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SKIPPY BEDELLE
By Owen Johnson
_Lawrenceville Stories_
THE PRODIGIOUS HICKEY
THE VARMINT
THE TENNESSEE SHAD
SKIPPY BEDELLE
* * * * *
STOVER AT YALE
THE WASTED GENERATION
BLUE BLOOD
CHILDREN OF DIVORCE
[Illustration: They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of
their grief. FRONTISPIECE. _See page 279_]
SKIPPY BEDELLE
HIS SENTIMENTAL PROGRESS FROM
THE URCHIN TO THE COMPLETE
MAN OF THE WORLD
BY
OWEN JOHNSON
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ERNEST FUHR
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1937
_Copyright, 1922_,
BY OWEN JOHNSON.
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
FOR AULD LANG SYNE
PREFACE
LIKEWISE A DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES
Until the first great disillusions of his youth, the Bedelle Foot
Regulator and the Mosquito-Proof Socks, had brought a new sentimental
need of consolation and understanding, Skippy Bedelle's opinion of the
feminine sex had been decidedly monastic. During the first twenty-five
years of their existence, he regarded them as unmitigated nuisances, and
pondering on them, he often wondered at the hidden purposes of the
Creator. Later they might possibly serve some purpose by marrying and
adding to the world's supply of boys. In a further progress, a sort of
penitential progress, they became more valuable members of society, as
maiden aunts who tipped you on the quiet, and grandmothers who mitigated
parental severity and knew the exquisite art of ginger snaps, crisp and
brown.
But before the skirted animal, which resembled but was quite unlike a
man, had atoned for the error of her birth, Skippy refused to take her
seriously. There were boys even younger than he who wore girls' jewelry,
who wrote and received what were called "mash notes," and who flaunted
these sentimentalities openly. He knew such incomprehensible males did
exist. There were three on his block and he had thrashed them all
soundly and been thrashed for having thrashed them, which of course
convinced him in his biblical estimate that women were created for the
confusion of man.
Skippy's prejudice was of long root. From an early age he had been
afflicted with sisters; one older and one younger, and he could find no
mitigating circumstances between the sister who could hit you and could
not be hit back, who never romped without pretending to howl, and the
sister who put you at your ease when you had tripped over the parlor
rug, by asking publicly:
"John, have you washed _behind_ your ears?"
The thought of girls was inalienably connected in his memory with
unnecessary washing up; with boring parties; with stiff collars; with
unending polishing of shoes; humiliating walks down the avenue,
stammering, idiotic phrases, while from every window the eyes of
malicious friends were set in mockery. Girls never slid down the
banisters or fell out of apple trees, or snapped garter snakes, or
raised white mice or collected splinters coasting down the icehouse
roof. Girls were always spruced up and shining; always covered with pink
ribbons and waiting for callers; always dressing and undressing; always
kissing their worst enemies in public instead of giving them a dig in
the ribs or treading on their toes and whispering under their breath:
"Wait till I catch you outside; I'll tear the hide off er yer!"
Girls spoiled vacations. It was on account of girls, to give them
something to do, that dancing schools were invented; that pews in
churches were stiff and uncomfortable; that ministers stormed and
threatened until the hour hand had gone its round. In a word, wherever
life was drab, or stiff, or formal, wherever prohibitions intervened to
check the young impulse, wherever the policing principle showed itself,
at the bottom somewhere the feminine sex must be the cause.
Gradually, of course, some mitigation came to this inveterate contempt;
gradually he did begin to distinguish between girls as such and women.
He saw that some such line of demarcation must be drawn but it was still
confused and hazy. Later on it was undoubtedly true that woman must play
some part in a man's life; this much he gathered from novels and the
ways of those giants to his imagination, the great Turkey Reiter and
Charlie de Soto.
Undoubtedly in the long process of evolution from the clam to the
stripling, morality was the contribution of the imitative monkey period
each boy passes as he merges towards perfect manhood. A thousand
supplications, commandings, and exhortations cannot accomplish what the
spectacle of a Turkey Reiter or a Charlie de Soto or a Dink Stover
instantly achieves in its casual Olympic passing. Such, with all due
respect to the efforts of secondary education, are the real moral forces
of youth.
When therefore Skippy had made choice of his heroes and slavishly set
himself in imitation, he had been unpleasantly disturbed by their
evident friendliness to the sex he despised and after much mental
perturbation perceived that sooner or later he, too, would share the
common lot and actually take pleasure in explaining to something pink
and white, with large rolling eyes and smiling teeth, that the game of
baseball is played with a ball and a bat and that the fielder and not
the batter is chasing the ball, that the difference between baseball and
football is that a baseball hurts the hands and a football hurts the
foot.
