CONTAINING SOME HIGH MELODRAMA
THERE are great moments in life when the acquired veneer of society
drops away and human beings revert to type. Tootsie lay down on her back
and kicked her legs in the air, howling with glee. Skippy, disentangling
himself from the bench, rose with slow deliberation. He saw that he
faced a crisis. If Tootsie, now rolling before him in hysterical agony,
ever was allowed to tell such a story as this, there would be no future
for John C. Bedelle but to ship before the mast. Skippy thought hard and
Skippy had the instincts of a diplomat. He decided to begin with a light
conciliatory manner.
"Well, Tootsie, old girl, you've got the goods on me. What's your
price?"
Tootsie's reply was a succession of hysterical gasps that sounded like a
child with the whooping cough laughing over a comic section.
"What's your price?" Skippy repeated more firmly, but striving to
maintain a sickly smile.
"OW! OW! OW!" said Tootsie, holding in her sides.
Skippy began to be alarmed. He thought a moment and then carefully
removed the dressmaker's form and hid it behind a packing-case. But the
sight of Skippy's dancing companion brought forth a fresh attack of
hysterics. Then he had recourse to water and a dripping oily sponge. The
sight of this so affected Tootsie that she rose precipitately and
staggered to a chair. Skippy at once abandoned the sponge and
sympathetically proffered his handkerchief.
"It's goin' to cost me a lot of money," he thought, considering her with
anxiety. He had fifteen dollars stowed away with the intention of adding
it to the cash returns of his approaching birthday and acquiring his
first dress suit. He made a mental surrender and advancing to the
somewhat calmer Tootsie, a third time asked:
"Well, come on! What's your price?"
"Thief!" said Tootsie, all at once remembering her grievance.
"Oh, I say, can't you take a joke?"
"A joke! Wait'll I get even with you, Mr. Smarty!"
"Go easy. Name your terms."
"And I paid you to watch it!" said Tootsie, whose anger began to rise as
her respiration returned.
Skippy mournfully admitted to himself that this had been an unnecessary
aggravation.
"Shucks! You didn't think I was going to keep the money, did you?" he
said, bringing out a dollar bill and tendering it humbly.
Tootsie put the bill from her with the gesture of a tragedy queen, stood
up, straightened her skirt and said:
"Just you wait, thief!"
"What are you going to do?"
"My business."
"You're not going to tell?" said Skippy, who had no doubt of her
intention.
"Oh dear no! Oh no indeed!" said Tootsie, moving to depart.
Skippy sprang ahead, slammed the door, locked it and pocketed the key.
"What good does that do?" said Tootsie disdainfully.
"You'll not leave this room until you swear a solemn oath," said Skippy
desperately.
"All right, I guess I can wait if you can," said Tootsie, settling down.
"But I pity you when Dad gets hold of you--thief!"
Skippy deliberated, resolved on anything short of murder to stifle the
threatening exposure. Sterner methods were necessary. All at once his
eye spied a coil of rope in the corner and he sprang to it with a shout.
"What are you going to do?" said Tootsie wrathfully.
"I am going to tie and gag and leave you to starve," said Skippy,
swinging a lasso.
There was a short and painful tussle in which his necktie was torn to
shreds and he surrendered a certain amount of hair, but at the end of
which, Miss Tootsie, tied hand and foot to a chair, was propped up
against a pillar, while her conqueror proceeded to roll up his
handkerchief with the evident intention of applying a gag.
"You'll like it when the rats come around," he said gloomily.
"Fiddlesticks! You can't scare me," said Tootsie with alarming calm.
"And there are bats too, don't forget the bats that get their claws in
your hair," said Skippy, approaching with the gag, "and not a soul to
hear your cries, you tattle-tale!"
"You'll get the licking of your life," said Tootsie, looking at him
steadily. "Thief!"
"So you won't name your price!" said Skippy, passing behind her and
holding the gag before her eyes.
"Not if you murder me--you thief!"
Skippy again considered.
