“You were wonderful to come up, Basil. I’m so excited having a beau so soon. Everybody’s jealous of me.”
The glass doors hinged like French windows, shutting them in on all sides. It was hot. Down through three more compartments he could see another couple—a girl and her brother, Minnie said—and from time to time they moved and gestured soundlessly, as unreal in these tiny human conservatories as the vase of paper flowers on the table. Basil walked up and down nervously.
“Minnie, I want to be a great man some day and I want to do everything for you. I understand you’re tired of me now. I don’t know how it happened, but somebody else came along—it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any hurry. But I just want you to—oh, remember me in some different way—try to think of me as you used to, not as if I was just another one you threw over. Maybe you’d better not see me for a while—I mean at the dance this fall. Wait till I’ve accomplished some big scene or deed, you know, and I can show it to you and say I did that all for you.”
It was very futile and young and sad. Once, carried away by the tragedy of it all, he was on the verge of tears, but he controlled himself to that extent. There was sweat on his forehead. He sat across the room from her, and Minnie sat on the couch, looking at the floor, and said several times: “Can’t we be friends, Basil? I always think of you as one of my best friends.”
Toward the end she rose patiently.
“Don’t you want to see the chapel?”
They walked upstairs and he glanced dismally into a small dark space, with her living, sweet-smelling presence half a yard from his shoulder. He was almost glad when the funereal business was over and he walked out of the school into the fresh autumn air.
Back in New Haven he found two pieces of mail on his desk. One was a notice from the registrar telling him that he had failed his trigonometry examination and would be ineligible for football. The second was a photograph of Minnie—the picture that he had liked and ordered two of in Mobile. At first the inscription puzzled him: “L. L. from E. G. L. B. Trains are bad for the heart.” Then suddenly he realized what had happened, and threw himself on his bed, shaken with wild laughter.
III
Three weeks later, having requested and passed a special examination in trigonometry, Basil began to look around him gloomily to see if there was anything left in life. Not since his miserable first year at school had he passed through such a period of misery; only now did he begin for the first time to be aware of Yale. The quality of romantic speculation reawoke, and, listlessly at first, then with growing determination, he set about merging himself into this spirit which had fed his dreams so long.
“I want to be chairman of the ‘News’ or the ‘Record’,” thought his old self one October morning, “and I want to get my letter in football, and I want to be in Skull and Bones.”
Whenever the vision of Minnie and Le Moyne on the train occurred to him, he repeated this phrase like an incantation. Already he thought with shame of having stayed over in Mobile, and there began to be long strings of hours when he scarcely brooded about her at all.
He had missed half of the freshman football season, and it was with scant hope that he joined the squad on Yale field. Dressed in his black and white St. Regis jersey, amid the motley of forty schools, he looked enviously at the proud two dozen in Yale blue. At the end of four days he was reconciling himself to obscurity for the rest of the season when the voice of Carson, assistant coach, singled him suddenly out of a crowd of scrub backs.
“Who was throwing those passes just now?”
“I was, sir.”
“I haven’t seen you before, have I?”
“I just got eligible.”
“Know the signals?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you take this team down the field—ends, Krutch and Bispam; tackles—”
A moment later he heard his own voice snapping out on the crisp air: “Thirty-two, sixty-five, sixty-seven, twenty-two—”
There was a ripple of laughter.
“Wait a minute! Where’d you learn to call signals like that?” said Carson.
“Why, we had a Harvard coach, sir.”
“Well, just drop the Haughton emphasis. You’ll get everybody too excited.”
After a few minutes they were called in and told to put on headgears.
“Where’s Waite?” Carson asked. “Test, eh? Well, you then—what’s your name?—in the black and white sweater?”
“Lee.”
“You call signals. And let’s see you get some life into this outfit. Some of you guards and tackles are big enough for the varsity. Keep them on their toes, you—what’s your name?”
“Lee.”
They lined up with possession of the ball on the freshmen’s twenty-yard line. They were allowed unlimited downs, but when, after a dozen plays, they were in approximately that same place, the ball was given to the first team.
“That’s that!” thought Basil. “That finishes me.”
But an hour later, as they got out of the bus, Carson spoke to him:
“Did you weigh this afternoon?”
“Yes. Hundred and fifty-eight.”
“Let me give you a tip—you’re still playing prep-school football. You’re still satisfied with stopping them. The idea here is that if you lay them down hard enough you wear them out. Can you kick?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s too bad you didn’t get out sooner.”
A week later his name was read out as one of those to go to Andover. Two quarterbacks ranked ahead of him, Danziger and a little hard rubber ball of a man, named Appleton, and Basil watched the game from the sidelines, but when, the following Tuesday, Danziger splintered his arm in practice, Basil was ordered to report to training table.
On the eve of the game with the Princeton freshmen, the egress of the student body to Princeton for the Varsity encounter left the campus almost deserted. Deep autumn had set in, with a crackling wind from the west, and walking back to his room after final skull practice, Basil felt the old lust for glory sweep over him. Le Moyne was playing end on the Princeton freshman and it was probable that Minnie would be in the stands, but now, as he ran along the springy grass in front of Osborne, swaying to elude imaginary tacklers, the fact seemed of less importance than the game. Like most Americans, he was seldom able really to grasp the moment, to say: “This, for me, is the great equation by which everything else will be measured; this is the golden time,” but for once the present was sufficient. He was going to spend two hours in a country where life ran at the pace he demanded of it.
The day was fair and cool; an unimpassioned crowd, mostly townsmen, was scattered through the stands. The Princeton freshmen looked sturdy and solid in their diagonal stripes, and Basil picked out Le Moyne, noting coldly that he was exceptionally fast, and bigger than he had seemed in his clothes. On an impulse Basil turned and searched for Minnie in the crowd, but he could not find her. A minute later the whistle blew; sitting at the coach’s side, he concentrated all his faculties on the play.
The first half was played between the thirty-yard lines. The main principles of Yale’s offense seemed to Basil too simple; less effective than the fragments of the Haughton system he had learned at school, while the Princeton tactics, still evolved in Sam White’s long shadow, were built around a punter and the hope of a break. When the break came, it was Yale’s. At the start of the second half Princeton fumbled and Appleton sent over a drop kick from the thirty-yard line.
It was his last act of the day. He was hurt on the next kick-off and, to a burst of freshmen cheering, assisted from the game.
With his heart in a riot, Basil sprinted out on the field. He felt an overpowering strangeness, and it was someone else in his skin who called the first signals and sent an unsuccessful play through the line. As he forced his eyes to take in the field slowly, they met Le Moyne’s, and Le Moyne grinned at him. Basil called for a short pass over the line, throwing it himself for a gain of seven yards. He sent Cullum off tackle for three more and a first down. At the forty, with more latitude, his mind began to function smoothly and surely. His short passes worried the Princeton fullback, and, in consequence, the running gains through the line were averaging four yards instead of two.
At the Princeton forty he dropped back to kick formation and tried Le Moyne’s end, but Le Moyne went under the interfering halfback and caught Basil by a foot. Savagely Basil tugged himself free, but too late—the halfback bowled him over. Again Le Moyne’s face grinned at him, and Basil hated it. He called the same end and, with Cullum carrying the ball, they rolled over Le Moyne six yards, to Princeton’s thirty-two. He was slowing down, was he? Then run him ragged! System counseled a pass, but he heard himself calling the end again. He ran parallel
