Chapter 5

There is a second yell, this time from our enemies. Harvard has lost the ball and Yale has it. And now before my bewildered eyes scrimmage follows scrimmage with fierce iteration, and one pile of bodies, arms, and legs succeeds another. The player, fortunate enough to carry or force the ball a yard or more toward the rival goal by a frantic rush before he is overwhelmed and squashed, reaps a whirlwind of applause from the absorbed multitude. Every inch of ground is disputed. Once in a long interval when the ball gets dangerously near a goal, someone on the imperiled side kicks it half the length of the field, and the scrimmages are renewed. But it is rarely kicked at all except at such junctures. Foot-ball! I say to myself that it is a gladiatorial combat with an occasional punt thrown in by way of identification. But every one around me is declaring that the play of both sides is magnificent, that the team work is perfection, and the head qualities displayed unique in the annals of the game. Sam tells me again and again that Fred is doing sheer wonders and is the backbone of the Harvard side, and I wonder how he can distinguish so easily which is Fred and whether he has any backbone left. I can no longer make out much of anything except that one ruffian closely resembles every other ruffian, and that one poor boy is lying on the ground perfectly still, as though he were dead. There is just a little lull on the benches. People are interested.

"Who is it?" gasps Josephine. "Is it he, dear?"

"Butchered to make a Roman holiday," I mutter between my teeth, with my heart in my mouth.

They are pulling and rubbing the victim, and a doctor, retained for such emergencies, is bending over him. After a few moments more he rises slowly, looks round him in a dazed fashion, and resumes his position with a painful limp, to a round of applause.

"It isn't Fred," says Josephine.

"But he has a mother, though," I answer.

"He'll be all right in a minute or two," says Sam. "They stamped the wind out of him, that's all."

To have the wind stamped out of one is a mere bagatelle, of course, and I have forgotten it in another moment under the spur of excitement. A Harvard player has the ball, and no one seems to be able to stop him. He throws off his antagonist and dodges two others, and races down the field like a deer, while the wearers of the crimson scream his name with transport and flourish their banners like madmen. It is Fred, it is Fred, it is Fred! I know his figure now. He has the ball and is flying like the wind with two great brutes at his heels. Will they catch him? Will they kill him? They are gaining on him.

"Run--run--run," I shout, in spite of myself, while all the people on our benches rise in their excitement, and Josephine covers her eyes with her hands, unwilling to look. On, on my boy runs, until at last he falls with his two pursuers on top of him full across the Yale line.

"A touch-down, a touch-down!" bursts out Sam, as he grasps my hand in his wild enthusiasm. I do not know exactly what has occurred except that there is pandemonium on the Harvard side of the field unequalled as yet by anything that has happened, and a deathly tranquility along the benches opposite. After making sure that Fred is still alive, I listen to the explanation that a touch-down counts a certain number of points, and gives the right to the side which wins it to try to kick a goal. This attempt is presently made. A player lies on the ground and holds the ball between his hands for another to kick. Presto! the ball sails through the air; for an instant there is agonized suspense, and then a shout from Yale. It has failed to go between the goal-posts, and consequently has missed.

"Four to nothing, anyway," says Sam. "That was a magnificent run. Rah! rah! rah! Harvard."

Josephine is wiping her eyes and everybody in our neighborhood is nudging each other in consequence of the news that we are blood relations of the hero of the hour. Mrs. Sloane nods her congratulations, and Mrs. Walton signals with a crimson flag from the adjoining section, and our beloved pastor smiles at Josephine in his delightful way.

And what follows? What follows is fierce and harrowing. What follows continues to hold that great audience spellbound to the close. The score is four to nothing in favor of Harvard; but the Yale team, smarting from defeat, throw themselves into the ever-recurring scrimmages with set faces. It is not my purpose to follow the contest in detail. I am writing as a father and philosopher, and not as a chronicler of athletic struggles. Suffice it to state that the scrimmages grow still more savage and earnest, and that a player from each side is obliged by the referee to retire from the field, because he has slugged an opponent. Suffice it to state that presently a rusher is obliged to retire from the field by reason of a sprained ankle. It is not little Fred, but might it not have been? Suffice it to state that by the end of the first three-quarters of an hour--let the uninitiated here learn that a match is divided into two bouts of that length each, with an interim of fifteen minutes--the Yale team, by the most magnificent work (according to Sam Bangs), has forced the ball steadily and surely toward the Harvard line, and won a touch-down and kicked a goal, leaving the score for the first half six to four in favor of the blue. Just after the ball has flown between the goal-posts, amid thunders of triumph from our enemies, the umpire calls time.

