HAD Andy Dunne’s surmise been laid before Darcy, it might have brought
sorely needed encouragement to her soul as the regenerative process
went on. True she had presently passed the first crisis which athletic
regimen develops for the untrained, and which is purely muscular. She
no longer swung to and fro, a helpless pendulum, between the agonies of
apprehension and the anguish of action. The steady exercise was telling
in so far as her muscles were concerned; she had still to face the test
of discipline. In this second and sterner crisis, Andy Dunne could help
her but little. It was a question of her own power of will, a will
grown slack and flabby from lack of exercise. Ahead of her loomed, only
dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the
deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is
subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in
the earlier stage, the body had rebelled.
A subject like Gloria Greene, high and fine of spirit, the sage Mr.
Dunne could have eased through the difficult phase by appeals to her
pride and to the sense of partnership which the successful trainer must
establish between himself and his pupil. With Darcy this was
impracticable because Andy Dunne, as he would have admitted with a
regretful grin, was “in wrong.” Darcy enthusiastically hated him.
At first sight she had estimated him as a stern spirit. Through
successive changes that reckoning had been altered to “harsh,” then
“brutal,” and now “Satanic.” Gloria’s judgment of her note of
introduction as “a commutation ticket to Hades, first class,” was amply
borne out.
Professionally Mr. Dunne’s discourse tended ever to the hortatory and
corrective. He was a master of the verbal rowel.
“Keep it up!”
“Again!”
“Ah-h-h, put some punch in it!”
“Yah ain’t _haff_ trying!”
“Go wan! Yah gotta do better’n’at!” And, occasionally, “Rotten!”
Worse still was a manner he had of regarding her with an expression of
mild and regretful wonder whilst giving voice to his bulldoggish
“Grmph!” in a tone indicating only too plainly that never before was
conscientious trainer so bored and afflicted with such an utterly
incompetent, inefficient, and generally hopeless subject as the daily
withering Darcy.
In lighter moments he would regale her with reminiscences of the Big
Feller and his eccentricities in and insubordinations under training,
while Darcy would lie, panting and spent, on the hard floor, wondering
regretfully why the Big Feller hadn’t killed Mr. Dunne when
opportunities must have been so plentiful. Then, just as her labored
breathing would begin to ease, the taskmaster in Mr. Dunne would
awaken, the call “Time” would sound like doom to her ears, and she
would set to it again, arching on her back, rolling on her stomach
(where the three creases were beginning to flatten), yanking at
overweighted pulleys, interminably skipping a loathly rope, standing up
like a dumb ten-pin before the ponderous medicine-ball which Mr. Dunne
hurled at her, punching at an elusive and too often vengeful bag,
rowing an imaginary boat against wind, wave, and every dictate of her
weary body, and finally running silly circles around the room like a
demented cat, until the monitor uttered the one, lone word of pity in
his inquisitorial vocabulary: “Nuff!”
Had all this deep-wrung sweat of brow and soul produced any definable
effect, Darcy could have borne it with a resigned spirit. It didn’t.
Four times a week she went through the hideous grind, and nothing
happened. Each night she went to bed early and after profound sleep had
to get up out of the cuddly warmth into a shudderingly cold bath—and
nothing happened. She gave up the before-dinner cocktail and with it
what little zest she had for her deadly plain diet—and nothing
happened. She denied her sweet tooth so much as one little bite of
candy—oh, but that was a bitter deprivation—and nothing happened. To
her regimen at the gymnasium she added a stint of simple but violent
house exercises on off days—and nothing happened. Life, which she had
supposed, in her first flush of hopeful enthusiasm for the new régime,
would be one grand, sweet song, was, in fact, one petty, sour
discord—wherein nothing happened. This was quite right and logical, had
Darcy but known it. Layers of fat, physical and moral, accumulated
through years of self-coddling, are not worked off in a week or a
month.
There came a day when something did happen. There always does. It was
not of that order of occurrences which can be foreseen by the expert
eye. It seldom is. Andy Dunne, honestly and simply intent on earning
his money, had been unusually exigent. Besides, Darcy had a nail in her
shoe. Besides, Mr. Riegel had been curtly critical of her latest and
most original design as “new-fangled.” Besides, Maud was becoming
satirically curious as to where she was spending so many afternoons.
Besides, it was a rotten day. There was no light on earth or in heaven!
“What’s the use of it all, anyway!” thought Darcy to herself, for
perhaps the fiftieth time, but rather more fervently than before.
As if in exasperation of her agnostic mood, the preceptor, in the
half-time intermission, had suggested not less, but more work!
“Yah’r gettin’ stale,” observed Mr. Dunne, which Darcy thought a
hopeful beginning.
“I feel so,” she said.
“There’s a clock,” Mr. Dunne informed her, “at Fifty-Ninth and Eighth.”
Darcy waited.
“There’s another at a Hundred’n Tenth and Seventh,” pursued the
chronometrical Mr. Dunne, and fell into calculating thought.
