the care of a Toronto branch of the First
Regal Bank of The Dominion.
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