I
We had beaten Yale hands-down the year before, and this year, when we started practice, we had eight out of eleven of last season’s men, and in spite of the fact that they had instituted a new system over in New Haven, had a new coach at the helm and were reported to have the best material in years, we couldn’t see how the Elis had even a show-in. There was nothing to it, any way you figured it. We weren’t even going to miss the three we had lost, for we had at least two good candidates for each of them. There wasn’t anything could stop us from winning the Eastern Championship again. That’s the way it was right up to the first week in October. Then things began to happen.
I guess we established the hard-luck record that Fall. Kendall went first. He was left tackle, and a corker. He fell down in exams. Then Penniwell, first-string quarter, got hurt in the Bates game and developed water on theknee. Next Hanson, fullback, pulled a tendon in practice. Of course, he would be out only a couple of weeks, but on top of everything else it made us feel a bit sick. It reminded one of the nursery rhyme of the Ten Little Indians. “One got charley-horse and then there were nine.” Only it didn’t stop at nine, not by a long shot. Stearns, our best halfback, fell down three dinky steps coming out of a recitation hall and broke an arm. Joe Leverett said he hoped it would be a warning to him and teach him to keep away from recitations. You’d think we’d about reached the limit then, wouldn’t you? We thought so, anyway. We tackled Amherst with just four of last year’s team in the line-up and barely escaped a licking. The Amherst game was the third on the schedule, and after that we had the big teams to meet. Of course by that time some of the earlier invalids were getting back into shape, and we figured that if we could stall through the next two games we’d be in pretty good shape for Princeton and Yale. But Fate wasn’t through with us. On the Tuesday following the Amherst scare they hurried Tom Shawl off to the Infirmary at eleven in themorning and operated on him for appendicitis at fourP. M.Good-night!
Of course you remember Shawl, all-America halfback two years running, the hardest line plunger in the country and a wizard at kicking. One of the New York papers the year before said that “yesterday, at New Haven, Tom Shawl, assisted by the Harvard eleven, defeated Yale 17 to 0.” The paper wasn’t so far off, either. Anyway, you can imagine what it meant to us to lose Shawl. There was some vague talk of his getting around in time to play against Yale, but no one believed in it. We just about threw up our hands then. I’ll never forget the conference we had in Pete Haskell’s room that evening. I was manager that year. There were five of us there: the Head Coach, Porter; Jewell, who had the linemen in charge; the trainer; Pete and myself. We were a sick and sober lot, I can tell you. We talked and talked and snarled at each other for two solid hours and nothing much came of it. The only thing we decided was that Hackett, right end, would have to go into the backfield. He had played half before they’d made an end of him,and he was a good one. But that meant we’d have to find a corking good man for right end, and there wasn’t one in sight. There were plenty of candidates, but not one showed the real stuff. We talked them all over. Finally Jewell said:
“Where’s that chap Perrin, who played left end on the Freshman team last Fall? Isn’t he back this year?”
Porter sat up. “He’s our man!” he cried. “He will have to come out!”
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Jewell.
“Folks won’t let him play,” said Pete. “He got hurt in the Yale Freshman game last year. It wasn’t anything serious, but his folks got scared, I guess.”
“Piffle!” said Jewell. “Get him out. We need him.”
“I’ll see him to-morrow,” said Porter. “Glad you thought of him, Walt.”
We talked some more, and about ten o’clock life looked a bit brighter. With Perrin at right end and Hackett at left half, we might get by. Of course, losing Shawl’s goal-kicking meantthat we’d have to reorganize the whole campaign against Yale, and that there was just about three months of hard work to do in six weeks, but we were all a bit more hopeful when we said good-night. I stayed behind after the others went. Billy Sawyer, who roomed with Pete and played fullback on the Second, came in just then and we three chewed it all over again. Billy shook his head over Perrin, though.
“You won’t get him,” he said. “I know him pretty well. We were at Milton together. He’s that sort.”
“What sort?” I asked.
“Well, the sort who keeps a promise.”
“You mean he promised his folks not to play?”
“Yep. He broke a bone in his hand last year in the game with the Yale freshies and his parents got cold feet. He told me about it. Said he’d promised to keep out of it. Sort of broke up, too, he was. Too bad, for you know the sort of a game he put up last Fall.”
