SUCH demoniac attributes as Mr. Andy Dunne might possess lurked in the
background on the occasion of Darcy’s first visit. Smothering her
misgivings, the girl had mounted the steps of the old-fashioned house
just off Sixth Avenue, undistinguished by any sign or symbol of the
mystic activities within, and presented Gloria’s letter. Mr. Dunne
revealed himself as a taciturn gentleman in funereal trousers and a
blue sweater, who suggested facially an athletic monk of reserved and
misanthropic tendency. He led her into a severely business-like office
sparsely furnished with a desk and two hard and muscular-looking
chairs, with liberal wall ornamentations of the championship Baltimore
“Orioles” (“A. Dunne, 2d b.” in clear script on the frame), pictures of
Mr. Dunne and other worthies in sundry impressive and hostile postures,
and a large photograph signed, with a noble flourish, “Yours truly,
John L. Sullivan.” It was the crowning glory of Mr. Dunne’s
professional career that he had trained the “Big Feller” for his final
championship fight.
Having perused his former pupil’s brief epistle, Mr. Dunne cast an
appraising glance over the neophyte.
“Full course?” he inquired.
“Yes, please.”
“How long?”
“Six months.”
The girl produced a roll of bills and laid them on the desk. Mr. Dunne
counted them twice. With a stony face and in a highly correct hand he
made out a receipt.
“Six months. Paid in advance,” he stated. “D’je meanter pay it all?”
“Y-y-yes. Isn’t it usual?” queried Darcy, wondering whether she was
shattering some conventionality of this unknown world.
“Nope. Three’s usual. What’s the big idea?”
“Gloria—that is Miss Greene told me to pay it all in advance because if
I didn’t I might get tired of it and back out. But I shan’t.”
From between Mr. Dunne’s hard-set lips issued a vowel-less monosyllable
such as might be enunciated by a contemplative bulldog engaged in
self-communion.
“Grmph!” said Mr. Dunne, which, Darcy decided, might mean much or
little. “Friend o’ Miss Greene’s?” he inquired after a pause. “Yes.”
“_Some_ lady!” said Mr. Dunne with an approach to enthusiasm which
Darcy was never thereafter to experience from his repressive spirit,
save only when he spoke of the “Big Feller.”
“Isn’t she wonderful!” acquiesced Darcy. Mr. Dunne rubbed his lower lip
with a reminiscent and almost romantic gleam in his heavy-browed eyes,
and the girl with difficulty suppressed a query as to whether that was
the spot whereon Gloria had landed her triumphant left. Emerging from
his reverie he issued his first direction. “Stannup, please.”
Darcy rose and stood, consciously loppish, while the trainer
circumnavigated her twice.
“Grmph!” he grunted. “When yah wanna begin?”
“At once, please.”
“Gotta outfit?”
“No.”
“Gittit.” He thrust a typed list into her hand. “How much you weigh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yah don’t _know?_”
“Somewhere about a hundred and fifty, I suppose.”
“Yah _suppose_. Grmph!” The exclamation was replete with contempt.
“Come into the shop.”
She followed him into a big airy room flooded with overhead light, and
filled with all sorts of mechanism. Obedient to a gesture she stepped
on the scales. Mr. Dunne busied himself with a careful adjustment.
“You’ll strip a hunner’n fifty-two,” he declared.
Darcy vaguely felt as if she were being accused of murder. She felt
even worse when the iron-faced Mr. Dunne made an entry in a little
notebook.
“Will I?” she said faintly.
“Not long,” retorted the trainer.
He strode across the room and set foot upon a huge, ungainly leather
ball. It seemed but the merest touch that he gave. Nevertheless the
ball left that spot hurriedly, rolled across to Darcy and encountered
her shins with an impact that all but crumpled her flabby legs beneath
her.
“Know what that is?” demanded the trainer.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Medicine-ball. Little pill. You’ll _like_ the little pill.”
Prophetic voices within Darcy told her that this was improbable: but
she mildly assented. The pulley-weights were next called to her
attention and identified.
“What do I do with them?” she inquired with a proper show of interest.
“Pull ’em up.”
“I see. And then what?”
“Let ’em down.”
It seemed to Darcy a profitless procedure, but she wisely refrained
from saying so, and was glad that she did when Mr. Dunne added in a
tone which emphasized the importance of the transaction:
“A coupla hundred times.”