"She doesn't scare worth a darn," he acknowledged to himself. Instead of
applying the gag he departed to the opposite side, sat down and began to
think. At the end of a long moment he rose and approached her with a
brisk set manner.
"So you're going to tell, are you?"
"You just bet I'm going to tell, you coward!"
"All right, tell then!" He stooped, freed her legs and arms and rose.
"Tell if you've made up your mind to--but God help you if you do.
That's all I have to say."
"You can't scare me," said Tootsie, but already intrigued by the new
plan of action which she divined behind her brother's silence.
"No, but there's some one I can scare!" said Skippy, unlocking the door.
"All right! War to the knife, Miss Tootsie! Remember, though, I warned
you!"
"Who are you threatening now?" said Tootsie, trying to conceal her
anxiety; for long association had engendered a lively respect for the
Skippy imagination.
"I never threaten," said Skippy disdainfully, "but if that red-haired,
knock-kneed, overfed beau of yours ever sets foot on this place again,
he comes in a hearse! And what goes for him, goes for all! Go on and
tell, but you'll have the loneliest summer you've ever had, young lady!"
Five minutes later a treaty of peace was concluded on the basis of
secret understandings secretly arrived at, and Miss Tootsie Bedelle
replaced the dressmaker's figure in the arms of the triumphant diplomat
while the phonograph gave forth the strains of the Washington Post.
* * * * *
Tootsie's terpsichorean assistance was sorely needed. Skippy was not a
natural glider and gliding as Tootsie explained to him was essential in
a ballroom, in polite society at least. Skippy's feet could skip, hop
and jump with the best, but they were not, in any sense of the word,
gliders. The change from the inanimate embrace of the dressmaker's form
to Tootsie's pliant figure, however, worked such miracles that at the
end of twenty minutes' industrious application, Tootsie expressed
herself as astonished and delighted.
Now of course Skippy could have gone for instruction to Dolly Travers,
who was the object of these secret efforts. But that was not the Skippy
way. He had always shunned any exhibition of inferiority. Whatever was
to be learned he learned in privacy and exhibited in public. He had
taught himself to shoot marbles, to solve the intricate sequences of
mumblety peg, to throw an out-curve, to pick up a double hitch with one
hand, to chin himself, skin the cat and hang by his toes behind the safe
seclusion of the barn wall. Whatever his failures they were not
accompanied by the jeers of an audience. He had gone off in secret to
the swimming pool by Bretton's creek and smarted for hours under
crashing belly-whoppers until he had taught himself to dive forward and
backward. Then he watched with grinning superiority the fate of less
experienced youngsters who followed his dare.
So in the present sentimental crisis. To rank in the estimation of Miss
Dolly Travers there was no escaping the fact that he would have to
surrender his prejudices and incline his feet to the popular way. But
having reached this decision he determined to stage his effects. For two
more Saturdays he continued in dignified isolation to escort Miss
Travers to the weekly hop and back, guarding her scarf and fan,
straining his mouth into the semblance of an interested smile while
other fellows slipped their arms around the tiny figure and moved
dexterously or heavily about the ballroom.
On the third Saturday, halfway to the club house, just as he had
planned, Miss Dolly returned to the point of discussion.
"Jack, aren't you ever, ever going to learn to dance?"
"Oh well, perhaps some day," he said casually.
"But you can't go through life without dancing!"
"Oh no, of course not."
"Really I think it's just too selfish of you. You know how I adore it.
Why won't you try? I do believe you're afraid of being laughed at."
Skippy smiled craftily to himself.
"Well, perhaps I'll have a try."
"That's what you've said every time," said Miss Dolly, shrugging her
shoulders.
Skippy bided his opportunity until the third two-step had begun and the
claimants for the favorite's hand were congregating.
"I'm sitting this out with Jack," said Dolly, with a sigh.
"Say, a fossil who can't dance oughtn't to have any rights around here,
nohow," said Happy Mather. "You're only a clothes horse anyway, Skippy."