We nodded gloomily.
“Still,” said I, “he might get his folks to let him off.”
Billy screwed his mouth up and shook his head.
“Don’t think so. He’s that sort, you see.”
“Bother your ‘sorts’! When Porter tells him we need him like everything and reads the riot act to him I’ll bet he will squirm out of it somehow. You’ll see. Besides, a fellow’s parents haven’t any right to keep a chap off the team when—when the college simply has to have him!”
“Oh, rot!” said Billy. “Parents aren’t bothering about who wins the Yale game, Gus. Besides, they have got some rights, say what you want. My dad’s paying a good stiff price to get me an education and if he told me I must quit playing football I’d do it. So would you. So would any fellow.”
“Maybe, Billy, but any sensible parent wouldn’t do it!”
“Why not? What’s the sense of spending a pile of money on a chap if he’s going to break his neck or come out of college with two or three important bones missing just wherethey’ll show the most? No, Bob, Perrin’s folks have got the right idea. Merely as an investment——”
“Money isn’t everything,” I said. “There’s such a thing as loyalty and duty to your college, Billy.”
“You’re talking about Bob; I’m talking about his folks. They don’t owe any duty to your old college, do they?”
“Just the same——”
“Oh, forget it,” said Pete. “Get out of here, Gus. I’m going to bed. It’s up to Porter, anyway. I hope he gets him, that’s all.”
“So do I,” said Billy, “but he won’t.”
And he didn’t. Perrin was awfully sorry about it, but he had made a promise to his parents and he meant to keep it. Porter told him he’d have to get his parents to let him off. Perrin said he wouldn’t ask it; said it wouldn’t be fair. Porter raved at him and pleaded, but Perrin just kept on saying how badly he felt about it and how much he would like to play, but——
Porter was sore that afternoon. “He’s a mule,” he said. “A stubborn mule.”
“So we don’t get him?” asked the trainer.
Porter closed his eyes in a way he had and set his mouth. “We get him, all right,” he answered grimly. “We’ve simply got to have him. Someone’s got to go and read the riot act to those folks of his. They live in Mearsville. Who knows him? Do you, Pete?”
Pete shook his head. “Only to speak to. Billy Sawyer does, though. He went to prep with him.”
“Sawyer of the Second?” asked the coach. “He’ll do. You take Sawyer and Gus to-morrow and go out to Mearsville and see them, Pete. I’d go myself, but with all this mix-up on my hands I can’t miss practice. I’ll see Wynant and get him to let Sawyer off. You have a car, haven’t you?”
“Yes. How far is Mearsville, and where is it?”
“Oh, about a hundred miles; out beyond Worcester somewhere. Look it up on the map. It’s a small place, and you’ll have no trouble finding them, I guess. Come around to-night, the three of you, and we’ll dope out a line oftalk. Don’t let Perrin hear about it, though. He might try to queer us. He’s a mule.”
We left the Square the next day right after lunch in Pete’s car. It had only one seat, and Billy Sawyer sat on the floor with his feet on the running-board and his knees hunched up under his chin. We made good time, for Pete’s boat is some goer, and we got to Mearsville about four o’clock. On the way we went over our argument. Porter had told us what we were to say and Billy was to do most of the talking. He was a peach at talking, Billy was. He’d been on three debating teams and knew all the tricks. Funny about him, too. You’d think with his gift for that sort of stuff that he’d have turned into a lawyer or a statesman or something, but he didn’t. Billy’s adding up figures in his father’s factory to-day. Just shows that you never can tell, doesn’t it?
It was a pretty country around Mearsville, and we made the trip on one of those peachy Indian summer days that sometimes happen along in October. We had a pretty good time, too. We almost ran through Mearsville without knowing it, because there wasn’t much insight except a post-office and a store. We asked at the post-office where Mr. Perrin lived, and the postmaster came out and showed us how to go.
“Wonder,” said Billy, as we went on, “what sort his father is. If we knew that it might help us.”
“What’s his business?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Don’t know a thing except that Bob’s an only child. He seems to have plenty of money, so I suppose his old man’s fairly well fixed. If he’s one of the crabbed kind we might as well turn around right now and go back.”
“Buck up,” said Pete. “When you turn that line of talk on him, Billy, he’ll just wilt before our eyes.”