Subsequently the neophyte was introduced to the dumb-bells, the
Indian-clubs, the rings, the hand-ball court, the rowing-machine—she
earned a glance of contempt by asking where it rowed to—the
punching-bag, which she disliked at sight, the finger-grip roller, the
stationary bicycle (which also got you nowhere), the boxing-gloves, and
a further bewildering but on the whole inspiriting array of machines
for making one strong, happy, beautiful, and healthy to order.
Somewhere in the girl’s consciousness lurked a suspicion that the
apparatus couldn’t be expected to do all the work: that there were
patient and perhaps strenuous endeavors expected of the operator. But
of the real rigors of the awaiting fate she had but the faintest
glimmer.
As she was leaving, a door bumped violently open and there appeared in
the “shop” a horrific female figure. It was that of a fat blonde with
four sweaters on. Her cheeks were puffy red, her eyes jutted poppily
from the sockets, and her jowls dripped. As a slave, treading the
unending grind of the mill, the apparition set herself to trot heavily
around the circumference of the room. And as she ran she blubbered.
“Oh, poor thing!” cried Darcy under her breath. “What’s the matter with
her?”
“Nothin’,” said Mr. Dunne indifferently.
“But there must be something,” insisted the newcomer aghast.
“Fat,” vouchsafed Mr. Dunne. “They mostly take it hard—at the start,”
he condescended to add. “She’s only been at it a month.”
A month! Darcy’s heart sank within her. She began to see why Gloria had
insisted on a binding prepayment. Did Gloria, splendid, vigorous
Gloria, have to go through that stage? Was this the inevitable
purgatory through which all flesh must pass to reach the goal? Could
she, Darcy, conscious of flaccidity of body and spirit, endure—
“Tomorra at three,” cut in Mr. Dunne’s brusque tones.
Impersonal and coldly business-like though Andy Dunne might appear to
the apprehensive novice, he was an artist in his line, and took a
conscientious interest in his clients. Inspired thereby, he called up
Gloria Greene and requested information.
“Spoiled child,” was the diagnosis which he received over the’phone.
“Fool parents?” he inquired.
“No.”
“Rich feller?”
“Nothing of that sort.”
“What’s spoilt her, then?”
“She’s spoilt herself.”
“That’s bad.”
“But she doesn’t know it.”
“That’s worse.”
“So I’ve sent her to you, Andy.” And Gloria outlined her hopeful
programme for Darcy.
“Grmph!” snorted the trainer. “Will she stand the gaff, d’ yah think?”
“She’ll have to,” chuckled Gloria. “If she doesn’t, let me know. I’ve
got a hold over her.”
The mere process of purchasing has an inspiriting effect upon the
feminine psychology. By the time Darcy had acquired her simple
gymnasium outfit, her fears were forgotten in optimism. With such
appropriate clothes the experiment must be a success! Proudly she
arrayed herself in them, upon arrival at Mr. Andy Dunne’s academy at
the hour set; the close-fitting, rather scratchy tights, the scant and
skirtless trousers, the light canvas shoes, the warmly enveloping
sweater, and the rubber cap to keep her hair from interfering with her
exertions. Thus appareled, Darcy quite esteemed herself as an athlete.
She could already feel her muscular potentialities developing beneath
the rough, stimulant cloth. She thought lightly of the various
apparatus awaiting her in the “shop”; playthings of her coming prowess.
She would show Mr. Andy Dunne what an apt and earnest devotee of the
vigorous life could achieve. Thus uplifted she went forth with a
confident smile to meet the man who, for weary months, was to fill a
large part of her life.
At sight of her Mr. Dunne, schooled though he was in self-restraint,
barely suppressed a groan of pained surprise. That garb which had so
pleased Darcy, however much it may have been an inspiration to her, was
a revelation to the dismayed eyes of her instructor. To Gloria Greene,
one of the few people with whom he forgot his reticence, he afterwards
made his little plaint.
“If they’re fat, I can sweat ’em. If they’re skinny, I can pad ’em with
muscle. But this squab, she’s fat and skinny _all_ in the wrong
places.”
Half hopeful that he might discover some disabling symptom, he tested
her heart and her breathing. All was normal. He noted her yellowish
eyes, her sallow skin, the beginning of a fold under her chin, the
slackness of her posture.
“How old are yah?” he demanded.
“Just twenty-one.”
“Grmph!” barked Mr. Dunne, in a tone which unflatteringly suggested
surprise, but also relief. “Well we gotta getta work.”
