The Opinions of a Philosopher Part 4

How exactly that was like a woman. Here was my wife, who had secretly aided and abetted her son in his design, and been the recipient of his hopes and fears on the subject, turning to me, who had dared to utter a feeble protest or two only to be scoffed at, and summarily sat upon, asking if the game was really safe.

"There are certain risks in this world that a man has to take," I answered, borrowing the sentiment which she had uttered on the occasion of our affair with the burglars.

Josephine did not appreciate my irony. "Why, oh why, did you give your consent to his playing foot-ball?" she asked, tragically. "I understand that it is a terribly rough and dangerous game."

"I give my consent? This is monstrous, Josephine, monstrous. I did not wish to be a killjoy and a marplot, or I would have forbidden Fred to touch a foot-ball after he entered college. Had you, my dear, given me the least bit of support, I should have nipped the whole business in the bud. Yet now you seek to throw the blame on me."

The suggestion of the dire parental sternness of which I had evidently just missed being guilty caused her thoughts to fly off on an opposite tack. "The poor darling, his heart was so set on being chosen," she said. "I am sure, Fred, it would have been a terrible blow to him if he had not succeeded."

"I dare say that it was his chief motive in going to college," I interjected, a little indignantly.

"I really think it was," she murmured, with sweet maternal sympathy.

"I shall live though in constant dread until it is over and done with."

"What is over and done with?"

"The Harvard-Yale foot-ball match. It's on account of that he's been so anxious to belong. And, Fred, he said to me the other day that if he was chosen, he hoped that we would go to Springfield to see the game. It is terrible to think that I might see him killed before my eyes, but he is set on our going."

"It is all a piece of infernal nonsense," I remarked, with majestic dignity; nevertheless, the idea did not strike me as a bad one. To tell the truth, I was beginning to be curious to see this game, which, according to the views of my eldest son, was the greatest game of the day, and to those of Horace Plympton a barbaric spectacle.

And now befell me a curious experience; at least it seemed to me such.

I found that I, who, though considered an industrious and painstaking lawyer, have never awakened any especial interest in the community, had acquired l.u.s.tre and importance by virtue of the circ.u.mstance that I had a son on the University foot-ball eleven. College graduates of various ages, who had hitherto cla.s.sed me with the general run of their acquaintance, grew suddenly cordial and congratulatory in their manner, and I had the satisfaction of reading in the public prints an item to the effect that Frederick ----, the father of the well-known half-back of the Harvard University foot-ball eleven, had recently visited New York for a few days. Altogether I had become, for the first time in my existence, an object of consequence to my fellow-citizens, and almost to the world at large.

As for the hero himself, he bore his importance modestly and meekly, though he evidently considered that he had rescued the family name from obscurity and set it gloriously in the public eye by dint of his renown. He was in strict training, and fiercely conscientious as to what he ate and drank, and as to his hours of sleep. Little was heard in the house when he was at home but conjecture and estimate as to who was likely to win in the impending contest. Had I been properly attentive, I might have learned from his lips not merely the names and nicknames of the members of the respective teams and the positions on the field they were to fill, but their weights in fighting trim, their fine points both as foot-ball kickers and as men, and not improbably their love affairs. When now and then, as occasionally happened, I betrayed by an unfortunate question or by unappreciative silence my lack of familiarity with this or that celebrity, the look of wondering pity with which my boy, and indeed every member of the family, regarded me made me feel myself to be a veritable ignoramus. Josephine and her girls knew the whole business from beginning to end, and I must confess that I secretly drank in more than I pretended.

A fortnight before the match was to come off Sam Bangs, who, as some of you will remember, is a second cousin of mine and rather a pal of Josephine's, appeared at the house one evening and laid before me, in his engaging, plausible fashion, a project which he and his wife and my wife had cooked up between them. He and Josephine a.s.sured me, in the first place, that I wouldn't have the least bother in the matter, and that everything would be perfectly plain running for the reason that Sam was intimate with the manager of the railroad, and that little Fred had secured the requisite number of tickets for the game. Then he proceeded to inform me that they had conceived the idea of going to see the game at Springfield in a private special car; that the manager had promised to let him have one, and that it would be much more jolly to go with a few friends like that and have a luncheon comfortably served by a caterer than to be lumped in the common cars with Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry, who were liable to be noisy students, or still more noisy prize-fighters, and starve; that there were several people crazy to go whom it would be very pleasant to have, notably Mrs. Guy Sloane and Mrs. Walter Warner (nee Polly Flinders), and that the expense would be comparatively trifling.

"I think it would be particularly nice, Fred, on Josie's account,"

added my wife. "I should ask two or three of her girls, and some boys to match. She is inclined to be shy, and this would be just the occasion to help her to feel at her ease with young men. Then I thought you would like to have a chat with Polly Warner; you so rarely see her now, and you and she used to get on so well together; and you know Mrs. Guy Sloane always stimulates you. I think you would have a very good time; and, as Sam says, it's a Dutch treat, so the expense would fall on everybody alike."

