Something New | Page 2

and
adventure. It was here that Ashe found his niche. Those adventures of
Gridley Quayle, Investigator, which are so popular with a certain
section of the reading public, were his work.
Until the advent of Ashe and Mr. Quayle, the British Pluck Library had
been written by many hands and had included the adventures of many
heroes: but in Gridley Quayle the proprietors held that the ideal had
been reached, and Ashe received a commission to conduct the entire
British Pluck Library--monthly--himself. On the meager salary paid
him for these labors he had been supporting himself ever since.
That was how Ashe came to be in Arundell Street, Leicester Square, on
this May morning.
He was a tall, well-built, fit-looking young man, with a clear eye and a
strong chin; and he was dressed, as he closed the front door behind him,
in a sweater, flannel trousers, and rubber-soled gymnasium shoes. In
one hand he bore a pair of Indian clubs, in the other a skipping rope.
Having drawn in and expelled the morning air in a measured and
solemn fashion, which the initiated observer would have recognized as
that scientific deep breathing so popular nowadays, he laid down his
clubs, adjusted his rope and began to skip.

When he had taken the second-floor front of Number Seven, three
months before, Ashe Marson had realized that he must forego those
morning exercises which had become a second nature to him, or else
defy London's unwritten law and brave London's mockery. He had not
hesitated long. Physical fitness was his gospel. On the subject of
exercise he was confessedly a crank. He decided to defy London.
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