How pleasurable was that hour’s exercise to Darcy! With what delight
did her unforeboding spirit take to the ways of a hardy athleticism!
‘Never could she have imagined it so easy. No sooner was she weary of
one kind of a trial, dumb-bells, Indian-clubs, or pulleys, than, when
her breath began to come short, the watchful instructor stopped her
and, after a rest, set her to something else. Her skin pricked and
glowed beneath the close but unrestricting suit. Little drops of
moisture came out on her face and were gayly brushed away. She could
feel herself breathing deeper, her blood running faster and fuller in
her veins, her muscles suppling along the bones. She hurled the
medicine-ball with fervor. She attacked the punch-ing-bag with
ferocity. She swung at the elusive little hand-ball with a violence
unhampered by any sense of direction. From time to time she threw a
glance, hopefully inviting approval, at the stonily watchful visage of
Mr. Andy Dunne.
The approval did not manifest itself. Darcy, had she but known it, was
going through that schedule of the mildest type known derisively to
Andy’s academy as “the consumptive’s stunt.” At the conclusion of a
trot three times around the room which she conceived herself as
performing with a light and springy step (“like a three-legged goat”
was Mr. Dunne’s mental comparison), that gentleman said, “Nuff,” a word
which later was to rank in his pupil’s consciousness as the one
assuaging thing in an agonized world. The regulation first-day’s-end
catechism then took place.
“How d’yah feel?”
“Fine!”
“’s good! Lame?”
“Not a bit.”
“Yah’ll stiffen up later. Don’t let it bother yah. Hot bath in the
morning.”
“All right.”
“Same time day after tomorra.” He busied himself replacing the deranged
apparatus. “How’s the appetite?” he asked carelessly.
“It hasn’t been so very good.”
“No? Try it on this.”
“Diet for Miss D. Cole,” was typed across the top of a meager-looking
list of edibles and what that young lady would have considered
inedibles, which she found herself conning.
“Is that _all?_” she inquired dismally.
“Take as much as yah want of it,” returned Mr. Dunne generously.
“But—I mean—it doesn’t look very nice.”
“The Big Feller trained on it,” observed the other with an air of
finality. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Why—why—it’s—well—monotonous,” explained the girl. “There isn’t a
sweet thing in it. No cakes. No desserts. Not even ice-cream. Why can’t
I have a little sweets?”
“Because,” answered Mr. Dunne, “yah got creases in your stomach.”
Darcy started. “No! Have I?” she asked, vaguely alarmed as to what
profound digestive catastrophe that might portend.
“Well, haven’t yah? About there—and there—and prob’ly there.” Mr. Dunne
drew an illustrative and stubby forefinger thrice vertically across his
own flat abdomen. “Look to-night and yah’ll see ’em.”
“Oh!” gasped Darcy, turning fiery red, for it is one of our paradoxical
conventions that a young lady may discuss the inside of her stomach
without shame, but not the outside.
Mr. Dunne regarded the blush with disfavor. “Look-a-here,” he said
bluntly. “Yah, needn’t get rattled.”
“But—I—I—didn’t—”
“Cut the school-girl stuff. Yah’r my pupil. I’m yahr trainer. That’s
all there is _to_ it, if we’re going to get along comfortable. Get me?”
“Yes,” said Darcy. “I won’t be silly again. And I’ll try and mind the
diet.”
Vastly to her surprise and gratification, the neophyte arose on the
following morning without severe symptoms of lameness. Here and there
an unsuspected muscle had awakened to life and to mild protest over the
resurrection. But on the whole Darcy felt none the worse for her
experience. She began to surmise that she was one of that physically
blessed class, a born athlete. If beauty, vigor, and health were to be
achieved at no harder a price than this, they were almost like a gift
of the good fairies. The only unusual phenomena she observed as a
result of her introspection were a lack of interest in her food, which
she set down to the discredit of the diet, and a tendency to fall
asleep over her work. She went to bed early that night, quite looking
forward to the morrow’s exercise.
Nature has a stock practical joke which she plays on the physically
negligent when they begin training. Instead of inflicting muscular
remorse on the morning after, she lets the bill run for another
twenty-four hours and then pounces upon the victim with an astounding
accumulation of painful arrears. Opening her eyes on that second day
after Mr. Dunne’s mild but sufficient schedule—the one muscular
movement she was able to make without acute agony—Darcy became
cognizant that every hinge in her body had rusted. She attempted to
swing her legs out of bed, and stuck, with her feet projecting out from
the clothes, paralyzed and groaning. From the bedroom next to Darcy’s
alcove, Helen Barrett heard the sounds of lamentation and tottered
drowsily in.