Seeing that Josephine's heart was set on going in just that way, I did not attempt to interpose objections. I took the liberty, however, of remarking that, though we as the parents of one of the players had a reason for going, I could not understand why a cultivated woman like Mrs. Guy Sloane was willing, crazy indeed according to what they had said, to take so much trouble to see a pack of college youths knock each other about. In answer to this, Sam declared that every man, woman, and child in the city who could possibly get away was going to Springfield; that trains were to be run every fifteen minutes, and that no less than twenty special private cars in addition to ours had been chartered for the occasion. Again I hung my diminished head before this broadside of superior information. Sam was perfectly right. I have rarely seen such a crowd in a small compa.s.s as was collected at the railway station before we started. How we ever reached Sam, who made himself visible to me at last across an ocean of heads by lifting himself on the shoulders of obliging friends, and found our special car seems mysterious to me as I look back upon it. It really appeared as though every man, woman, and child in the city _were_ going, from the highest officials of the State and our leading citizens in various fields to the veriest street Arab who had managed to beg, borrow, or earn the requisite fare. Everybody, or nearly everybody, carried a flag, and Josephine seemed to think that I, as a Harvard man and the father of the half-back of the team, was lacking in enthusiasm because I had not got possession of one.

"It will be time enough for enthusiasm when we win the match," I remarked, sententiously, though what with the general crowd and the files of students bubbling over with Rah-rah-rahs as they tore along the platform to find seats in the several trains, I was beginning to feel very tremulous about the gills, so to speak.

I doubt if Josephine heard my answer. Her attention had suddenly been absorbed by the sight of Mrs. Willoughby Walton, on the way to her special car, in all her glory, which consisted of a new seal-brown costume with tiger-skin tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and a retinue comprising Gillespie Gore, Dr. Henry Meredith, the specialist on nervous diseases (who, like everybody else, had evidently taken a day off), and half a dozen youths who looked young enough to be freshmen. She was frantically waving a crimson flag, which she shook at the windows of our car as she pa.s.sed with the spirit of a belle of nineteen.

"That woman is simply wonderful," murmured my darling. "She is fifty-five if she is a day, but she will not give up."

"Rah! rah! rah! Harvard!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed hysterically. I felt that I was getting rattled, as my famous son calls it.

"Look here, Cousin Fred," said Sam Bangs at my shoulder. "Seen the morning paper? Here he is cabinet size and a full family history annexed. It's something which his great-grandchildren will be proud of. Where the d.i.c.kens, by the way, is Mrs. Sloane? I've been looking for her everywhere in the station. She's coming, because she telephoned me last night to inquire if I could squeeze one more into our car. We'll be off in another five minutes."

"What _do_ you mean, Sam? What is it?" asked Josephine, as she seized and held to the light the newspaper which he was extending.

I looked over her shoulder and broke into a cold perspiration at beholding an execrable three-quarters length cut of my darling son superscribed by his name in holograph.

"It's an indecent outrage," I hissed.

"It isn't like him in the least. No one would ever know who it was.

It makes him look like a prize-fighter," cried Josephine.

"They've no right to print his picture at all; it'll do the boy a serious injury by leading him to believe there is nothing else in the world worth thinking about but foot-ball," I a.s.serted. "What right have they to do it?"

"Pooh, Cousin Fred," said Sam. "It's nothing but ordinary newspaper enterprise. They print everybody's portrait nowadays, from the common murderer up. Your ox is gored this time, that's all. Cheer up, old man--Rah! rah! rah! Harvard!"

"I never supposed they would make him look like that, or I wouldn't have let Fred have the photograph to give them," said Josephine, forlornly.

"Do you mean that you gave it to them?" I asked, in horror.

"It was to Fred I gave it. He said that his picture was to appear with the others, and that he must have a photograph. But they have made him much the worst looking of them all. It's a libel on the dear boy."

I was saved from intemperate language by the sudden advent of Mrs. Guy Sloane, in whose custody appeared the Rev. Bradley Mason, our spiritual adviser. They were both breathless with haste, occasioned, as we shortly learned, by the necessity imposed on our beloved pastor of marrying a couple before he could escape from his fold.

"If I had ever dreamed that you would come, Mr. Mason, I should have sent you an invitation myself," said Josephine, whose delight, as I perceived, was tinged with jealousy.

"I planned it as a delirious surprise," interjected Mrs. Sloane. "I knew you would be only too glad to have him if there was room. I dare say you thought I was a little mysterious over the telephone last night, Mr. Bangs," she added with a blithe twist of her neck in Sam's direction.

"I am a thorough believer in the efficacy of manly sports on character," I heard Mr. Mason remark to my wife. "They cannot be too much encouraged by us all."

"It is very kind of you to say so," said Josephine, with a radiance which told me plainly that her qualms concerning the whole proceeding as an educational factor were at least temporarily dispelled. "I shall tell little Fred that you were with us. It will gratify him very much to know that you saw the game."

