Cobb’s Anatomy(科伯的解剖学)
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Cobb's Anatomy
1
Cobb's Anatomy
by Irvin S. Cobb
Cobb's Anatomy
2
Tummies
Dr. Woods Hutchinson says that fat people are happier than other
people. How does Dr. Woods Hutchinson know? Did he ever have to
leave the two top buttons of his vest unfastened on account of his extra
chins? Has the pressure from within against the waistband where the
watchfob is located ever been so great in his case that he had partially to
undress himself to find out what time it was? Does he have to take the
tailor's word for it that his trousers need pressing?
He does not. And that sort of a remark is only what might be
expected from any person upward of seven feet tall and weighing about
ninety-eight pounds with his heavy underwear on. I shall freely take Dr.
Woods Hutchinson's statements on the joys and ills of the thin. But when
he undertakes to tell me that fat people are happier than thin people, it is
only hearsay evidence with him and decline to accept his statements
unchallenged. He is going outside of his class. He is, as you might say,
no more than an innocent bystander. Whereas I am a qualified authority.
I will admit that at one stage of my life, I regarded fleshiness as a
desirable asset. The incident came about in this way. There was a
circus showing in our town and a number of us proposed to attend it. It
was one of those one-ring, ten-cent circuses that used to go about over the
country, and it is my present recollection that all of us had funds laid by
sufficient to buy tickets; but if we could procure admission in the regular
way we felt it would be a sinful waste of money to pay our way in.
With this idea in mind we went scouting round back of the main tent to
a comparatively secluded spot, and there we found a place where the
canvas side-wall lifted clear of the earth for a matter of four or five inches.
We held an informal caucus to decide who should should go first. The
honor lay between two of us--between the present writer, who was
reasonably skinny, and another boy, named Thompson, who was even
skinnier. He won, as the saying is, on form. It was decided by
practically a unanimous vote, he alone dissenting, that he should crawl
under and see how the land lay inside. If everything was all right he
Cobb's Anatomy
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would make it known by certain signals and we would then follow, one by
one.
Two of us lifted the canvas very gently and this Thompson boy started
to wriggle under. He was about halfway in when--zip!--like a flash he
bodily vanished. He was gone, leaving only the marks where his toes
had gouged the soil. Startled, we looked at one another. There was
something peculiar about this. Here was a boy who had started into a
circus tent in a circumspect, indeed, a highly cautious manner, and then
finished the trip with undue and sudden precipitancy. It was more than
peculiar--it bordered upon the uncanny. It was sinister. Without a word
having been spoken we decided to go away from there.
Wearing expressions of intense unconcern and sterling innocence upon
our young faces we did go away from there and drifted back in the general
direction of the main entrance. We arrived just in time to meet our young
friend coming out. He came hurriedly, using his hands and his feet both,
his feet for traveling and his hands for rubbing purposes. Immediately
behind him was a large, coarse man using language that stamped him as a
man who had outgrown the spirit of youth and was preeminently out of
touch with the ideals and aims of boyhood.
At that period it seemed to me and to the Thompson boy, who was
moved to speak feelingly on the subject, and in fact to all of us, that
excessive slimness might have its drawbacks. Since that time several of
us have had occasion to change our minds. With the passage of years we
have fleshened up, and now we know better. The last time I saw the
Thompson boy he was known as Excess-Baggage Thompson. His figure
in profile suggested a man carrying a roll-top desk in his arms and his face
looked like a face that had refused to jell and was about to run down on his
clothes. He spoke longingly of the days of his youth and wondered if the
shape of his knees had changed much since the last time he saw them.
Yes sir, no matter what Doctor Hutchinson says, I contend that the slim
man has all the best of it in this world. The fat man is the universal goat;
he is humanity's standing joke. Stomachs are the curse of our modern
civilization. When a man gets a stomach his troubles begin. If you
doubt this ask any fat man--I started to say ask any fat woman, too. Only
Cobb's Anatomy
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there aren't any fat women to speak of. There are women who are plump
and will admit it; there are even women who are inclined to be stout. But
outside of dime museums there are no fat women. But there are plenty of
fat men. Ask one of them. Ask any one of them. Ask me.
