Skippy Bedelle Part 1

Skippy Bedelle.

by Owen Johnson.

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 s.e.x 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.e.x 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 pa.s.ses 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 d.i.n.k Stover instantly achieves in its casual Olympic pa.s.sing. 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 s.e.x 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 d.i.n.k Stover undoubtedly he would condescend to be gazed at and flattered and fondled. If d.i.n.k 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 d.i.n.k Stover was right, for d.i.n.k 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 att.i.tude toward the s.e.x was still the att.i.tude 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.

SKIPPY BEDELLE

CHAPTER I

FATE IN A BATHTUB

THERE comes a moment when without warning boy and puppy instantaneously pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.ttering 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 d.a.m.nation 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 part.i.tion in set disapproval.

"h.e.l.lo, Slops!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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, pa.s.sed and re-pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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?"

"h.e.l.lo, Doc!"