Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Born of all this, you would have thought that young Giddy would grow up
a somewhat objectionable young man; and so, in fact, he did, though not
nearly so objectionable as he might well have been, considering things
in general and his mother in particular. At sixteen, for example, Giddy
was driving his own car--a car so exaggerated and low-slung and with
such a long predatory and glittering nose that one marvelled at the
expertness with which he swung its slim length around the corners of our
narrow tree-shaded streets. He was a real Gory, was Giddy, with his
thick waving black hair (which he tried for vain years to train into
docility), his lean swart face, and his slightly hooked Gory nose. In
appearance Winnebago pronounced him foreign looking--an attribute which
he later turned into a doubtful asset in Nice. On the rare occasions
when Giddy graced Winnebago with his presence you were likely to find
him pursuing the pleasures that occupied other Winnebago boys of his
age, if not station. In some miraculous way he had escaped being a snob.
Still, training and travel combined to lead him into many innocent
errors. When he dropped into Fetzer's pool shack carrying a malacca
cane, for example. He had carried a cane every day for six months in
Paris, whence he had just returned. Now it was as much a part of his
street attire as his hat--more, to be exact, for the hatless head had
just then become the street mode. There was a good game of Kelly in
progress. Giddy, leaning slightly on his stick, stood watching it.
Suddenly he was aware that all about the dim smoky little room players
and loungers were standing in attitudes of exaggerated elegance. Each
was leaning on a cue, his elbow crooked in as near an imitation of
Giddy's position as the stick's length would permit. The figure was
curved so that it stuck out behind and before; the expression on each
face was as asinine as its owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell
could make it; the little finger of the free hand was extravagantly
bent. The players themselves walked with a mincing step about the table.
And: "My deah fellah, what a pretty play. Mean to say, neat, don't you
know," came incongruously from the lips of Reddy Lennigan, whose father
ran the Lennigan House on Outagamie Street. He spatted his large hands
delicately together in further expression of approval.
"Think so?" giggled his opponent, Mr. Dutchy Meisenberg. "_Aw_--fly
sweet of you to say so, old thing." He tucked his unspeakable
handkerchief up his cuff and coughed behind his palm. He turned to
Giddy. "Excuse my not having my coat on, deah boy."
Just here Giddy might have done a number of things, all wrong. The game
was ended. He walked to the table, and, using the offending stick as a
cue, made a rather pretty shot that he had learned from Benoit in
London. Then he ranged the cane neatly on the rack with the cues. He
even grinned a little boyishly. "You win," he said. "My treat. What'll
you have?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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