This thing of acquiring a tummy steals on one insidiously, like a thief
in the night. You notice that you are plumping out a trifle and for the
time being you feel a sort of small personal satisfaction in it. Your shirts
fit you better. You love the slight strain upon the buttonholes. You
admire the pleasant plunking sound suggestive of ripe watermelons when
you pat yourself. Then a day comes when the persuasive odor of
mothballs fills the autumnal air and everybody at the barber shop is having
the back of his neck shaved also, thus betokening awakened social
activities, and when evening is at hand you take the dress-suit, which fitted
you so well, out of the closet where it has been hanging and undertake to
back yourself into it. You are pained to learn that it is about three sizes
too small. At first you are inclined to blame the suit for shrinking, but
second thought convinces you that the fault lies elsewhere. It is you that
have swollen, not the suit that has shrunk. The buttons that should adorn
the front of the coat are now plainly visible from the rear.
You buy another dress-suit and next fall you have out-grown that one
too. You pant like a lizard when you run to catch a car. You cross your
legs and have to hold the crossed one on with both hands to keep your
stomach from shoving it off in space. After a while you quit crossing
them and are content with dawdling yourself on your own lap. You are
fat! Dog-gone it--you are fat!
You are up against it and it is up against you, which is worse. You
are something for people to laugh at. You are also expected to laugh. It
is all right for a thin man to be grouchy; people will say the poor creature
has dyspepsia and should be humored along. But a fat man with a grouch
is inexcusable in any company--there is so much of him to be grouchy.
He constitutes a wave of discontent and a period of general depression.
He is not expected to be romantic and sentimental either. It is all right
for a giraffe to be sentimental, but not a hippopotamus. If you doubt me
consult any set of natural history pictures. The giraffe is shown with his
Cobb's Anatomy
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long and sinuous neck entwined in fond embrace about the neck of his
mate; but the amphibious, blood-sweating hippo is depicted as spouting
and wallowing, morose and misanthropic, in a mud puddle off by himself.
In passing I may say that I regard this comparison as a particularly apt one,
because I know of no living creature so truly amphibious in hot weather as
an open-pored fat man, unless it is a hippopotamus.
Oh how true is the saying that nobody loves a fat man! When fat
comes up on the front porch love jumps out of the third-story window.
Love in a cottage? Yes. Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat man's
heart is supposed to lie so far inland that the softer emotions cannot reach
it at all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did but know it, and also they
are the tenderest and a man with a double chin rarely leads a double life.
For one thing, it requires too much moving round.
A fat man cannot wear the clothes he would like to wear. As a race
fat men are fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no fat man can indulge
his innocent desires in this direction without grieving his family and
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
Cobb's Anatomy
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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,"
Cobb's Anatomy
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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 without fear of successful contradiction that it cannot be done. And
if it could be done-- which as I say it can't--there would be no real pleasure
in touching a set of toes that one has known of only by common rumor for
years. Those toes are the same as strangers to you--you knew they were
in the neighborhood, of course, but you haven't been intimate with them.
Maybe you try dieting, which is contrary to nature. Nature intended
that a fat man should eat heartily, else why should she endow him with the
capacity and the accommodations. Starving in the midst of plenty is not
for him who has plenty of midst. Nature meant that a fat man should
have an appetite and that he should gratify it at regular intervals--meant
that he should feel like the Grand Canyon before dinner and like the Royal
Gorge afterward. Anyhow, dieting for a fat man consists in not eating
anything that's fit to eat. The specialist merely tells him to eat what a
horse would eat and has the nerve to charge him for what he could have
found out for himself at any livery stable. Of course he might bant in the
same way that a woman bants. You know how a woman bants. She
begins the day very resolutely, and if you are her husband you want to
avoid irritating her or upsetting her, because hell hath no fury like a
woman banting. For breakfast she takes a swallow of lukewarm water
and half of a soda cracker. For luncheon she takes the other half of the
cracker and leaves off the water. For dinner she orders everything on the
menu except the date and the name of the proprietor. She does this in
order to give her strength to go on with the treatment.
