to college. He could guess the effect of the news. A week ago the
knowledge of Blake's illness had staggered them; the college had grown
sick at heart; the city papers published details and the hopes of
Berkeley bounded to certainty of victory, for there was only one Blake.
Without him the Stanford team was nothing exceptional, and common
estimate gave the chance to California. The Stanford management did the
only thing they could do by putting in Ashley, the scrub fullback; but
this did not help matters materially. Ashley was a man of beautiful
physique, and the most conscientious player on the field. There he
stopped. He utterly lacked the head-work that Blake put into the game.
For the star fullback had possessed the football instinct. Beyond his
quickness and dash, he had the mysterious faculty of staying with the
ball. If he were breaking the line, he placed the hole the fraction of
an instant before anyone else perceived it. They used to put him at
quarterback in defensive work, and he knew by inspiration where the play
was going, so that the line felt confident with him at their backs.
Tom Ashley had nothing of all this. He punted as well as the 'Varsity
man, generally better, at the beginning of the season; but was slow with
his kick, often fatally slow when the 'Varsity broke through the scrub
line. He was late in starting, too, though a strong runner when out in
the field. The chief beauty of his game was a quick and certain
straight-arm. At another time he might have easily been the 'Varsity
fullback, for he put up a hard, steady game from one end of the season
to the other; but he had come to college with Blake, and the position
had been out of the question. Besides, there were a couple of star
halves; he was not good at end, either. So he staid on the Scrub eleven,
and worked doggedly for three years.
Diemann lay back in the car seat and aimlessly thought of his work with
the substitute the week of Fred's illness. He had done his best with
Ashley, trying to instill into him something of the other's style and
dash. He had talked with him long and carefully, showing him the subtle
points of Blake's game. During the few practices following the star's
departure he had watched the new man faithfully through every play,
giving him all his time. He was sorry for the sub. A man could be placed
in no more exacting position.
Ordinarily, such a chance would have been a god-send to a scrub player,
for the second-eleven man is the type of the Great Unthanked. Diemann
thought of the three months through which the scrub trains religiously,
sacrificing beloved pipe, or sorority dance, or week's end trip to
Mayfield, or to the Orpheum in town; leaving the "gang" singing in the
moonlit Quad, while he turns in at ten according to pledge; faring day
after day on the same service of rare beef and oatmeal water; getting
pounded and battered about over a hard field every afternoon. Ashley had
had three years of this sort of thing--and all for what? At best, to
squat in football clothes on the side-lines, Thanksgiving day, with
Blake's or Smith's sweater around his neck, waiting for the accident
that may give the game to Berkeley at the same time that it lets him
trot out on the field, while the crowd calls out to him encouragingly,
although they are sick at heart. He goes through each season borne up by
the excitement, working breast to breast with the honored 'Varsity, but
lost in their mighty shadow. When the big day comes he slips back into
the great, wild crowd that lifts the team to its shoulders; worship is
not for him, no, nor remembrance either, in that hour of homage. Such
men, to the bleachers, are but working material for the 'Varsity; the
scrub player is part of an inorganic thing--until his chance comes.
Yet, when fortune gave Ashley his chance he was not to be envied. To be
put suddenly, at the last moment almost, into the shoes of the college
hero, when the hopes of the University had been centered in that one
man, this was too much for any fellow. In his docile way the substitute
went into the trying place, working along as faithfully, and to all
appearance with as little concern, as in his old position. Secretly, the
responsibility wore upon him. It was a hopeless undertaking to be like
Blake; but everybody expected it of him. He tried his best to grasp the
patient coaching of Diemann and to put it in play at the right time, but
he never seemed quick enough; that cursed slowness of his came in to
show how futile it all was. Everything he did or could do as a football
man was made negative by the fact that he was in Blake's place. It was a
hard graft.
Diemann had known all along what the fellow was suffering, and he pitied
him. According to Ashley's room-mate, the boy talked in his sleep, all
night sometimes, chiefly about Blake and the play. If they did not look
sharp, the coach said to himself, there might be another stale man on
their hands.
