_I Become The Panting Champion_
Month after month, through the cycle of the revolving seasons, I went
along deceiving myself, even though I deceived none else, coining new
pleas in extenuation or outright contradictions to meet each new-arising
element of confirmatory proof to a state of case which no unprejudiced
person could fail to acknowledge. The original discoverer of the alibi was
a fat man; indeed, it was named for him--Ali Bi-Ben Adhem, he was, a
friend and companion of the Prophet, and so large that, going into Mecca,
he had to ride on two camels. This fact is historically authenticated. I
looked it up.
In the fall of the year, when I brought last winter's heavy suit out of
the clothes-press and found it now to hug o'ersnugly for comfort, I
cajoled my saner self into accepting a most transparent lie--my figure had
not materially altered through the intervening spring and summer; it was
only that the garments, being fashioned of a shoddy material, had shrunk.
I owned a dress suit which had been form fitting, 'tis true, but none too
close a fit upon me. I had owned it for years; I looked forward to owning
and using it for years to come. I laid it aside for a period during an
abatement in formal social activities; then bringing it forth from its
camphor-ball nest for a special occasion I found I could scarce force my
way down into the trousers, and that the waistcoat buttons could not be
made to meet the buttonholes, and that the coat, after finally I had
struggled into it, bound me as with chains by reason of the pull at
armpits and between the shoulders. I could not get my arms down to my
sides at all. I could only use them flapper fashion.
I felt like a penguin. I imagine I looked a good bit like one too.
But I did not blame myself, who was the real criminal, or the grocer who
was accessory before the fact. I put the fault on the tailor, who was
innocent. Each time I had to let my belt buckle out for another notch in
order that I might breathe I diagnosed the trouble as a touch of what
might be called Harlem flatulency. We lived in a flat then--a nonelevator
flat--and I pretended that climbing three flights of steep stairs was what
developed my abdominal muscles and at the same time made me short of wind.
I coined a new excuse after we had moved to a suburb back of Yonkers.
Frequently I had to run to catch the 5:07 accommodation, because if I
missed it I might have to wait for the 7:05, which was no accommodation. I
would go jamming my way at top speed toward the train gate and on into the
train shed, and when I reached my car I would be 'scaping so emphatically
that the locomotive on up ahead would grow jealous and probably felt as
though it might just as well give up trying to compete in volume of sound
output with a real contender. But I was agile enough for all purposes and
as brisk as any upon my feet. Therein I found my consolation.
Among all my fellow members of the younger Grand Central Station set there
was scarce a one who could start with me at scratch and beat me to a train
just pulling out of the shed; and even though he might have bested me at
sprinting, I had him whipped to a soufflé at panting. In a hundred-yard
dash I could spot anyone of my juniors a dozen pairs of pants and win out
handily. I was the acknowledged all-weights panting champion of the Putnam
division.
[Illustration: TO OBSERVE MR. BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
_Page 45_]
If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was
we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer
for the Putnam Division Country Club--three deep long pants, say,
followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets. But I would have been
elected pants leader without a struggle. My merits were too self-evident
for a contest.
But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and
thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff? I did
not! No, sir, because I was fat--indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond
the peradventure of a doubt, fat--I kept on playing the fat man's game of
mental solitaire. I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that
my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, hence
pants. I cast a pitying eye at other men, deep of girth and purple of
face, waddling down the platform, and as I scudded on past them I would
say to myself that after all there was a tremendous difference between
being obese and being merely well fleshed out. The real reason of course
was that my legs had remained reasonably firm and trim while the torso was
inflating. For I was one who got fat not all over at once but in favored
localities. And I was even as the husband is whose wife is being gossiped
about--the last person in the neighborhood to hear the news.
As though it were yesterday I remember the day and the place and the
attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon me. Two
of us went to Canada on a hunting trip. The last lap of the journey into
camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the woods. The
native who was to be our chief guide met us with our mounts at a way
station far up in the interior of Quebec. He knew my friend--had guided
him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in those parts. Now until
that hour it had never occurred to me that I was anywhere nearly so
bulksome as this friend of mine was. For he indubitably was a person of
vast displacement and augmented gross total tonnage; and in that state of
blindness which denies us the gift to see ourselves as others see us I
never had reckoned myself to be in his class, avoir-dupoisefully
speaking. But as we lined up two abreast alongside the station, with our
camp duffel piled about us, the keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one
side, considered our abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my
companion said as plainly as words, "Well, I see you've brought a spare
set along with you in case of a puncture."
But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless. What he
did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not fetched
along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on. He had a good big
chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he said, which
would have answered my purposes first rate.
I experienced another disillusioning jolt. Could it be that this practiced
woodsman's eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even
heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point was that I
woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who would pluck the
mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely take note of the
beam which we have swallowed crosswise!
Even so, a great light was beginning to percolate to my innermost
consciousness. A grave doubt pestered me through our days of camping there
in the autumnal wilderness. When we had emerged from the woods and had
reached Montreal on the homeward trip I enticed my friend upon a
penny-in-the-slot weighing machine in the Montreal station and I observed
what he weighed; and then when he stepped aside I unostentatiously weighed
myself, and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock; also
with an error, which should have been entered up a long time before that.
Approximately, we were of the same height and in bone structure not
greatly unlike. I had figured that daily tramping after game should have
taken a few folds of superfluous flesh off my frame, and so, no doubt, it
had done. Yet I had pulled the spindle around the face of the dial to a
point which recorded for me a total of sixteen pounds and odd ounces more
than his penny had registered for him.
If he was fat, unmistakably and conclusively fat and he was--what then was
I? In Troy weight--Troy where the hay scales come from--the answer was
written. I was fat as fat, or else the machine had lied. And as between me
and that machine I could pick the liar at the first pick.