Cobb's Anatomy
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No fat man would diet that way; but no matter which way he does diet
it doesn't do him any good. Health exercises only make him muscle-sore
and bring on what the Harvard ball team call the Charles W. Horse; while
banting results in attacks of those kindred complaints--the Mollie K.
Grubbs and the Fan J. Todds.
Walking is sometimes recommended and the example of the camel is
pointed out, the camel being a creature that can walk for days and days.
But, as has been said by some thinking person, who in thunder wants to be
a camel? The subject of horseback riding is also brought up frequently in
this connection. It is one of the commonest delusions among fat men that
horseback riding will bring them down and make them sylphlike and
willowy. I have several fat men among my lists of acquaintances who
labor under this fallacy. None of them was ever a natural-born horseback
rider; none of them ever will be. I like to go out of a bright morning and
take a comfortable seat on a park bench--one park bench is plenty roomy
enough if nobody else is using it--and sit there and watch these unhappy
persons passing single file along the bridle-path. I sit there and gloat
until by rights I ought to be required to take out a gloater's license.
Mind you, I have no prejudice against horseback riding as such.
Horseback riding is all right for mounted policemen and Colonel W. F.
Cody and members of the Stickney family and the party who used to play
Mazeppa in the sterling drama of that name. That is how those persons
make their living. They are suited for it and acclimated to it. It is also
all right for equestrian statues of generals in the Civil War. But it is not a
fit employment for a fat man and especially for a fat man who insists on
trying to ride a hard-trotting horse English style, which really isn't riding
at all when you come right down to cases, but an outdoor cure for
neurasthenia invented, I take it, by a British subject who was nervous
himself and hated to stay long in one place. So, as I was saying, I sit
there on my comfortable park bench and watch those friends of mine
bouncing by, each wearing on his face that set expression which is seen
also on the faces of some men while waltzing, and on the faces of most
women when entertaining their relatives by marriage. I have one friend
who is addicted to this form of punishment in a violent, not to say a
Cobb's Anatomy
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malignant form. He uses for his purpose a tall and self-willed horse of
the Tudor period--a horse with those high dormer effects and a sloping
mansard. This horse must have been raised, I think, in the knockabout
song-and-dance business. Every time he hears music or thinks he hears it
he stops and vamps with his feet. When he does this my friend bends
forward and clutches him round the neck tightly. I think he is trying to
whisper in the horse's ear and beg him in Heaven's name to forbear; but
what he looks like is Santa Claus with a clean shave, sitting on the
combing of a very steep house with his feet hanging over the eaves,
peeking down the chimney to see if the children are asleep yet. When
that horse dies he will still have finger marks on his throat and the
authorities will suspect foul play probably.
Once I tried it myself. I was induced to scale the heights of a horse
that was built somewhat along the general idea of the Andes Mountains,
only more rugged and steeper nearing the crest. From the ground he
looked to be not more than sixteen hands high, but as soon as I was up on
top of him I immediately discerned that it was not sixteen hands--it was
sixteen miles. What I had taken for the horse's blaze face was a snow-
capped peak. Miss Anna Peck might have felt at home up there, because
she has had the experience and is used to that sort of thing, but I am no
mountain climber myself.
Before I could make any move to descend to the lower and less
rarified altitudes the horse began executing a few fancy steps, and he
started traveling sidewise with a kind of a slanting bias movement that was
extremely disconcerting, not to say alarming, instead of proceeding
straight ahead as a regular horse would. I clung there astraddle of his
ridge pole, with my fingers twined in his mane, trying to anticipate where
he would be next, in order to be there to meet him if possible; and I
resolved right then that, if Providence in His wisdom so willed it that I
should get down from up there alive, I would never do so again.
However, I did not express these longings in words--not at that time. At
that time there were only two words in the English language which
seemed to come to me. One of them was "Whoa" and the other was
"Ouch," and I spoke them alternately with such rapidity that they merged
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