Cobbs Anatomy | Page 5

friends and exciting the derisive laughter of the unthinking. If he puts on a fancy-flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a Hanging Garden of Babylon. And yet he has a figure just made for showing off a fancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may favor something in light checks for his spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a checked suit, ribald strangers will look at him meaningly and remark to one another that the center of population appears to be shifting again. It has been my observation that fat men are instinctively drawn to short tan overcoats for the early fall. But a fat man in a short tan overcoat, strolling up the avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be constantly overhearing persons behind him wondering why they didn't wait until night to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; but if he turns round to reproach them he is liable to shove an old lady or a poor blind man off the sidewalk, and then, like as not, some gamin will sing out: "Hully gee, Chimmy, wot's become of the rest of the parade? "Ere's the bass drum goin' home all by itself."
I've known of just such remarks being made and I assure you they cut a sensitive soul to the core. Not for the fat man are the snappy clothes for varsity men and the patterns called by the tailors confined because that is what they should be but aren't. Not for him the silken shirt with the broad stripes. Shirts with stripes that were meant to run vertically but are caused to run horizontally, by reasons over which the wearer has no control, remind others of the awning over an Italian grocery. So the fat man must stick to sober navy blues and depressing blacks and melancholy grays. He is advised that he should wear his evening clothes whenever possible, because black and white lines are more becoming to him. But even in evening clothes, that wide expanse of glazed shirt and those white enamel studs will put the onlookers in mind of the front end of a dairy lunch or so I have been cruelly told.
When planning public utilities, who thinks of a fat man? There never was a hansom cab made that would hold a fat man comfortably unless he left the doors open, and that makes him feel undressed. There never was an orchestra seat in a theater that would contain all of him at the same time--he churns up and sloshes out over the sides. Apartment houses and elevators and hotel towels are all constructed upon the idea that the world is populated by stock-size people with those double-A-last shapes.
Take a Pullman car, for instance. One of the saddest sights known is that of a fat man trying to undress on one of those closet shelves called upper berths without getting hopelessly entangled in the hammock or committing suicide by hanging himself with his own suspenders. And after that, the next most distressing sight is the same fat man after he has undressed and is lying there, spouting like a sperm-whale and overflowing his reservation like a crock of salt-rising dough in a warm kitchen, and wondering how he can turn over without bulging the side of the car and maybe causing a wreck. Ah me, those dark green curtains with the overcoat buttons on them hide many a distressful spectacle from the traveling public!
If a fat man undertakes to reduce nobody sympathizes with him. A thin man trying to fatten up so he won't fall all the way through his trousers when he draws 'em on in the morning is an object of sympathy and of admiration, and people come from miles round and give him advice about how to do it. But suppose a fat man wants to train down to a point where, when he goes into a telephone booth and says "Ninety-four Broad," the spectators will know he is trying to get a number and not telling his tailor what his waist measure is. Is he greeted with sympathetic understanding? He is not. He is greeted with derision and people stand round and gloat at him. The authorities recommend health exercises, but health exercises are almost invariably undignified in effect and wearing besides. Who wants to greet the dewy morn by lying flat on his back and lifting his feet fifty times? What kind of a way is that to greet the dewy morn anyhow? And bending over with the knees stiff and touching the tips of the toes with the tips of the fingers--that's no employment for a grown man with a family to support and a position to maintain in society. Besides which it cannot be done. I make the statement unequivocally and