Darcy waited again.
“Yah leave Fifty-Ninth at 4.20 p.m.”
“When?”
“Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
“Oh!” said Darcy blankly.
“And yah get to a Hundred’n-Tenth in time to hear that clock strike 5.”
“What! Walk? Nearly three miles in forty minutes?”
“No,” said Mr. Dunne thoughtfully.
“Then, how—”
“Yah’d better run part way, or yah won’t make it on time.”
“You want to kill me!” declared the petulant and self-pitying Darcy.
“Grmph!” said Mr. Dunne.
“Suppose it rains?” put forth Darcy desperately.
“Then yah’ll get wet,” was Mr. Dunne’s reasonable answer.
“And catch my death riding back in the bus.”
“Don’t ride. Walk. I’m giving this to yah for fresh air.”
“But Mr. Dunne—”
“Time!”
It may have been this fresh grievance which lay heavy upon Darcy’s
chest, clogging her breathing and slowing her suppled muscles. She was
conscious of doing less well than usual—and of not caring, either! The
medicine-ball was heavier and more unwieldy than ever. The
punching-bag, instinct with a demoniac vitality, came back at her on a
new schedule and bumped her nose violently, a mortifying incident which
had not occurred since the first week. The despicable little hand-ball,
propelled by her trainer, bounded just a fraction of an inch out of her
straining reach, and when she did hit it, felt as soggy as sand and as
hard as rock and raised stone-bruises on her hands. She even pinched
her thumb in the rowing-machine, which is the zenith of inexpertness.
With every fresh mishap she became more self-piteous and resentful and
reckless. Andy, the Experienced, would have ascribed all this to that
common if obscure phenomenon, an “off day,” familiar to every professor
whether of integral calculus or the high trapeze. Then the dreadful
thing happened, and he revised his opinion.
The last, and therefore worst, five minutes of the grind had come.
Darcy lay on the mat going through the loathed body-and-limb-lifting
while Andy Dunne exhorted her to speed up. “Now the legs. Come on.
Hup!”
Something in Darcy went on strike.
“Can’t,” she said.
“Grmph! What’s matter?”
“Won’t!” said Darcy.
From the corner of a hot and rebellious eye she could see overspreading
her trainer’s face that familiar expression of contemptuous and weary
patience. Anything else she could have stood. But that—that was the
spark that fired the powder. Stooping over, the trainer laid hold, none
too gently, on one inert heel.
Heaven and earth reversed themselves for Mr. Andy Dunne. Also day and
night, for a galaxy of stars appeared and circulated before his mazed
eyes. The walls and the ceiling joined in the whirl, to which an end
was set by the impact of the floor against the back of his head. For
one brief, sweet, romantic moment Andy Dunne was back in the
training-ring with the Big Feller and that venerated and mulish right
had landed one on his jaw. But why, oh, why, should the mighty John L.
thereupon burst into hysterical sobbing? And if it wasn’t the Big
Feller, who was it making those grievous noises?
Mr. Dunne sat up, viewed a huddled, girlish form trying unsuccessfully
to burrow headforemost out of sight in the hard mat, and came to a
realization of the awful fact. With all the force of her newly acquired
leg muscles, the meek Miss Cole had landed a galvanic kick on his
unprotected chin. For a moment he stared in stupefaction. Then he arose
and went quietly forth into his own place, where he sat on a chair and
rubbed his chin and thought, and presently began to chuckle, and kept
it up until the chuckle grew into a laugh which shook his tough frame
more violently than had the unexpected assault.
“Well, I _am_ d——d!” said Mr. Dunne. “The little son-of-a-gun!”
Meanwhile Darcy lay curled up like a quaking armadillo. Probably Andy
Dunne would kill her. She didn’t much care. Life wasn’t worth living,
anyhow. She was through. The one pleasant impression of her whole
disastrous gymnasium experience was the impact of her heel against that
contemptuous chin.
She opened one eye. Andy Dunne was not where he should have landed as
the result of the revolution which he had been performing when he
whirled from her view. She opened the other eye. Andy Dunne was not
anywhere. He had vanished into nothingness.
With all the sensation of a criminal, Darcy rose, dressed, and fled.
She fled straight to Gloria Greene. That industrious person was, as
usual, at work, and as usual found time to hear Darcy’s troubles. What
she heard was gaspy and fragmentary.
“Gloria, I’ve done an _awful_ thing!”
“What? Out with it,” commanded the actress.
“I ki-ki-ki—I can’t tell you,” gulped Darcy. “Mr. Dunne—I mean, I
ki-ki-ki—”
“Yes,” encouraged Gloria. “What awful thing have you done to Andy
Dunne? Kissed him?”
“_No!_ Worse.”
“Oh! You ki-ki-killed him, I suppose,” twinkled Gloria.
“I don’t know. I hope so. I ki-ki-kicked him. I kicked him _good!_”
“Darcy! Where?”
“On the chin.”
