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Page 5
The first time he appeared in Arundell Street in his sweater and
flannels he had barely whirled his Indian clubs once around his
head before he had attracted the following audience:
a) Two cabmen--one intoxicated;
b) Four waiters from the Hotel Mathis;
c) Six waiters from the Hotel Previtali;
d) Six chambermaids from the Hotel Mathis;
e) Five chambermaids from the Hotel Previtali;
f) The proprietor of the Hotel Mathis;
g) The proprietor of the Hotel Previtali;
h) A street cleaner;
i) Eleven nondescript loafers;
j) Twenty-seven children;
k) A cat.
They all laughed--even the cat--and kept on laughing. The
intoxicated cabman called Ashe "Sunny Jim." And Ashe kept on
swinging his clubs.
A month later, such is the magic of perseverance, his audience
had narrowed down to the twenty-seven children. They still
laughed, but without that ringing conviction which the
sympathetic support of their elders had lent them.
And now, after three months, the neighborhood, having accepted
Ashe and his morning exercises as a natural phenomenon, paid him
no further attention.
On this particular morning Ashe Marson skipped with even more
than his usual vigor. This was because he wished to expel by
means of physical fatigue a small devil of discontent, of whose
presence within him he had been aware ever since getting out of
bed. It is in the Spring that the ache for the larger life comes
on us, and this was a particularly mellow Spring morning. It was
the sort of morning when the air gives us a feeling of
anticipation--a feeling that, on a day like this, things surely
cannot go jogging along in the same dull old groove; a
premonition that something romantic and exciting is about to
happen to us.
But the southwest wind of Spring brings also remorse. We catch
the vague spirit of unrest in the air and we regret our misspent
youth.
Ashe was doing this. Even as he skipped, he was conscious of a
wish that he had studied harder at college and was now in a
position to be doing something better than hack work for a
soulless publishing company. Never before had he been so
completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into
which he had fallen.
Skipping brought no balm. He threw down his rope and took up the
Indian clubs. Indian clubs left him still unsatisfied. The
thought came to him that it was a long time since he had done his
Larsen Exercises. Perhaps they would heal him.
The Larsen Exercises, invented by a certain Lieutenant Larsen, of
the Swedish Army, have almost every sort of merit. They make a
man strong, supple, and slender. But they are not dignified.
Indeed, to one seeing them suddenly and without warning for the
first time, they are markedly humorous. The only reason why King
Henry, of England, whose son sank with the White Ship, never
smiled again, was because Lieutenant Larsen had not then invented
his admirable exercises.
So complacent, so insolently unselfconscious had Ashe become in
the course of three months, owing to his success in inducing the
populace to look on anything he did with the indulgent eye of
understanding, that it simply did not occur to him, when he
abruptly twisted his body into the shape of a corkscrew, in
accordance with the directions in the lieutenant's book for the
consummation of Exercise One, that he was doing anything funny.
And the behavior of those present seemed to justify his
confidence. The proprietor of the Hotel Mathis regarded him
without a smile. The proprietor of the Hotel Previtali might have
been in a trance, for all the interest he displayed. The hotel
employees continued their tasks impassively. The children were
blind and dumb. The cat across the way stropped its backbone
against the railings unheeding.
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