Yarns Without Threads 

'What's wrong with me?' demanded the doctor. 'Tell me that.'

'Merely that you're as naked as the palm of my hand,' Peter observed. 'Apart from that small item, you look perfectly natural.'

'My patients don't seem to mind,' retorted the doctor. ...

'Wouldn't be quite so degrading if you happened to be a woman, although that would be bad enough.'

'Naked women,' answered the doctor, flexing his limbs by squatting suddenly. 'You'll have more than you want of those in here.'

Peter was too alarmed by the man's words to be revolted by his actions.

'What!' he exclaimed. 'Naked women in here?'

'Why not?' ...

... 'As a matter of fact,' the doctor went on meditatively, 'the ladies seem to take to it quicker than the men.'

'Take to what?' asked Peter fearfully.

'Being naked,' replied the doctor.

'Do you mean to your being naked or to their being naked?' Peter wanted to know.

'To our being naked together,' said the doctor

... white bodies on the lawn, white and gleamingly naked. An appalling sight, this, and yet not unpicturesque. ... In the face of so much nudity he found himself doubting the reality of such terrifically reiterated facts as the Empire State Building, Tammany Hall, and crooning. Had the bodies been black instead of white, he would have felt a little better about it. Black bodies and brown ones had a way of getting naked. But, then, the black races were not essentially interested in things of the flesh like the white race. No. Black people took the flesh at a stride and passed on to the supernatural and other things of the spirit with only an occasional fleshly picnic - a good rough-and-tumble sort of orgy that cleared up a lot of nonsense and left their thoughts free for other and more important considerations. ...

... they had reached the house, ... only to find themselves in the presence of a fresh burst of nudity. Naked people were sitting, squatting, and reclining wherever Peter tried to rest his eyes from the sight of flesh. Had he been able to discover the Bishop bereft of garments he might have found some comfort there. Even an unclad Aspirin Liz would have provided a slight kick, but the only member of the party who was present was his valet-pickpocket, Little Arthur. ...

... Through a long window he could see a number of naked children wandering about the lawn. They did not seem elated. Some of the older ones, Peter thought, looked far more self-conscious than their elders. Evidently they had not yet been entirely claimed by the general depravity. This was quite natural, children being instinctively conservative like all other self-respecting animals.

'The fact is ... in this colony nudity leaves us emotionally cold, or should leave us cold. Of course there are occasional localized rises in temperature which are due, we hope, entirely to lack of training. On the other hand, the average well-built woman ... dressed as women dress today, which is a little more than demi-nude, arouse our gentlemen nudes to outbursts of simply amazing ferocity. ...'

'... What we do object to here is the undue emphasis placed on sex. Sex preoccupation day in and day out. Sex consciousness morning, noon, and night. What is the dress of woman but an invitation and a challenge to the eye, to the senses? Do women dress to keep warm? Certainly not. Do they dress to cover their nakedness? Certainly not. They dress to reveal it, to suggest it, to enhance it. A pair of high-stockinged legs against a background of frills is a far more provocative sight, with a few exceptions, than the same pair of legs nude, hairy, and garter-stripped. ...'

... 'We order things better here,' Mr Jones resumed. 'By taking off our clothes we forget about our bodies.'

'... it is my belief that any attempt to introduce sustained nudity is as impractical as it is undesirable. In view of this we have made arrangements to enjoy at our little colony certain seasons and occasions. During Seasons of Forgetfulness ... it is our intention to get all dressed up and to conduct ourselves as men and women ordinarily do now under this regime of prohibition. In other words, we intend to drink bad gin in garish and cleverly faced up surroundings. Women will dress as provocatively as possible and men will pursue them without stay or hindrance. ... During these little seasons, which should be limited to a week's duration, we will all of us become highly civilized human beings such as exist in the world today. ... In short, every little cankerous growth will have its day. ...'

... Her conception of a nudist colony and that of Mr Jones were greatly at variance, for the simple reason that the colony had been established for the benefit of sex slaves instead of executives. ...

... To the children of the colony Josephine was the most acceptable adult nude. It was strange to hear these small naked creatures trying to persuade their mothers and fathers to go back to the house and put on some clothing. The conservative attitude of children is strongly marked in a budding nudist colony. Here the disastrous results of endeavouring to inculcate the youthful mind with a sense of decency before a knowledge of indecency has been acquired became accusingly apparent. For the first days the lives of the little people were quite miserable. They spent much of the time in hiding.

Josephine, however, they accepted at her flesh value. In her company they began to thaw out a little, to forget the shame of it all, and to take an interest in their naked world. And although the dances she created for them were far from being the seriously ludicrous affairs their elders fondly believed to be aesthetic, they were danced with a great deal more enjoyment and a lot more noise. After telling them the story of Pandora as told by Mr Eustace Bright in Hawthorne's Wonder Book she eventually succeeded in reconciling the children to their own nudity if not to their parents'.