Suffice it to state that the second three-quarters of an hour is largely a repetition of the first--short, furious rushes, everlasting scrimmages, and here and there a punt. The ruffians look still more ruffianly from frequent contact with mother-earth and the clutches of one another. Ominous gloom and depressing silence take possession of the friends of Harvard; their very cheers are anxious, and with good reason. Yale has kicked another goal from the field in the first twenty minutes and the crimson is being gradually and steadily outplayed. My heart bleeds for my son; he will be so disappointed if he loses. And I shall be so happy when the game is over and I am sure that he is not maimed for life. He is doing wonders still, dear boy. Twice I see him lying flat and motionless on the field with the wind stamped out of him, to borrow Sam's euphemism, while his mother wriggles in her seat in the throes of uncertainty and is hardly to be restrained from going to him. Twice, after the doctor has fumbled over him and water has been dashed in his face, I see Sam's diagnosis vindicated, and my half-back rise to his feet, and the game go on as though nothing had happened. Such episodes are a matter of course, and not to be taken too seriously. A broken rib or two is not a vital matter, and only one rib is broken in the second three-quarters of an hour. Even then the poor victim does not have to be carried off on a litter, for he is able to walk with the help of the doctor and a friend. It is not Fred; Fred has merely had the wind stamped out of him a few times and is still doing wonders. Will it never end? I look at my watch feverishly. The ball is close by the Harvard goal, and Yale holds it there with the tenacity of a bull-dog. Bull-dog? They are all bull-dogs--twenty-two bull-dogs cheek by jowl.

"Isn't it magnificent?" murmurs Sam, looking back at me. "They have outplayed us fairly and squarely. Only five minutes left, and the score eleven to four against us. We're not in it. That run of Fred's was the most brilliant play of the day, though."

"The poor darling will be broken-hearted," whispers Josephine.

"That is better than being broken-headed--better for us," I whisper in reply.

"I do hope he hasn't lost any of his front teeth. His mouth was bleeding the last time he fell," continues his mother.

"False ones nowadays are very satisfactory," I answer,

Ten minutes later we are moving along with the rest of our acquaintance on the way to the railroad. Yale has won, eleven to four, and the bruised and battered players of both teams have departed on their respective tally-hos, and Josephine and I are free to receive the congratulations of our friends with a calm mind, though my darling is still haunted by the fear that our illustrious son has left a tooth or two on the arena. Fred's run is on everybody's lips, and we as the authors of his being are made much of. Mr. Leggatt, the banker, works his way up to me through the crowd at great personal distress, for he is a fat man, in order to say, with an enthusiastic shake of the hand:

"Great boy that of yours; splendid grit; I must have him when he graduates."

I sputter many thanks confusedly. Here is a strange development truly. I had been hoping, as you may remember, to be able to go to Mr. Leggatt, at Fred's graduation, and to ask for a clerkship for my boy on the plea of his steadiness and sterling common sense; and now the solicitation has come to me on the score of his grit as a foot-ball kicker. The world seems just a little topsy-turvy, and I am not quite sure whether to laugh or to cry.

We got home at last somehow; and here I am sitting in my library trying to collect my faculties and to appreciate the honor which has been thrust upon me--the honor of being the father of a famous half-back. To tell the truth, it sticks in my crop just a little and does not relish to the extent which would seem appropriate. Indeed I am not altogether sure whether I can see a distinction between being the father of a famous half-back and the father of a famous toreador or famous prize-fighter. I know that Leggatt and one or two others, to whom I ventured to expose my qualms on the way home, declared them preposterous, and that the game was magnificent discipline for both mind and body. Come to that, the vicissitudes of a matador are magnificent discipline for both mind and body. So are those of a gladiator. Yet I have my doubts whether Leggatt would like to be the father of either. Nevertheless, although he is a citizen of far greater consideration than I, he gave me to understand that he would be proud to be described in the newspapers as the father of a famous half-back, and to see a son of his handed down to posterity in the public prints as a prize animal of this description.

I fear there must be a screw loose somewhere in my make-up as a father and a philosopher. You remember the case of the burglars? It did not seem to me worth while to go downstairs and expose myself to be shot. Yet Josephine felt differently on the point.

Moreover, I have never been able to understand why it is courageous or meritorious to be an amateur Alpine climber, whereas many are fain to admire the beauties of nature from an elevation where a false step or a rotten rope would be passports to destruction. Then, again, people who cross the ocean in dories, or fast for indefinite periods, have never aroused my enthusiasm. On the contrary, I regard them as being in the same general category with lunatics. I have never seen a bull-fight, and I have sometimes fancied that I should be weak enough to attend one out of curiosity if I happened to be in Spain at the right time; but I am sure that I should never care to go twice. And yet I am expected to feel proud and grateful because my eldest son has made prowess at foot-ball the aim and object of his college course. I am trying to, trying hard, but I fear it is no use. I should like to understand why it is glorious or sensible for an honest, strapping fellow, who has been sent to college by dint of some economy on the part of his parents, to devote his entire energies to a course of training which will entitle him to run the risk of having his legs, arms, or ribs broken in fighting for a leather ball before several thousand people. Of one thing I am certain already, even at the risk of seeming to agree with Horace Plympton, which is, that if I had another son with like proclivities, I should put a stop to it.

