A Princetonian/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
THE MAN IN THE 'VARSITY SWEATER.
There was no cane-spree this October at Princeton, for the reason that the sophomores decided at a class meeting to frown upon it; this determination being arrived at really because they had no man to put in against the freshman heavy-weight, who, despite his playing on the Eleven, had expressed his determination to go in for it.
But Hart was growing very moody and L. Putney Betts, Congreve, and Golatly did their best to draw him out of himself, but he kept away from them.
"It's the big game that's on his mind," observed Congreve one afternoon. "Wait till he breaks training and we'll teach him some of the pleasures of existence—oh! beer, beer, glorious beer!"
"Let's go over to his room and razzle-dazzle him now," said Golatly.
They all three crossed the campus and made their way towards Edwards. They pounded on Hart's door and were admitted, but they did not stay long, and the razzle-dazzle was not a success.
Upon their entrance, Hart had slipped a letter he was writing under the blotting pad. It was one addressed to Mabel Van Clees, telling her that he would be in Oakland on the first of December and that he hoped they could be married before Christmas.
Days flew by, and Princeton won the Harvard game—score something big—and bonfires blazed. But the great event was yet to come—"Yale! Yale!" was the talk on the campus.
One day the college waked up in a peculiar manner. Very early in the morning some one had thrust his head out of a window, and it only needed a glance to show that the weather was fine—crisp and cool, cheerful and bright, and not a cloud in the sky!
The early riser was Tommy Wilson, and after squinting about he proceeded to do a very curious thing. He skipped over to the corner of his room and picked up a shot-gun, which he carefully loaded; then he went into the little room in which his room-mate, Manager Bishop, slept, and he awakened the latter by tweaking both of his great toes:
"Resurrect, ye sleeper!" he cried. "Resurrect! The great day is here! Come forth! Break out!"
Bishop aimed a kick at Tommy's chest and threw off the bedclothes, but by this time Tommy had reached the window.
“Bang! Bang!" went the shot-gun, and then the two inhabitants of the corner room in West-middle Witherspoon began to shout:
"Heads out! Heads out! Waow! Ya yi yi yi Waouw!"
The booming of a great tin horn answered from the direction of Edwards, and then six quick pops from a revolver spurted out of a window over the early risers' heads. Another horn took up the tooting. A bunch of fire-crackers began crackling in another direction, and then a screaming and roaring and rippling of sound arose from all over the campus.
The college had not gone crazy as might, at first, have appeared; nor was it a prearranged émeute, or an open rebellion. It was merely the greeting accorded to the Yale Game Day, and the undergraduate pulse was high and feverish. Steam was at top pressure; and this was a preliminary blow-off, as it were, for the sake of health. No one is late for breakfast on this morning, be it put on record.
At the same early hour Newton Wilberforce Hart awoke in a room in a hotel on Fifth Avenue. He looked across at the other bed and saw that Minton, the half-back, was fast asleep, doubled up like a ball. Hart went to the window. He had never been in the city until the day before, when the team had arrived and driven straight to the hotel. The avenue was quiet, but at a window across the way a little orange-and-black flag floated, and farther down Hart could make out a great blue banner with a huge Y upon it, stretching from one window to another.
Minton had heard him stirring and stretched himself sleepily.
"Good weather, eh?" he grunted. "What time is it?"
"Five o'clock," returned Hart, pulling a watch out of a pocket.
"Skivings! Is that so? I'm going to sleep again." Minton turned over on his side and began to snore; but Hart sat down in a chair by the window. He marvelled at and envied the half-back's capacity for repose. So far as his own sensations went, he was never so wide awake in all his life. It was the veteran and the novice over again. But the difference in temperament might be taken into account also—Minton always paled when confronted with excitement, while Hart flushed, although he never lost his head.
Just at this present moment Hart felt as though he had swallowed a trip-hammer. He looked at the soiled canvas suit spread out on a chair, and the striped stockings, and would have given the world to have put them on and gone out to do battle on the instant—he hated suspense. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Franklin, fully dressed, came in.
"Look at that cold-blooded fish," the senior chuckled, pointing at Minton. "And say, Pop, how do you feel, old man, how's the ankle?" he asked, slapping Hart on the shoulder.
