Part 13

Finally, unable by modesty to end the uproar, they rose, one by one and bowed, and the feeling engendered that moment has never died, but lives in the hearts of Cornell men to-day, who are wont in reminiscent mood to refer to it as the "finest show of fellowship on record."

A youth with a high tenor voice, who could not be distinguished from the rear of the theatre started the chorus of "The Yellow and the Blue." The boys around him took it up and the citizenry of Detroit, in the balcony, were treated to such a song recital as they had never before heard. In the midst of it the discovery was suddenly made by some keen youth in the gallery that one man was missing from the right hand boxes. He nudged his companion. The word was passed along the rail. Then, with a suddenness that caused the women in the balcony to start with little screams, one name was shrieked above the clamor of the lower floor:--

"Adams! Adams! Adams!"

The singing ceased.

The cry was taken up, repeated, screeched.

A commotion was observed in the box and then a tall figure arose. It was the manager. A silence that was awesome descended upon the house.

He held up his hand.

"I'm sorry," he began.

"Adams!" some one shrieked. Part of the audience laughed. The rest hissed.

"I am sorry," the manager resumed, "but Mr. Adams is not here to-night."

He sat down.

It was well that at that instant the orchestra commenced a medley of college airs by way of overture.

Presently the shrill tinkle of a little bell was heard and with a swish the curtain lifted, disclosing the glittering, golden court of an Oriental monarch. There was a blare of trumpets and a score of lithe limbed dancers appeared upon the stage. The crowd cried its huge delight and the college yell was flung across the footlights to the end that several of the dancers made missteps, and, covered with a confusion that brought forth another cheer, rushed into the wings.

After that first catastrophe the audience lent itself to a full enjoyment of the piece. Occasionally when the chief comedian gave utterance to a joke of ancient manufacture, the throng gave voice to its displeasure, by way of criticism, but more often the clamor sprang from keen appreciation of a song or bit of funny "business."

In all the audience there was, perhaps, but a single spectator whose face showed him to have no interest either in the audience and its noise or the action on the stage. He sat at one end of the balcony, back from the rail, unnoticed by those about him, satisfied, seemingly, to look on without participation either in the pleasure or the anger of the crowd around him. When his gallery champion cried out his name he had shrunk in his seat and almost held his breath, but now he sat up, his arms folded across his deep, broad breast.

He had entered the theatre late. Indeed there had been no one in the lobby when he bought his ticket. He was glad when he learned the location of his seat. He had thus far avoided all contact with the crowd. He would continue to avoid it. Through the first long act he sat looking down, apparently seeing nothing, staring blankly as though dreaming, yet awake.

When the second act was well under way, he glanced at his watch. He drew out his hat from beneath the chair and inconveniencing no one, left his seat. He glided up the aisle close to the wall. In the lobby, less brilliant now, he squared his shoulders and pulled in a long, deep breath. He lighted a cigarette and for a space stood just outside the door, in the street, idly watching the passers-by.

At the soldier's monument a group of students--he recognized them as such in the lighted thoroughfare--had formed a ring around some one who appeared to be dancing on the asphalt as they shouted, rythmically, and clapped their hands. As he watched, Adams saw the ring part on the side nearest him and he glimpsed the dancer. All the blood went out of his face. He threw away his cigarette and buttoned his coat nervously. With a cry, the ring resolved itself into two lines and paraded down the street with the dancer, who was obviously unsteady on his legs, supported by a twain of students at the front. Adams, at the edge of the curb, perceived the goal toward which the poor little procession was making its way--the portal of a huge German restaurant which he knew well. A picture of its interior as he remembered it flashed upon his mind--the long room, filled with tables, many white clad waiters, stolid of face, light of tread. The head of the procession reached the wide door, bright beneath the great electric sign above. He waited until the last man had entered, then crossed the street swiftly. In the outer hall he heard a medley of noises beyond the mahogany and glass partition. He heard the quick shuffle of feet. Some one was trying to dance on the sanded floor. In the midst of the jig he flung back the connecting door and entered the room of riot.