Dolly burst out laughing at this, which pained Skippy exceedingly.
"Oh, any chump can dance if he wants to."
"You think so?"
"Sure. Easiest thing in the world if I wanted to."
"Easy?"
"Sure. Just keeping in time, that's all."
"Here's a dollar you can't get three times around the room."
Skippy pretended to hesitate.
"I'll pay another dollar any day to see a circus," said Joe Crocker,
beginning to smirk.
"Dolly, hold the money," said Skippy.
Miss Dolly looked up in some consternation for the group now numbered a
half a dozen and the floor was vast and bare.
"Don't you want to wait a little?" she said with a glance at Crocker,
who was nudging his neighbor.
"What's the use?" said Skippy. "Now tell me again what I do."
"Two steps with the left forward and then two steps with the right. Hold
my arm so," said Dolly a little breathlessly.
"Hold on tight, Skippy," said Happy Mather.
"Step on your own feet."
"Balance on your heels."
"Don't let them rattle you, Jack."
"They can't. Which foot do I start on?"
"The left."
"Shall we give him a push, Dolly?" said Lazelle sympathetically, while
his companions, linking arms, were beaming with anticipated delight.
Skippy, having properly worked up his audience, nodded to his partner
and floated off in a perfect dancing style.
"Jack, you wretch, you've danced for years!" said Dolly after the first
surprise had passed. "You've just been making fun of me all this time."
"Never been on a ballroom floor before in my life," said Skippy, keeping
within the letter of the truth.
"Why you're wonderful, Jack! But then how could you--"
"It's mental, everything is mental," said Skippy conceitedly. "I just
watched till I got it in my mind and the rest was easy. Thanks for the
long green. Hello, what's become of our little gallery of nuts?"
Whether or not Dolly was entirely convinced by this casual explanation,
the immediate return to Skippy was enormous. Not only were the claimants
to her affections completely distanced, but Miss Dolly, for a time,
adopted an attitude of respect and deference towards him, which had
formerly been totally lacking.
Skippy was tremendously in love. There was no doubt about that. You
could see it in the dishpan glow of his scrubbed forehead, in the
spotless flannels and the lily white hands. There was something secure
and permanent in the attachment. Dolly was not sentimental and only
distantly affectionate, but she was absorbing. There was no question of
an eight-hour day in his case. From nine A.M. until Mr. Travers
ostentatiously began to bar the library windows for the night, Mr.
Skippy Bedelle was at one end of a wire with Miss Dolly Travers at the
other, pushing the button.
That practical young lady, realizing that Skippy's earning capacity was
still woefully limited, permitted no allusions to the distant holy bonds
of matrimony, but she did allow him to mortgage his future to the extent
of the promenade and dances which would decorate his scholastic and
collegiate journey, as well as attendance at all athletic contests of
any nature whatsoever. On his birthday (when the sinking fund toward the
first dress suit rose to the colossal sum of fifty dollars) they
solemnly exchanged pins, Dolly openly sporting the red and black of
Lawrenceville, while Skippy concealed in the secret recesses of his tie
a little gold wishbone which would lead him to the higher prizes in
life, add three inches to his stature and the additional twenty pounds
necessary to qualify for the varsity.
His fall from grace was of course the subject of great merriment among
his companions, particularly Happy Mather and Joe Crocker in whom memory
still rankled. A direct insult was of course dangerous, but there were
other subtler ways. At least half a dozen times a day some one was sure
to ask him,
"I say, Skippy, what's doing to-night?"
"Got anything on this afternoon?"
But Skippy brushed aside their crude attempts at persiflage with
indifference. He had won out. The courted prize was his. For two weeks
not a cloud obtruded on the clear sky of his content. Dolly bullied and
bossed him. He did her errands. He fetched and carried. He served her
and no other goddess. And then tragedy arrived with the arrival of the
celebrated Hickey Hicks, who came down to spend a fortnight with the
Triumphant Egghead.