“Huh,” said Billy. “Wish you had it to do. Don’t see what I let them rope me into this for, anyway. It’s not my funeral.”
“It’s what you get for knowing the chap,” said I. “Bet you that’s the place now, the stone gate ahead of us.”
It had solid comfort written all over it. There was an old-style white house that rambledaround behind a lot of trees and some lawn and nearly fooled you into thinking it was a genuine antique. When you got near it, though, you saw it was a reproduction. It looked like a compromise between a gentleman’s estate and a nice little place out of town. Everything was neat and well groomed, and we felt like vandals for mussing up the newly dusted gravel drive with the automobile tracks. Pete was whistling “This is the Life” softly as we drew up to the door. A trim-looking maid showed us into a living-room with about a million long French windows and a thousand dollars’ worth of white and yellow chrysanthemums standing around in tall vases. Billy cleared his throat and Pete sneaked away to the further side of the room, pretending he wanted to see the view from a window. I started to follow, but Billy grabbed me.
Mr. Perrin came in the next instant. I don’t know what sort of a man the others had pictured, but I know he didn’t look at all like what I’d expected. If I’d seen him, say, in a club without knowing who he was, and anyone had asked me to guess, I wouldn’t have thoughttwice. “Noted explorer just back from successful rummage in Peru,” I’d have answered. As Billy would say, he was that sort. He had a rather long, lean face with a lot of lines, a wide mouth, a thin nose and a pair of faded blue eyes that were deep set and looked lighter than they were because his skin was as brown as a saddle. He was tall and straight and lean and looked about as fit as any man I ever saw. I warmed up to him right away. Couldn’t help it. There was something about that mouth and those pale blue eyes that was awfully friendly. And when he shook hands he did it quick and hard, and you could feel that his muscles were like little steel wires. It was up to me to introduce myself and the others, which I did, and as soon as I said “football” I saw by a little gleam in his eyes that he was dead on to our game. But he told us in a nice deep voice that he was glad to see us, got us seated in big comfortable chairs, offered cigars and made us feel right at home. Then he waited, smiling, for us to shoot. So Billy stuck his hands in his pockets and opened up.
Billy did himself proud. I wish I could rememberjust what he said, but, then, it was more the way he put it over than anything else. Porter had tipped us to be dead sober. “Make him understand that the situation is big and serious. Don’t smile except to be polite, and then do it as if it hurt your face.” So Billy started out as grave as a minister. He began by outlining the condition the team was in because of injuries and such, dwelt on the hopeless position in which the coaches found themselves and predicted ruin and disaster unless new material could be found to prop the tottering structure, or words to that effect. And all the time he spoke in low, fateful tones like a doctor breaking the news to the family after a consultation. If he had kept it up two minutes longer I’d have been in tears.
“I gathered from the papers,” said Mr. Perrin just as gravely, “that things were in pretty bad shape at Cambridge. I’m very sorry, Mr. Sawyer.”
Then he waited again, looking appropriately funereal. But there was a little flicker in those blue eyes of his that told me he wasn’t as concerned as he pretended.
Billy took a fresh start and began on Bob Perrin. He allowed you to understand by the tone of his voice that there was a ray of hope, after all, but that you weren’t by any means to think the patient out of danger. He told about the fine work done by Bob last year on the Freshman team and how if he would spring into the breach all might yet be well. Billy said so many nice things about Bob that I couldn’t see how his father could help looking a bit proud. He didn’t, though. He just kept his eyes on Billy and waited. It seemed as if his watchful waiting game was getting on Billy’s nerves, for Billy stumbled once or twice and his voice began to flatten out a little. He took the ground that in such a stupendous crisis as then confronted the college—the college we all loved—Billy’s voice sort of took on a tremolo effect there—all selfish thoughts and desires should be brushed aside. At such a time it was the duty of all loyal sons of Harvard to—to put their shoulders to the wheel, to banish prejudices, to forget self and—er—strive as one man to avert the disaster that threatened to engulf their glorious Alma Mater.
Said Mr. Perrin: “Did Bob send you out here?”
