Irvin S. Cobb - One Third Off
I >>
Irvin S. Cobb >> One Third Off
_One Third Off_
_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
THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
"OH WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"
FIBBLE D.D.
"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--"
EUROPE REVISED
ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
COBB'S BILL OF FARE
COBB'S ANATOMY
_Miscellany_
THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
THE GLORY OF THE COMING
PATHS OF GLORY
"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS--"
* * * * *
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
* * * * *
[Illustration: I WEIGHED MYSELF AND IN THE BOX SCORE CREDITED MYSELF WITH
A PROFOUND SHOCK. _Frontispiece_]
_One Third Off_
_By_
_Irvin S. Cobb_
_Author of_
_"Old Judge Priest," "Speaking_
_of Operations--" Etc._
_Illustrated by Tony Sarg_
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
_Copyright, 1921,_
_By George H. Doran Company_
_Copyright, 1921,_
_By The Curtis Publishing Company_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_One Third Off_
TO
HARRY M. STEVENS, ESQUIRE
WHO IN TIMES GONE BY HELPED ME
PUT THAT ONE THIRD ON
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER ONE: PAGE
_Extra! Extra! All About the Great Reduction_ 15
CHAPTER TWO:
_Those Romping Elfin Twenties_ 25
CHAPTER THREE:
_Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others_ 31
CHAPTER FOUR:
_I Become the Panting Champion_ 41
CHAPTER FIVE:
_On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores_ 55
CHAPTER SIX:
_More Anon_ 65
CHAPTER SEVEN:
_Office Visits, $10_ 75
CHAPTER EIGHT:
_The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach_ 95
CHAPTER NINE:
_The Fallen Egg_ 111
CHAPTER TEN:
_Wherein Our Hero Falters_ 121
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
_Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained_ 145
ILLUSTRATIONS
I weighed myself and in the box score
credited myself with a profound shock _Frontispiece_
"64 Broad" 19
To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting is a
sight worth seeing 45
"You are now registering the preliminary
warnings--" 87
CHAPTER I
_Extra! Extra! All About The Great Reduction!_
The way I look at this thing is this way: If something happens to you and
by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a
benefactor to the race, then why not? Does not the philanthropic aspect of
the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side? I hold that it
does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded
persons. It is to this class that I particularly address myself.
Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here with
the contemporary paragraph. That which follows in this little volume is
not for them.
An even stronger motive impels me. In hereinafter setting forth at length
and in detail the steps taken by me in making myself thin, or, let us
say, thinner, I am patterning after the tasteful and benevolent examples
of some of the most illustrious ex-fat men of letters in our country. Take
Samuel G. Blythe now. Mr. Blythe is the present international bant-weight
champion. There was a time, though, when he was what the world is pleased
to call over-sized. In writing on several occasions, and always
entertainingly and helpfully, upon the subject of the methods employed by
him to reduce himself to his current proportions I hold that he had the
right idea about it.
Getting fat is a fault; except when caused by the disease known as
obesity, it is a bad habit. Getting thin and at the same time retaining
one's health is a virtue. Never does the reductionist feel quite so
virtuous as when for the first time, perhaps in decades, he can stand
straight up and look straight down and behold the tips of his toes. His
virtue is all the more pleasant to him because it recalls a reformation on
his part and because it has called for self-denial. I started to say that
it had called for mortification of the flesh, but I shan't. Despite the
contrary opinions of the early fathers of the church, I hold that the
mortification of the flesh is really based upon the flesh itself, where
there is too much of it for beauty and grace, not merely upon the process
employed in getting rid of it.
Ask any fat man--or better still, any formerly fat man--if I am not
correct. But do not ask a fat woman unless, as in the case of possible
fire at a theater, you already have looked about you and chosen the
nearest exit. Taken as a sex, women are more likely to be touchy upon this
detail where it applies to themselves than men are.
I have a notion that probably the late Lucrezia Borgia did not start
feeding her house guests on those deep-dish poison pies with which her
name historically is associated until after she grew sensitive about the
way folks dropping in at the Borgia home for a visit were sizing up her
proportions on the bias, so to speak. And I attribute the development of
the less pleasant side of Cleopatra's disposition--keeping asps around the
house and stabbing the bearers of unpleasant tidings with daggers and
feeding people to the crocodiles and all that sort of thing--to the period
when she found her anklets binding uncomfortably and along toward half
past ten o'clock of an evening was seized by a well-nigh uncontrollable
longing to excuse herself from the company and run upstairs and take off
her jeweled stomacher and things and slip into something loose.
[Illustration: "64 BROAD."]