Diemann had been thinking of this that very morning when he got the
doctor's telegram. The shock had driven out every thought of Ashley and
the team. All through his work with the sub it had not occurred to him
that anything fatal could come to Blake, he had been doing so well;
then, without warning, came the message saying that he was sinking. He
had got there just in time. Now it was all over and he was going back
to college, where Fred would never hear them shout for him again, never
feel an arm about him in the long walks over the hills.
When the train drew into Palo Alto, Frank Lyman, the football manager,
quiet and sober-faced, stood under the station-light.
"Can you come to dinner with me?" asked Diemann.
The two rode along under the oaks to the instructor's Palo Alto
boarding-house. When they were alone upstairs, the manager said:
"Will you tell me about it? You got up there all right?"
"Yes," said the other, slowly; "not any too soon. The boy was conscious
at the last, and knew me and talked a bit. It was all football, pretty
much. I don't think he was quite clear enough to talk about other
things."
"What did he say--that is, anything special?"
"No; he said he was more than sorry that he wasn't going to get in the
game; it was his last and he wanted to play, but, of course, it wasn't
his fault, and the college wouldn't think he had thrown them down. He'd
never been a quitter, he said."
"No, never," said the manager.
"He went on in that strain a good deal; said that he wished that he
could have stayed longer, just to play for them again. At the end he
pressed my hand and said: 'I'll come back somehow, Die, if there is
anything in it.'"
The Psychology instructor had spoken half in revery. He added quickly:
"He was pretty well gone then, poor old chap, and wandering a little,
and soon after that, why, he went over the line."
He was sorry for having let that sentence slip out. The student would
not understand it; he could not know what those last words of Blake's
had meant to him, who saw their meaning. Lyman would only think it a bit
of ghastly humor that need not have been repeated. But the manager did
not take it so, evidently.
"That reminds me of something, Diemann," he said. "I haven't talked it
over with anyone yet, because everybody is sour-balled enough as it is.
It's about Ashley. I'm afraid he is going stale."
"Yes?" said Diemann, with dull interest, "I've rather been afraid of
it."
"Of course, I knew he was up on his toes about his job, but I didn't
know just how bad it was until this afternoon. You see, you weren't
here, and after practice there were things to speak about, so I walked
over to the Hall with him. Then I thought I'd rub him myself, because
Billy is overworked, you know. He didn't answer questions for a time,
but lay quite still and looked at me, yet I don't think he saw me at
all. He began to talk away, speaking of himself, in the third person,
mind you, and about his poor play and all that. He was as clean nutty as
any man you ever saw; as near as I could make out he thought he was
Fred."
Diemann faced the manager.
"What time was this, Frank?"
"About five, I think. Shortly afterward I got your telegram. He went on
giving the straightest kind of football talk; but he was no more himself
all the time than I am he. This went on for several minutes; then he got
clear again. Pretty soon he rose and said he was faint, but guessed he
was all right. I didn't know whether to speak to the doctor or not. Now,
that sort of thing won't do; the man can't have such attacks and keep in
shape. If he goes stale, where will we be?"
"He talked like Blake, did he?"
"Yes, really he did. He had even Fred's little way of sliding over his
r's. Being troubled about having Fred's place has unstrung him. You've
noticed his absent-mindedness out on the field? I know Ashley pretty
well; he's always been sensitive as to what people think about him; he
likes to feel that he's doing what you expect of him. He was struck on
the head to-day; I don't doubt that's what made him a little off.
Still, his nervous condition must be bad."
Diemann rose and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"Yes," said he, thoughtfully, "we must watch him. Perhaps we ought to
speak to Dr. Forest; but I'll look after him a while first."
"Very well. We won't have any practice to-morrow, out of respect to
Fred; we couldn't stand it, any of us; that will give Ashley a rest,
then Friday we have the last practice before going to the Springs."
"I am going up there with you. I think I'll turn in early to-night; I'm
pretty well knocked. I'll see you in the Quad before noon to-morrow."
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 associate 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 substitute 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 balustrade 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 substitution 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 Jap who cleans house Saturdays. 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 Sophomores
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 associate coach, passing 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 lustiest 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 substitute 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
hoarse 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. Nobody 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
substitute 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 mass, 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?