A LONG CHEER FOR WIMBOURNE

Harry did eventually bestir himself to the extent of hiring a locker in the track house and going out and "exercising," as he called it, three or four afternoons a week. He enjoyed it, but he obviously did not take it very seriously. He was neither good enough nor enthusiastic enough to attract the attention of the coach and captain, and it was something of a surprise to all concerned when he took a first place in the low hurdles in the fall meet and became entitled to wear his class numerals.

"Fine work," said the captain, a small and insignificant-looking senior, who could pole vault to incredible heights without apparent effort. "Macgrath tells me you haven't come within two seconds of your time to-day in practise."

"No," said Harry; "I've been working more at the jumps."

"Well, you'd better stick to the hurdles from now on. We're weakest there. You practise and train regularly this year and next year you'll probably be the best man on the hurdles we have. Except Popham, of course. But we never can depend on Popham for a meet; he's always on pro, or something."

That evening after dinner Harry strolled into Trotwood's room.

"Say, you're the hell of a fine hurdler, you are," growled the latter, from the depths of a Morris chair. Harry was somewhat taken aback till his friend suddenly clutched at his hand and began swinging it up and down like a pump handle. Then he realized that objurgation was merely Trotwood's gentle method of expressing pleasure and affection. Delight shone in his face; not delight in his triumph but in the thought that it meant something to Trotwood and that he understood Trotwood's peculiar way of showing it.

"That's all right, Trotty dear," he said. "Never mind about giving me back my hand; I shall have no further use for it."

"I suppose you think you're quite a man now, don't you?" continued Trotwood in the same vein. "Just because you won a damned race against people that can't run anyway."

"Sweet as the evening dew upon the fields of Enna fall thy words, O sage," said Harry. "You're really quite a wonderful person at bottom, aren't you, Trotty? How did you know that the last thing I'd want was to be slathered over with congratulations by you? Good Lord, you ought to have heard Junius LeGrand on the subject!"

"Never mind about LeGrand. Speaking seriously, it's a great thing for you, Harry. I don't suppose you realize that, bar that unspeakable rounder Popham, you're the coming man in the hurdles from now on? Why, you've got your Y absolutely cinched for next year, with him going on the way he does!"

"So it seems," said Harry dryly. "I seem to have heard the name of Popham before. Suppose we talk about something else.... Look, Trotty; will you room with me next year?"

"Yes," answered Trotwood, blushing deeply, and continued, after a pause: "I've wanted to arrange that for some time, but I thought you'd better be the one to mention the subject first."

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know; I thought if I asked you, you'd accept out of plain good nature, for fear of throwing me down, and I didn't want that."

"Well, as it happened, I was determined to let the first advances come from you, for very much the same reason. Until just now, when I was so afraid you'd room with some one else that I couldn't wait another minute. I've lost all sense of maidenliness, you see."

"Maidenliness be hanged. You don't have to be maidenly when you've won your numerals at track."

That was on a Saturday. James had been out of town with the football team and did not return till late that evening. The next day he and Harry walked out to their old home together for their regular Sunday dinner with Aunt Selina. On the way they discussed at length the fine points of the game of the day before, in which James had played right half with great distinction. Presently he inquired:

"By the way, how about the fall meet yesterday? How did you come out?"

"Oh, fairly well. I only entered in the low hurdles, but I came out all right."

"All right?"

"Yes—first."

"What? Do you mean to say that you got first place in the hurdles?"

"Substantially that, yes."

"Good Lord. I hadn't heard a thing. Went straight to bed when I got home last night and only got up this morning in time for Chapel. Why, it's the best ever, Harry! You get your numerals. You must be about the first man in your class to do that. What was your time?"

"Pretty rotten. Twenty-five two."

"Not so bad. Gee, but that's fine for you, child!"

"I'm glad you're pleased, James."

"It isn't merely the getting of your numerals in the fall meet, either. It means that you'll be one of the main gazabes in the track world from now on, if you work. There's no one here that can make better time than you in the hurdles, bar Popham, who makes such a fool of himself they can't use him, mostly."

"Oh, damn," said Harry softly and slowly.

"What's the matter? Forgotten something?"

"No. I can't forget something, that's the trouble."

"Well, what is biting you?"

"Only that if I hear the name of Popham much more, I believe I shall go mad on the spot."

"Oh, don't take it so hard as that. Most likely you'll be able to beat him out anyway, if you make progress, and he's likely to drink himself out of college anyway before—"

"Shut up, James, for Heaven's sake!" There was real anger in Harry's tone, and James turned and looked at him with surprise. "You're as bad as every one else—worse! Don't you know me better than to suppose that all my chances of happiness in college, in this world, in the next, depend on Popham's drinking himself to death? Do you think it's pleasant for me to know that every one considers my—my success, I suppose you'd call it, dependent on whether that rounder stays off probation or not? You make me sick, James."