“No, Mr. Perrin, your son does not know of our visit. Mr. Porter, our Head Coach, tried to persuade him to play, but he replied that he was bound by a promise to you and that it would not be fair for him to ask to be released from it. It was then that Mr. Porter decided to see you himself, feeling certain, as he said, that when you once realized the gravity of the situation you would eagerly and gladly give your consent to Bob’s playing.”
“Ah.” Mr. Perrin glanced at Pete and then at me. “But neither of these gentlemen is Mr. Porter, I believe?”
“No, sir. Mr. Haskell is Captain of the Varsity and Mr. Kirke is Manager. Mr. Porter was unable to come since his presence at practice is indispensable just now. We represent him, sir, and I have tried to bring you his message just as he delivered it to me. Were he here he could undoubtedly speak more convincingly, sir, but——”
“No, no,” said Mr. Perrin. “You do yourself an injustice. He could not, I am certain,have dispatched a more capable and eloquent emissary.” He paused and looked toward the windows. “Gentlemen, I am going to suggest that we go outdoors. This is much too fine a day to be inside. You will, I hope, stay to dinner with us.”
We all said we wouldn’t think of it, but he didn’t pay much attention to that.
“Let me have my way, please,” he went on. “Both Mrs. Perrin and I shall be most pleased to have you. We don’t have many opportunities to entertain, and you really must humor us. Besides, I want you to meet her, and just now she is unable to appear. Now let us take a walk. I want to show you my place. You know we folks who live in the country always drag our visitors around the grounds the first thing.”
We went out on the porch. Mr. Perrin dropped behind to get his cap and stick, and the three of us looked at each other questioningly. Billy was frowning and Pete looked blank. I remember I shook my head. Mr. Perrin joined us then, and we set out around the house. He showed us his stable and barn and greenhouses and piggery and a cellar where heraised mushrooms, and a lot of things like that. Pete got full of enthusiasm right away and asked a lot of questions. Pete subscribes toCountry Lifeand draws plans of model farms at lectures. Somehow, out of doors we all forgot to be gloomy, and the first thing we knew we were laughing at the colts in the paddock and chatting away just as if there wasn’t any Stupendous Crisis. After we’d seen everything Mr. Perrin led the way across a meadow to a little hill that had pine trees clumped on top of it and brown needles underneath. It was when we were climbing the hill that Mr. Perrin said:
“You must forgive me for being a bit slow. This leg of mine isn’t as spry on the grades.”
I noticed then for the first time that he limped a little and bore pretty heavily on his stick. I slowed down with him and asked: “Accident, sir?”
“Yes,” he said. “I broke it in football.”
“Oh!” said I. I couldn’t think of anything else to say just then.
“It was in a game with Pennsylvania a goodmany years ago now,” he went on. “We used to play on Jarvis Field in those days.”
“Where the tennis courts are now?” I asked. “Were you—were you on the Varsity, sir?”
“Yes. I was captain that year. This break kept me out of the Yale game, and I remember that I felt pretty badly about it.”
“It was pretty tough luck,” I muttered. I did a whole lot of thinking the rest of the way up the hill.
When we got to the top we sat down on the pine needles in the sunlight, and Mr. Perrin filled a pipe. “Perhaps,” he said as he started to light it, “I shouldn’t do this, as you chaps are in training.” Billy and Pete told him it didn’t matter any to them. It didn’t to me because I didn’t smoke. I’d promised my folks not to until I was twenty-one. There was a fine view from where we sat, and the country was as pretty as a picture, with the sun getting low and sending long shafts of golden light across the fields. It was quiet, too, so quiet you could hear a cowbell tinkling half a mile away. Billy put his hands under his head and stretched himself out on his back with a sigh. Petehugged his knees and looked blissful. I suppose he was thinking of the place he meant to have when he was through college. There was a rock near me with moss growing all over it, and I settled my back against it and blinked at the sun. After a minute Mr. Perrin said:
“It always seems easier to me to think and talk out of doors. I suppose it’s because I’ve spent a good deal of my life there.” And then, speaking quietly and sort of lazily, he told us some things he’d seen and that had happened to him. He wasn’t an explorer, after all. He was an engineer and he had spent most of his life in the West and Southwest building irrigating dams and canals and things. I’ll bet they were good ones. He was that sort, as Billy would say. Some of the yarns he told were corkers, and he told them in such a smiling, matter-of-fact way that they sounded bully and made you want to pack up and hike out there where such things happened. He had had adventures, all right! And he had us laughing one minute and sitting still and gripping our hands the next and hardly daring to breathe!Gee, if I could tell a story the way he could, I’d never do another thing!