Some day when he grew to be Captain of the Eleven like Dink Stover
undoubtedly he would condescend to be gazed at and flattered and
fondled. If Dink Stover could stand the way Tough McCarthy's sister hung
on his arm and flirted openly before the whole school--why of course in
permitting such a display of affection Dink Stover was right, for Dink
Stover could do no wrong. Some day, then, like his hero, he would
condescend to be adored. Some day his turn would come as they sang at
the immortal Weber and Fields:
"For I must love some one,
And it may as well be you."
But all this was in the uncharted future. His attitude toward the sex
was still the attitude of normal soap-defying boyhood, defensive and
belligerent. Yet all this was to change, in the twinkling of an eye, in
one short season. The first great disillusionments of youth were at hand
and woman with the mask of sympathy and understanding waiting to fashion
the man out of the urchin. By what ways, ludicrous and tragically comic,
this sentimental progression was achieved is here set down in reverent
reminiscence.
CONTENTS
PREFACE PAGE
Likewise a Declaration of Principles vii
CHAPTER
I Fate in a Bathtub 1
II Birth of an Idea 7
III Macnooder Opens Vistas 10
IV Loneliness of Great Men 16
V The Golden Shower 21
VI Methods of a Financier 26
VII Tragedy 37
VIII When Friends Prove False 40
IX Snorky as a Lady-Killer 51
X Love Lightly Considered 59
XI The Demon of Jealousy 62
XII All's Well That Ends Well 70
XIII A Woman of the World 74
XIV The Plot Against the Mosquito 83
XV The Tennessee Shad Suspects 94
XVI Experiments in Fragrance 99
XVII Soap and Sentiment 110
XVIII Love Comes Like the Measles 118
XIX The Urchin Begins to Bloom 127
XX The Heart of a Brunette 135
XXI Worldly Wisdom of Skippy Bedelle 145
XXII Girls as an Epidemic 151
XXIII The Blonde of the Species 160
XXIV Result of a Brother's Advice 169
XXV Antics of a Talking Machine 175
XXVI Containing Some High Melodrama 183
XXVII Hickey in a Deadly Role 194
XXVIII Sitting It Out 200
XXIX Dead Game Sports 206
XXX Experiments in a Dress Suit 214
XXXI Shirt Studs as Cupid's Messenger 222
XXXII Living up to an Angel 230
XXXIII Sudden Interest in the Bible 242
XXXIV The Way of the Transgressor 248
XXXV The Scalp Hunter 257
XXXVI Splashing With Your Toes 275
XXXVII Skippy Retires With His Scalp 279
XXXVIII The Philosophical Attitude 289
XXXIX Love Plus Hippo 305
XL Reality Minus Hippo 312
ILLUSTRATIONS
They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of
their grief _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges 4
"Good gracious!" cried Miss Dabtree with an impetuous
lunge towards the point of attack 78
"Really, Jack, I'm beginning to suspect you're an old
hand." 140
He balanced carefully, stretched out one arm to encircle
an imaginary waist 172
The partner of his arms, escaping, rolled over towards
Tootsie 182
SKIPPY BEDELLE
CHAPTER I
FATE IN A BATHTUB
THERE comes a moment when without warning boy and puppy instantaneously
pass into the consciousness of manhood. With the young canine it comes
with the first deep-throated defiance of the intruder, the instinct that
the wriggling, fawning days are over and that the moment to attack and
accept attack has arrived. With the human puppy the change is more
elusive. To some it comes with the first clinging splendor of long
trousers, to others with the first hopeless love, when at the tragic age
of fifteen the world, fate and the disparity of ages intervene. But
usually this transformation, all in the twinkling of an eye, from the
hungry slouch of boyhood into the stern and brooding adolescence, comes
with the discovery of a controlling idea. Without any apparent cause,
some illuminating purpose descends on the imagination, the future opens,
and in the vision of a future Napoleon, a P. T. Barnum, a millionaire or
a predestined genius the man emerges.
When Skippy Bedelle at the age of fifteen years and three months, in the
warmth of early Spring, rambled across the green stretches to his
appointed rendezvous with Compulsory Bath, he went as a puppy sidles to
an undetermined purpose, with a skipping, broken motion, occasionally
halting for an extra hitch at the long undisciplined trousers. A cap
rode on the straw-colored shock of hair which hung like weeds over the
freckled, sharp nose and the wide and famished mouth. Once the idea
occurred to him to turn a cartwheel, and he promptly landed sprawling on
his back, picked himself up, skipped forward a dozen steps, stooped to
tighten a shoe lace and arrived breathlessly before Doc Cubberly, who
was eyeing him, watch in hand.
