The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSkippy BedelleThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Skippy BedelleAuthor: Owen JohnsonIllustrator: E. FuhrRelease date: May 14, 2008 [eBook #25465]Most recently updated: January 3, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Garcia, Emmy and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKIPPY BEDELLE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Skippy BedelleAuthor: Owen JohnsonIllustrator: E. FuhrRelease date: May 14, 2008 [eBook #25465]Most recently updated: January 3, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Garcia, Emmy and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Title: Skippy Bedelle
Author: Owen JohnsonIllustrator: E. Fuhr
Author: Owen Johnson
Illustrator: E. Fuhr
Release date: May 14, 2008 [eBook #25465]Most recently updated: January 3, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Emmy and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKIPPY BEDELLE ***
By Owen JohnsonLawrenceville StoriesThe Prodigious HickeyThe VarmintThe Tennessee ShadSkippy Bedelle——————Stover at YaleThe Wasted GenerationBlue BloodChildren of Divorce
Lawrenceville Stories
The Prodigious HickeyThe VarmintThe Tennessee ShadSkippy Bedelle
——————
Stover at YaleThe Wasted GenerationBlue BloodChildren of Divorce
They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their grief. Frontispiece. See page 279They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their grief.Frontispiece.See page279SKIPPY BEDELLEHIS SENTIMENTAL PROGRESS FROMTHE URCHIN TO THE COMPLETEMAN OF THE WORLDBYOWEN JOHNSONWITH ILLUSTRATIONS BYERNEST FUHREmblemBOSTONLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY1937
They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their grief. Frontispiece. See page 279They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their grief.Frontispiece.See page279
HIS SENTIMENTAL PROGRESS FROMTHE URCHIN TO THE COMPLETEMAN OF THE WORLD
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BYERNEST FUHR
Emblem
BOSTONLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY1937
Copyright, 1922,By Owen Johnson.——————All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America
ToCHARLES HANSON TOWNEFOR AULD LANG SYNE
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 "mashnotes," 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 washedbehindyour 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 perfectmanhood. 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 histurn 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.
Spine of bookPrefacePAGELikewise a Declaration of PrinciplesviiCHAPTERIFate in a Bathtub1IIBirth of an Idea7IIIMacnooder Opens Vistas10IVLoneliness of Great Men16VThe Golden Shower21VIMethods of a Financier26VIITragedy37VIIIWhen Friends Prove False40IXSnorky as a Lady-Killer51XLove Lightly Considered59XIThe Demon of Jealousy62XIIAll's Well That Ends Well70XIIIA Woman of the World74XIVThe Plot Against the Mosquito83XVThe Tennessee Shad Suspects94XVIExperiments in Fragrance99XVIISoap and Sentiment110XVIIILove Comes Like the Measles118XIXThe Urchin Begins to Bloom127XXThe Heart of a Brunette135XXIWorldly Wisdom of Skippy Bedelle145XXIIGirls as an Epidemic151XXIIIThe Blonde of the Species160XXIVResult of a Brother's Advice169XXVAntics of a Talking Machine175XXVIContaining Some High Melodrama183XXVIIHickey in a Deadly Rôle194XXVIIISitting It Out200XXIXDead Game Sports206XXXExperiments in a Dress Suit214XXXIShirt Studs as Cupid's Messenger222XXXIILiving up to an Angel230XXXIIISudden Interest in the Bible242XXXIVThe Way of the Transgressor248XXXVThe Scalp Hunter257XXXVISplashing With Your Toes275XXXVIISkippy Retires With His Scalp279XXXVIIIThe Philosophical Attitude289XXXIXLove Plus Hippo305XLReality Minus Hippo312
Spine of book