But then, as Josephine reminds me, the fact that our David does not care a picayune for anything of the sort, robs my resolve of much of its solemnity. I might, to be sure, interpose a mandate at this late hour and cut off little Fred in the flower of his renown, and (to quote my wife once more) break his heart; which might be a more serious consequence than a broken leg. No, I am inclined to think, on the whole, now that the mischief is done, we may as well let him follow the path he has chosen, especially as Leggatt has his eye on him and has promised to give him a start. We must live in the hope that the breath will not be trampled out of him once too often before that desirable result is brought to pass. Moreover, if he is borne of the field on a litter, it will not be in the presence of his parents. We have seen one gladiatorial combat, and our thirst for gore is sated.

Henceforth we shall be content to cower by the hearth on the days when the great matches are played and fancy each ring at the door-bell the summons of a telegraphic emissary. And by way of celebrating our first escape from bereavement, I am going to present our David with a gold watch for the excellent showing he made in his studies last summer.

VI

Little Fred has been graduated from college without the loss of his front teeth or an eye. He has a few scars, which will not permanently disfigure him; and though he halts slightly as the result of a strained tendon in the calf of one of his legs, Dr. Meredith assures us that this is chiefly a nervous symptom, which will pass off presently. He says Fred is a little run down, and he advises raw eggs and milk between meals. I assume that the doctor is right, but it seems strange to me that a boy should get run down through foot-ball exercise. However, he is to go abroad for six months, which ought to mend matters, and then buckle down to work with Leggatt & Paine. He is an honest, manly fellow, who will make friends, and, provided he does not break his neck in following the hounds or playing polo, is likely to do well.

David, my second boy, is a born chemist and a genuine book-lover besides. He is at the School of Science, to which we decided to send him, instead of to college, in view of the fact that his proclivities were in the line of gases and forces rather than Greek roots and history. He is doing famously, I believe; and though I am a profound ignoramus on such matters, I should not be at all surprised if he were to make a name for himself early in life by some valuable discovery in the electrical or bacillic line. He has lately made a test of all the wall-papers and upholstery in our house, and discovered, to our dismay, that there is arsenic in pretty nearly everything, including some of the bed-sheets, which, strange to state, in spite of their innocent appearance, proved to be particularly full of the deleterious poison. We have had to overhaul everything in consequence, and Josephine firmly believes that Fred's nervous halt is due to the presence of arsenic in his system, for the bed-sheets in his college room belonged to the condemned batch. Seeing that the rest of us are perfectly well, I secretly suspect that late hours and tobacco are more to blame than arsenic for my athletic son's condition; but in the teeth of scientific warning I have not ventured to run the risk of continued exposure, and have consented to the purchase of new carpets, curtains, window-shades, and other household apparel.

I am much more concerned, to tell the truth, lest some of the germs which David is cosseting in his bed-chamber may get loose and ravage the community. He has a bacillus farm, where, according to his account, the cholera germ, the germ of tuberculosis, the typhoid-fever germ, and the diphtheria germ are growing side by side for his private edification. As Josephine says, there are certain risks which a brave man has to take; but I am not sure that this is one of them. Even my darling is a little anxious on the score of contamination, in spite of her scientific son's assurance that his pets are thoroughly harmless.

I do not really know whether Josephine is prouder of Fred or of David. Certainly her mind is comparatively at rest regarding them both, notwithstanding my second troy is not quite like other people. I do not mean that he is boorish or eccentric, merely that he is bookish and self-absorbed. He takes no interest in his personal appearance, and he avoids every young woman except his sisters. Fred is dandified, keenly fond of the social interests of the day and of the other sex. I foresee that he bids fair to be a leading man of affairs, and to figure prominently in society, and later on to become a member of Congress or to be sent abroad as a foreign minister. But he is just like everybody else, so to speak; or rather he accepts the world as he finds it and accommodates himself to it. Now, David is cast in a different mould. He is essentially unconventional. And yet, though his mother sighs now and then over his repugnance to young ladies, and tries to badger him into looking a little more spruce, I can perceive that she is thoroughly proud of his originality and independence, and believes that he is even more likely than his conventional brother to distinguish himself and immortalize the family name. Josephine used to say, when the boys were little, that she hoped one of them would be a clergyman, and I know that she has more sympathy than I--and I have considerable--with a scheme of life which entertains starving in a garret for the sake of art or science as a meritorious contingency. She has held up before her boys, since their earliest childhood, the perils of idle and purely worldly living, and spurred them to make the most of themselves.