'Well spoken, Little Arthur,' said Bishop Waller, 'in spite of your choice of words. If those bodies were only black or brown, I might at least succeed in getting drawers on them as I have in the past. With white bodies it is sadly different. Once they have abandoned their drawers, they seem also to have abandoned their reason.'

'You forget, my dear Bishop,' observed Peter, 'that drawers are a bit of a novelty to our dark-skinned converts, whereas no drawers are equally novel to these deluded people.'

If the truth must be known, it was not the fact of nakedness that disquieted Yolanda's reflections as she stood there fully dressed on the sun-bright beach. It was the acceptance of the fact of nakedness that did things to her vanity - the incredible disregard of sex distinction all these naked men and women were displaying before her outraged eyes. The thing just could not be true. These people were pretending. Yolanda would not believe that a man could so far forget his place in life as to look on a naked woman with anything other than covetous eyes. Not that women desired this reaction - far from it - but men were that way about women. It was very annoying, but women had learned to expect it, some even endured it with a splendid display of fortitude. As a matter of fact, she herself had learned to endure the lascivious glances of men. Let the poor beasts ogle if it did them any good.

At this moment, confronted by factual evidence of her own eyes, Yolanda still refused to believe that these men would remain insensible to her fair body should she remove the clothes from it and display it along the beach. She did not go so far as to say to herself that a riot would break out, but she did admit the possibility of a series of serious assaults not to mention innumerable insulting invitations. How could it be otherwise? And the women. How annoyed they would be - how enviously sympathetic. It was a fascinating idea. It crept inside Yolanda and gradually took possession of her. ...

... For the first time since she had become an involuntary guest of the nudist colony, Yolanda was moved by an impulse to emulate in public the example set by its members. She was more than moved by this daring impulse. She was actually impelled by it. As her dress fell to the sand and she stood in her low-cut slip for all the world to see, she felt herself on the threshold of a revolutionary experience. With the slip gone, little remained of Yolanda's clothing, but what little there was, that went, too, falling like foam round her feet on the yellow sand. For a moment she experienced the sensation of being blind. The pores of her skin were startled by the light. She gasped. She shrank a little. Then, for a moment, before self-consciousness shut down on her, she raised her arms to the sunlight and gave herself to its warmth - one of the few honest, unstudied gestures she had made since she had last been unaware of her naked body some twenty odd years ago.

This sudden, spontaneous gesture ended in a startled crouch as Yolanda realized her condition. Half frightened, half expectant, she glanced about her. As the warm air bathed her body and the shouts of the bathers drifted to her from down the beach, her thoughts were spinning dizzily. This was an even more difficult experience than any she had passed through under the skilful tutelage of Mr Jones. Now she was so much alone, so definitely her own woman. Only her stockings remained between herself and complete nudity. Glancing down, she noticed that these sheer, well-filled sheaths of silk had become wrinkled since being detached from the garters. This would never do. Fastidiously she seated herself on her abandoned clothing and slipped off the stockings. Now she had done it, irretrievably committed herself to the official costume of the colony - bare flesh. Slowly she stood up, and as she did so the air and sunlight flooded round her body like the soft, clear waters of a pool. Dimly she felt all this, felt herself a living part of the beach, a little more intimate with the ocean and less remote from the gulls in the air. But dominating her consciousness was the thought of how she must look in the eyes of men, the effect she would have upon them.

'If we ever get back to civilization, Bishop Waller,' Aspirin Liz put in, 'you should send those drawers to the Smithsonian Institution.'

'I wish you would give them their proper name,' Bishop Waller protested. 'This garment is known as jaegers.'

'Don't care whether they're jaegers, jumpers, or jiggers,' the ex-model replied. 'You're wearing whatever they are where most men wear their drawers.'

He had found Baggage in a storage warehouse. She had been sold in default of payment for her keep. Yet even the dusty mantle gathered from her long incarceration had failed to rob her body of its wild pagan grace. Mr. Pebble had an eye that automatically discounted the outer draperies of women in favor of what lay beneath. He had bought her on the spot.

... Mr. Pebble had driven off with Baggage. Later he had presented her to his mistress. Since then she had become a part of the establishment, like Nockashima and the bloodhound, Mr. Henry.

With a slight start Mr. Pebble raised his snow-white head, then shrugged his shoulders as if remonstrating with himself. Had those cocktails made him drowsy, and had his thoughts gone straying into the realms of pure fancy? Surely he had imagined he had seen the tawny, voluptuous form of Baggage step down from her little pedestal and come gliding towards him across the path of the slanting sun now flickering on the still waters of the pool. Surely he had imagined this, and yet         Mr. Pebble half rose from the bench, and looked at the spot where the statue had been but where it was no more.