IV

He was immediately perceived and the crowd with a single voice shouted him a welcome. Through the shifting gossamer of smoke that filled the room he distinguished many familiar faces.

"Come over here, old man," he heard some one call, and turned. He stared without sign of recognition at a young man, who, with many gestures, indicated a vacant chair at a near-by table. He saw the smoke, the waiters gliding noiselessly through it, the littered floor, the wet, glistening table-tops. These misty details he saw mistily, as one sees things in a dream.

His face was pale; there were unfamiliar lines about his mouth, and an unnatural glitter was in his eyes.

He saw the dancer, a man of age who wore the clothes of a laborer, fling himself heavily upon a frail chair at the nearest table, across which he leaned unsteadily, wagging his head and muttering incoherently.

Adams strode over to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.

"Come," he said, quietly.

With an effort the man balanced his head and lifted his heavy eyes.

"Come," Adams repeated.

It was as though the youths at the other tables knew it to be a psychological moment. The noise subsided. Every eye in the room was intent upon Adams, strong in his splendid youth, and the man beside whom he stood and who was weak in his age.

Adams was seen to encircle the man's shoulders with one arm and fairly lift him from the chair. On his feet he was unsteady. Adams supported him to the door of the restaurant, which swung back noiselessly as the ill-mated couple disappeared.

Then were exchanged many glances among those who had watched the little play in silence.

"What's he going to do with the old guy?" some one asked.

A general, half-forced laugh of relief ensued, which broke the tension, and immediately the company relapsed into its previous state of conviviality. The songs were resumed. The noise developed swiftly and the strangely incongruous incident of Adams' disappearance with the drunken moulder was forgotten straightway.

No one even took the trouble to go to a window to see if developments had occurred outside. And if one had been thus sufficiently interested, he would merely have observed Adams hail a passing cab, into which, as it drew up at the curb, he thrust the man, hesitating an instant with his hand on the door to mutter a certain address to the cabman leaning from his box.

The driver touched his horse, and the vehicle swung into Woodward Avenue. Of a sudden, from the dark patch of pavement that the restaurant faced, Adams felt himself flung into a maelstrom of light.

The façades of two theatres were all a-glitter; an immense confectionery across the street was ablaze, and, looking down at the pavement through the window in the cab door, Adams noted the weird, distorted reflections in the asphalt ooze that gives the city streets at night the uncertain quality of a looking-glass wantonly smeared with pitch.

He blinked in the yellow glare of the street illumination. It was as though he were passing through a tunnel of brilliance. A car whirred by, with clanging gong. He caught a fleeting, swift glimpse of the several passengers.

As the cab proceeded, his attention was attracted now and then to groups of young men loitering at various corners as though in contemplation of some deed, very secret, if not very terrible. The lilting chorus of a college song that he recognized was brought to him in the noiselessly rolling cab. Before the last store-lights in the business district were passed, he had obtained such an impression of the city as he had never had before.

Through the window in the door he saw the skeleton trees in Grand Circus Park as the cab cut the circle of its area, and he shivered at the prospect of the winter they suggested.

A sound very close to him caused him to start. He smiled, looked down, and the smile went out of his eyes and left them cold and hard.

The man beside him had succumbed to the comfort of the cab, and, asleep, was snoring gently. Passing beneath an electric lamp, the light fell an instant on his face--pale beneath the stubble beard and the splotches of grime. His knees were high and his hands, broad, work-hardened, lay limp upon them.

Adams turned again to the window.

The cab was passing through a residence district now. He noted with a shifting, vague interest, the houses--big, shapeless for the most part, and set far back in broad yards. The lights in the lower stories glared yellow like the earth-close eyes of crouching monsters.

Suddenly Adams pulled himself together. He began to experience a livelier interest in the dark picture of the street, with its broad curbs, its iron fences, dark hedges, and wide yards. He pressed his face against the window in the cab door, and now and again twisted his neck to gaze as far back down the street as the swift motion of the vehicle would permit.

