A few minutes later the ball changed hands and he ran back to the safety position thinking: “They’d yank me if they had anybody to put in my place.”
The Princeton team suddenly woke up. A long pass gained thirty yards. A fast new back dazzled his way through the line for another first down. Yale was on the defensive, but even before they had realized the fact, the disaster had happened. Basil was drawn on an apparently developed play; too late he saw the ball shoot out of scrimmage to a loose end; saw, as he was neatly blocked, that the Princeton substitutes were jumping around wildly, waving their blankets. They had scored.
He got up with his heart black, but his brain cool. Blunders could be atoned for—if they only wouldn’t take him out. The whistle blew for the quarter, and squatting on the turf with the exhausted team, he made himself believe that he hadn’t lost their confidence, kept his face intent and rigid, refusing no man’s eye. He had made his errors for today.
On the kick-off he ran the ball back to the thirty-five, and a steady rolling progress began. The short passes, a weak spot inside tackle, Le Moyne’s end. Le Moyne was tired now. His face was drawn and dogged as he smashed blindly into the interference; the ball carrier eluded him—Basil or another.
Thirty more to go—twenty—over Le Moyne again. Disentangling himself from the pile, Basil met the Southerner’s weary glance and insulted him in a crisp voice:
“You’ve quit, Littleboy. They better take you out.”
He started the next play at him and, as Le Moyne charged in furiously, tossed a pass over his head for the score. Yale 10, Princeton 7. Up and down the field again, with Basil fresher every minute and another score in sight, and suddenly the game was over.
Trudging off the field, Basil’s eye ranged over the stands, but he could not see her.
“I wonder if she knows I was pretty bad,” he thought, and then bitterly: “If I don’t, he’ll tell her.”
He could hear him telling her in that soft Southern voice—the voice that had wooed her so persuasively that afternoon on the train. As he emerged from the dressing room an hour later he ran into Le Moyne coming out of the visitors’ quarters next door. He looked at Basil with an expression at once uncertain and angry.
“Hello, Lee.” After a momentary hesitation he added: “Good work.”
“Hello, Le Moyne,” said Basil, clipping his words.
Le Moyne turned away, turned back again.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Do you want to carry this any further?”
Basil didn’t answer. The bruised face and the bandaged hand assuaged his hatred a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. The game was over, and now Le Moyne would meet Minnie somewhere, make the defeat negligible in the victory of the night.
“If it’s about Minnie, you’re wasting your time being sore,” Le Moyne exploded suddenly. “I asked her to the game, but she didn’t come.”
“Didn’t she?” Basil was startled.
“That was it, eh? I wasn’t sure. I thought you were just trying to get my goat in there.” His eyes narrowed. “The young lady kicked me about a month ago.”
“Kicked you?”
“Threw me over. Got a little weary of me. She runs through things quickly.”
Basil perceived that his face was miserable.
“Who is it now?” he asked in more civil tone.
“It seems to be a classmate of yours named Jubal—and a mighty sad bird, if you ask me. She met him in New York the day before her school opened, and I hear it’s pretty heavy. She’ll be at the Lawn Club dance tonight.”
IV
Basil had dinner at the Taft with Jobena Dorsey and her brother George. The Varsity had won at Princeton and the college was jubilant and enthusiastic; as they came in, a table of freshmen by the door gave Basil a hand.
“You’re getting very important,” Jobena said.
A year ago Basil had thought for a few weeks that he was in love with Jobena; when they next met he knew immediately that he was not.
“And why was that?” he asked her now, as they danced. “Why did it all go so quick?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Because I let it go.”
“You let it go?” he repeated. “I like that!”
“I decided you were too young.”
“Didn’t I have anything to do with it?”
She shook her head.
“That’s what Bernard Shaw says,” Basil admitted thoughtfully. “But I thought it was just about older people. So you go after the men.”
“Well, I should say not!” Her body stiffened indignantly in his arms. “The men are usually there, and the girl blinks at them or something. It’s just instinct.”