“What ever is the matter, Darcy?”
“I can’t get up” moaned the victim.
“What is it? Are you ill?”
“No! No! I’m all right. Only—”
“Get your legs back in bed.” The kindly Helen thrust back the
protruding limbs, thereby wringing from the sufferer a muffled shriek
which brought Maud Raines to the scene.
“It’s rheumatism, I think,” explained Helen to the newcomer. “Or else
paralysis.”
“It isn’t,” denied Darcy indignantly.
“What is it, then?”
Racked by all manner of darting pains and convulsive cramps, Darcy
began the cautious process of emerging from bed. “Do be good—ugh!” she
implored. “And don’t—ooch!—ask questions—and draw me a boiling hot
bath—ow-w-w!—and help me into it—oh-h-h-h—_dear!_”
Greatly wondering they followed the sufferer’s directions, got her duly
en-tubbed, and ensconced themselves outside the door, which they left
carefully ajar for explanations. All they got for this maneuver was an
avowal of the bather’s firm intention of spending the rest of the day
in the mollifying water.
“If you want to be really nice,” she added, “you might bring my coffee
and rolls to me here.”
“Well, really!” said Maud indignantly, for this was a reversal of the
normal order of things in Bachelor-Girls’ Hall. As the homely member of
an otherwise attractive trio, Darcy had been, by common consent,
constituted the meek and unprotesting servitor of the other two. Thus
do relics of Orientalism persist among the most independent race of
women known to history.
Darcy accepted the rebuff. “It doesn’t matter,” said she, with a quaver
of self-pity. “I can’t have coffee. I can’t have hot rolls. I can’t
have anything.”
Her two mates exchanged glances. “Darcy, you’ve got to see a doctor.”
“I haven’t! I won’t!”
“But if you can’t move and can’t eat—”
“I’m much better now. Really I am,” declared the other, alarmed at the
threat of a physician, who might suspect the truth and give her away to
the others. “I’m going to dress.” Which she did, at the price of untold
pangs. Breakfast passed in a succession of questioning silences and
suspicious glances, but Darcy guarded her tongue. To reveal the facts
and what lay behind them would be only to invite discouragement and
dissuasion if not actual ridicule. After the frugal and tasteless
ordeal of hominy without sugar, followed by one egg without butter, she
limped into the front room and set herself doggedly to the elaboration
of a new design for B. Riegel & Sons. Notwithstanding the legacy, she
could not afford to neglect the economic side of life whilst fostering
the physical. Her special course in the development of charm, via the
muscle-and-sinew route, she perceived, was going to take longer than
she had foreseen. Already she felt that the schedule ought to be
radically relaxed. Her unfitness to take the lesson set for that
afternoon was obvious. Next week, perhaps—’though, on the whole, she
inclined to the belief that she should have about ten days to
recuperate.
She would write to Mr. Dunne and explain. No; she would telephone him.
Better still, she would go up to the Academy of Tortures in person and
exhibit to the proprietor’s remorseful eyes the piteous wreck which he
had made of her blithe young girlhood.
She went. Mr. Andy Dunne regarded the piteous wreck without outward and
visible signs of distress.
“Yah got five minutes,” he remarked emotionlessly, glancing at the
clock.
“I can’t possibly go on to-day,” said Darcy firmly.
“No?”
“Every bone in my body creaks. I haven’t got a muscle that isn’t sore.
I ache in places that I didn’t even know I had. Why, Mr. Dunne,” she
declared impressively, as a conclusion to the painful inventory, “if I
tried to go through those exercises again to-day, I’d die!”
“Grmph!” said Mr. Dunne, indicating that he was unimpressed.
“I c-c-c-can’t do it and I won’t!” said Darcy, like a very naughty
child.
“Yah paid me three hundr’n sixty dollars, didn’t yah?”
“Yes,” replied Darcy, her heart sinking, at the recollection of the sum
which she had invested in assorted agonies.
“Did yah think that was going to buy yah what yah’r after?”
Darcy gulped dismally.
“It ain’t. Money can’t buy it. Yah gotta have gu—grit.” Mr. Dunne
achieved the timely amendment in the middle of the stronger
qualification.
