Professionally Mr. Dunne’s discourse tended ever to the hortatory and corrective. He was a master of the verbal rowel.
“Keep it up!”
“Again!”
“Ah-h-h, put some punch in it!”
“Yah ain’t haff trying!”
“Go wan! Yah gotta do better’n’at!” And, occasionally, “Rotten!”
Worse still was a manner he had of regarding her with an expression of mild and regretful wonder whilst giving voice to his bulldoggish “Grmph!” in a tone indicating only too plainly that never before was conscientious trainer so bored and afflicted with such an utterly incompetent, inefficient, and generally hopeless subject as the daily withering Darcy.
In lighter moments he would regale her with reminiscences of the Big Feller and his eccentricities in and insubordinations under training, while Darcy would lie, panting and spent, on the hard floor, wondering regretfully why the Big Feller hadn’t killed Mr. Dunne when opportunities must have been so plentiful. Then, just as her labored breathing would begin to ease, the taskmaster in Mr. Dunne would awaken, the call “Time” would sound like doom to her ears, and she would set to it again, arching on her back, rolling on her stomach (where the three creases were beginning to flatten), yanking at overweighted pulleys, interminably skipping a loathly rope, standing up like a dumb ten-pin before the ponderous medicine-ball which Mr. Dunne hurled at her, punching at an elusive and too often vengeful bag, rowing an imaginary boat against wind, wave, and every dictate of her weary body, and finally running silly circles around the room like a demented cat, until the monitor uttered the one, lone word of pity in his inquisitorial vocabulary: “Nuff!”
Had all this deep-wrung sweat of brow and soul produced any definable effect, Darcy could have borne it with a resigned spirit. It didn’t. Four times a week she went through the hideous grind, and nothing happened. Each night she went to bed early and after profound sleep had to get up out of the cuddly warmth into a shudderingly cold bath—and nothing happened. She gave up the before-dinner cocktail and with it what little zest she had for her deadly plain diet—and nothing happened. She denied her sweet tooth so much as one little bite of candy—oh, but that was a bitter deprivation—and nothing happened. To her regimen at the gymnasium she added a stint of simple but violent house exercises on off days—and nothing happened. Life, which she had supposed, in her first flush of hopeful enthusiasm for the new régime, would be one grand, sweet song, was, in fact, one petty, sour discord—wherein nothing happened. This was quite right and logical, had Darcy but known it. Layers of fat, physical and moral, accumulated through years of self-coddling, are not worked off in a week or a month.
There came a day when something did happen. There always does. It was not of that order of occurrences which can be foreseen by the expert eye. It seldom is. Andy Dunne, honestly and simply intent on earning his money, had been unusually exigent. Besides, Darcy had a nail in her shoe. Besides, Mr. Riegel had been curtly critical of her latest and most original design as “new-fangled.” Besides, Maud was becoming satirically curious as to where she was spending so many afternoons. Besides, it was a rotten day. There was no light on earth or in heaven!