Читать книгу Skippy Bedelle - Owen Johnson - Страница 8

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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!

Instantly 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 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.