One Third Off Part 4

My glad low gurgle of antic.i.p.atory joy smothered the small inner voice of caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young turnip greens. So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode some more--for behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.

Right then and there was when and where I lost all I had gained in a fortnight of stalwart self-disciplining; rather it was where I regained all I haply had lost. When, gorged and comatose, I staggered from that fair matron's depleted table I should never have dared to trundle over a wooden culvert at faster than four miles an hour. Either I should have slowed down or waited until they could put in some re-enforced-concrete underpinnings.

I was right back where I had started, and for the moment didn't care a darn either. Sin is glorious when you sin gloriously.

But I rallied. I retrieved myself. However, I do not take all the credit to myself for this; circ.u.mstances favored me. Shortly I quitted the land of temptation where I had been born, and was back again up North living on dining cars and in hotels, with nothing more seductive to resist than processed pastry and machine-made shortcakes and Thousand Islands dressing; which made the fight all the easier to win, especially as regards the last named. I sometimes wonder why, with a thousand islands to choose from, the official salad mixer of the average hotel always picks the wrong one.

I kept on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other and convincing testimony besides. I could tell it by my physical feelings, by my viewpoint, by my enhanced zest for work and for play.

Purposely, for the first month I refrained from weighing myself. When I did begin weighing at regular intervals I found I was losing at a rate of between two and three pounds a week. Moreover, I had now proved to my own satisfaction that within sane reasonable limitations I could resume eating most of the things which formerly I ate to excess and which I had altogether eliminated from my menus during the initiatory stages of dieting.

About the time I emerged from the novitiate cla.s.s I discerned yet one more gratifying fact. If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it might be. Work in the open air whetted my appet.i.te, but the added exertion burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but a.s.similation was perfect.

For my daily life at home, where I am writing this, I have cut out these things: All the cereals; nearly all the white bread; all the hot bread; practically all pastries except very light pastries; white potatoes absolutely; rice to a large extent; sausages and fresh pork and nearly all the ham; cream in my coffee and on fruits; and a few of the starchier vegetables.

Of b.u.t.ter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of reason came. Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat as freely as I please. And when a person begins to reckon up everything else among the edibles--flesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and the rest he finds quite a sizable list.

I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things.

Take pies, now--if there is any person alive who likes his pie better than I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at being compelled to bar out the rice--not the gummy, glued-together, sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and b.u.t.ter, or with salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.

And as for white potatoes--well, it distresses me deeply to think that hereafter the Irish potato, except when I'm camping out, will be to me merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab the office pen in on the clerk's desk in an American-plan hotel. For I have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature's most succulent gifts to mankind. I like potatoes all styles and every style, French fried, lyonnaise, O'Brien, shoestring shape, pants-b.u.t.ton design, hashed brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, souffle--if only I knew who blew 'em up--and most of all, baked _au naturel_ in the union suit. And I miss them and shall keep on missing them. But no longer do I yearn for cream in my coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.

Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable. From the standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most approved methods of evading, circ.u.mventing and defying the Federal and State statutes against drinking. Therefore I drink, too. Even so, I have not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters indiscriminately swallowed. I confess to a fear that I shall never make a complete success of the undertaking.

I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire. Prior to the attempted enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament. An occasional mild c.o.c.ktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a bottle of light beer or a gla.s.s of light wine with the dinner--these, in those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon. In the springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year. Likewise at Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional egg-nog. And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter, a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions. But these indulgences about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was concerned. For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling, and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal. Champagne, to me, was about the poorest subst.i.tute for good well-water that had ever been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig & Haig never had to put on a night shift at the works on my account.

Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life. The town where I was born was one of the last towns below Mason & Dixon's Line to stand out against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br'er Volstead's pleasant little act went over nationally.

While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me. Many of our oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries. Some of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the purity of their product. Men of all stations in life drank freely and with no sense of shame in their drinking. Mainly they took their'n straight or in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by misguided individuals up North who didn't know any better than to drown good liquor in charged water. There were decanters on the sideboard; there were jimmy-johns in the cellar; and down at the place on the corner twenty standard varieties of bottled Bourbons and ryes were to be had at an exceedingly moderate price. Bar-rail instep, which is a fallen arch reversed, was a common complaint among us.

Even elderly ladies who looked with abhorrence upon the drinking habit were not denied their wee bit nippy. They got it, never knowing that they got it. Some of them stayed pleasantly corned year in and year out and supposed all the time they merely were enjoying good health. For them stimulating tonics containing not in excess of sixty per cent of pure grain alcohol were provided by pious patent-medicine manufacturers in Chattanooga and Atlanta and Louisville--earnest-minded, philanthropic patriots these were, who strongly advocated the closing-up of the Rum Hole, which was their commonest pet name for the corner saloon, but who viewed with a natural repugnance those provisions of the Pure Food Act requiring printed confession as to fluid contents upon the labels of their own goods. It was no uncommon thing in the Sunny Southland to observe a staunch churchgoer who was an outspoken advocate of temperance rising up and giving three rousing hiccups for good old Dr. Bunk.u.m's Nerve Balm. And distinctly I recall the occasion when a stalwart mother in Israel, starting off to attend a wedding and feeling the need of a little special toning-up beforehand, took three winegla.s.sfuls of her favorite Blood Purifier instead of the customary one which she took before a meal; and, as a consequence, on her arrival at the scene of festivities was with difficulty dissuaded from s.n.a.t.c.hing down the Southern smilax and other decorations that she might twine with them a wreath to crown herself. She somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May. It was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on the parlor chandelier. But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried to hang by her legs from it.

Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses, barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long before I came of age. The literature of any total abstinence society would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a drunkard's grave. Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me. As I say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition came. Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult Americans began doing--which was to take a drink when the opportunity offered. As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet. He doesn't particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a whack at unlimited jam.

To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers, law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set of shoulders to another set of shoulders. Men who formerly drank to excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of chance to buy hard liquor. They cannot rake together enough coin to purchase the adulterated stuff at ten times the price they had paid for better liquor before the law went into effect. On the other hand, men--and women--who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt, inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense of adventure and daring.

Far be it from an humble citizen to criticise our national law-making body. Far be it from him, as he contemplates the spectacle frequently presented under the dome of the Capitol at Washington, to paraphrase Ethan Allen's celebrated remark when he took Fort Ticonderoga in the name of Jehovah and the Continental fathers and exclaim: "Congress--oh, my G.o.d!"

Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing worse.

At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a cla.s.s, been content to obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth Amendment saddled upon us and no Volstead act to bridle us.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, and stripping aside the lesser contributory causes, I maintain there were just two outstanding reasons why this country went dry after the fashion in which it did go dry: One reason was the Distiller; the other was the Brewer. And for the woes of either or both I, for one, decline to shed a single tear.

How a fellow does run on when he gets on the subject which is uppermost in the minds of the American people this year! All I intended to say, when I started off on this tack, a few pages back, was that if I absolutely and completely cut out all alcoholic stimulant no doubt I should be reducing my weight much faster than is the case at this writing. To-day practically all the members in good standing of the Order of Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach--I mean the dietetic sharps--agree that he or she who is banting will be well-advised to drink not at all. For the most part they do not make a moral issue of this detail. Some of them refuse to concede that a teetotaler is necessarily healthier or happier or more useful to the world than the moderate imbiber is. They merely point out that whiskies and beers are, for the majority of humans, fattening things and should therefore be eliminated from the diet of those wishful to lose their superfluous adipose tissue. Here, again, they disagree with their professional forebears. The experts of the preceding generations, being mainly Englishmen and Germans, could not conceive of living without drinking. Some advocated wines, some ales, some a mixture of both with an occasional measure of spirits added for the sake of digestion. But among the dependable dietetic authorities of the present day there appears to be no wide range of argument on this point. They pretty generally agree that even a casual indulgence in beverages is not indicated for those who seek to reduce. I am sure they are right. But as I remarked just now, what can you do when you are encompa.s.sed about by the bottle-toting, sop-it-up-behind-the-door custom which has sprung up since Prohibition was slipped over on us by the Anti-Saloon League?

I confess that I have not the strength of character to swim, almost alone, against the social current. So I partake of the occasional snort and to that extent stand a self-admitted apologist for an offense which no true reductionist should commit.

But I claim that otherwise--that in so far as the solid foodstuffs are concerned--I have, for my own individual case, exactly the right idea about it.

CHAPTER XI

_Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained!_

My advice to the man or the woman who is in the same fix I was in is to go and do likewise, with variations to suit the individual temperament. It means self-denial but self-denial persevered in is a virtue, and virtue he will find--or she will--not alone is its own reward but a number of additional rewards as well. Let my late fellow sufferer likewise patronize the gymnasium and the steam room and the cold plunge if he so chooses. If he desires to have automatic pores, all right. As for me, I recall what the Good Book says about the pores which ye have always with ye, and I decline to worry about the present uncultured state of mine. Let him try the electric rollers and the electric baths, if such be his bent; no doubt they have their value. And by all means let him consult a qualified physician if he fears either that he is overdoing or underdoing his banting. Personally, though, I am satisfied with the plan I tried out, of being my own private test tube.

I claim that I have better information touching on what sustenance I need than any outsider ever can hope to have unless he breaks into me surgically. I claim that a series of rational experiments should tell any rational human how much he needs to eat and what he needs to eat in order to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates with whom obesity is a disease, but of those who owe their grossness of outline to gluttony. Lacking vital statistics on the subject, I nevertheless dare a.s.sert that these latter const.i.tute fully 90 per cent of those among the American people who are distinctly and uncomfortably and frequently unhealthily fat.

Remains but one fly in the ointment. Since Tony Sarg is going to ill.u.s.trate this treatise, then Tony must revise the old working plans. For my figure is not so much pro as once it was. It is more con, if you get my meaning--the profile curves in toward, instead of being, as formerly, so noticeably from.

Still, I should worry about the troubles of an artist, even though a friend. I weighed myself this morning. Three months ago, when I set out to reduce my belt line and my collar size, I s.n.a.t.c.hed the beam down ker-smack at two hundred and thirty-six pounds, stripped. This morning I weighed exactly one hundred and ninety-seven, including amalgam fillings and the rights of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

One hundred and eighty-five pounds is my ultimate aim. Howsoever, I may keep right on when I attain that figure and justify the t.i.tle of this book by taking a full one third off. In either event, though, I shall know exactly where I am going and I'm on my way. And I feel bully and I'm happy about it and boastfully proud.

Three rousing cheers for lithesome grace regained!

THE END

_By Irvin S. Cobb_

_Fiction_

FROM PLACE TO PLACE

THOSE TIMES AND THESE

LOCAL COLOR

OLD JUDGE PRIEST

BACK HOME

THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM

_Wit and Humor_

ONE THIRD OFF

A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER

THE ABANDONED FARMERS