“What did he do?”
“Disappeared.”
“Do I understand that you kicked him into microscopical pieces?”
“Don’t laugh at me, Gloria. It’s very, very serious.”
“It sounds so.”
“I’m done with it. Forever.”
“Done with what?”
“The gymnasium. The diet. Andy Dunne. Everything.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
“I am! I _am!_ I yam!” declared Darcy with progressive petulance. “I’ve
been torturing myself for nothing. It hasn’t made a bit of difference.
Look at me!”
Gloria looked and with difficulty concealed a smile of satisfaction.
For, to her expert eyes, there was a difference, a marked difference,
still submerged but obvious, beneath the surface, in movements which,
formerly sluggish, were now brisk and supple, in a clear eye, and a
skin which seemed to fit on the flesh where before it had sagged.
“How did you get up here?” inquired Gloria abruptly.
“Ran.”
“Up the whole four flights? The elevator is working.”
“D——n the elevator!” said the outrageous Darcy.
“A few weeks ago you were damning it because it wouldn’t carry up your
lazy body. Isn’t there a difference now?”
“I don’t care; it isn’t the difference I want. I want to look like
something. Gloria, I’m desperate.”
“No, child. That isn’t despair. It’s temper.”
“It’s not.”
“Go back to Andy’s and work it off.”
“I wont!”
“Very well.” With a sigh for her interrupted task, Gloria selected a
hat, set it carefully upon her splendid hair and pinned it in place.
“You’ll excuse me, won’t you, my dear?” she added in tones which
aroused her visitor’s alarmed suspicions.
“Where are you going? To see Mr. Dunne?”
“Not at all.”
Darcy’s misgivings livened into something like terror.
“Where, then?”
“To see Maud and Helen.”
“What for?”
“To recount to them the authentic and interesting history of Sir
Montrose Veyze, Bart., hand-picked fiancé, of—”
“Gloria! You wouldn’t be so _base!_”
“I would be just that base,” returned the other in the measured tones
of judgment. “But I’ll give you a respite until your next training day.
When is it?”
“Day after to-morrow,” answered Darcy faintly.
“If you aren’t at Andy’s then to answer to the call of time, I’ll tell
the whole thing to the two fiancées with whatever extra details my
imagination can provide.”
Whereupon Darcy burst into tumultuous weeping, declared that she hadn’t
a friend in the world, and didn’t care, anyway, because she wished she
was dead, and went forth of that unsympathetic spot with the air and
expression of one spurning earth’s vanities and deceptions forever.
Being wise in her generation and kind, Gloria knew that the girl would
go back to her martyrdom. So she called up Andy Dunne for a conference,
which concluded with this sage advice from her to him:
“This is the appointed time, Andy. When she comes back, put the screws
on hard. She’ll go through. If she doesn’t, let me know.”
No scapegrace of school, led back from truancy after some especially
nefarious project, ever wore a face of more tremulous abasement than
Miss Darcy Cole, returning to her faithful trainer whom she had kicked
in the jaw. As he entered the gymnasium a strip of court-plaster on the
curve of his chin caught her fascinated attention and for the moment
evicted from her mind the careful apology which she had formulated.
Before she could recapture it, the opportunity was gone. “Time!” barked
Mr. Dunne.
The day’s work was on.
Such an ordeal as Darcy underwent in consequence of Gloria’s advice,
few of Mr. Dunne’s pupils other than professional athletes would have
been called upon to endure, a fact which might have helped her had she
known it. Not knowing it, she won through that violent hour on sheer
grit. At the trainer’s final “Nuff,” she contrived to smile, but she
couldn’t quite manage to walk off the floor. She sat down upon a
convenient medicine-ball and waited for the dimness to clear. A hand
fell on her shoulder and rested there with an indefinable pressure of
fellowship. She looked up to see the taskmaster standing above her.
“Say, kid,” he began. “Yah are a kid, ainche?” he broke off, a little
doubtfully.
“I’m going—on—twenty-two,” panted Darcy.
“Yeh, I’d figure yah about there—now. Well, I’m an old man; old enough
for the father stuff. And I wanta tell yah something. I like yah. D’
yah know why I like yah?”
Darcy, with brightening eye, shook her head.
“Because yah’r game,” said Mr. Andy Dunne.
A voice within Darcy’s heart burst into song. For the first time in her
life she had been praised to the limit of a fellow being’s measure. For
gameness, as she well knew, was the ultimate virtue to the athlete
mind. The Big Feller had been game, even in his downfall; it was that,
over and above all his victories, which had enshrined him in Andy
Dunne’s and thousands of other stout and inexpressive hearts.
Her trainer had paid her his finest compliment.
“Yah’r game,” he repeated. “I dunno exactly what yah’r out after, but
I’m backin’ yah to get it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dunne,” said Darcy gratefully.
“Grmph!” retorted that gentleman. “Cut the Mister. Andy, to you.”
“Thank you, Andy,” said the recipient of the accolade.