Curiously enough, our two girls are just as dissimilar to each other as Fred and David. Josie, the elder--who, as I have already specified, is, according to the world at large, the image of her mother at the same age--will not be troublesome in the least degree, so my wife tells me. She has taken to society as a duck takes to water. She has a natural aptitude for pleasing and being pleased; consequently she has plenty of partners. My wife says that, considering the dear child was all legs and arms three years ago, we have every reason to congratulate ourselves that she has turned out such a pleasant-looking girl, and that her red hair is decidedly ornamental. I call her handsome, but Josephine declares that I make myself ridiculous by the assertion, and that it is very rare that a girl who has not really a ray of beauty to commend her becomes such a thorough-going favorite in her first season.

"She constantly reminds me of you, and that is enough for me," I remarked, tenderly, on one occasion.

"You make me boil when you say that, Fred. I was really a very pretty girl, if I do say it; whereas Josie, the sweet soul, only just escapes being homely. Her smile and her hair save her, so that she passes. But it is a libel to compare her with what I was at her age. We must look facts in the face, dear."

"People tell me every day that she is the living image of her mother," I answered humbly.

"People are idiots. They know you will believe it because you are a man. They don't dare tell me anything of the sort. No, Fred, we must build all our hopes of beauty on Winona."

"Ah!" I remarked, with an intonation of pride; "even her mother will not be able to pick a flaw in _her_."

"She is a very handsome girl, but----"

Josephine stopped short, and I could see that her lip was trembling with emotion.

"There is no 'but,'" I protested. "Whatever Josie may be, Winona is a raving beauty."

"Oh, yes, Fred, I am perfectly satisfied with her looks. That makes it all the harder. I'm on tenterhooks lest she is going to be queer."

"Queer?" I inquired, with agitation, dreading some disclosure of mental derangement.

"Odd--not like other people. It would break my heart, Fred. She is seventeen, and she doesn't take the slightest interest in coming out. You remember I had her appear for an hour at Josie's party, and that she was surrounded by young men from the moment she entered the room until I sent her to bed? Most girls would have been in danger of having their heads turned. Winona was bored."

"She will get over that as soon as she is a year older. She is shy."

"She is not shy. If she were shy I should think nothing of it. She declares that society is all nonsense, and that she wishes never to come out at all."

"What an egregiously sensible girl," I murmured.

"I hope you will not encourage her, Fred," pleaded my darling. "I have counted so much on her. If Josie had taken it into her head to be queer, I shouldn't have said a word, for I think myself that is often for a plain girl's happiness not to have to undergo the ordeal of being neglected; but in the case of a beauty like Winona it would be such a waste! There is not a girl of her age who compares with her in beauty."

"What is it she wishes to do?" I asked, with a knitted brow. A man is apt to leave the management of his own daughters to his wife, even though he is a philosopher and prolific in theories. I had rather taken it for granted that certain advanced notions of mine regarding the conduct of women's lives would be allowed to lie dormant in my brain for lack of an animating cause, or, more accurately speaking, for lack of moral courage on my part to exploit them for the benefit of my own flesh and blood. It is more satisfactory to try experiments in the line of education on some one else's children. Besides, I had argued that Josephine was the proper person to propose a departure from the established method, in conformity with which conclusion I had paid out a handsome round sum for a coming-out party and a social wardrobe for my eldest girl. But now I felt in conscience bound to prick up my ears.

"She doesn't know herself what she wishes to do," said my wife, dejectedly. "She is daft on the subject of books and education."

"Is not that rather to her credit?" I ventured to inquire.

Josephine gazed at me as though my words had stung her.

"Of course it is to her credit," she replied, almost fiercely. "You know perfectly well, Fred, I have encouraged the girls to study and cultivate their minds in every conceivable manner, and that I have always said they should have equal advantages in the way of education with their brothers so far as it was possible to procure them. I have just told you that if Josie had wished to be a student and to go in for a career of some kind, I should have been perfectly willing; yes, I should have been glad. But it does seem hard that they should change places, and the one who is a radiant beauty, and sure to be universally admired, should take it into her head to cut loose from society. I remember saying when she was christened that we were gambling with Divine Providence in giving her such an individualizing name, for fear she would grow up a fright. I little thought I was running the risk of such a contingency as this."

"It _is_ hard, Josephine," I murmured, wishing to be sympathetic. "I think, though, you are a little premature in taking it for granted that Winona will not come round all right in the end."