Stanford Stories Part 11

Lyman went, and the Psychology man, refilling his pipe, stared at the fire and smoked until midnight.

"I don't know," he thought, as he settled into bed, "it may be only a case of dual personality, it may be something greater. I've got where I must guard against myself."

With an intensified interest, the coach resumed his work over Ashley. He waited for a recurrence of the phenomenon which Lyman had marked and he yielded again to the general excitement over the approaching contest.

Absorbed in the two unrelated interests, he gradually came to connect them. This he kept to himself.

The last campus practice was half over, the bleachers were crowded.

Across the field the confirmed fiends were standing along the ropes to get a nearer view of that tangle of human bodies, not a movement of which escaped them. On the side-lines the privileged advisers, from rubbers and Freshman manager up to a.s.sociate coach, squatted on the adobe, careless of their clothes.

The whole University had come out. An air of sorrow hung over everything, the rooters were silent, and the teams played listlessly.

Frank Lyman went over where the wildest howlers usually sat.

"Boys," he said, "we can't send the men away like this, it would take them a week to get over it. We must have some yelling. We're not honoring the memory of Blake this way. Do you know what his last words were? He said to Professor Diemann, 'They know I never was a quitter.'

Do you think he would like a practice like this?"

Then the crowd started up and gave the yell as one man, and the others joined in until something like the usual demonstration arose about the field, and the 'Varsity, feeling the inspiration, bent down and hammered away at the Scrubs as they meant to do against the Blue and Gold on Thanksgiving day. Here and there a fraternity dog, showing his head between a pair of golf-clad knees, joined the quick, sharp yell of the people about him with an imitation that raised a laugh. When the bleachers were still just before a big play, one could hear in the breathless silence the slap of the canvas suits, the thud of heavy shoes, the sniffling of men just out of a scrimmage. Far across the bay, the hills that were cool and blue when practice began, grew luminously red in the level light of the dying rays; against the fading color of the west, the power-house chimney rose picturesquely dark; the swift, elusive twilight of California settled down on Santa Clara's broad acres, so that Diemann had to stare hard to follow Ashley's play. Then the whistle sounded, sharp in the still air, and the teams came trotting to the side-lines to take their sweaters and caps from devoted admirers and to stroll off, arm over shoulder, with people who minded not in the least the campus dirt those heroes had been gathering.

Diemann took Ashley's arm. "Let's walk together," he said.

The subst.i.tute fullback had been playing hard ball. The gloom hanging over the first half of the practice had affected him strongly and he had flung himself into the game, trying to forget, to cast off the foolish sense of an implied reproach. Diemann could see that he was very tired.

He made him lean upon him, and they started for the Hall. Suddenly he realized that the football man was not answering questions, that the weight on his own shoulder was growing heavier. He glanced up into Ashley's face; there was an absent look in the man's eyes.

"Fred!" whispered Diemann sharply in his ear.

"Yes?" answered the fullback; then he shook himself and said:

"It's chilly, Die, I'm wet. Let's get in."

Some fifteen minutes later, the two came down the corridor toward the training table.

"Good-night, Ashley."

"Won't you stay to dinner, Diemann?"

"No, I must go down, and you are late as it is. Hurry along in."

"All right. I'm not going stale if I can help it. I just felt a little faint over there; I got pretty tired."

Diemann stepped up closer to him beside the curving bal.u.s.trade and looked the football man steadily in the eyes.

"You are playing more like Blake every day," he said.

"I wish I were."

"We are going to the Springs to-morrow," went on the coach, "and you can rest. By the way, if I were you I wouldn't say anything about your feeling faint just now. It would only trouble Lyman and the rest of the boys."

"What does it all mean?" Diemann mused as the palms bordering the bicycle path flashed by him. "There was something about him like Fred, in his way of speaking, and some of the things he said about the game, but it stopped there. With all my questioning, I never got a word that belonged to us two alone. I suppose I must admit that it is merely the memory of the subjective mind, a case of dual personality brought on by hyper-aesthetic conditions. Oh, if it were only the other thing, if I only could know! But it can't be; he would give me some clue, some sign.

Then again the subst.i.tution has not come at a critical time, only after the practice, when Ashley is tired. If it were Fred, he would appear in the play, he would come at a time like that, if there is anything in it."

Diemann gripped his handle-bar tightly as he shot through the sandstone gates.

"Oh," he thought, "whatever it is, if it would only come stronger, if I could only be sure!"

On Thanksgiving morning when the long special runs up on the University track and stops between the Library and Encina, the flaming bunting looped along its sides starts the excitement of the day. Everybody is out on the walk, bristling with the College cardinal, from Professor Grind and his wife to the j.a.p who cleans house Sat.u.r.days. If there is anyone who cannot or does not want to go up to town to-day, he has hidden himself in grief or shame. The President wears a ribbon in his coat, and talks gravely with Professor Diemann, who has been at the Springs with the team. A knot of students have already determined to get the Doctor to lead the yell when he comes in to the grounds. They know he will do it; he is as full of the spirit of the day as any of them.

"Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Stanford!"

The engine whistles it, the crowd shouts it, and the hills give it back again as the laden train slips down to the main line and starts on its way to town. Streaming with cardinal bunting, it looks like a burning thing as it rushes over the marsh land, sending the horses in the field snorting away, and bringing women to the doors of cottages along the tracks. In their excitement the delirious Soph.o.m.ores and Juniors hang out of the windows and throw kisses wildly to these women, who grin and wave back, doubtless saying something about "them crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags.