“It’s a big country out there,” he said finally, “with lots of things to be done.”
“I should think,” said Pete, “you’d find it rather tame back here, Mr. Perrin.”
“Tame? Not at all. I like this best. But then, I’m getting along toward where the quiet life begins to look pretty good, boys. I find now when I go back out there that saddles are harder than they used to be and ponchos aren’t as soft to sleep on as hair mattresses. But I’m always glad to get there again—and always glad to come back. In two or three years more I won’t have to make the trip very often, I guess. Bob will do that for me. He’s going to have a man’s job on his hands when he’s ready for it.”
“Is he going to take up engineering too, sir?” I asked.
“No, that won’t be necessary. That part of it is done. Of course it’s best for him to know something of it, and so he and I go out there in the summers and I show him the why and the how. I dare say he learns as well that wayas he would if he took a course at the Scientific School. Bob’s work will be to manage what I’ve built. It will be his after a while, you see. Bob’s the only one we have and there won’t be any others now. It’s a good deal like putting all your eggs in one basket, you see. When you do that you’re liable to be mighty careful of the basket.”
He filled his pipe again, looking off across the field toward where the smoke was going up straight from the chimneys of the house. We didn’t say anything. After a minute:
“It’s a fine, comforting thing to know that there’s someone coming after you to carry things along,” he said thoughtfully. “It makes what’s ahead of you look pretty trifling. I always feel a deep pity for men who haven’t sons. It seems to me that they’ve failed in what God sent ’em here to do. I guess your fathers know what I mean, and you will know it, too, some day—I hope. I hate to think what it must be like for men who haven’t any children when the shadows begin to deepen. Maybe all fathers don’t feel the way I do about it, but I guess they must. Four of the finest words I know of arethese: ‘From father to son.’ Well, well, I’m boring you with all this stuff. And it’s getting a little chilly now. We’ll walk back and get ready for dinner. We dine early out here. I hope you won’t mind.”
When we got back he took us upstairs to a fine big room, and it took just a glance to show that it was Bob’s. There were all sorts of photographs stuck around: school nines and elevens and track teams, you know, with Bob’s face peering out from some of them. There was a bookcase in one corner with all Bob’s old school books and story books on the shelves. And there were some pewter cups on the mantel and some pennants on the walls and a split baseball bat and a canoe paddle with things written on it and a plaited hair bridle and a pair of wicked-looking Mexican spurs. It was just a regular boy’s room with all the things a fellow accumulates and hates to throw away even as he grows older. Mr. Perrin took up some of the photographs and pointed out Bob in them; Bob, a little kid in knickerbockers; Bob in track togs, with his fingers tight over his grips; Bob holding a football in the center of a group; Bobwearing chaps and a big sombrero and seated on a cow pony. Then he went out and left us, and we washed up. No one said very much, and we all hurried.
Downstairs we met Mrs. Perrin. I guess you’d call her homely, but she was the sort of homely that looks good to a fellow. She was small and looked not very strong, but she was all right. You knew she could do one thing to the King’s taste, and that was to be a mother. We had a bully dinner. Nothing fluffy, but regular food that went right to the spot and stuck. We were all of us hungry, too, all of us except, maybe, Mrs. Perrin. I don’t think she ate much, but she surely saw to it that we did. Billy made a great hit with her because he had been at Milton with Bob. She didn’t talk a whole lot about Bob, but you could see that she was pretty proud of him just the same. There wasn’t a word said about why we were there. We were just friends or college mates of Bob’s, and that was enough. Mrs. Perrin was full of fun in a quiet way, and it was dandy to see how she and Mr. Perrin played up to each other. She prompted him to tell this story or that, andhe came back at her the same way. About the middle of dinner we felt as if we’d known those folks for years! We sure had a dandy time.
