Now came a fat, bald soul, with dewlaps and a protruding stomach, who later I learned was a manufacturer of clothing—six hundred employees under him—down in health and nerves, really all "shot to pieces" physically. Plainly nervous at the sound of his name, he puffed quickly into position, grabbing wildly after the purposely eccentric throws which his host made and which kept him running to left and right in an all but panicky mood.
"Move! Move!" insisted our host as before, and, if anything, more irritably. "Say, you work like a crab! What a motion! If you had more head and less guts you could do this better. A fine specimen you are! This is what comes of riding about in taxis and eating midnight suppers instead of exercising. Wake up! Wake up! A belt would have kept your stomach in long ago. A little less food and less sleep, and you wouldn't have any fat cheeks. Even your hair might stay on! Wake up! Wake up! What do you want to do—die?" and as he talked he pitched the balls so quickly that his victim looked at times as though he were about to weep. His physical deficiencies were all too plain in every way. He was generally obese and looked as though he might drop, his face a flaming red, his hands trembling and missing, when a "Well, go on," sounded and a third victim was called. This time it was a well-known actor who responded, a star, rather spry and well set up, but still nervous, for he realized quite well what was before him. He had been here for weeks and was in pretty fair trim, but still he was plainly on edge. He ran and began receiving and tossing as swiftly as he could, but as with the others so it was his turn now to be given such a grilling and tongue-lashing as falls to few of us in this world, let alone among the successful in the realm of the footlights. "Say, you're not an actor—you're a woman! You're a stewed onion! Move! Move! Come on! Come on! Look at those motions now, will you? Look at that one arm up! Where do you suppose the ball is? On the ceiling? It's not a lamp! Come on! Come on! It's a wonder when you're killed as Hamlet that you don't stay dead. You are. You're really dead now, you know. Move! Move!" and so it would go until finally the poor thespian, no match for his master and beset by flying balls, landing upon his neck, ear, stomach, finally gave up and cried:
"Well, I can't go any faster than I can, can I? I can't do any more than I can!"
"Ah, go on! Go back into the chorus!" called his host, who now abandoned him. "Get somebody from the baby class to play marbles with you," and he called another.
By now, as may well be imagined, I was fairly stirred up as to the probabilities of the situation. He might call me! The man who was playing opposite me—a small, decayed person who chose me, I think, because he knew I was new, innocuous and probably awkward—seemed to realize my thoughts as well as his own. By lively exercise with me he was doing his utmost to create an impression of great and valuable effort here. "Come on, let's play fast so he won't notice us," he said most pathetically at one point. You would have thought I had known him all my life.
But he didn't call us—not this morning at any rate. Whether owing to our efforts or the fact that I at least was too insignificant, too obscure, we escaped. He did reach me, however, on the fourth or fifth day, and no spindling failure could have done worse. I was struck and tripped and pounded until I all but fell prone upon the floor, half convinced that I was being killed, but I was not. I was merely sent stumbling and drooping back to the sidelines to recover while he tortured some one else. But the names he called me! The comments on my none too smoothly articulated bones—and my alleged mind! As in my schooldays when, a laggard in the fierce and seemingly malevolent atmosphere in which I was taught my ABC's, I crept shamefacedly and beaten from the scene.
It was in the adjoining bathroom, where the host daily personally superintended the ablutions of his guests, that even more of his remarkable method was revealed. Here a goodly portion of the force of his method was his skill in removing any sense of ability, agility, authority or worth from those with whom he dealt. Apparently to him, in his strength and energy, they were all children, weaklings, failures, numbskulls, no matter what they might be in the world outside. They had no understanding of the most important of their possessions, their bodies. And here again, even more than in the gymnasium, they were at the disadvantage of feeling themselves spectacles, for here they were naked. However grand an osseous, leathery lawyer or judge or doctor or politician or society man may look out in the world addressing a jury or a crowd or walking in some favorite place, glistening in his raiment, here, whiskered, thin of legs, arms and neck, with bulging brow and stripped not only of his gown but everything else this side of his skin—well, draw your own conclusion. For after performing certain additional exercises—one hundred times up on your toes, one hundred times (if you could) squatting to your knees, one hundred times throwing your arms out straight before you from your chest or up from your shoulders or out at right angles, right and left from your body and back to your hips until your fingers touched and the sweat once more ran—you were then ready to be told (for once in your life) how to swiftly and agilely take a bath.
"Well, now, you're ready, are you?" this to a noble jurist who, like myself perhaps, had arrived only the day before. "Come on, now. Now you have just ten seconds in which to jump under the water and get yourself wet all over, twenty seconds in which to jump out and soap yourself thoroughly, ten seconds in which to get back in again and rinse off all the soap, and twenty seconds in which to rub and dry your skin thoroughly—now start!"
The distinguished jurist began, but instead of following the advice given him for rapid action huddled himself in a shivering position under the water and stood all but inert despite the previous explanation of the host that the sole method of escaping the weakening influence of cold water was by counteracting it with activity, when it would prove beneficial.
He was such a noble, stalky, bony affair, his gold eyeglasses laid aside for the time being, his tweeds and carefully laundered linen all dispensed with during his stay here. As he came, meticulously and gingerly and quite undone by his efforts, from under the water, where he had been most roughly urged by Culhane, I hoped that he and not I would continue to be seized upon by this savage who seemed to take infinite delight in disturbing the social and intellectual poise of us all.