James remained silent a moment. "No offense meant," he said gently. "I'm sure I'm sorry if—"

"Oh, rot!" Harry disclaimed offense by slipping his hand through his brother's arm. "Only you don't seem to see, James. That's what bothers me."

"Well, no; I'm afraid I don't. It will be a great thing for you if you get your Y next year. Do you think it's low of me to wish that Popham, who is no good anyway, should get out of your way?"

"No; the wish is kindly meant, of course.... But this idea that my whole worldly happiness is tied up with Popham takes the pleasure out of it all, somehow. I don't give a continental whether I get my Y or not, now."

"Oh, come on. Don't be morbid."

"No. I've a good mind not to go out for track any more."

James made no answer to this, and the two walked on in silence till they had reached the house. As they walked up the front steps James said:

"You must tell Aunt Selina all about this. She'll be awfully glad to hear about it."

"Including Popham," said Harry in a low voice. James made no reply to this, for it scarcely called for a reply, but his lips were ever so slightly compressed as he walked through the front door.

During the idle months that followed Harry used his spare time for efforts in another and wholly different direction—a literary one. He became what is known in the parlance of the college as a "Lit. heeler"; that is, he contributed regularly to the Yale Literary Magazine. For the most part his contributions were accepted, and in the course of a few months his literary reputation in his class equaled his athletic fame. His verses, written chiefly in the Calverly vein, were equally sought for by both the Lit. and the Record, the humorous publication, and his prose, which generally took the form of short stories with a great deal of very pithy, rapid-fire dialogue in them, was looked upon favorably even by the reverend dons whose duty it was to review the undergraduates' monthly offerings to the muses.

"Has a cinder track been laid to the top of Parnassus?" wrote one who rather prided himself on his quaint and whimsical fancy. "Do poets hurdle and sprint where once they painfully climbed? Do the joyous Nine now stand at the top holding a measuring tape and wet sponges, instead of laurel wreaths, as of old? Assuredly we shall have to answer in the affirmative after reading the story 'Quest and Question' which appeared in the last issue of the Lit., for not only is the writer of this, the best and brightest offering of the month, a mere freshman, but a freshman who, it seems, has distinguished himself so far for physical rather than mental agility. The 'question' about Mr. Wimbourne appears, indeed, to be whether the fleetness of his metrical feet can equal that of his material ones," etc.

All this amused Harry, who, it is to be feared, sometimes laughed at rather than with his reviewers; and it gave him something to think about outside of his studies and his classmates, both of which palled upon him heavily at times. But he was irritated from time to time by the way in which even literary recreation was looked upon, by the undergraduate body. A casual and kindly remark of a classmate, "Hullo, I see you're ahead in the Lit. competition," would often throw him into a state of restless depression from which only the soothing presence of Trotwood could reclaim him.

"Isn't it awful, Trotty," he once complained; "Euterpe (she's the lyric muse, you know), has deserted me. I haven't been able to write a line for a month. Of course the loss to the world of letters is almost irreparable, but that's not the worst of it. You see, if I can't write, I shan't do well in the Lit. competition, and if I don't do well I shan't make the chairmanship, and if I don't make the chairmanship in the competition, I shan't make a senior society, and wouldn't that be terrible, Trotty?"

"Cheer up, old cow; you probably won't make one anyway," suggested Trotty reassuringly, and Harry laughed.

The football game with Harvard was played in New Haven that year, and Harry took Aunt Selina to it. Aunt Selina had never seen James play, and was anxious to go on that account, though she had not been to a game for many years, and even the last one she had seen was baseball.

"You must explain the fine points of the game to me, my dear," she told him as they drove grandly out to the field in her victoria. "You see, I have not been to a game since the seventies, and I daresay the rules have changed somewhat since then. I used to take a great interest in it, but I've forgotten all about it, now."

They were obliged to abandon the victoria at some distance from the stands, rather to Aunt Selina's consternation, for she had secretly supposed that they would watch the play from the carriage, as of old. She was consequently somewhat bewildered when, after fifteen or twenty minutes of such shoving and shouldering as she had never experienced, she found herself in a vast amphitheater which forty thousand people were trying to convert into pandemonium, with very fair success. As they wormed their way along the sidelines toward their seats, a deafening roar suddenly burst from the stands on the other side of the field, which caused Aunt Selina to clutch her nephew's arm in affright.