We didn’t stay at the table after Mrs. Perrin went because we weren’t smoking, and Mr. Perrin pretended he didn’t want to. So we went back to the library, and the first thing I knew Pete was over at the piano with Mrs. Perrin pulling the music about for him. Pete’s a wonder at the ivories, and he played and we all sang; Mr. Perrin, too, when he knew the song; and had a regular merry-merry for about an hour. Then we had to mosey back to Cambridge, and Mr. Perrin sent out and had Pete’s car brought around from the stable. They made us take sweaters and coats, for we hadn’t brought any, and it was getting chilly. We were to leave them with Bob. We said good-night to Mrs. Perrin in the library, and she made us all promise to come again, which wasn’t hard to do, for we were dead eager to. Mr. Perrin went out to the car with us and stood around while we lighted up and packed ourselves in. Pete started the engine the firsttime and tried not to look surprised, and we all shook hands and Mr. Perrin said we mustn’t forget our promise to come again, and we said he wasn’t to worry about that! But then he didn’t move away, and we saw he had something to say and Pete throttled down his engine.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” he said earnestly, “and it’s this. I want Harvard to win this year, boys, perhaps every bit as much as you do. I’m afraid I haven’t appeared very sympathetic this evening, but I do sympathize with you in your trouble. I’ve been through with something of the same sort myself, and I haven’t forgotten. And I’m not going to tell you that whether we win or lose the world’s going to keep on whirling. I know it didn’t seem so to me in the old days, and it doesn’t seem so to you. I don’t believe there’s an old player who follows the fortunes of the Team any more closely than I do, boys. I’ve ridden eighty miles at night to learn the result of a Yale game. I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to think that I’ve outgrown my devotion to the college, my loyalty to the Team.”
He paused and Pete pretended to tinker with the switch.
“And now one thing more,” said Mr. Perrin. “Two things, rather; for I want to tell you that I appreciate the fine way in which you have refrained from showing impatience or criticism of my attitude in regard to Bob. It may be that you secretly look on me as a selfish, pig-headed old codger——”
Billy started to say something, but Mr. Perrin continued:
“And perhaps I am. But partly because you have acted like three of God’s gentlemen and partly because—well, because an old player can never quite forget, I’m going to leave it in your hands. If you think the Team needs Bob more than I do, you tell him that he is to go in there and play his level best! Good-night, boys!”
Mearsville was ten miles behind before anyone said anything. Then it was Billy, and, since we had a hard road and the engine purred no louder than a kitten, we heard him even though he only muttered. “Fellowsdoget hurt,” he growled. “You can’t deny that. Look at thelist of them just in our own time: Choate and Riley and ‘Fan’ Tanner and a whole bunch, to say nothing of this year’s list.”
A mile further on, I said: “I suppose a fellow with a busted leg wouldn’t be much use out there on that job.”
Going into Worcester, Pete said: “There’s that chap Nelson.”
“Did well at Exeter,” said Billy.
“With six weeks to work on him,” I murmured, “seems to me——”
Later Pete broke out with: “Hang him, he had no business saying that we thought him selfish and pig-headed!”
“Still, we did, you know,” I reminded, “before.”
“Before, yes, but not after! Anyway, I didn’t.”
“Mean to say I did?” demanded Billy somewhat hotly.
“Shut up! What we’ve got to decide is this,” I said. “What are we going to tell Porter to-morrow?”
“Tell him?” grunted Pete, taking a corner on two wheels. “Tell him nothing doing!”
I showed this to Pete, who went in heavy for English Composition and can talk you deaf, dumb and blind about characterization, climax, crisis, suspense anddénouement, and he says I finished my story at the last paragraph and that if I write any more I’ll be pulling an anti-climax. Maybe he’s right, but I know that if I was reading this yarn I’d want to know who won the Yale game. And so I’m going to tell you. And if you think the way Pete does, why, you can stop up there where it says “nothing doing.” That’s all right, isn’t it?
Well, Bob Perrin didn’t come out for the team. Porter fumed and kicked for a while, and then yanked Nelson off the bench and sicked half a dozen assistant coaches on him. He had a pretty tough time of it for about five weeks. No matter which way he turned there was always one or more coaches waiting to grab him. I’m not sure they didn’t read him to sleep out of the rules book and camp outside his door at night. But they did what they set out to do, believe me! They made an All-America end of him, even if they almost killed him in the operation. And, although we lost toBrown, and although Princeton swamped us, we came right back on the twenty-fourth of November and put it over the Elis, 7 to 3.
As Billy would say, we were that sort!