"Out of sight," Hart returned. "How's your knee?"
"First-rate," answered Franklin. "Let's go out and take a stroll before grub."
"Come ahead."
"Do you know it's a strange thing," remarked Franklin, as they went out upon the sidewalk, "I never get this way before a Harvard game. It only strikes me when we meet the man with a Y on his shirt. I'd give a dollar to know if he feels the same way about us."
Already a few coaches, decorated in blue or the colors of old Nassau, were rumbling down the avenue to pick up their patrons. The breakfast hour passed and the food was swallowed somehow.
"I wish to thunder," Elliott, the football captain, observed, "that Jim would crack a smile. He's as glum as a hospital nurse."
"You never mind me," returned the trainer, who had been carrying around a couple of spare footballs all the morning, as if afraid some one would steal them. "You just play your 'ardest, that's hall I hask of you."
The morning passed so quickly that it hardly seemed an hour from the time of rising before the team climbed on the coach and started up-town for the battle ground; all the town seemed bound there also. The streets echoed with cheers, horns, and howling, and many a clerk from the drygoods district imagined himself for the nonce a college man, and claimed what he apparently thought were all the privileges; which resulted in many instances—sad to tell—in his supposed alma mater falling into disrepute.
Owing to Hart's turned ankle, he had not played in the Harvard game, having been one of the small army crouched along the side-lines on that momentous occasion. But every Princeton man knew that he was fit, and the only weak spot in the line of striped legs was now invulnerable.
More printer's ink has been expended in the description of this one game than on some conflicts of the civil war perhaps; and for the detailed description of the plan of campaign, see the daily press, or look into a college scrap-book for that year. But the points of view of reporter and spectator are very different from that of the sweating, deep-breathing individual, whose sensations and bruises are taken into small account. He has little time to notice anything but what is close to hand. His ears are alert for the quarter-back's signals, and the roaring of the thousands of voices makes but an undertone, over which he must not fail to hear orders. If he attends to duty he sees but two things—the man opposite and the slippery oblong ball.
When it is all over, his heart is lead or feathers, as the case may be, and he wonders where the black and blue marks came from, and who it was that gave him that frightful crack on the jaw,—but during the game he thinks of how much he wants to win—that's all.
As the team clambered down from the coach, upon their arrival at the grounds, and elbowed their way through the roaring multitude, Hart had a grin on his face that fixed the corners of his mouth as if they had been moulded.
"Holy smoke! look at the size of him!" observed a flashy individual in a silk hat, pointing with his cigar.
"Them's the boys!" cried a knotty-faced little Irishman. "Them's the Princetons!"
Some of the crowd even extended their hands and touched the players as they elbowed their way toward the dressing-room. Once inside, there was a confusion of low talking and much stamping of heavy-cleated boots. Then a graduate coach stood up in a corner and gathered all about him. (They leaned on one another's shoulders and listened breathlessly.) He began his speech in this way:
"Now, I'm going to talk to you fellows like a Dutch uncle. Remember this———"
There is no use in going into what the big graduate with the light-blue eyes said, but if a "Dutch uncle" speaks always in the manner he did, he is the most earnest orator and the most inspiring talker on the face of the green earth.
The confused jumble of sound from the outside suddenly raised itself into a well-defined burst of cheering the other team was out; and, pulling off their sweaters, the ten men from New Jersey, and the subs, followed their captain at a dog-trot through the walls of curious gorming faces and reached the field.
Hart looked about him, and it seemed as if the world must be present on the bleachers and the hillside; the enclosed space was very small. The grand stand, as the reporters put it, "was a mass of moving color."
"High there, Pop, mind your eye!" shouted Minton, directly in front of him.
The little half-back was pale, his teeth were showing, and he continually licked his lips and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his jersey.
Hart dove for the ball as it came bounding toward him, and fell on it. A short distance away a Yale man did the same thing, and rolled over and over, and got to his feet Yale-fashion, somehow. The full-backs were making practice drop-kicks and punts, and the crowd was howling indiscriminately. Young men with badges and walking-sticks appeared on the edges of the field. But soon there came a silence, then the flash of a coin, and Princeton won the toss, taking the westward goal with the wind behind them, and giving Yale the ball.