"Harry, what is it?" she asked. "What are they making that frightful noise about?"

"That's the Harvard cheer," replied Harry calmly. "You'll hear the Yale people answering with theirs in just a minute."

The Yale people did answer, but it would be too much to say that Aunt Selina heard. She was vaguely conscious of going up some steps and being propelled past a line of people to what Harry told her were their seats, though she could see nothing but a narrow bit of board. Nevertheless she sat down, and tried to accustom her ears and eyes to chaos; just such a chaos, she thought, as Satan fell into, only larger and noisier.

"Here we are," Harry was saying cheerfully, "just in time, too. The teams will be coming on in a minute or two. What splendid seats James has got us, bang on the forty yard line. Why, we're practically in the cheering section! Do you know the Yale cheer, Aunt Selina? You must cheer too, you know; it's expected of you.... Here comes the Yale team...."

Aunt Selina lost the rest, as chaos broke forth with redoubled vigor. She saw a group of blue-sweatered figures run diagonally across the field, and thought the game had begun.

"Which is James?" she asked feverishly, feeling chaos work its way into her own bosom. "Do you think he'll win, Harry? Oh, I do hope he'll win!"

When the team lined up for its short preliminary practise Harry pointed James out to her in his place at right halfback.

"I see," she said, gazing intently through her field glasses, "he's one of those three little ones at the back. Does that mean that he'll be the one to kick the ball? I'd rather he kicked it than be in the middle of all that tearing about. Poor boy, how pale he looks!"

"He won't look pale long," said Harry grimly.

Aunt Selina by this time felt every drop of sporting blood in her course through her veins. "Which is the pitcher, Harry?" she inquired knowingly, and was not in the least abashed when her nephew informed her that there was no pitcher in football.

"Well, well," said she indulgently, "isn't there really? Things do change so; I can't pretend to keep up with them. I remember there used to be a pitcher in my time, and Loring Ainsworth used to be it."

Just then the teams set to in deadly earnest, and conversation died. In bewildered silence Aunt Selina watched the twenty-two players as they ran madly and inexplicably up and down the field, pursued by the fiendish yells of the spectators, and wondered if in truth, she were dead and this—well, purgatory.

She made no attempt to understand anything that was going on down on the field, or even to watch it. She turned her attention to Harry; he seemed to be the most familiar and explicable object in sight, though she wondered why he should leap to his feet from time to time shouting such nonsense as "Block it, you ass!" or "Nail him, Sammy, nail him!" or "First down! Yay-y-y!" Presently she became aware of a growing intensity in the excitement. The players seemed to be moving gradually down toward one end of the field, and short periods of breathless silence in the audience punctuated the shouts. She heard cries of "Touchdown! Touchdown!" emanate from all directions, but they meant nothing to her. The players moved further and further away, till they were all huddled into one little corner of the field. Every time they tumbled over together in that awful human scrap-heap she shut her eyes, and did not open them again till she was sure it was all right. Finally, after one of those painful moments, there was a relapse of chaos, fifty times more severe than any of the previous attacks. Women, as well as men, shrieked like maniacs, and threw things into the air. Trumpets bellowed and rattles rattled; somewhere in the background was a sound of a brass band, of an organized cheer. Hats and straw mats flew through the air in swarms.

"What is it?" shrieked Aunt Selina. "Who won? Who won?"

"It's a touchdown!" Harry shouted in her ear. "For Yale! It counts five!" (It did, then.) "And James did it! James has made a touchdown!" And in a moment Aunt Selina had the unusual pleasure of hearing her own name shouted in concert by ten or fifteen thousand people at the top of their voices.

"—rah rah rah Wimbourne! Wimbourne! Wimbourne!" shouted the crowd, at the end of the long Yale cheer, and they went on shouting it, nine times; then another long cheer, and nine more Wimbournes, and so on.

It was a great moment. Is it to be wondered that Aunt Selina, who did not know a touchdown from a nose-guard, shrieked with the others and wept like a baby? Is it strange that Harry, to whom the event meant more than to any other person among the forty thousand, should have forgotten himself in the expression of his natural joy; should have forgotten where and what and who he was, everything but the one absorbing fact that James had made a touchdown? We think not, and we have reason to believe that every man jack out of the forty thousand would have agreed with us. One did, we know. She thought it was the most natural thing in the world, though it did set her coughing and disarranged her hat and veil beyond all hope of recovery without the assistance of a mirror, not to mention a comb and hairbrush. And Harry needn't apologize any more, for she wouldn't hear of it; and the way she had behaved herself, in the first excruciating moment, was a Perfect Disgrace. So they were quits on that matter, and might she introduce Mr. Carruthers? Mr. Wimbourne. Was Harry surprised that she knew who he was? Well, she would explain, and also tell him who she was herself, if she could ever get the hair out of her mouth and eyes.