He remembered definitely, vividly, certain landmarks of his young boyhood, as he was whirled on, noiselessly, save for the rythmic _clackety-clack_ of the horse's hoofs on the echoing asphalt. There was the house from the side yard of which he had once, as a tiny lad, stolen a great armful of roses. There, again, was the house with the smoke tree near the porch behind which Pauline, his little sister, and he had once hidden until the policeman passed, indolently swinging his night stick.

Adams smiled at the recollection.

The cab came opposite a tall apartment house at the junction of a cross-town car line. On the ground now occupied by the ungainly, rambling pile of stone, he remembered vividly, had stood, when he was a very small boy--hardly big enough to push his cart--a little shack occupied by an old cobbler, deserted in his age by a son who had robbed him. Very many were the hours he had spent in that little shop. He recalled certain of those hours with a momentary pang of sadness. The cobbler had been a soldier in Poland, in his time, and was wont to tell great stories of his own valor, to which the yellow-headed lad, all forgetful of his mission and his cart, had listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The memory came swift and certain and distinct in detail and in the richness of it Adams shrank from the ugly stone pile in passing, as though it were a horrid thing thus to thrust itself upon a young man's memory of his little boyhood.

As he dreamed thus the cab turned a corner, suddenly. The rich residential thoroughfare vanished like the palace in the pantomime, and Adams, his face still close to the glass, saw a row of little, squat, mean houses, set regularly behind low white picket fences. Only here and there a light shone from small, square windows. The street seemed totally deserted, save for a single dog that he saw crawl under one of the low latched gates and vanish behind a house that was like all the others in the little squalid street. And as he noted these things, the cab pulled up before such another house, and, mechanically, he passed his hand over his forehead, as a child does when awakened.

A brief parley ensued with the burly driver of the cab, comical in his bristling fur cape.

"Kin yeh git 'im out?" he asked.

"Yes."

One of the windows in the second story of the cottage before which the cab had stopped, was aglow, and across the drawn shade a shadow passed, and passed again.

Adams shook the sleeper in the cab. Finally after a series of muffled grunts and grumblings that were like remonstrances, the man was gotten out.

"All right?" inquired the driver, gathering up the reins.

"All right," Adams replied; whereat the driver spoke to his horse, turned, and drove back down the squalid street.

Adams supported the tottering figure of the man to the door of the house and fumbled for the knob, which, when his fingers found it, turned in his hand and the door swung open. On a table in the room at the end of the narrow, bare, unlighted hallway, stood a lamp, turned low. As he half carried, half led the man into the room, Adams heard footsteps overhead. And as he cast his burden down upon a carpet-covered lounge, pushed back against the wall at the further end of the room, he heard a voice from above call:

"Iss dat you?"

"Come down," he answered.

There was a little frightened, feminine "Oh!" followed by quick, heavy footfalls on the bare stairs. The next instant the short, thick figure of a woman was framed by the doorway. The light of the lamp struck her face which was broad and kindly.

"Chon!" she exclaimed.

His eyes met hers and he smiled faintly. Then his gaze wandered to the lithograph of the Christ tacked to the wall, and to the couch beneath, and he said:

"There's father; I brought him home."

The woman uttered a little cry and bent over the prostrate figure.

"Ah," she muttered. Then, glancing back over her rounded shoulder, she asked: "Where you git heem?"

"Down town," the boy replied, quietly.

"So." And the woman sat down again, and as long as her son was with her she kept her eyes upon him, oblivious, seemingly, of the unfeeling body on the couch.

"Ven you come in?" she asked.

"This morning," he replied. "I played football to-day."

"Och, yes," she murmured, nodding. "I heard dee noise. Yes."

There ensued a moment's silence that was complete, save for the heavy breathing of the sleeper on the couch.

"Chon," the woman said, calmly, "you don't do dat?" And she indicated with a gesture the prone shape on the lounge.

The boy laughed forcedly, and shook his head.

