“By this time she had us all doing calisthenics. The creaky floors of Mrs. Vesey's house used to resound night and morning with the agonies of our gymnastics. There was one exercise that Gloria told us she found particularly helpful. It was to lie down with the feet under a bureau or any other heavy piece of furniture, extend the arms behind the head, and then raise and lower the body a hundred times, pivoting from the waist. This was only one of fifty or more laborious accomplishments that we undertook for the sake of our goddess. No woman was ever wooed with more honest pangs, or with more repeated genuflections. As we lay on the floor before going to bed, raising our legs in the air two hundred times, or groaned in some sinew-cracking, twisting contortion devised by the pitiless Swede, it was the vision of Gloria's beauty of snow and rose that gave us courage. If any passer-by ever looked up at the front of Mrs. Vesey's house in the early mornings, he must have been startled to see a white figure near every window, furiously going through the Swedish manual. One of us, we fondly thought, would some day spend a healthy Swedish honeymoon performing these motions in ecstatic company with Gloria; and we did not want to be shamed by her incomparable perfection. If she worshipped bodily symmetry, our goal was nothing less. We wanted to be lithe, supple, very panthers of elasticity and grace. The evening I was able to stand on one leg in the restaurant and proudly raise my other foot to touch a gas-jet some six feet from the floor, I felt that Gloria might some day be mine.”
Dove paused again, and seemed to fall into a reminiscent reverie. Unconsciously he stiffly extended one leg in front of him, and I divined that he was inwardly rehearsing that act of calisthenic triumph.
“By gracious!” he said, “I've never forgotten the night I got her father's permission to take her to some gymnastic tournament, or something of that sort, down at Madison Square Garden. How annoyed the other men were when they went to the chop-house that night for their evening penance of lentils, and found Gloria absent! Yes, it was an odd wooing. I had found the measurements of the Venus de Milo in some Sunday paper, and that night, when we became quite sentimental, I made her promise to take her own dimensions, so that we could compare the proportions of the two. And we had some very happy little jokes, quite simple ones that she would understand, about her arms being much more lovely than those of the statue, and that sort of thing. How deliciously she blushed the next day when she gave me her list of measurements, written out on a sheet of paper. Of course, I pretended not to understand which was which. I wrote a little poem about them.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that you were getting on very well. What was the trouble? You didn't marry her, did you?”
“Old man Larsen,” he continued, gravely, “had a number of other hobbies besides vegetarianism and physical culture. He was a mechanical genius in his way. I remember once, after we had expressed exaggerated admiration of some atrocious compound of lentils and nuts and fruit, Gloria took us through the kitchen to show us an ingenious sandwich-making machine her father had contrived. You fed in loaves of pumpernickel bread and pats of nut butter on one side, hard-boiled eggs and lettuce and dressing on the other, and out came egg-salad sandwiches through a slot, as neat as you could want to see. But the best of his stunts was a sort of miniature vacuum cleaner which the waitresses used for taking the crumbs off the tables. You've seen those little hot-air pistols they use at swell shoe-shining stands to dry the liquid cleanser off your shoes before they put on the polishing paste? Well, Larsen's decrumbing machine, as we used to call it, looked rather like those. You screwed a plug into an electric light socket, ran the little gun over the table, and in a jiffy it sucked up crumbs and cigarette ashes and spilled lentils and matches, and left the cloth neat. Larsen was so proud of it he said he was going to patent it.
“I never cared so very much for the old man, he was a little too eccentric; and I began to think, after a while, that he used his daughter a little too crudely as a business bait; but he was full of ideas. He had a big motor-truck that he used to cruise around town, visiting the markets himself, to get the pick of the vegetables; and he was always tinkering with that truck, planning new mechanical tricks of some kind. He had an insatiable curiosity, too. He used to sit down at the table with us sometimes, late in the evening, and ask about our work, and where we lived, and what Mrs. Vesey was like, and what time of day we were home, and all sorts of fool questions like that.
“Well, the time went on, and it began to be cold weather. I noticed this sooner than the other fellows, I think, because whereas most of them went to offices during the daytime, I stayed home at Mrs. Vesey's, trying to write in my narrow coop of a top bedroom. You know how depressing an instrument a typewriter is when your hands are cold. I haven't forgotten some dreary vigils I had up there, struggling to write short stories. Sometimes I used to give it up weakly, and go round to Larsen's, where it was always warm and cozy, to drink herb coffee and eat those brittle Swedish biscuits and chat with Gloria. I used to complain to her about the cold in my room, and she would laugh and say that I just ought to try a winter in Sweden.
“'Swedish exercises,' she would say. 'That's the thing to stir up your blood! They'll keep you warm.'
“And then, in her enchanting way, she would tell me a new one, and if there were no customers (as there generally weren't in the middle of the afternoon) she would illustrate how it should be done. Sometimes she would even allow me what she called a Swedish kiss—a very fleeting and provocative embrace. And then I would show her my new perfection in doing the backward stoop or some such muscular oddity, and return to my cold citadel.
“But in spite of the fact that we were all busy much of the time going through our manual of exercises, presently the chill of Mrs. Vesey's lodgings became severe. Mrs. Vesey was a rather obstinate and frugal old dear, and she herself dwelt down in the kitchen, where her big gas-range kept her comfortable. When we complained of the cold, she had all sorts of excuses for postponing lighting the furnace. There was a big coal strike that year, and she was quite right in suspecting that once her present supply was exhausted it would be very hard to get more. Also, she said, her furnace man had quit, but she was hunting for another. On one pretext or another, she kept on putting us off, until finally it was mid-November, and we were doing our exercises in rooms where our breath showed like clouds of fog. And then one day Mrs. Vesey came up in great glee to say that a coal man had called that very morning, of his own accord, and had offered to give her five tons. She had promptly snapped at the chance, and he had put the coal in the cellar; so we should have heat the very next day, when the new furnace man was expected.