"It must be a proud day for you as a father and a college man," he continued, with a kindly smile in my direction.

"Really, sir, I am not altogether certain yet," I answered, a trifle doggedly. "My judgment is in a state of suspension."

He obviously mistook my philosophic utterance for fears concerning the outcome of the game, inasmuch as he presently sought to soothe me by a speech to the effect that a game well lost was a victory in ethics, which prompted me to remark, under my breath:

"Provided it doesn't cost a leg or a rib or two."

"Cost nothing," cried the irrepressible Sam, whose ear caught what I had meant for an aside. "He'll come out of it all right, Cousin Fred.

We're bound to win too. Rah! rah! rah! Harv-a-rd!" Thereupon the engine gave a puff and a couple of snorts, and we were off.

V

We were early on the ground. That is to say, only a few hundred people were in their places when we arrived. The seating accommodations were for thousands. Have you ever seen an intercollegiate foot-ball field?

If not, picture to yourself a long, level, rectangular arena about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide marked out with white lines at certain regular intervals. At either end stands a crossbar supported by two posts. These are the respective goals. All along the field on either side runs a tall tier of seats similar to those at a hippodrome, and there are tiers of seats also opposite the ends; but the best seats are likely to be those on either side in proximity to the middle of the field.

Sam Bangs led the way with the confident tread of a drum-major down the Harvard side--for the custom is to apportion the seats on one of the long sides of the field among the friends of one college, and those on the other correspondingly--until he reached a desirable location. Then we established ourselves according to his directions and waited. It was rather a long wait--nearly two hours--during which I had ample leisure to philosophize to the top of my bent. We had to console us Sam's a.s.surance that it was necessary to take time by the forelock to this radical extent in order to secure satisfactory places. For the next two hours a steady stream of people poured along the two sides of the field until they became great walls of crimson and blue humanity.

Flags waved, badges fluttered, the human voice worked itself hoa.r.s.e in every form of encouraging outcry from the full-chested song to the indiscriminate cat-call. In front of each section of seats stood a separate youth, who at very short intervals, and at the slightest provocation, invoked cheers upon cheers for everything and everybody, from the captain of the team to the college coster-monger. An hour before the game began the benches were crowded, and I seemed to have recognized in the pa.s.sing throng every person of consideration among my acquaintance. Mrs. Willoughby Walton and her party were among the last to arrive. I was curious to see where they would bestow themselves, seeing that we were all packed tight as herrings, and there was only here and there an occasional chance for another mortal to squeeze in, and that generally at the cost of clambering over the heads of two or three hundred people. As Josephine said to me later, I might have known that Mrs. Walton would not put herself in any such plight. I was just wondering what on earth her elegant procession, which had halted in front of the section next to ours, was going to do, when of a sudden the occupants of the two best rows of seats trooped out in orderly file and relinquished their places to the fashionable party. Sam, after a moment's dazed silence, which must have been gall to him, for he does not like to be imposed upon in such matters, furnished us with the solution of this act of legerdemain.

They were mill hands subsidized to come early and hold the seats until Mrs. Willoughby arrived.

Another hour of antic.i.p.ation, and then at last a roar; a roar which runs like a fire down our side of the field, waking tired lungs to new enthusiasm and calling into action every crimson flag and rag. Only the wearers of the blue are quiet; their benches remain coldly silent.

The Harvard eleven have arrived on a tally-ho, and in a few minutes more are disporting themselves like a band of prairie dogs over the campus. The uproar is deafening, but they seem to pay no attention to it. They strip off their crimson jerseys and concentrate their energies on bunting and punting a leather foot-ball about the field.

They wear earth-colored canvas jackets and earth-colored knickerbockers ending in crimson stockings, and I say to myself that they are the most unpleasant-looking band of ruffians I have ever beheld. Nor are my fond paternal eyes able to make a reservation in little Fred's favor on this point. I have considerable difficulty, indeed, in distinguishing him from his mates, though Josephine declares that she singled him out the moment he appeared on the scene. He suggests to me a compromise between a convict and a hod-carrier. Nevertheless, my eyes begin to water as I follow his every movement, and my pulses throb eagerly. At the same time I am impelled to link my arm affectionately in my son David's, next to whom I am sitting. I cannot help wondering what he, dear boy, is thinking of it all. He is perfectly healthy, but he is slight, and will never be an athlete. His tastes do not run in that direction. He graduated at school last summer next to the head of his cla.s.s, and it was no cla.s.s of two, but of twenty times that number. We were very proud of it, Josephine and I. We went to the exhibition and saw him receive a number of prizes. It was a pleasant occasion, but how trifling and insignificant were the plaudits he received compared with the uproarious ovation accorded a successful half-back. I feel almost indignant, even in the midst of my excitement over little Fred, and would fain throw my arms round his brother's neck and whisper that he must not take the matter to heart, and that the whole business is terribly unjust.