CHAPTER XXVI Containing Some High Melodrama THERE are great moments in life when the acquired veneer of society drops away and human beings revert to type. Tootsie lay down on her back and kicked her legs in the air, howling with glee. Skippy, disentangling himself from the bench, rose with slow deliberation. He saw that he faced a crisis. If Tootsie, now rolling before him in hysterical agony, ever was allowed to tell such a story as this, there would be no future for John C. Bedelle but to ship before the mast. Skippy thought hard and Skippy had the instincts of a diplomat. He decided to begin with a light conciliatory manner.

"Well, Tootsie, old girl, you've got the goods on me. What's your price?"

Tootsie's reply was a succession of hysterical gasps that sounded like a child with the whooping cough laughing over a comic section.

"What's your price?" Skippy repeated more firmly, but striving to maintain a sickly smile.

"OW! OW! OW!" said Tootsie, holding in her sides.

Skippy began to be alarmed. He thought a moment and then carefully removed the dressmaker's form and hid it behind a packing-case. But the sight of Skippy's dancing companion brought forth a fresh attack of hysterics. Then he had recourse to water and a dripping oily sponge. The sight of this so affected Tootsie that she rose precipitately and staggered to a chair. Skippy at once abandoned the sponge and sympathetically proffered his handkerchief.

"It's goin' to cost me a lot of money," he thought, considering her with anxiety. He had fifteen dollars stowed away with the intention of adding it to the cash returns of his approaching birthday and acquiring his first dress suit. He made a mental surrender and advancing to the somewhat calmer Tootsie, a third time asked:

"Well, come on! What's your price?"

"Thief!" said Tootsie, all at once remembering her grievance.

"Oh, I say, can't you take a joke?"

"A joke! Wait'll I get even with you, Mr. Smarty!"

"Go easy. Name your terms."

"And I paid you to watch it!" said Tootsie, whose anger began to rise as her respiration returned.

Skippy mournfully admitted to himself that this had been an unnecessary aggravation.

"Shucks! You didn't think I was going to keep the money, did you?" he said, bringing out a dollar bill and tendering it humbly.

Tootsie put the bill from her with the gesture of a tragedy queen, stood up, straightened her skirt and said:

"Just you wait, thief!"

"What are you going to do?"

"My business."

"You're not going to tell?" said Skippy, who had no doubt of her intention.

"Oh dear no! Oh no indeed!" said Tootsie, moving to depart.

Skippy sprang ahead, slammed the door, locked it and pocketed the key.

"What good does that do?" said Tootsie disdainfully.

"You'll not leave this room until you swear a solemn oath," said Skippy desperately.

"All right, I guess I can wait if you can," said Tootsie, settling down. "But I pity you when Dad gets hold of you—thief!"

Skippy deliberated, resolved on anything short of murder to stifle the threatening exposure. Sterner methods were necessary. All at once his eye spied a coil of rope in the corner and he sprang to it with a shout.

"What are you going to do?" said Tootsie wrathfully.

"I am going to tie and gag and leave you to starve," said Skippy, swinging a lasso.

There was a short and painful tussle in which his necktie was torn to shreds and he surrendered a certain amount of hair, but at the end of which, Miss Tootsie, tied hand and foot to a chair, was propped up against a pillar, while her conqueror proceeded to roll up his handkerchief with the evident intention of applying a gag.

"You'll like it when the rats come around," he said gloomily.

"Fiddlesticks! You can't scare me," said Tootsie with alarming calm.

"And there are bats too, don't forget the bats that get their claws in your hair," said Skippy, approaching with the gag, "and not a soul to hear your cries, you tattle-tale!"

"You'll get the licking of your life," said Tootsie, looking at him steadily. "Thief!"

"So you won't name your price!" said Skippy, passing behind her and holding the gag before her eyes.

"Not if you murder me—you thief!"

Skippy again considered.

"She doesn't scare worth a darn," he acknowledged to himself. Instead of applying the gag he departed to the opposite side, sat down and began to think. At the end of a long moment he rose and approached her with a brisk set manner.

"So you're going to tell, are you?"

"You just bet I'm going to tell, you coward!"

"All right, tell then!" He stooped, freed her legs and arms and rose. "Tell if you've made up your mind to—but God help you if you do. That's all I have to say."

"You can't scare me," said Tootsie, but already intrigued by the new plan of action which she divined behind her brother's silence.

"No, but there's some one I can scare!" said Skippy, unlocking the door. "All right! War to the knife, Miss Tootsie! Remember, though, I warned you!"

"Who are you threatening now?" said Tootsie, trying to conceal her anxiety; for long association had engendered a lively respect for the Skippy imagination.

"I never threaten," said Skippy disdainfully, "but if that red-haired, knock-kneed, overfed beau of yours ever sets foot on this place again, he comes in a hearse! And what goes for him, goes for all! Go on and tell, but you'll have the loneliest summer you've ever had, young lady!"

Five minutes later a treaty of peace was concluded on the basis of secret understandings secretly arrived at, and Miss Tootsie Bedelle replaced the dressmaker's figure in the arms of the triumphant diplomat while the phonograph gave forth the strains of the Washington Post.

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Tootsie's terpsichorean assistance was sorely needed. Skippy was not a natural glider and gliding as Tootsie explained to him was essential in a ballroom, in polite society at least. Skippy's feet could skip, hop and jump with the best, but they were not, in any sense of the word, gliders. The change from the inanimate embrace of the dressmaker's form to Tootsie's pliant figure, however, worked such miracles that at the end of twenty minutes' industrious application, Tootsie expressed herself as astonished and delighted.