But upon this subject men are less inclined to be fussy, and by the same
token more inclined, on having accomplished a cure, to take a justifiable
pride in it and to brag publicly about it. As I stated a moment ago, I
claim Mr. Blythe viewed the matter in a proper and commendable light when
he took pen in hand to describe more or less at length his reduction
processes. So, too, did that other notable of the literary world, Mr.
Vance Thompson. Mr. Thompson would be the last one to deny that once upon
a time he undeniably was large. The first time I ever saw him--it was in
Paris some years ago, and he was walking away from me and had his back to
me and was wearing a box coat--I thought for a moment they were taking a
tractor across town. All that, however, belongs to the past. Just so soon
as Mr. Thompson had worked out a system of dieting and by personal
application had proved its success he wrote the volume Eat and Grow Thin,
embodying therein his experiences, his course of treatment and his advice
to former fellow sufferers. So you see in saying now what I mean to say I
do but follow in the mouth-prints of the famous.
Besides, when I got fat I capitalized my fatness in the printed word. I
told how it felt to be fat.
I described how natural it was for a fat man to feel like the Grand Canon
before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterwards.
I told how, if he wedged himself into a telephone booth and said, "64
Broad," persons overhearing him were not sure whether he was asking
Central for a number or telling a tailor what his waist measurements were.
I told how deeply it distressed him as he walked along, larding the earth
as he passed, to hear bystanders making ribald comments about the
inadvisability of trying to move bank vaults through the streets in the
daytime. And now that, after fifteen years of fatness, I am getting thin
again--glory be!--wherein, I ask, is the impropriety in furnishing the
particulars for publication; the more especially since my own tale, I
fondly trust, may make helpful telling for some of my fellow creatures?
When you can offer a boon to humanity and at the same time be paid for it
the dual advantage is not to be decried.
CHAPTER II
_Those Romping Elfin Twenties_
It has been my personal observation, viewing the matter at close range,
that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon
one unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens
and into my early twenties--ah, those romping elfin twenties!--I was, in
outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who have
known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one of my
boyhood nick-names--I had several, and none of them was complimentary but
all of them were graphic--was Bonesy. At sixteen, by striping myself in
alternate whites and blacks, I could have hired out for a surveyor's rod.
At twenty-one I measured six feet the long way, and if only mine had been
a hook nose I should have cast a shadow like a shepherd's crook.
My avocation in life was such as to induce slenderness. I was the city
staff of a small-town daily paper, and what with dodging round gathering
up items about people to write for the paper and then dodging round to
avoid personal contact with the people I had written the items about for
the paper, I was kept pretty constantly upon the go. In our part of the
country in those days the leading citizens were prone to take offense at
some of the things that were said of them in the public prints and given
to expressing their sense of annoyance forcibly. When a high-spirited
Southern gentleman, regarding whom something of a disagreeable nature had
appeared in the news columns, entered the editorial sanctum without
knocking, wearing upon his crimsoned face an expression of forthright
irritation and with his right hand stealing back under his coat skirt, it
was time for the offending reporter to emulate the common example of the
native white-throated nut-hatch and either flit thence rapidly or hunt a
hole.
Since prohibition came in and a hiccup became a mark of affluence instead
of a social error, as formerly, and a loaded flank is a sign of
hospitality rather than of menace, things may have changed. I am speaking,
though, of the damper early nineties in Kentucky, when a sudden motion
toward the right hip pocket was a threat and not a promise, as at present.
So, what with first one thing and then another, now collecting the news of
the community and now avoiding the customary consequences, I did a good
deal of running about hither and yon, and kept fit and spry and
stripling-thin.
Yet I ate heartily of all things that appealed to my palate, eating at
least two kinds of hot bread at every meal--down South we say it with
flours--and using chewing tobacco for the salad course, as was the custom.
I ate copiously at and between meals and gained not a whit.
CHAPTER III
_Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others_
It was after I had moved to New York and had taken a desk job that I
detected myself in the act, as it were, of plumping out. Cognizant of the
fact, as I was, I nevertheless took no curative or corrective measures in
the way of revising my diet. I was content to make excuses inwardly. I
said to myself that I came of a breed whose members in their mature years
were inclined to broaden noticeably. I said to myself that I was not
getting the amount of exercise that once I had; that my occupation was now
more sedentary, and therefore it stood to reason that I should take on a
little flesh here and there over my frame. Moreover, I felt good. If I had
felt any better I could have charged admission. My appetite was perfect,
my digestion magnificent, nay, awe-inspiring.
To me it seemed that physically I was just as active and agile as I had
been in those 'prentice years of my professional career when the ability
to shift quickly from place to place and to think with an ornithological
aptitude were conducive to a continuance of unimpaired health among young
reporters. Anyhow--thus I to myself in the same strain,
continuing--anyhow, I was not actually getting fat. Nothing so gross as
that. I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified
fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday. So why worry about
what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament, and having my
hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?