"No," he said.

"Och, yes, no," his mother muttered.

"How's Pauline?" he asked.

"She's vell; she's to a dance."

He shivered as with cold.

"Isn't it late?" he asked.

"No," his mother replied. "She be home maype a hour; maype two hour."

Each seemed conscious of the infinite labor of the conversation.

"Well," John said after half an hour, "I guess I'd better be going."

"So soon!" his mother exclaimed. "Vy not in de morning? We go to church, you ant me."

He shook his head, sadly.

"No," he said. "I must go back to-night. The train leaves before long."

"All right," she muttered.

At the gate in the low fence he turned. His mother's figure was silhouetted against the light of the room at the end of the hall.

"Good-bye," he said, "and tell Pauline to take care."

"Goot-pye," she called to him softly.

She turned back into the house at once and he heard the door shut.

Passing beneath an electric light he examined his watch. The train was due to leave in an hour. He decided to walk to the station. The cold felt good on his face.

He straightened his shoulders and walked with long, even strides, looking neither to right nor left.

He found Janet waiting in the shadow of the baggage-room doorway. The station was thronged with a shouting, jostling crowd. Taking her arm, he guided her through the gate and assisted her to the platform of the last coach.

"You hold the seat, will you?" he asked. "I want to smoke. We broke training to-night, you know."

She nodded, smiling.

And until the porter's call he paced up and down the long train shed. As the train pulled out he swung himself to the platform of the rear coach and entered.

V

A throng of several hundred awaited the arrival of the train at midnight in the railway yards. At the first shriek of the whistle away beyond the bend of the river the cheering commenced. It gathered force sufficiently to smother completely the pounding of the great engine as it thundered past the trim little station and came to a grinding stop.

In the crowd that packed the platform the old men were as eager as the lads; and there were not a few such old men with white in their hair and lined faces, that the lights of the station made radiant. Professors were there, eagerly jostling, squirming, edging in the crowd, holding their own in the tight-squeezed mass with elbows every whit as pointed as the elbows of the youngsters that the youngsters thrust into _their_ sides.

The crowd discovered at once that the team was in the second coach and before a man of the eleven had reached the platform the car was surrounded.

Late as was the hour, speeches were demanded, nor was a path opened through the throng until the demand had been acceded to. A circle formed around the band and its brassy noise blared out upon the night until every townsman within range of the farthest-carrying horn flung up his window and poked a head wonderingly into the outer darkness.

As the crowd surged down the platform to the front of the train, Adams, taking advantage of the clear way at the rear, assisted Janet to the ground and unobserved they passed out into the street through the tall turnstile in the shadow of the baggage-room.

She breathed deeply of the cool night air and he felt the pressure of her hand upon his arm as her steps quickened to his.

In the crowded train she had refrained from all attempts to learn the reason for his silence. Only now and then, as in answer to some question that she asked him, had he spoken in the hour and a half required to cover the forty miles between Detroit and Ann Arbor.

But now in the silence of the darkened street she took courage. At the top of the steep hill, as they passed beneath a sputtering electric lamp, she looked up at him and asked:

"What is it, John--tell me--what is it?"

She hung upon his reply eagerly, a little frightened, though she realized, in seeking to analyze her foreboding that she could not tell herself why she should.

"There's a great deal, Janet," he replied calmly. She perceived an unfamiliar note in his voice, a note that seemed to her to sound a sort of resignation.

"But _what_---- Can't you tell me? Has anything happened?"

For a moment he did not answer, but then he said: "Yes, dear; several things have happened--several things----"

"What?" she asked, almost in a whisper, and he felt her hand's pressure upon his arm again.

He continued, ruminatively, quite as though she had not spoken: "Several things, that make other things clearer to me now--much clearer."

She had never heard him speak like this before. Perhaps it was a matter intimately personal with him, too intimately personal even for her to share his knowledge, his consideration of it. She almost regretted having asked him. Why had she not prattled on about the game, the splendid victory, his own skill? But when next he spoke she understood she had done no wrong.