Now of course Skippy could have gone for instruction to Dolly Travers, who was the object of these secret efforts. But that was not the Skippy way. He had always shunned any exhibition of inferiority. Whatever was to be learned he learned in privacy and exhibited in public. He had taught himself to shoot marbles, to solve the intricate sequences of mumblety peg, to throw an out-curve, to pick up a double hitch with one hand, to chin himself, skin the cat and hang by his toes behind the safe seclusion of the barn wall. Whatever his failures they were not accompanied by the jeers of an audience. He had gone off in secret to the swimming pool by Bretton's creek and smarted for hours under crashing belly-whoppers until he had taught himself to dive forward and backward. Then he watched with grinning superiority the fate of less experienced youngsters who followed his dare.

So in the present sentimental crisis. To rank in the estimation of Miss Dolly Travers there was no escaping the fact that he would have to surrender his prejudices and incline his feet to the popular way. But having reached this decision he determined to stage his effects. For two more Saturdays he continued in dignified isolation to escort Miss Travers to the weekly hop and back, guarding her scarf and fan, straining his mouth into the semblance of an interested smile while other fellows slipped their arms around the tiny figure and moved dexterously or heavily about the ballroom.

On the third Saturday, halfway to the club house, just as he had planned, Miss Dolly returned to the point of discussion.

"Jack, aren't you ever, ever going to learn to dance?"

"Oh well, perhaps some day," he said casually.

"But you can't go through life without dancing!"

"Oh no, of course not."

"Really I think it's just too selfish of you. You know how I adore it. Why won't you try? I do believe you're afraid of being laughed at."

Skippy smiled craftily to himself.

"Well, perhaps I'll have a try."

"That's what you've said every time," said Miss Dolly, shrugging her shoulders.

Skippy bided his opportunity until the third two-step had begun and the claimants for the favorite's hand were congregating.

"I'm sitting this out with Jack," said Dolly, with a sigh.

"Say, a fossil who can't dance oughtn't to have any rights around here, nohow," said Happy Mather. "You're only a clothes horse anyway, Skippy."

Dolly burst out laughing at this, which pained Skippy exceedingly.

"Oh, any chump can dance if he wants to."

"You think so?"

"Sure. Easiest thing in the world if I wanted to."

"Easy?"

"Sure. Just keeping in time, that's all."

"Here's a dollar you can't get three times around the room."

Skippy pretended to hesitate.

"I'll pay another dollar any day to see a circus," said Joe Crocker, beginning to smirk.

"Dolly, hold the money," said Skippy.

Miss Dolly looked up in some consternation for the group now numbered a half a dozen and the floor was vast and bare.

"Don't you want to wait a little?" she said with a glance at Crocker, who was nudging his neighbor.

"What's the use?" said Skippy. "Now tell me again what I do."

"Two steps with the left forward and then two steps with the right. Hold my arm so," said Dolly a little breathlessly.

"Hold on tight, Skippy," said Happy Mather.

"Step on your own feet."

"Balance on your heels."

"Don't let them rattle you, Jack."

"They can't. Which foot do I start on?"

"The left."

"Shall we give him a push, Dolly?" said Lazelle sympathetically, while his companions, linking arms, were beaming with anticipated delight.

Skippy, having properly worked up his audience, nodded to his partner and floated off in a perfect dancing style.

"Jack, you wretch, you've danced for years!" said Dolly after the first surprise had passed. "You've just been making fun of me all this time."

"Never been on a ballroom floor before in my life," said Skippy, keeping within the letter of the truth.

"Why you're wonderful, Jack! But then how could you—"

"It's mental, everything is mental," said Skippy conceitedly. "I just watched till I got it in my mind and the rest was easy. Thanks for the long green. Hello, what's become of our little gallery of nuts?"

Whether or not Dolly was entirely convinced by this casual explanation, the immediate return to Skippy was enormous. Not only were the claimants to her affections completely distanced, but Miss Dolly, for a time, adopted an attitude of respect and deference towards him, which had formerly been totally lacking.

Skippy was tremendously in love. There was no doubt about that. You could see it in the dishpan glow of his scrubbed forehead, in the spotless flannels and the lily white hands. There was something secure and permanent in the attachment. Dolly was not sentimental and only distantly affectionate, but she was absorbing. There was no question of an eight-hour day in his case. From nine a.m. until Mr. Travers ostentatiously began to bar the library windows for the night, Mr. Skippy Bedelle was at one end of a wire with Miss Dolly Travers at the other, pushing the button.

That practical young lady, realizing that Skippy's earning capacity was still woefully limited, permitted no allusions to the distant holy bonds of matrimony, but she did allow him to mortgage his future to the extent of the promenade and dances which would decorate his scholastic and collegiate journey, as well as attendance at all athletic contests of any nature whatsoever. On his birthday (when the sinking fund toward the first dress suit rose to the colossal sum of fifty dollars) they solemnly exchanged pins, Dolly openly sporting the red and black of Lawrenceville, while Skippy concealed in the secret recesses of his tie a little gold wishbone which would lead him to the higher prizes in life, add three inches to his stature and the additional twenty pounds necessary to qualify for the varsity.

His fall from grace was of course the subject of great merriment among his companions, particularly Happy Mather and Joe Crocker in whom memory still rankled. A direct insult was of course dangerous, but there were other subtler ways. At least half a dozen times a day some one was sure to ask him,

"I say, Skippy, what's doing to-night?"

"Got anything on this afternoon?"

But Skippy brushed aside their crude attempts at persiflage with indifference. He had won out. The courted prize was his. For two weeks not a cloud obtruded on the clear sky of his content. Dolly bullied and bossed him. He did her errands. He fetched and carried. He served her and no other goddess. And then tragedy arrived with the arrival of the celebrated Hickey Hicks, who came down to spend a fortnight with the Triumphant Egghead.

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