PrefacePAGELikewise a Declaration of PrinciplesviiCHAPTERIFate in a Bathtub1IIBirth of an Idea7IIIMacnooder Opens Vistas10IVLoneliness of Great Men16VThe Golden Shower21VIMethods of a Financier26VIITragedy37VIIIWhen Friends Prove False40IXSnorky as a Lady-Killer51XLove Lightly Considered59XIThe Demon of Jealousy62XIIAll's Well That Ends Well70XIIIA Woman of the World74XIVThe Plot Against the Mosquito83XVThe Tennessee Shad Suspects94XVIExperiments in Fragrance99XVIISoap and Sentiment110XVIIILove Comes Like the Measles118XIXThe Urchin Begins to Bloom127XXThe Heart of a Brunette135XXIWorldly Wisdom of Skippy Bedelle145XXIIGirls as an Epidemic151XXIIIThe Blonde of the Species160XXIVResult of a Brother's Advice169XXVAntics of a Talking Machine175XXVIContaining Some High Melodrama183XXVIIHickey in a Deadly Rôle194XXVIIISitting It Out200XXIXDead Game Sports206XXXExperiments in a Dress Suit214XXXIShirt Studs as Cupid's Messenger222XXXIILiving up to an Angel230XXXIIISudden Interest in the Bible242XXXIVThe Way of the Transgressor248XXXVThe Scalp Hunter257XXXVISplashing With Your Toes275XXXVIISkippy Retires With His Scalp279XXXVIIIThe Philosophical Attitude289XXXIXLove Plus Hippo305XLReality Minus Hippo312
They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their griefFrontispiecePAGEInstantly the air was filled with flying sponges4"Good gracious!" cried Miss Dabtree with an impetuous lunge towards the point of attack78"Really, Jack, I'm beginning to suspect you're an old hand."140He balanced carefully, stretched out one arm to encircle an imaginary waist172The partner of his arms, escaping, rolled over towards Tootsie182
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 soapand 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!
Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges. Page 4Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges. Page 4
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!"
"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 limbBut 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 attemptedthe 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.
TEN minutes later he sidled out of the bath and, having balanced Doc Cubberly's Grand Army hat on the gas jet, and simulated an attack on Tippy, the black and tan, escaped before the guardian of the bath could return to the rescue of his pet.
"All the same, you ought to be able to work a bathtub with your foot," he said as he went skipping towards the village with heightened appetite. "Gee, thatwouldbe scrumptious!"
Suddenly a queer thought came to him. After all—why not? All you needed was a foot regulator, to let in the hot and cold water gorgeously, at your ease and inclination! Foot regulators! Why not? There was something in that idea surely.
"Gee, what a cinch thatwouldbe!"
If man in his age-old struggle with nature could harness the force of steam to his service and ride the air, why should he not be master of his daily comforts?
"I don't think a foot regulator would be so ding fired hard to invent," he said, meditating.
The idea had begun to work, though as yet the vast scale had not opened to his tender imagination. Now in youth when an idea beginsto grow it brings sharp animal appetites. To contemplate properly this new entrancing thought, he repaired to that first station on the hunger route, which was known as Laloo's Kennels, where fragrant hot dogs sent their tantalizing invitation from bubbling tins.
"Two ki-yis and easy on the mustard."
Mr. Laloo prospered because Mr. Laloo dealt on a strictly cash basis. He was languidly tired. One foot rested on a soap box, one arm rested on the upholstered divan he had exchanged with the late Hickey Hicks for a hot dog a day in the lean month of December, and his head drooped over the supporting toothpick. Mr. Laloo never made an unnecessary motion or uttered a superfluous word. So he continued without apparent notice to conserve the feeble energy which ran low in his burnt-out eyes.
Skippy looked at Laloo and understood. Freshmen might argue but even the Tennessee Shad wasted no time in producing the coin. There was exactly ten cents in Skippy's pocket after the most painstaking search revealed this last ray of hope in the lining of the threadbare pocket. Only ten cents to stop the deficit in his stomach! The choice was difficult. There was ginger-pop at Bill Appleby's, and jiggers at Al's, pancakes at Conover's, and the aching void within him knew no prejudice or limitations to its hospitality. He hesitated, but the fragrance in the air was maddening—besidesthere was always the chance of a friend in funds. He fingered the coin regretfully and laid it on the counter with a heavy heart. He might argue with Bill and plead with Al, but Laloo had the soul of a pawnbroker.
"There's the bank roll, pick out the fat ones!"