"My God!" he muttered. "Did the poor girl fall in? This is indeed a night of catastrophe."

"Sit down, old man," said a low voice beside him. "I didn't fall in the pool. I have come to pay you a long deferred visit."

Mr. Pebble resumed his seat. Quite calmly he accepted the situation.

"Hello, Baggage," he said. "I'm afraid you've come too late. I'm an old man now, as you have just reminded me.

He glanced at the beautiful figure beside him, then savored as if on the tip of his tongue the full bitterness of his years. There was something so imperatively urgent in the sleek young body of the girl sitting so close to him on the bench, Mr. Pebble felt that a just God should do a little something about it. ... The low voice was speaking again. "You were too busy when you were young to pay any attention to me," said Baggage. "What were you always doing in that little pavilion down there?"

"You know all the answers," Mr. Pebble told her. "Hadn't you better let me get you some clothes?"

"And you know me better than that," said the girl, with a mocking laugh. "I never wore a stitch of clothes in my life. Why should I begin now?"

"Well, times are not what they were, my child," Mr. Pebble answered feebly. "Women wear clothes nowadays -not much of them, I'll admit, but still they wear a few."

"I wish you were young again," said the girl, fixing Mr. Pebble with a pair of wickedly disturbing eyes.

"Oh, how I do," muttered Mr. Pebble. "Don't look at me like that. It won't do you a bit of good, and it's upsetting me terribly. After all, I did you a good turn once. What's the idea now? Why are you trying to torment me?"

"I'm jealous," replied Baggage, "jealous of the youth you've lost. I want you back again."

"Listen, Baggage," Rex Pebble said earnestly. "Nobody wants to get back more passionately than I do, but you can see for yourself, my child, it just can't be done. There's no going back for me. I'm an old man now, with a heart too weak to hold its memories.

... "If that woman of mine called Spray finds us together like this there'll be no escaping her."

"I hope she does," said Baggage. "I'd love to annoy her."

"I feared as much," said Mr. Pebble. "She is annoyed enough already."

"Are you?" asked the girl, burrowing her small nose into his neck just behind his ear. "You smell awfully clean. Why don't you take your clothes off?"

With a startled ejaculation Mr. Pebble broke the girl's strangle hold and slid along the bench to momentary safety.

"There should be an open season for unmarried women over a certain age."

"From the little I've been able to observe of the modern young woman," said Mr. Pebble, "assault seems no longer necessary. I have an idea there should be a closed season for men."

"You don't have to worry about that," replied Spray. "Your season is closed for good."

"Yes," said Mr. Pebble regretfully. "My hunting days are done."

"And I am no longer hunted," added Spray. "All I am is an old abandoned quarry whose feet have been run ragged."

"I tell you what let's do," said Mr. Pebble, seized by a sudden impulse. "Let's strip off our clothes and take a dip in the pool."

"Are you craftily trying to get me to help you look for that naked lady?" demanded Spray Summers. "We haven't been in the pool for years. The shock might kill us."

"What if it does kill us?" replied Mr. Pebble, now reckless from many cocktails. "It would be as good a way to go out as any. My heart is ready to call it a day at the slightest provocation. Let's take a chance. The cool water might soothe your tired feet."

This last possibility did much to break down the woman's resistance, which at best had never been strong.

"Give me another cocktail," she said, "and I might consider it, although I think the idea is perfectly mad." She accepted the proffered glass and polished off its contents with professional celerity. As the potently stimulating concoction was assimilated into her system the idea lost some of its madness and her mood became more yielding. "Your suggestion has its points," she resumed, breaking the short silence. "It might be fun at that. We'll take our last swim, and if we do die it will save us a lot of time and trouble."

"You always were a game kid," said Mr. Pebble approvingly. "Especially where foolishness was concerned. Come on, let's strip."

"I'd like to be foolish again," replied Spray. "And this certainly seems foolish to me."

A few minutes later two mother-naked figures were standing on the edge of the pool. Had Nockashima been watching-as he probably was-he would have found the occasion highly diverting. The years had added flesh to Spray Summers' body and removed it from Mr. Pebble's. Of the two it was the man whose figure appeared the more youthful. Spray was fat and flaccid, given to sagging here and there and bulging in various places. When she had finished with her body she had shamefully let it down, and now it was taking its revenge. Rex Pebble still remained as straight and slim as a boy, but a great deal more knobby.

"I hate you," declared Spray Summers, regarding him enviously. "You remain the same from year to year while all I do is get fatter and more jellified. It isn't fair. I hate my body."

"... Trouble can find its way about without my assistance."