From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations, and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes.

Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip upstairs under the protecting shadow of the a.s.sociate coach, pa.s.sing the suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great fresh specimen of the l.u.s.tiest student-body in the world. You take his hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.

Diemann found Ashley quiet in his room. The fullback was in splendid fettle; the week at the Springs had done him a world of good. There was no staleness about him now. It had helped him to be away from the College, away from that excited crowd that sat on the bleachers and watched him play, demanding that he be like Blake, who had died. He breathed more easily in the quiet air of the mountains where the team had secret practice. People stopped urging him to be like Blake; only Diemann went over the thing again and again, explaining, reminding. Now Thanksgiving had come, and the subst.i.tute fullback had never felt better in his life. He would do his best, and they could not say he had not tried.

The manager was radiant over Ashley's condition, and the other men slapped Tom's big shoulders and said that he would put up a good game for the College. Diemann alone seemed sour-balled. The rest of them knew how Blake's death had broken him up, but that was no reason, Lyman said, why he need keep nagging the new fullback about Fred. The College realized that the two men were hopelessly different, and they were fairly reconciled by this time. If the boy played the best that was in him, the team might make it in spite of the odds. It was too bad to take the spirit out of him by constantly suggesting that he play like Blake.

The manager said this to Diemann, but the coach only shook his head and answered:

"It won't do any harm, Frank, and it may possibly work him up to something like Fred's game."

But a week's watching at the Springs had made Diemann despondent. The phenomenon he had witnessed the evening of the last practice had not appeared again. He had allowed his theories to lead him away into impossible hopes. The man on the bed was Ashley, slow, normal, in perfect condition, hopeless, and Ashley he would remain. The chance for a psychic manifestation ceased when Ashley's football worry was over.

Opportunity had come and gone, unfruitfully.

That afternoon, the athletic grounds were banked with great flower-beds of people, where red and blue and yellow blossomed and faded and burst out again as the teams swayed back and forward on the white-lined gridiron between. The wild noise of the college yells greeting the teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands, the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the hoa.r.s.e bellow of the brown paper megaphones,--all this tumult had hushed suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other for the kick-off.

The uproar boomed forth again, and presently the Stanford bleachers became silent from breathless watching. The first five minutes of play meant most to the cardinal. In that dozen rushes, they could tell whether there was a chance of winning or whether the hope of victory had died with Blake. The first Berkeley play went at the line and crumpled up without gain; again it held and again, until the crowd felt that there was more than hope, that the Stanford stone-wall defense would win out once more. Yet so closely were the teams matched that they swung back and forth without score for a good half.

When the game was almost at the end of the second half, the score was tie, 6-6. But Berkeley was sure of the day. She had forced her adversaries to their five-yard line, and there were only six minutes left to play. Stanford took a desperate brace and Berkeley lost the ball on downs. If only Stanford could gain ground now, or if time could be called. n.o.body wanted a tie, to be sure, but defeat was hard to accept,--the first time, too.

Diemann of Stanford crouched on the side-lines with a heart of lead. The game was lost. What he had looked for, hoping against hope since play was called, had not happened. Ashley had played his usual hard, consistent game, straining every muscle, punting longer and higher than ever before, but missing stupidly some golden chances, the chances Blake would never have let slip by. Diemann had talked to him between halves, a few eager words, urging him to quickness, reminding him of Fred. The subst.i.tute had only shaken his head, and muttered that he was doing his best. Toward the end of the second he had shown the severity of the strain. Playing his hardest, with despair in his soul, it had told on him. In the last scrimmages his work had been very ragged. Indeed, the whole team seemed to have slumped, and the Berkeley line had hammered them down toward their own goal while precious seconds slipped by.

Now the men lined up rapidly. Stanford tried an end play. No gain.

Diemann stood back of the team at one side of the goal; he was struggling hard to be calm, but he did a strange thing. He seized a small megaphone from the hands of an urchin beside him, and just as they lined up after Stanford's unsuccessful trial at end, he stepped to the white goal line and raising the funnel to his lips shouted in a voice audible to every man on both teams:

"Now, Fred Blake, play your game!"

Lyman heard and looked back, wondering.

Ashley heard. He stared at the grandstand with a bewildered, appealing face. Then the signal was given. It sent Ashley through tackle. The boy, feeling as though he had lost the game for his College where the other man would have won, went into the line with the energy of a forlorn hope. The Berkeley men gathered their superior force, and the Stanford team was lifted up and borne back, a gradually shifting ma.s.s, to its own goal line.

Were they over? The Berkeley crowd yelled, and an exultant sub threw his sweater in the air. No, the teams were up, and the ball was almost on the line, not quite. There remained a chance to punt it out of danger. Could Ashley do it quickly enough? He had been punting too slowly; the other line could surely get through and block his kick, and there were only two minutes to play.

Diemann, rigid with anxiety, saw that a Stanford man still lay on the ground. Straining his eyes through the dusk, a glance at the team told him that it was Ashley. The drawn muscles of the instructor's legs trembled, the blood beat in his temples. Was it coming, at the last moment?

As the trainer shot out from the side-lines with bucket and sponge, Diemann saw Ashley spring up, slap the grimy moleskins of the men nearest him, and get back into position to kick. Stanford was standing on her own goal line. He saw the ball snapped back; the fullback kicked it, in time; then, instead of the long, curving drive that was to save the day, he saw the ball rise almost straight in the air above the teams, and he groaned aloud as the Berkeley men broke through, and people with delirious laughter waved the blue and gold frantically about him.