Darcy’s mind went back to Gloria Greene’s preachment upon the text of
“grit”: “You don’t know what the word means, yet.” Apparently she was
in a fair way to find out.
“Two minutes gone,” announced the trainer’s inexorable voice.
How she did it she never knew. But under impulsion of the sterner will,
she got into her gymnasium suit and was on the floor only three minutes
past the hour. The apparatus which she had at first encountered with so
much interest and curiosity now had a sinister effect of lying in wait
like the implements of a dentist’s office. She speculated, with a
shrinking of her whole frame, upon which one would be selected as the
agency of the initial agony. Giving them not so much as a look, Mr.
Andy Dunne led her to a large, rough mat and bade her stretch out on
her back.
“Lift the left foot in the air,” he directed.
Darcy did so, with caution.
“Higher!” said Mr. Dunne.
“Oo-yee!” lamented Darcy.
“Back. Lift the right foot in the air.”
Darcy obeyed without enthusiasm.
“Higher!” said Mr. Dunne.
“Ow-wow!” mourned Darcy.
“Back. Lift both feet in the air.”
“I can’t!” said Darcy.
“Yah gotta!” said Mr. Dunne.
Two wavering, quivering legs rose slowly from the mat, attained an
angle of forty-five degrees, and dropped back to earth with a thud.
Their owner had been forcibly reminded of the three creases in her
stomach by the fact that they had unanimously set to writhing and
grinding upon each other in fiery convolutions of protest, resultant
upon the unwonted angle of the legs.
“Higher!” commanded the pitiless Mr. Dunne.
“Can’t!”
“Gotta!”
With a spasmodic heave, the victim attained perhaps fifty degrees of
elevation, and straightened out, gasping. Next her instructor had her
sit up erect from a flat position, without aid from hands or elbows,
whereat all the muscles in her back, thighs, and abdomen, hitherto
unawakened, roused themselves and yelled in chorus. Then he had her
repeat the whole devastating process from the first before he spoke the
word of reprieve.
“Nuff!”
Darcy rolled over on her face and lay panting. “How d’ yah feel?”
“Awful!” gasped Darcy.
“Still a bit stiff?”
“A bit! Oh-h-h-h!”
“Then we’ll do it all again,” said Mr. Dunne cheerfully. “Nothin’ like
light exercise to loosen up the human frame.”
For that “light” Darcy could cheerfully have slain him. Nobody since
the world began, she felt convinced, neither gladiator of the classic
arena nor the mighty John L. himself, had ever undergone such a
fearsome grilling and lived. And now there was more to come. Over the
twistings and turnings, the arm-flexures, the hoppings and skippings,
the tingling of the outraged muscles, the panting of the overtaxed
lungs, let us draw a kindly curtain.
When the horrid hour was over, Darcy in her cold shower felt numb.
Whether she could ever manage to get home on her own disjointed feet
seemed doubtful. But she did. She went to bed at eight o’clock that
night, having eaten almost nothing, in the firm conviction that she
never would be able to get up in the morning without help, and probably
not with it!
Sleep such as she had not known in years submerged her. Roused late by
her companions, she moved first an arm, then a leg, tentatively. No
penalty attached to the experiment. With a low, anticipatory groan she
sat up slowly in bed. The groan was a case of crying before she was
hurt. She began to feel herself cautiously all over. Her skin was a
little tender to the touch, and she noted with interest that the blood
ran impetuously to whatever spot on the surface her exploring fingers
pressed. But of that crippling lameness, that feeling of the whole
bodily mechanism being racked and rusted, there remained only a trace.
In its place was left a new variety of pang which Darcy pleasantly
identified. She was ravenously hungry.
Maud Raines observed to Helen Barrett after breakfast that any one who
could bolt plain oatmeal the way Darcy did must have the appetite of a
pig, and no wonder she was fat and slobby. But Andy Dunne, calling up
Gloria to report progress, thus delivered his opinion:
“You know that squab you sent me, Miss Greene?”
“Yes.”
“She wanted to quit.”
“No! Did she do it?”
“I bluffed her out of it. And say, Miss Greene!”
“Yes, Andy.”
“There may be something to that kid.”
“Glad you think so.”
Said Andy Dunne, expert on the human race slowly, consideringly, and
more prophetically than he knew:
“I kinda think there’s fighting stuff some-wheres under that fat.”