With the first play pandemonium broke loose and continued to the end of the game. At intervals it would swoon away to a plaintive humming; then it would rise to the intensity of wind and rain and thunder, and beat across the twilight from one side of the Bowl to the other like the agony of lost souls swinging across a gap in space.
The teams lined up on Yale’s forty-one yard line and Spears immediately dashed off tackle for six yards. Again he carried the ball—he was a wild unpopular Southerner with inspired moments—going through the same hole for five more and a first down. Dolly made two on a cross buck and Spears was held at center. It was third down, with the ball on Yale’s twenty-nine-yard line and eight to go.
There was some confusion immediately behind me, some pushing and some voices; a man was sick or had fainted—I never discovered which. Then my view was blocked out for a minute by rising bodies and then everything went definitely crazy. Substitutes were jumping around down on the field, waving their blankets, the air was full of hats, cushions, coats and a deafening roar. Dolly Harlan, who had scarcely carried the ball a dozen times in his Princeton career, had picked a long pass from Kimball out of the air and, dragging a tackler, struggled five yards to the Yale goal.
VI
Some time later the game was over. There was a bad moment when Yale began another attack, but there was no scoring and Bob Tatnall’s eleven had redeemed a mediocre season by tying a better Yale team. For us there was the feel of victory about it, the exaltation if not the jubilance, and the Yale faces issuing from out the Bowl wore the look of defeat. It would be a good year, after all—a good fight at the last, a tradition for next year’s team. Our class—those of us who cared—would go out from Princeton without the taste of final defeat. The symbol stood—such as it was; the banners blew proudly in the wind. All that is childish? Find us something to fill the niche of victory.
I waited for Dolly outside the dressing rooms until almost everyone had come out; then, as he still lingered, I went in. Someone had given him a little brandy, and since he never drank much, it was swimming in his head.
“Have a chair, Jeff.” He smiled, broadly and happily. “Rubber! Tony! Get the distinguished guest a chair. He’s an intellectual and he wants to interview one of the bone-headed athletes. Tony, this is Mr. Deering. They’ve got everything in this funny Bowl but armchairs. I love this Bowl. I’m going to build here.”
He fell silent, thinking about all things happily. He was content. I persuaded him to dress—there were people waiting for us. Then he insisted on walking out upon the field, dark now, and feeling the crumbled turf with his shoe.
He picked up a divot from a cleat and let it drop, laughed, looked distracted for a minute, and turned away.
With Tad Davis, Daisy Cary and another girl, we drove to New York. He sat beside Daisy and was silly, charming and attractive. For the first time since I’d known him he talked about the game naturally, even with a touch of vanity.
“For two years I was pretty good and I was always mentioned at the bottom of the column as being among those who played. This year I dropped three punts and slowed up every play till Bob Tatnall kept yelling at me, ’I don’t see why they won’t take you out!’ But a pass not even aimed at me fell in my arms and I’ll be in the headlines tomorrow.”
He laughed. Somebody touched his foot; he winced and turned white.
“How did you hurt it?” Daisy asked. “In football?”
“I hurt it last summer,” he said shortly.
“It must have been terrible to play on it.”
“It was.”
“I suppose you had to.”
“That’s the way sometimes.”
They understood each other. They were both workers; sick or well, there were things that Daisy also had to do. She spoke of how, with a vile cold, she had had to fall into an open-air lagoon out in Hollywood the winter before.
“Six times—with a fever of a hundred and two. But the production was costing ten thousand dollars a day.”
“Couldn’t they use a double?”
“They did whenever they could—I only fell in when it had to be done.”
She was eighteen and I compared her background of courage and independence and achievement, of politeness based upon the realities of cooperation, with that of most society girls I had known. There was no way in which she wasn’t inestimably their superior—if she had looked for a moment my way—but it was Dolly’s shining velvet eyes that signaled to her own.
“Can’t you go out with me tonight?” I heard her ask him.
He was sorry, but he had to refuse. Vienna was in New York; she was going to see him. I didn’t know, and Dolly didn’t know, whether there was to be a reconciliation or a good-by.
When she dropped Dolly and me at the Ritz there was real regret, that lingering form of it, in both their eyes.
“There’s a marvelous girl,” Dolly said. I agreed. “I’m going up to see Vienna. Will you get a room for us at the Madison?”
So I left him. What happened between him and Vienna I don’t know; he has never spoken about it to this day. But what happened later in the evening was brought to my attention by several surprised and even indignant witnesses to the event.
Dolly walked into the Ambassador Hotel about ten o’clock and went to the desk to ask for Miss Cary’s room. There was a crowd around the desk, among them some Yale or Princeton undergraduates from the game. Several of them had been celebrating and evidently one of them knew Daisy and had tried to get her room by phone. Dolly was abstracted and he must have made his way through them in a somewhat brusque way and asked to be connected with Miss Cary.
One young man stepped back, looked at him unpleasantly and said, “You seem to be in an awful hurry. Just who are you?”
There was one of those slight silent pauses and the people near the desk all turned to look. Something happened inside Dolly; he felt as if life had arranged his role to make possible this particular question—a question that now he had no choice but to answer. Still, there was silence. The small crowd waited.
“Why, I’m Dolly Harlan,” he said deliberately. “What do you think of that?”
It was quite outrageous. There was a pause and then a sudden little flurry and chorus: “Dolly Harlan! What? What did he say?”
The clerk had heard the name; he gave it as the phone was answered from Miss Cary’s room.
“Mr. Harlan’s to go right up, please.”
Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow in his heart that was best of all. Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate ahead of him or the small chatter behind.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (21 January 1928).