"On your toes, there, everybody!" cried Elliott. "They're going to try our old flying wedge, Buck. Get into them! Look out, you end rushers!" He blew into his hands as if his fingers were being frost-bitten.
A shrill whistle, and down came the charge of the men in blue. The game was on! Hart felt as though he weighed a thousand pounds. He plunged forward, and was first to meet the crush of legs, and arms, and bodies. It rolled over him like a sea, and underneath him, doubled up; his straining fingers were searching for the welcome touch of the smooth leather. There it was locked tight in the grasp of the thick-set captain from New Haven.
A futile struggle to obtain possession of it, then the umpire poking about, managed to reduce the mass to order, and the teams lined up. No longer now did Hart see the crowds or hear the cheers and shouting; no longer did he think of who he was or what he was. There was the goal, there was the ball, and there was that wild-eyed, set-jawed man in front of him. But oh! the joyousness of the moment when he got through the line unhampered! Oh! the bound of his heart as he stopped the full-back's kick (with a noise heard upon the hillside) and saw nothing before him but the erratic leaps of the ball as it twirled across the turf! If he could only pick it up ! But just as he reached forward something bumped him from behind and he slipped and missed it. The Yale man did the same thing, and at last a half-dozen swooped down upon it at once. Another disentangling of the squirming pile of striped legs and blue elbows, and underneath was Minton, laughing in a nervous chatter. Line up again! And now backwards and forwards, gaining what was lost and losing what was gained, they fought it out. The .steam rose from their soaking backs, and lips grew dry and cottony, but the ball stayed in the centre of the field.
Occasionally there were anxious, nervous moments when time was being taken out and a figure, for the instant limp or struggling, lay on the ground, surrounded by a bending crowd (prominent among which were a young man with a bag, and an eager individual with a dirty, soppy sponge); then a swaying, dizzy player, lurching into line again, a cheer from all around, or a substitute dashing up to fill a vacant place, set things agoing. A minute more to play! Slowly the ball went down toward the eastern goal. Thirty seconds more! Fifteen yards more to gain! Would they kick, or try for it? A rush, a smash! Five yards! A kick this time! Elliott skips backward. The centre places his scratched fingers on the ball. Not a sound from the grand stand. A spring forward, confusion for an instant, and in the midst of it the sharp blowing of the umpire's whistle, and the world went crazy!
The first half was over—the result "no score."
Back to the dressing-rooms again now, with the policemen trying to make a path through the surf and surgings of the mob.
Elliott was talking like one demented, stamping his feet and working his elbows.
"Never mind, never mind!" he was crying.
"Oh, God, if we had had ten seconds more!" Another "Dutch uncle" was speaking:
"You held them down, but oh! confound it, boys, you can win! Oh! why don't you do it! Rogers, play in closer! Buck, don't let that man get by you again! Follow the ball! Follow that ball! Elliott, try their left end. Keep hammering at it; you gain there every time! Oh! oh! oh! win! There's forty-five nice long minutes ahead—make use of 'em!"
"It only seemed to me that we were out there ten minutes," chuckled Hart to Franklin. The left guard was rinsing out his mouth.
"This half will be long enough," he spluttered. "Hullo, we're off again! You did well, old man!" he added, slapping Hart on the back. "Keep it up. I'm proud of you!"
If any one wishes to know the progress of the second struggle (or the first for that matter), he may be referred to the diagram printed in the next morning's papers. To the uninitiated it may look like an engineer's profile platting, but it is well worth study.
Thirty-five minutes passed and it was the same thing over again. To and fro, hammer and hit, kick and return; bruises, charges, and countercharges, with long excursions toward the goal.
Now, how the great thing happened Hart never knew; but suddenly, as he scrambled to his feet, he saw a confusion down the field, off to the right. The umpire was working like a terrier at a rathole; the crowds were standing and still; but a striped-legged individual suddenly leaped into the air, and, turning around, addressed the gods at large with extended arms, and then threw a handspring!
Minton had the ball, and that was all there was to it! It was behind the Yale goal line! A hero had been made—a championship decided!
What matters the rest! More battering-ram work in the centre of the field, and then in the course of time the whistle blew. Time was up, and there was another ball for the Princeton trophy-room.