Five minutes later, with his nose buried in a fragrant sandwich, elbows on the counter, he returned to The Great Idea. Suddenly the sublimity of the conception smote him. Think of lolling languidly under the surface and regulating the temperature at will with only the exposure of a foot! Think of the gain to humanity in the added daily comfort! The idea was stupendous, colossal! It beat even Dink Stover's famous Sleep Prolonger, the Alarm Clock, which automatically closed the window and opened the hot air register at the designated hour. And out of the world, out of the whole human race, present and past, he, John C. Bedelle, was the first to stumble upon this revolutionary fact! An accident? Perhaps—but so was Galileo's discovery of the telescope an accident. When the gnawing appetite had been placated (somewhat placated, but not convinced), the Skippy Bedelle who descended Laloo's steps, with grave and thoughtful face, had emerged from the warm skin of the urchin, with the consciousness of manhood's call to service.
TO Skippy's credit be it recorded that the first impulse was humanitarian. For the second was distinctly mercenary. But then Skippy lived in a materialistic age and Skippy's father owned a department store. Yet the practical and profitable possibilities did not proceed from any inward contamination of the generous impulse of invention, but from contact and suggestion. At Bill Appleby's, where he wandered in hungrily, in a desperate hope of meeting some friend whose memory could be jogged by reference to past favors, he perceived the celebrated Doc Macnooder in earnest conclave with Appleby, to whom he was offering to sell the Lawrenceville rights of his latest invention, the Folding Toothbrush. Given Bill Appleby's natural canniness, and Macnooder's hypnotic eloquence, the discussion was apt to be long and difficult, so Skippy hovered at a respectable distance with ears at attention.
At this time, due to a rift in the lute (a little matter of expert accounting on a joint operation), the firm of Macnooder and the Tennessee Shad had been dissolved and each financier had assumed an independent and belligerent attitude. The Shad had a certain adroit and deviousimagination, but the practical mind was Macnooder. His point of view was purely economic. Hickey might plan the daring manœuvre which made the conquest of the clapper possible, and revel in the faculty's amazement at the sudden silence of the tyrant will. Macnooder would have proceeded to capitalize this imagination by fabricating clapper watch charms and selling them at auction prices. The Gutter Pup might organize the sporting club in memory of the lamented Marquis of Queensberry; Macnooder sold the tickets and extinguished the surplus. His ambition was not to be a philosopher, or a benefactor. He announced openly that he intended to be a millionaire, and among his admiring victims there was much speculation as to just how far he had gone in the accomplishment of his heart's ambition.
When Skippy moved into an eavesdropping position, the situation was this: Bill Appleby, having carefully closed and locked the cash drawer, was braced with both arms extended against the counter, eyeing Macnooder with a look of steely negation that expressed a settled conviction to doubt instantly any statement whenever or however made. Macnooder's round capuchin body was drawn up in confidence and ease and the smile on his face was bland as he remarked:
"Bill—get my proposition; let it percolate,sift down and settle. But, Bill, make no mistake. The Macnooder Folding Toothbrush is a fact—patented and financed! I'm not asking you to take stock,—no, Bill, no." He shook his head and said with friendly regret—"I couldn't, Bill; not in fairness to myself—not in fairness to my family. Why, Bill, if you were to get in on the ground floor, you'd buy a yacht in five years, live on Fifth Avenue and marry Lillian Russell."
"Go slow," said Appleby huskily, for Appleby was a bachelor.
"Well, watchme," said Macnooder with a wave of his hand that played among the rubies and emeralds floating in his imagination. "Bill, I'd like to put you in—I can't—that's flat. I can't! Why, Bill, if you put your hand in your pocket this moment and took out that little green wallet of yours and said: 'Mr. Macnooder, this is your account—it's nothing—I dismiss it, I tear it to pieces—you are my guest from now on; let's start right;—what will you have?' If you should say that—"
"I won't!" said Appleby, shrinking from the hypnotic caress in the financier's manner.
"If you should do thatandshould take out a nice new one hundred dollar bill—you have one, Bill, right in that old leather wallet—don't shrink, Bill, your alarm pains me—if you, now, here in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, John C. Green Foundation, should produce thatone hundred dollar bill—slap it on the counter, shove it into my face, force it into my pocket, beg me to give you a little interest—no!No, Bill, no! I'd refuse—I'dhaveto refuse. Don't build up any false hopes, Bill, don't."
