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circus?"
Laird grinned. "Go ahead, Louie. Nobody's stopping you from entaring anything you like.
How about it, Ogden? Is she a woman?"
"Well. . . really. . - oh, dear-"
"Please!" lantha Delfoiros rolled her violet-blue eyes at the bewildered referee. "I
should so like to swim in this nice pooi with all these nice people!"
Wambach sighed. "All right, my dear, you shall!"
"Whoopee!" cried Laird, the cry being taken up by Vining, the members of the Knickerbocker
Swimming Club, the other officials, and lastly the spectators. The noise in the enclosed space
made sensitive eardrums wince.
"Wait a minute," yelped Connaught when the echoes had died. "Look here, page 19 of the
rules. 'Regulation Costume, Women:
Suits must be of dark color, with skirt attached. Leg is to reach-' and so forth. Right here it
says it. She can't swim the way she is, not in a sanctioned meet." -
"That's true," said Wambach. "Let's see-"
Horwitz looked up from his little score-sheet-littered table. "Maybe one of the girls has
a halter she could borrow," he suggested. "That would be something."
"Halter, phooey!" snapped Connaught. "This means a regular suit with legs and a skirt, and
everybody knows it."
"But she hasn't got any legs!" cried Laird. "How could she get into-"
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"That's just the point! If she can't wear a suit with legs, and the rules say you gotta
have legs, she can't wear the regulation suit, and she can't compete! I gotcha that time! Ha-ha,
I'm sneering!"
"I'm afraid not, Louie," said Vining, thumbing his own copy of
the rule book. He held it up to the light and read: "Note.-These rules are approximate, the idea
being to bar costumes which are immodest, or will attract undue attention and comment. The referee
shall have the power'-et cetera, et cetera. If we cut the legs out of a regular suit, and she
pulled the rest of it on over her head, that would be modest enough for all practical purposes.
Wouldn't it, Mr. 'Wambach?"
"Dear me-I don't know-I suppose it would."
Laird hissed to one of his pupils, "Hey, listen, Miss Havranek! You know where my suitcase
is? Well, you get one of the extra suits out of it, and there's a pair of scissors in with the
first-aid things. You fix that suit up so lantha can wear it."
Connaught subsided. "I see now," he said bitterly, "why you guys wanted to finish with a
300-yard free style instead of a relay. If I'da' known what you were planning-and, you, Mark
Vining, if I ever get in a jam, I'll go to jail before I hire you for a lawyer, so help me!"
Mrs. Santalucia had been glowering at Iantha Delfoiros. Suddenly she turned to Connaught.
"Thissa no fair. I swim against people. I no-gotta swim against mermaids."
"Please, Maria, don't you desert me," wailed Connaught.
"I no swim tonight."
Connaught looked up appealingly to the balcony. Mr. Santalucia and the little Santalucias,
guessing what was happening, burst into a chorus of: "Go on, mamma! You show them, mammal"
"Aw right. I swim one, maybe two races. If I see I no got a chance, I no swim no more."
"That's better, Maria. It wouldn't really count if she beat you anyway." Connaught headed
for the door, saying something about "telephone" on the way.
Despite the delays in starting the meet, nobody left the pooi room through boredom. In
fact, the empty seats in the balcony were full by this time and people were standing up behind
them. Word had gotten around the Hotel Creston that something was up.
By the time Louis Connaught returned, Laird and Vining were pulling the altered bathing
suit on over lantha's head. It did not reach quite so far as they expected, having been designed
for a slightly slimmer swimmer. Not that lantha was fat. But her human part, if not exactly plump,
was at least comfortably upholstered, so that no bones showed. lantha squirmed around in the suit
a good deal and threw a laughing remark in Greek to Wambach, whose ex [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]