Thirty seconds later he was contemplating the tips of his toes from the
warm and delicious water, yielding to the relaxing ecstasy of pleasant
day dreams. He had no quarrel with water as such, though from principle
and to remain regular he rebelled against the element of compulsion, but
water, particularly warm water, brought him a quickening of the
imagination.
Now between water as such and bath, particularly compulsory bath, is all
the difference between the blue freedom of the sky and the allotted
breathing space which is enclosed in a cage. There was something
peculiarly humiliating and servile in being forced to soap and water
three times a week under penalty of having your name read out before a
tittering schoolroom--_Absent from Bath!_ It vaguely recalled medieval
days and such abominations as the inspection of ears and the prying
intrusion of governesses!
Skippy was aware of all this and publicly voiced his indignation at the
despotic practice. To have done otherwise would have been to draw down a
storm of ridicule. There are certain traditions in school life as firmly
established as the doctrine of infant damnation in the good old days of
theology. Secretly, however, Skippy adored the first warm contact of the
tentative toes, the slow ecstasy of the mounting ripple over the sinking
body and the long, drowsy languor of complete submersion. It was the
apotheosis of happiness when all the aches and vexations of the day
disappeared in a narcotic reverie, when he could forget the scorn of the
Roman, flunking him; the jibes of Slugger Jones, the rigorous discipline
of Turkey Reiter and the base ingratitude of Dennis de Brian de Boru
Finnegan, who had refused him the price of a jigger, with pockets that
bulged with the silver he had loaned him.
"Well, I'll be jiggswiggered!"
Skippy looked up hastily to perceive the unwashed features of Slops
Barnett peering over the partition in set disapproval.
"Hello, Slops!"
[Illustration: Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges. _Page
4_]
"What are you doing that for?"
"Doing what?"
"Getting into it," said Slops in an angry whisper. "You're a nice one,
you are!"
Slops' method of rebellion, which antedated the hunger strike, was to
submit to a superior authority so far as outward appearances required.
But once safely behind a locked door, he employed the minimum of ten
minutes in simulating the bathing process by immense disturbances in the
bathtub, produced without recourse to disrobing processes, while
gleefully chanting:
"Mother may I go out to swim?
Yes, my darling daughter.
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb
But don't go near the water!
Don't go near, don't go near, don't go near the water!"
Publicly Skippy stood pledged to this uncompromising defiance of the
Powers That Be, so with Slops Barnett's accusing glance on him, he
answered hastily:
"I caught an awful cold and got to steam it out!"
"Faker!"
"Honest, Slops."
At this moment a dripping sponge came spinning through the air and
struck the young irreconcilable squarely between the shoulders.
"If Pee-wee Davis threw that sponge I'll skin him alive," announced
Slops wrathfully. Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges.
Towels, like dripping comets, passed and re-passed, while Doc Cubberly
came hobbling in, threatening, imploring and dodging stray missiles.
Skippy, safe below the surface, watched this bombardment swing over
head, die out and silence return. One by one his fellow prisoners
emerged, vociferous, hilarious, and passed moist and voicing
imprecations into the outer region. Still Skippy continued gorgeously to
steam and doze.
Then a sharp rat-tat-tat on the door.
"Mr. Bedelle?"
"Hello, Doc!"
"Time's up."
"All right, almost dressed. Coming fast."
The crucial moment had arrived, the tragic end to all happiness below,
that inevitable moment when he must, by some supreme exercise of the
will, rise out of this blissful warmth and stretch a reluctant arm
through the chilly air to let in the cold water. End of dreams and chill
return of reality! He temporized. A second time Doc Cubberly's sliding
step arrived.
"Mr. Bedelle--Mr. Bee-delle!"
"Just buttoning on my collar, Doc!"
For the hundredth time, one foot slowly emerged and five over-civilized
toes sought in vain to turn the round faucet labeled "Cold." A hundred,
yes a thousand times, he had attempted the apelike expedient before the
final mental determination to rise out of the warm spell into the frigid
air.
"Gee, if I could only turn that with my foot," he said. "Lord, what a
cinch that would be!"
He tried a last ineffectual time, jerked up precipitately, shot out his
arm, let in the cold water and dodged back below the surface.