I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that. For
every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the
waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind. I see the
truth of it now. When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.
With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds
of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right
there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average
fattish man nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the visible situation.
Vanity blinds his one eye, love of self-indulgence blinds the other.
Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a reformed offender,
which is the way of reformed offenders and other reformers the world over.
We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as the fact of the crime
recedes. Moreover, he who has not erred has but little to gloat over.
There are two sorts of evidence upon which many judges look askance--that
sort of evidence which is circumstantial and that sort which purely is
hearsay. In this connection, and departing for the space of a paragraph or
so from the main theme, I am reminded of the incident through which a
certain picturesque gentleman of the early days in California acquired a
name which he was destined to wear forever after, and under which his
memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far
West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into
active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the
unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps
it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no
matter; at least it was some such. One evening a low-down
terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by
stealth, under cover of the cloaking twilight, went away with them into
the far mysterious spaces of the purpling sage.
To these ponies the owner was deeply attached, not alone on account of the
intrinsic value, but for sentimental reasons likewise. So immediately on
discovering the loss the next morning, Mr. Watkins took steps. He saddled
a third pony which the thief had somehow overlooked in the haste of
departure, and he girded on him both cutlery and shootlery, and he mounted
and soon was off and away across the desert upon the trail of the vanished
malefactor. Now when Mr. Watkins fared forth thus accoutered it was a sign
he was not out for his health or anybody else's.
Friends and well-wishers volunteered to accompany him upon the chase, for
they foresaw brisk doings. But he declined their company. Folklore,
descending from his generation to ours, has it that he said this was his
own business and he preferred handling it alone in his own way. He did
add, however, that on overtaking the fugitive it was his intention, as an
earnest or token of his displeasure, to eat that Injun's liver raw. Some
versions say he mentioned liver rare, but the commonly accepted legend has
it that the word used was _raw_. With this he put the spur to his steed's
flank and was soon but a mere moving speck in the distance.
Now there was never offered any direct proof that our hero, in pursuance
of his plan for teaching the Indian a lesson, actually did do with regard
to the latter's liver what he had promised the bystanders he would do;
moreover, touching on this detail he ever thereafter maintained a
steadfast and unbreakable silence. In lieu of corroborative testimony by
unbiased witnesses as to the act itself, we have only these two things to
judge by: First, that when Mr. Watkins returned in the dusk of the same
day he was wearing upon his face a well-fed, not to say satiated,
expression, yet had started forth that morning with no store of
provisions; and second, that on being found in a deceased state some days
later, the Piute, who when last previously seen had with him two of Mr.
Watkin's pintos and one liver of his own, was now shy all three. By these
facts a strong presumptive case having been made out, Mr. Watkins was
thenceforth known not as Ezekiel or Emanuel, or whatever his original
first name had been, but as Liver-Eating, or among friends by the
affectionate diminutive of Liv for short.
This I would regard as a typical instance of the value of a chain of good
circumstantial evidence, with no essential link lacking. Direct testimony
could hardly have been more satisfactory, all things considered; and yet
direct testimony is the best sort there is, in the law courts and out. On
the other hand, hearsay evidence is viewed legally and often by the layman
with suspicion; in most causes of action being barred out altogether.
Nevertheless, it is a phase of the fattish man's perversity that,
rejecting the direct, the circumstantial and the circumferential testimony
which abounds about him, he too often awaits confirmation of his growing
suspicions at the hands of outsiders and bystanders before he is willing
openly to admit that condition of fatness which for long has been patent
to the most casual observer.
Women, as I have observed them, are even more disposed to avoid confession
on this point. A woman somehow figures that so long as she refuses to
acknowledge to herself or any other interested party that she has
progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested and
overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long may she
keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich which
first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid
detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its head
in the sand was a lady ostrich, and moreover one typical of her sex. But
men are bad enough. I know that I was.
CHAPTER IV
_I Become The Panting Champion_
Month after month, through the cycle of the revolving seasons, I went
along deceiving myself, even though I deceived none else, coining new
pleas in extenuation or outright contradictions to meet each new-arising
element of confirmatory proof to a state of case which no unprejudiced
person could fail to acknowledge. The original discoverer of the alibi was
a fat man; indeed, it was named for him--Ali Bi-Ben Adhem, he was, a
friend and companion of the Prophet, and so large that, going into Mecca,
he had to ride on two camels. This fact is historically authenticated. I
looked it up.