“Can’t a man make a girl fall for him?”
“Some men can—the ones who really don’t care.”
He pondered this awful fact for a moment and stowed it away for future examination. On the way to the Lawn Club he brought forth more questions. If a girl who had been “crazy about a boy” became suddenly infatuated with another, what ought the first boy to do?
“Let her go,” said Jobena.
“Supposing he wasn’t willing to do that. What ought he to do?”
“There isn’t anything to do.”
“Well, what’s the best thing?”
Laughing, Jobena laid her head on his shoulder.
“Poor Basil,” she said, “I’ll be Laura Jean Libbey and you tell me the whole story.”
He summarized the affair. “You see,” he concluded, “if she was just anybody I could get over it, no matter how much I loved her. But she isn’t—she’s the most popular, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I mean she’s like Messalina and Cleopatra and Salome and all that.”
“Louder,” requested George from the front seat.
“She’s sort of an immortal woman,” continued Basil in a lower voice. “You know, like Madame du Barry and all that sort of thing. She’s not just—”
“Not just like me.”
“No. That is, you’re sort of like her—all the girls I’ve cared about are sort of the same. Oh, Jobena, you know what I mean.”
As the lights of the New Haven Lawn Club loomed up she became obligingly serious:
“There’s nothing to do. I can see that. She’s more sophisticated than you. She staged the whole thing from the beginning, even when you thought it was you. I don’t know why she got tired, but evidently she is, and she couldn’t create it again, even if she wanted to, and you couldn’t because you’re—”
“Go on. What?”
“You’re too much in love. All that’s left for you to do is to show her you don’t care. Any girl hates to lose an old beau; so she may even smile at you—but don’t go back. It’s all over.”
In the dressing room Basil stood thoughtfully brushing his hair. It was all over. Jobena’s words had taken away his last faint hope, and after the strain of the afternoon the realization brought tears to his eyes. Hurriedly filling the bowl, he washed his face. Someone came in and slapped him on the back.
“You played a nice game, Lee.”
“Thanks, but I was rotten.”
“You were great. That last quarter—”
He went into the dance. Immediately he saw her, and in the same breath he was dizzy and confused with excitement. A little dribble of stags pursued her wherever she went, and she looked up at each one of them with the bright-eyed, passionate smile he knew so well. Presently he located her escort and indignantly discovered it was a flip, blatant boy from Hill School he had already noticed and set down as impossible. What quality lurked behind those watery eyes that drew her? How could that raw temperament appreciate that she was one of the immortal sirens of the world?
Having examined Mr. Jubal desperately and in vain for the answers to these questions, he cut in and danced all of twenty feet with her, smiling with cynical melancholy when she said:
“I’m so proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
But the phrase was precious to him and he stood against the wall repeating it over to himself, separating it into its component parts and trying to suck out any lurking meaning. If enough people praised him it might influence her. “I’m proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
There was a commotion near the door and someone said, “By golly, they got in after all!”
“Who?” another asked.
“Some Princeton freshmen. Their football season’s over and three or four of them broke training at the Hofbrau.”
And now suddenly the curious specter of a young man burst out of the commotion, as a back breaks through a line, and neatly straight-arming a member of the dance committee, rushed unsteadily onto the floor. He wore no collar with his dinner coat, his shirt front had long expelled its studs, his hair and eyes were wild. For a moment he glanced around as if blinded by the lights; then his glance fell on Minnie Bibble and an unmistakable love light came into his face. Even before he reached her he began to call her name aloud in a strained, poignant Southern voice.
Basil sprang forward, but others were before him, and Littleboy Le Moyne, fighting hard, disappeared into the coatroom in a flurry of legs and arms, many of which were not his own. Standing in the doorway. Basil found his disgust tempered with a monstrous sympathy; for Le Moyne, each time his head emerged from under the faucet, spoke desperately of his
