第24章 THE SWIMMING-HOLE(4)

No, I cannot say that I wholly approve of the sudden method of learning to swim. It has the advantange of lumping all the scares of a lifetime into one and having it over with, and yet I don't suppose the scare of being thrown into the water by one's daddy is really greater than being ducked in mid-stream by some hulking, cackle-voiced big boy. It seems greater though, I suppose, because a fellow cannot very well relieve his feelings by throwing stones at his daddy and bawling: "Goldarn you anyhow, you - you big stuff!

I'll get hunk with you, now you see if I don't!" Here would be just the place to make the little boy tie knots in the big boy's shirt-sleeves, soak the knots in water, and pound them between stones.

But that is kind of common, I think. They told about it at the swimming-hole above the dam, but nobody was mean enough to do it.

Maybe they did it down at the Copperas Banks below town. The boys from across the tracks went there, a race apart, whom we feared, and who hated us, if the legend chalked up on the fences "DAMB THEPRODESTANCE," meant anything.

Under the slow method of learning to swim one had leisure to observe the different fashions - dog-fashion and cow-fashion, steamboat-fashion, and such. The little kids and beginners swam dog-fashion, which on that account was considered contemptible. The fellow was sneered at that screwed up his face as if in a cloud of suffocating dust, and fought the water with noise and fury, putting forth enough energy to carry him a mile, and actually going about two feet if he were headed down stream. Scientific men say that the use of the limbs, first on one side and then on the other, is instinctive to all creatures of the monkey tribe. That is the way they do in an emergency, since that is the way to scramble up among the tree limbs. I know that it is the easiest way to swim, and the least effective. When the arms are extended together in the breast stroke, it is as much superior to dogfashion as man is superior to the ape. I have always thought that to swim thus with steady and deliberate arm action, the water parting at the chin and rising just to the root of the underlip, was the most dignified and manly attitude the human being could put himself in. Cow-fashion was a burlesque of this, and the swimmer reared out of water with each stroke, creating tidal waves. It was thought to be vastly comic.

Steamboat-fashion was where a fellow swam on his back, keeping his body up by a gentle, secret paddling motion with his hands, while with his feet he lashed the water into foam, like some river stern-wheeler. If he could cry: "Hoo! hoo! hoo!" in hoarse falsetto to mimic the whistle, it was an added charm.

It was a red-headed boy from across the tracks on his good behavior at the swimming-hole above the dam that I first saw swim hand-over-hand, or "sailor-fashion" as we called it, rightly or wrongly, I know not. I can hear now the crisp, staccato little smack his hand gave the water as he reached forward.

It has ever since been my envy and despair. It is so knowing, so "sporty." I class it with being able to wear a pink-barred shirt front with a diamond-cluster pin in it; with having my clothes so nobby and stylish that one thread more of modishness would be beyond the human power to endure; with being genuinely fond of horseracing;with being a first-class poker player, I mean a really first-class one; with being able to swallow a drink of whisky as if I liked it instead of having to choke it down with a shudder; with knowing truly great men like Fitzsimmons, or whoever it is that is great now, so as to be able to slap him on the back and say: "Why, hello! Bob, old boy, how are you?" with being delighted with the company of actors, instead of finding them as thin as tissue-paper - what wouldn't Igive if I could be like that? My life has been a sad one. But Imight find some comfort in it yet if I coin only get that natty little spat on the water when I lunge forward swimming overhand.

We used to think the Old Swimming-hole was a bully place, but Iknow better now. The sycamore leaned well out over the water, and there was a trapeze on the branch that grew parallel with the shore, but the water near it was never deep enough to dive into. And that is another occasion of humiliation. I can't dive worth a cent.