In the fall of the year, when I brought last winter's heavy suit out of
the clothes-press and found it now to hug o'ersnugly for comfort, I
cajoled my saner self into accepting a most transparent lie--my figure had
not materially altered through the intervening spring and summer; it was
only that the garments, being fashioned of a shoddy material, had shrunk.
I owned a dress suit which had been form fitting, 'tis true, but none too
close a fit upon me. I had owned it for years; I looked forward to owning
and using it for years to come. I laid it aside for a period during an
abatement in formal social activities; then bringing it forth from its
camphor-ball nest for a special occasion I found I could scarce force my
way down into the trousers, and that the waistcoat buttons could not be
made to meet the buttonholes, and that the coat, after finally I had
struggled into it, bound me as with chains by reason of the pull at
armpits and between the shoulders. I could not get my arms down to my
sides at all. I could only use them flapper fashion.
I felt like a penguin. I imagine I looked a good bit like one too.
But I did not blame myself, who was the real criminal, or the grocer who
was accessory before the fact. I put the fault on the tailor, who was
innocent. Each time I had to let my belt buckle out for another notch in
order that I might breathe I diagnosed the trouble as a touch of what
might be called Harlem flatulency. We lived in a flat then--a nonelevator
flat--and I pretended that climbing three flights of steep stairs was what
developed my abdominal muscles and at the same time made me short of wind.
I coined a new excuse after we had moved to a suburb back of Yonkers.
Frequently I had to run to catch the 5:07 accommodation, because if I
missed it I might have to wait for the 7:05, which was no accommodation. I
would go jamming my way at top speed toward the train gate and on into the
train shed, and when I reached my car I would be 'scaping so emphatically
that the locomotive on up ahead would grow jealous and probably felt as
though it might just as well give up trying to compete in volume of sound
output with a real contender. But I was agile enough for all purposes and
as brisk as any upon my feet. Therein I found my consolation.
Among all my fellow members of the younger Grand Central Station set there
was scarce a one who could start with me at scratch and beat me to a train
just pulling out of the shed; and even though he might have bested me at
sprinting, I had him whipped to a souffle at panting. In a hundred-yard
dash I could spot anyone of my juniors a dozen pairs of pants and win out
handily. I was the acknowledged all-weights panting champion of the Putnam
division.
[Illustration: TO OBSERVE MR. BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
_Page 45_]
If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was
we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer
for the Putnam Division Country Club--three deep long pants, say,
followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets. But I would have been
elected pants leader without a struggle. My merits were too self-evident
for a contest.
But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and
thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff? I did
not! No, sir, because I was fat--indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond
the peradventure of a doubt, fat--I kept on playing the fat man's game of
mental solitaire. I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that
my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, hence
pants. I cast a pitying eye at other men, deep of girth and purple of
face, waddling down the platform, and as I scudded on past them I would
say to myself that after all there was a tremendous difference between
being obese and being merely well fleshed out. The real reason of course
was that my legs had remained reasonably firm and trim while the torso was
inflating. For I was one who got fat not all over at once but in favored
localities. And I was even as the husband is whose wife is being gossiped
about--the last person in the neighborhood to hear the news.
As though it were yesterday I remember the day and the place and the
attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon me. Two
of us went to Canada on a hunting trip. The last lap of the journey into
camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the woods. The
native who was to be our chief guide met us with our mounts at a way
station far up in the interior of Quebec. He knew my friend--had guided
him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in those parts. Now until
that hour it had never occurred to me that I was anywhere nearly so
bulksome as this friend of mine was. For he indubitably was a person of
vast displacement and augmented gross total tonnage; and in that state of
blindness which denies us the gift to see ourselves as others see us I
never had reckoned myself to be in his class, avoir-dupoisefully
speaking. But as we lined up two abreast alongside the station, with our
camp duffel piled about us, the keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one
side, considered our abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my
companion said as plainly as words, "Well, I see you've brought a spare
set along with you in case of a puncture."
But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless. What he
did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not fetched
along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on. He had a good big
chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he said, which
would have answered my purposes first rate.
I experienced another disillusioning jolt. Could it be that this practiced
woodsman's eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even
heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point was that I
woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who would pluck the
mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely take note of the
beam which we have swallowed crosswise!
Even so, a great light was beginning to percolate to my innermost
consciousness. A grave doubt pestered me through our days of camping there
in the autumnal wilderness. When we had emerged from the woods and had
reached Montreal on the homeward trip I enticed my friend upon a
penny-in-the-slot weighing machine in the Montreal station and I observed
what he weighed; and then when he stepped aside I unostentatiously weighed
myself, and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock; also
with an error, which should have been entered up a long time before that.