For it must be explained that Harry, in his transports of exultation, had behaved in a very unseemly manner toward his next-door neighbor on the right hand. Aunt Selina, who sat on his left, had sunk, exhausted with joy and excitement, to her seat as soon as she was told that James had made a touchdown, and Harry, whose feelings were of a nature that demanded immediate physical expression, had unconsciously relieved them on the person of his other neighbor, who still remained standing; never noticing who or what she was, even that she happened to be a young and attractive woman. Harry never could remember what he had done in those hectic seconds that immediately preceded his awareness of her existence; according to her own subsequent account he had slapped her violently several times on the back, put his arm around her, shaken her by the scruff of her neck and shouted inarticulate and impossible things in her ear.

The interval of hair-recovery was tactfully designed to give Harry a moment's grace in which to recall, if possible, his neighbor's identity; she was perfectly able to tell who she was with the hair in her mouth and eyes, proof of which was that she had been talking in that condition for the past few minutes. Harry was grateful for the intermission.

"Why of course I know you!" he exclaimed, as soon as the dying away of the last nine Wimbournes made conversation feasible. "It was stupid of me not to remember before. Do you remember; dancing school?.... It must have been ten years ago, though; and you have changed!"

"Yes, I suppose I have changed—thank Heaven!" The exclamation given with a smile through a now unimpeachably neat veil, seemed in some subtle, curious way to vindicate Harry, to emphasize his innocence in failing to recognize her. "I know what I looked like then, all long black legs and stringy yellow hair—"

"Not stringy," said Harry, recognizing his cue; "silky. I remember the long black—the stockings, too. And lots of white fluffy stuff in between; lace, and all that.... And we used to dance a good deal together, because we were the two youngest there, and you were so nice about it, too, when you wanted to dance with the older boys. But how did you know me? Haven't I changed, too?"

"Oh, yes; but not so much. Boys don't. Beside, I knew your aunt by sight...."

"I'm sorry, I forgot," said Harry. "Aunt Selina, do you know Miss Elliston? And Mr. Carruthers, my aunt."

"Madge Elliston," corrected the girl, smiling, "you know my mother, I think, Miss Wimbourne."

"Indeed I do, my dear; I am delighted to meet her daughter," said Aunt Selina, who had had time to recover her customary grande dame air, "I knew her when she was Margaret Seymour; we used to be great friends."

And so forth, through the brief but blessed respite that follows a touchdown. There is no need to quote the conversation in full, for it degenerated immediately into the polite and commonplace. If we could give you a picture of Madge Elliston during it, if we could do justice to the sweetness and deference of her manner toward Aunt Selina, her occasional smile, and the easy way she managed to bring both Harry and Mr. Carruthers into the conversation, that would be a different thing.

The next kick-off brought it to an end, and all parties concerned turned their attention once more to the field. Harry attempted to explain some of the rudiments of the game to Aunt Selina, who confessed that her recollections of the rules of the seventies were not of material assistance to her enjoyment. And so passed the first half.

"Do you know, I believe I know exactly what you're thinking of?" was the next thing Harry heard from his right. It was between the halves; Miss Elliston was in an intermission of Mr. Carruthers, and Harry was listening in silence to "Fair Harvard," which was being rendered across the field.

"Do you?" he replied. "Well, I'll tell you if you're right."

"You were thinking of 'Forty Years On.'"

The smile died from Harry's face, and he paused a moment before replying, almost gruffly:

"Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. How did you guess it?"

"Oh, I know all about you, you see." She stopped, and her silence seemed to Harry to mean "I'm sorry if I've hurt you; but I wish you'd go on and talk to me, and not be absurd." So he threw off his pique and went on:

"I don't know how you know about my going to Harrow, nor how you know anything about 'Forty Years On,' and I don't care much; but I put it to you, as man to man, isn't it a song that's worth thinking about?"

"It is! There never was such a song."

"Not even 'Fair Harvard'?"

"No."

"Not even 'Bright College Years,' to which you will shortly be treated?"

"Not even that." They exchanged smiles, and Harry continued, with pleasure in his voice:

"Well, it is a relief to hear some one say that, in a place where 'For God, for country, and for Yale' is considered the greatest line in the whole range of English poetry. But of course I'm a heretic."

"You like being a heretic?" The question took him by surprise; it was out of keeping, both in substance and in the way it was asked, with Miss Elliston's behavior up to this point. He gathered his wits and replied:

"Oh, yes; who doesn't? Is there any satisfaction like that of knowing that every one else is wrong and you alone are right?"