"Here comes a compact little chunk of it now," observed Spray Summers, hastily snatching up a towel. "That runt of a heathen is running as if his heart would break, if he had one. Wonder what's taken possession now of his undeveloped mind?"

In a condition of mental and physical demoralization, Nockashima arrested his mad progress and stood scrutinizing the two nude figures, his small, rapidly blinking eyes generating hopeless bewilderment.

"This night," he announced at last, "the nakedest I recall. No clothes for anybody. Maybe I take off mine too."

"No," said Mr. Pebble hastily. "Don't do that. Someone must stay dressed."

"Perhaps yes," agreed the little Jap. "You see two other naked bodies knocking about? Old naked bodies-not so good."

"The parchment-faced little ape," muttered Spray Summers. "I like his nerve."

"Listen, Nocka," said Rex Pebble. "Those old bodies you referred to so offensively are new again. Here they are, standing right before you. Don't you recognize our voices?" "

Nockashima received this startling information with truly admirable self-control.

"How nice," he said approvingly. "Hot stuff now."

"Just what does he mean by that?" inquired Spray. "Is there no bottom to his depravity?"

"Don't ask him to elaborate," replied Mr. Pebble.

"Voices just same," continued the grinning servant, "but bodies quite different. Very rapid improvement. Boss look similar to young nephew, Mist' Kippie. Madam some wow. Look like naked lady. Madam have everything. Pretty good, I think."

"Only pretty good," put in Spray tartly. "They don't come any better. I'm the swellest-looking naked lady you ever clapped an eye on, you squat myopic dreg."

"Madam look like naked lady on next lawn," declared the myopic dreg as if he had not heard. "You know, boss -pants snatcher."

The little man's eyes were not as myopic as Spray had told him. She did look remarkably, like the nymph, Baggage. Her half-parted lips had the same provocative smile, and her body the same brazen challenge.

"You do look a lot like Baggage," remarked Mr. Pebble, regarding her curiously. "I knew there was something just a little different about you. Every now and then I've had a feeling she was looking out at me through your eyes. I hope it isn't a case of atavism. If she has merged her peculiar talents and disposition with yours there won't be a pair of trousers left in the countryside."

"Gord!" muttered the fireman, gazing at Rex Pebble with round, wondering eyes. "Another old and rare. Don't anybody ever wear any clothes at all in this joint?"

"Why should we wear clothes?" demanded Rex Pebble with an ill-advised swish of his toga as he stalked across the room. "This lady and myself have been born again. We have nothing to conceal."

"You've got enough and more," retorted the fireman. "I wouldn't go round like that in my own home."

"Fireman," replied Mr. Pebble, "yours is a mistrustful nature or a very bad home. At the moment, I can't say which. You should learn to forget your body-to dismiss it, so to speak."

"Look," called Sue Pebble in a voice so musical that it surprised herself, "did you ever see anything neater?" She indicated her bust with a proud gesture.

"Very good," commented Baggage across the water, "but I think I'm pretty neat myself." The girl abruptly lifted her skirts, revealing ankles and limbs of graceful beauty. They were, however, somewhat on the classical mold, while Sue Pebble's rejuvenated form was nothing more nor less than the lusciously appealing, smoothly curved figure of a girl in the deceptive neighborhood of twenty.

"No wonder," returned Sue; "you ought to be beautiful. You've been in this pool all your life."

"A hell of a lot of good it did me," came back the sharp answer. "I'd like to know what fun the Venus de Milo ever had. All that ever happened to her was to have her block knocked off." Baggage, out of bitter experience, was deeply scornful of the ways of art.

"I wonder, my dear," said Sue, in the voice of half-abstraction which a beautiful woman uses while she is engaged in examining her figure, "whether you have ever looked at the Venus closely enough?"

"Oh, I've been chipped myself," said Baggage, "but that's just by curiosity-seekers, people you'd meet in any museum. It's no more damaging than riding in a taxi- I should say less so, on the whole. What I mean is, there I was locked up in stone for fifteen years, watching everyone else have fun, while some of them actually used to laugh at me."

"They did?" inquired Sue, but her tone revealed only perfunctory interest. Sue preened here and there, removing wet garments from time to time to get as much look at her new-found loveliness as she possibly could.

She began to wish desperately for a full-length mirror.

"They used to snicker and say, 'Wonder what that old gal would do if she could get down off her pedestal?'"

"Well, my dear, wasn't that just what you were thinking yourself?"

"It certainly was," answered Baggage, "but it was the way they used to say it that burned me up. Of course, my clothes were old-fashioned, but, after all, you can't keep up with the styles if no one will send a sculptor around. Besides, those men do have the most awfully phooey ideas. A sash here and a bow there, and they call it class. Personally, I think clothes are heaven's greatest gift to man. I'd rather tantalize any day than give away the whole show the first time I see a man."