"I must tell you about those things, Janet; I must tell you now--to-night--I have meant to before."

Her hand upon his arm tightened its grasp.

"John, what _is_ it? _What_ has happened?" Now she made no effort to conceal the fright that sounded in her voice.

He patted her hand, white on his black sleeve, and laughed lightly--forcedly, she thought.

"There, don't be afraid," he said, "I haven't committed any crime."

She laughed then herself, and said, "You _did_ frighten me, though."

They had come to the library. As they passed, the deep throated bell in the tower rang out twice upon the stillness--tang--tung.

Fifteen minutes past one, Janet calculated.

They took the diagonal walk to the crossing of South and East University Avenues. Her room was in the second house from the corner, on the former street.

He seemed of a sudden to perceive where they were, for, looking about him, he said: "Janet, it is something I must tell you for your own sake. And when I'm through, you can say to me what you think; it won't hurt."

A step and they were at her home.

"Can't you sit here on the porch a few minutes?" he asked; "I shan't keep you long."

With sudden anger she replied:--

"John, if you don't speak out at once what you have to say, I shall go in immediately. You've said again and again that there is something you must tell me; why don't you? Couldn't you see; can't you see now that I haven't begged you to tell because it seems to pain you."

"It does," he exclaimed, "you can't know how it pains me." He looked down at her where she sat on the step and into her uplifted face.

"What is it?" she asked calmly, now.

He sat beside her.

"I hardly know where to begin," he commenced and hesitated. He seemed to be arranging the words in his mind, for, after a moment he resumed.

"I told you it wasn't any crime," he said. "Well, maybe it isn't, but Janet," he went on quickly, "while you were standing at the window of the club this afternoon, you saw a man--do you remember? He wore overalls. His face and hands were black. You said you saw a policeman push him back into the crowd, and you believed him to be drunk---- He was drunk, Janet----"

"How do you know?" she asked, quite indifferently, "did you see him again?"

"Yes, I saw him again," he said. "I saw him in a big restaurant that was crowded with students, men whom I know, whom I have eaten with, whose cheers till now have been--been inspiring to me----"

"John--really----" the girl put in impatiently. "I can't see why that drunk man should have made such an impression--that common laborer--nor what he can have to do----"

"Wait a moment," he remonstrated. "You remember, when you called my attention to him, I took you out across the field, and down town another way? Yes? Well, I had a reason. I didn't want that drunken man to see me--to see you----"

"But, dear," she exclaimed with a little laugh.

"It was my father," he said, quietly.

"John!"

Passion, shock, anger, perhaps pity, were all in the tone of her exclamation. Unconsciously she drew away from him.

"Don't be afraid," he said, holding out a hand to her, "I shan't smirch you----"

She realized her movement then, and pity filled her heart, pity for this great creature beside her whose own heart, the heart she knew, was like a child's.

"Dear," she murmured, "don't think that. Don't. I didn't mean to."

He seemed not to notice the plea in her voice.

"I don't blame you," he went on as calmly as before, "but it was because I _knew_ you would do just that that I haven't told you before. But now--I can't wait any longer. Listen. My parents are Poles, Janet. My father and mother were born in the same tiny town in Poland a little way from Cracow. They came to this country when I was only five years old--before my sister--my little sister Pauline, was born. My father was a peddler at first; afterward for a time he was a street sweeper; and then, during a strike, a good many years ago, he went into the Stove Works and learned the moulder's trade. It's a good trade, Janet; the men sometimes earn four dollars a day, pouring the hot iron into the sand. My father earns that now----"

She had listened to him raptly, the pale light white upon her lifted face.

"But John," she exclaimed, "your name--your name isn't foreign?"

He laughed.

"My name isn't 'Adams,'" he replied.

"John!"

"No," he went on--"but maybe my name is, too, after all. I should have said 'perhaps.' My father's name is not. It is Adamowski----" He heard her little quick in-taking of breath and looked away.