"I suppose not! That's the main danger of heresy, don't you think? Subjective, not objective. Being burned at the stake doesn't matter, much; it's good for one rather than otherwise. But thinking differently from other people merely for the pleasure of being different, and above them—there's danger in that, isn't there?"

"Then there is no such thing as honest heresy?"

"That was not what I said." This remark, spoken gently and with a quizzical little smile, had none of the sharpness that cold type seems to give it. Adopting something of her manner, Harry pursued:

"But I am not an honest heretic?"

"I didn't say that, either." Again the smile, which seemed to be directed as much toward herself as toward him, softened the words. "And aren't you rather trespassing on female methods of argument?"

"I don't understand."

"Applying abstract remarks to one's own case; that's what women are conventionally supposed to do. But don't let's get metaphysical. What I want to say is that, though I think 'Forty Years On' is incomparably finer, as a song, than 'Bright College Years,' I wouldn't have it changed if I could. The 'For God, for country, and for Yale' part, I mean; and 'the earth is green or white with snow,'—a woefully under-appreciated line.... There is something priceless, to me, in the thought of a great crowd of men, young and old, getting up and bellowing things like that together, never doubting but that it's the greatest poetry ever written. That's worth a great deal more, to me, than good poetry.... They're all such dears, too; the absurdity never hurts them a bit!"

"By George," said Harry slowly, "you're right. I never thought of that before. It is rather a priceless thought."

"Yes, isn't it? It's the full seriousness of it that makes it so good. 'For God, for country, and for Yale'—it's no anti-climax to them; it's the way they really feel. It's absurd, it's ridiculous. But I love it, for some reason."

"That's it. You make me see it all differently.... You mean, I suppose, that if we could start from the beginning with a clean slate, we would choose 'Forty Years On,' or something like it, every time. But now that we've got the other, and they sing it like that, it seems just as good, in its way ... so that we wouldn't like to change it...."

He wanted to add something like "What an extraordinary young person you must be, to talk of such things to me, a stranger, under such conventional circumstances," but a simultaneous recurrence of Mr. Carruthers and the game prevented him. It is doubtful if he would have dared, anyway.

He spoke no more to her that day, except to say good-by and ask if he might call. Nor did he think much more of her. We would not give a false impression on this point; he was really much more interested in the game than in Miss Elliston, and after the second half was fairly started scarcely gave her another thought. But in the moment that intervened between the end of their conversation and the absorbing scurry of the kick-off it did occur to him that Madge Elliston had grown up into an unusual girl, a girl whom he would like to know better. Their short conversation had been as different from the ordinary run of football game civilities between young men and maidens as champagne from water. Harry liked girls well enough, and got on well with them, but in general they bored him. He had never met one, except Beatrice Carson, with whom he was able to conduct anything approaching an intellectual give-and-take, and even Beatrice was no more than an able follower in his lead. Madge Elliston was a bird of a very different feather; she had undeniably led him during every moment of their conversation. It was a new sensation; he wondered if it would always be like that, in future conversations.

But football was uppermost in his mind for the remainder of that day, at least. He was proud and pleased beyond all expression about James, and longed to grasp his hand in congratulation. But he had to go all the way home with Aunt Selina after the game was over, and when at last he reached Berkeley Oval he met James hurrying away somewhere and could give him only the briefest and vaguest expressions of pleasure. On returning to York Street he learned that the team was to have a banquet that evening, in the course of which they would elect their captain for the next year. It occurred to him that it would be nice if James were elected, and it gave him pleasure to hear Trotwood and others say that his chance was as good as any one's.

He stayed up to hear the result of the election, which when it came was disappointing. James had missed the honor, less, apparently, because he was not good enough, than because some one else was considered even better. Harry was sorry, though he lost no sleep over it. When he saw James next morning, he spoke first of what was uppermost in his heart.

"James," he said impulsively, seizing his brother's hand and hanging on to it as he spoke; "I want to say a whole lot more about yesterday. I don't mind saying you're the greatest thing that ever came down the pike, and I'm proud to own you!" and more in the same vein, which James received with smiling protests and remarks of a self-depreciatory nature. But when Harry ended up "And I'm sorry as heck about the captaincy," his manner changed.

"Oh, that's all right," he said. His face became grave, his whole attitude seemed to add: "And we won't talk any more about that, please; it's a sore subject."

Harry's easy flow of talk stopped short, and a new feeling filled his mind. "Good Heavens, James cares, actually cares about the confounded thing," he thought, and dropped his brother's hand.