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for six weeks more and I'll find myself fallen away to a perfect three-ton truck. Keep it up for three months and I'll be ready to rent myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in the main tank. I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me seasick merely to look down at myself as I walk. I may slosh about and billow somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down. I refuse to be known as the human tidal wave, with women and children being hurriedly removed to a place of safety at my approach. Right here and now is where I quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!"
Which accordingly I did. What I did not realize was that the unwonted exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at dinner--and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller's prepared food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a meal. I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder. So, never associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest. I'd just make the best of it.
And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a walk.
Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago something else happened. And on top of that something else--to wit: The Great Reduction.
Of the Great Reduction more anon.
CHAPTER VI
More Anon
Well, I made up my mind, having tried violent exercise in the gymnasium, coupled with violent language in the steam room, and having found neither or both had been of the least avail in trimming down my proportions, but on the contrary had augmented them to the extent of nearly ten pounds, live weight, that I would let well enough alone. If 'twere my ordained fate to be fat--why, then so be it; I'd be fatly fatalistic and go on through life undulating and rippling. If an all-wise Providence meant to call me to the estate of being the bulkiest writing man using the English language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire Belloc look to his laurels and Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings. There was one consolation: Thank heavens the championship would remain in America!
The years go marching by in ordered processional. A great war bursts and for a space endures. In our own land prohibition is nationally enacted and women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce it. Ireland undertakes to settle her ancient problem on the basis of self-extermination. Several rich retail profiteers die, the approval being hearty and general, and on arriving at heaven experience great difficulty in passing through the Needle's Eye, or tradesmen's entrance. Somebody tells Henry Ford about what some high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago and in the first flush of his startled indignation he becomes violently anti-Semitic. General Pershing returns from the battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins, Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo." Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics, its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains at the juncture