That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that it “spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running ’way down here,” and the equally earnest and far more peevish complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few pounds.
But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty’s calm refusal to consider their arguments––some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty’s fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse. Hogarty had a way 168 of telling them just how little they actually amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to amuse them.
The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the ex-lightweight’s scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly increasing waist-line––or lack of one. For their lines were largely a series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had originally designed them.
They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughter, to reappear an hour or two later stepping like three-year-olds, serenely, virtuously joyous at the tale of the scales which indicated a five-pound loss. And the Saturday and Sunday week-end out of town which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before.
Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty’s––but never until along about noon. And because he knew how infallible were the habits of his patrons, Hogarty did not so much as lift his eyes to the practically empty gymnasium floor when a clock at the far side of the room tinkled the hour of eleven. The two boys who were busily scrubbing with waxing-mops the floor that already glistened like the unruffled surface of some crystal pool were quite as 169 unconcerned at the lack of activity as was their employer. They merely paused long enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads––it was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to bear––and went at their task harder than ever.
Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all––and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame––knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in––say the tenth. It was common gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else.
No man had ever ventured to interrupt twice the breathless interest with which Hogarty was accustomed to play his game. It did not promise to be safe––a second interruption. And Hogarty was playing dominoes this particular Monday morning, at a little round, green-topped table against the wall opposite the door, peering stealthily at the upturning face of each piece of a newly dealt hand, when the clock struck off that hour. But if Hogarty was oblivious to everything but the game, his opponent 170 was far from being in that much to be envied state. Bobby Ogden yawned––yawned from sheer ennui––although he tried to hide that indication of his boredom behind a perfectly manicured hand, while he scowled at the dial.
Ogden was one of the Monday morning regulars––one of the crowd which usually arrived in a visibly taut-nerved condition at an entirely irregular and undependable hour. An attack of malignant malaria, contracted on a prolonged ’gator hunt in the Glades, coupled with the equally malignant orders of his physician, alone accounted for his presence there at that unheard of o’clock.
There were purplish semi-circles still painfully too vivid beneath his eyes; his pallor was still tinged with an ivory-like shade of yellow. And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty’s happy deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious man across the table from him to a state of violence.
Ogden’s quite perfectly lined features were smooth with the smoothness of twenty years or so. His lack of stability and poise belonged also to that age and to a physique that managed to tilt the scale beam at one hundred and eighteen––that is, unless he had been forgetting rather more rashly than usual that 171 liquids were less sustaining than solids, when one hundred and ten was about the figure.