"I won't," said Appleby, yet already a sense of great personal loss had begun to invade him.
"All I can let you in on are the regional rights—the Lawrenceville rights—for ten years. I might, I don't say it flat,—I want to consider,—but Imightextend them to Princeton. It's a gift, but I might. And do you know why I'm giving you this opportunity of a lifetime?"
"Why, Doc?"
"Because, Bill, I don't want to break you. I don't want to have to run you out of business. That's friendship, but there's more. I can use you," said Macnooder magnanimously. "You have the qualities I shall need in my future operations—I suffer from them now but I appreciate them. You will make an ideal watchdog of the dollar, and when the dollar leaves your hand, Bill, there won't be a rim left to it. Bill, let's do business—it's more than just the toothbrush, it's a whole future's open to you. Bill, the moment is yours. Choose! Fifth Avenue, a yacht, box at the opera—Lillian Russell!"
Appleby fumbled in his pocket and drew outa cigar to break the spell, and the hand that held the match trembled.
"Wall, now," he began cautiously, "to-morrow's to-morrow, and toothbrushes is toothbrushes. And say—gettin' down to tacks—who in Sam Hill ever wanted a folding toothbrush, nohow?"
Macnooder's fist descended on a shivering glass counter as he cried triumphantly:
"Say that again!"
"Wall, who does want a folding toothbrush?" said Appleby, in a more bellicose manner.
"Bill, your hand!" said Macnooder, matching the gesture to the exclamation. "Straight to the point. Keen—Gad, you're devilishly keen! That's you, Bill, no one can beat you at seeing the kernel at once! Who wants a folding toothbrush? No one!" said Macnooder, folding his arms and beaming with delight. "Is there any reason any one should? There is not. Can you imagine anything more unnecessary, idiotic or useless than a folding toothbrush? Don't try—you can't. That's the beauty of it. But, Bill, make no mistake—that's where you get the heterogeneous sucker! Has there ever been a folding toothbrush! Never! That's where they bite! Think of it—no one's ever had one before. How do they know whether they want one until they've tried it? They've had a bicycle or a kodak, but afolding toothbrush, Bill—think what it means! Get the sound of it. Why, Bill, it's sunk into your imagination already! You've got the hankering yourself. You have. I can feel it!"
"Wall, now, I would sorter like a squint at one."
"And you shall," said Macnooder, reaching into his pocket. But at this moment he stopped, perceiving Skippy, who, lost in wonder, was listening, all ears.
"I beg your pardon, Doc, honest, I couldn't help hearing," he said hastily.
"This is a private conversation," said Macnooder severely.
"I say, Doc," said Skippy, gazing at the package which had come forth from an inner pocket, "I say, Doc, can't I just have one look at it?"
"You cannot," said Macnooder, whose hand indicated the exit in the classic gesture of melodrama when the cruel father dismisses the penniless lover.
Skippy drew a long breath, hesitated and went slowly out. But what a world had opened before him! It was something to be a benefactor of humanity, but why not tap the wealth of the Incas! If the mere invention of a folding toothbrush could open the sacred precincts of Fifth Avenue, what realms beyond the dreams of avarice were waiting for him who should revolutionize the bathtub!
THE course of his meditations suddenly halted before the Jigger Shop. They were all there; the fortunate possessors of dimes and nickels, gluttonously, selfishly gorging themselves with juicy creamy strawberry, coffee, and chocolate jiggers; clinking their glasses, licking their spoons—and he, John C. Bedelle, the future Bathtub King, without a cent in his pockets! The irony of it! If they only knew, what sycophants would fawn upon him! Then an idea came to him—at such moments alone can man read the secret heart of humanity. He would make a test of true friendship.
He passed through the outer rapturous fringe of hungry boyhood and slowly approached the counter where Al, guardian of the jigger, dished out the jiggers and watched the counters with uneasy eye. Not that he had any hope, but it was only fair to give even the most abandoned of mankind a sporting chance.
"Hello, Al!"
"I see you, Skippy."
The tone was not encouraging. Bedelle determined on direct methods. He turned his pockets deliberately inside out.
"You see?"
"Oh yes, I see you."
"Anything doin'?"
"Nothing doin'," said Al, stroking his corn-colored mustache with that languid finality against which there was no appeal. "Nothin' at all."
"He has had his chance," said Bedelle to himself in gloomy pride. Yes, Al had had his chance, that one chance that comes unwittingly to every man—Al who might have toured the world with him as his majordomo, or his confidential valet.
"Hello, Dennis!" he said, perceiving back of an enormous chocolate éclair the human anaconda famine and opportunity had at this moment made of Finnegan, the discoverer of the double adjective.
"Hello yourself!"
"How's the bank account?" said Skippy lightly, for etiquette forbade any reference to the half-dollar parted with on the Wednesday before.
"Why, bless my immortal soul, you old rambunctious, skipping Zockarooster, are you setting them up?" said Brian de Boru, pretending to misunderstand.
Skippy disdained a reply. Al, after all, was but running true to form, but this was the basest ingratitude,—the serpent's tooth in the fair landscape of friendship.
"If he'd at least offered to share that éclair I—I could—" said Skippy to himself, and then stopped in silence before the future Finnegan had thrown to the winds. For he liked Dennis and Denniswouldhave made such an ideal publicity man.
He passed like a poor relation at a wedding feast, and as he passed with many a stammered hint, and eloquently pleading eyes, his faith in his kind began to ooze away. Of course it was the end of the month, yet of twenty friends who had fed from his hand, when his hand had been hospitable, not one stirred to the commonest of human impulses. And so gloomy, alone and misunderstood, like the young Napoleon at Brienne, John C. Bedelle, with the consciousness of future greatness, moved out from the uncomprehending crowd. At the door Toots Cortrelle arrived with unmistakably jingling pockets, and seeing him, cried with the zest of young hunger certain of gratification:
"Hullo, Skippy, old sockbutts!"
"Couldn't lend me a quarter or a dime, could you?" said Skippy solemnly.
"Why not?"
"You can, Toots—you can, honest?"
"With ease and pleasure. This is the way it is done," said Toots, who proceeded to transfer a quarter from his pocket to the astounded Skippy, with the classic manner of a prestidigitator.
"What's happened?" said Skippy, feeling that the situation demanded some explanation.
"Maiden aunt and birthday," said Toots joyfully. "Al, take Mr. Bedelle's order and make mine a triple jigger, coffee with chocolate syrup!"
When ten minutes later, gorged and sated, with his faith in humanity somewhat restored, Skippy separated from his benefactor, he turned to Toots and said solemnly:
"Old friend, I shall remember this!"
"All right—turn about's fair play. Ta-ta and so long," said Cortrelle, all unsuspecting of the future Destiny had built up for him.
"Yes, some day Ishallremember," said Skippy solemnly to himself. And as he trudged back to his room at the Kennedy, there to map out the future operations of the Bathtub Trust, he allowed his imagination to dwell delightfully on that momentous future date when the debt of friendship should be paid. He saw himself in a gorgeous marble-lined office, protected by an outer fringe of obsequious secretaries, a box of expensive cigars on his shining mahogany desk, and before him in respectful attention Toots Cortrelle, now grown a man, but worn and wasted with the buffeting years, and he saw the light of hope spurting upward in the tired eyes as he heard himself saying:
"Cortrelle, once long ago, you did something I told you I should remember. You have forgottenit. I never forget. For that I am going to put you in charge of my whole South American trade at a salary—" Here Skippy paused somewhat perplexed before continuing, awed at his own munificence—"at a salary of overthree thousand dollarsa year!"
But just as Toots with tears in his eyes was starting to grasp his hand, Skippy's foot tripped over a step and he rolled ignominiously down the terrace and fetched up in a heap among the gravel.
"Oh, please do it again!" said the voice of Snorky Green from an upper window.
"You go to blazes!" exclaimed Skippy, rising wrathfully. But all at once his anger left him. Snorky Green was his roommate and partner of his secrets, and the secret that had been locked up within him these last momentous hours simply had to be told.