There have been in half a century many and significant changes in
Washington Square. Of the buildings that defied time fifty years ago,
not many remain. On the East especially, where Waverley Place--once
more picturesquely called Rag Carpet Lane--links the Square to
Broadway, the traditional brick structures have all been replaced by
modern loft-buildings, almost as sober but far less austere. Elsewhere
around the Square the old-time residences only here and there survive,
encroached upon more and more by the inroads of modernity. Only along
Washington Square North, east and west of Fifth Avenue, has there been
consistent and effective resistance to the tidal march of progress; and
it was east of the Avenue and in the immediate shadow of the New that
Miss Mary Wardrop had lived for more than three generations.
Now there remained only three of what must not long ago have been a
considerable community--those that dwelt on Washington Square at the
time when Central Park was being made or when Lincoln called for a
quarter of a million volunteers and in prompt and patriotic answer the
Northern regiments passed through cheering crowds down Broadway.
Miss Wardrop herself, being by far the most dominant of the three,
shall be mentioned first. The second was her ancient butler, whose
surname--and apparently his only name--was Jenks, which was always
pronounced with ever so slight a tendency toward him of the Horse
Marines. And the third, who, like Miss Wardrop, still retained
possession of the family mansion, was Mr. Augustus Lispenard, bachelor,
aged--in the morning--nearly eighty, although later in the day, when
the ichor in his veins began to course more briskly, his appearance was
that of an uncommonly well-preserved man of sixty or thereabouts. His
residence adjoined that of Miss Wardrop, but there had never been any
intimacy between the two households. For this there were a number of
reasons, but the paramount one was the fact that Mr. Lispenard was
descended from one of the oldest houses among the Knickerbockers, and
as such it was extremely difficult for him to become aware of any one
not sprung with equal selectness. The Wardrops had arrived on the
Square at the comparatively recent period of Miss Mary's babyhood--and
even now Miss Mary was only sixty or so.
Miss Helen Maitland remembered very well the occasion of her first
meeting with the distinguished personage who lived next door. It had
occurred on the first visit she had made her aunt, when she was but a
small girl, yet Helen had found few things in after years to etch
themselves more sharply upon her recollection. It had been in the
holiday season, and, Helen's mother having been sent South by the
inclemencies of the Boston weather, the child had been left with Miss
Wardrop over the Christmas time. On New Year's Day, wide-eyed, she had
beheld the elaborate, old-world, decorous preparations made by Jenks
under the eye of his mistress, and with delight she had learned that,
while she could not--nor indeed did she wish to--attend the New Year's
reception herself, she was to be allowed a seat of vantage above stairs
where part, and the most interesting part, of the reception hall lay
open to her view.
Miss Wardrop rigidly preserved the old custom as to New Year's
calls--preserved even the old blue punch-bowl, which Jenks filled with
a decoction of haunting and peculiar excellence; and the dress wherein
the hostess received had done duty on more New Years' Days than its
owner liked always to recall.
Peering down through the mahogany railings that fenced her eyrie from
the world, the youthful Miss Maitland had watched, starry-eyed, a
function which in essentials had not altered in very many years. Its
hostess had grown more gray, but no less alert, had changed in years
more than in age. And it was with a courtly bow, which also had not
varied in angle or courtliness, that little Miss Maitland saw Mr.
Augustus Lispenard bend low over Miss Wardrop's hand.
A small, slight man was Mr. Lispenard, very erect, very straight of
eyebrow, keen of glance, precise of speech. His extraordinary black
eyes peered out from beneath his level brows in a disquietingly
observant manner. One felt immediately that one's hands and feet were
peculiarly large and awkward, or one's last remark hopelessly banal, or
one's birthplace in some cheap and innominate region outside of
Manhattan. So long as Miss Wardrop remained under forty, Mr. Lispenard
had held aloof. Perhaps he feared that by calling on a maiden lady
under forty he might arouse hopes which, however chaste, could not, in
the nature of things, be fulfilled, he being what he was, a
Knickerbocker. But after this danger mark was past, and perhaps
stimulated by the removal of almost the last of the other patriarchal
residents of the Square, he called one New Year's afternoon, and
gravely presented the compliments of the season to the woman to whom he
now spoke for the first time in his life.
There was nothing vindictive about Miss Wardrop. She appreciated his
viewpoint, and bade him welcome as naturally as though they had been
friends for years. And thereafter Mr. Lispenard was an irregular but
always gladly received caller in the parlor separated from his own by
little more than twelve inches of brick and mortar.
In the days when Miss Mary was growing up to childhood, Mr. Lispenard
had been one of those who had marched down Broadway in 1861, not to
return for four long years. South of the Potomac he had acquired many
vivid and remarkable experiences of which no one had ever heard him
speak, and also a pension, incredibly small, which he received in
silent dignity each month and equally without comment turned over to a
rascally body servant who had run away from more battles than one would
have conceived to be possible. This sturdy retainer, having served a
short time in Mr. Lispenard's troop and performed him some trifling
services, had ten years after the war turned up with a calm and most
surprising assumption of his old commander's responsibility for his
entire existence, and since that time had lived on his ex-lieutenant's
bounty.
One of the chief attractions, in Helen's eyes, of her aunt's old house
in Washington Square was the chance of a call or two from Mr.
Lispenard. After her third or fourth visit he grew friendly with her,
in fact vastly more friendly than he ever became with her aunt. And
she, for her part, found this elderly aristocrat all the more
fascinating for finding him in New York, through the rushing
progressiveness of which he seemed to move in a kind of stately,
romantic twilight.
"My dear child," were her aunt's first words after Helen's latest
arrival, "you have missed by a single day a call from our next-door
neighbor."
"Well, if he doesn't come again," replied the girl, with a smile, "I'll
scandalize the dear old man nearly to death by going and calling on him
myself."
And this, a few days later, she actually did, to the carefully
concealed elation of Mr. Lispenard's elderly housekeeper, who, after
ushering Miss Maitland into the high-ceiled parlor, betook herself to
the region below stairs, where she definitely expressed herself to the
cook.
"Sure it's a divil the masther is wid the ladies till this very
day--and him only about four minutes inside of eighty!"
"A lady calling, is it?" inquired the cook, with interest.
"Sure--a young wan. It's the ould bhoys have the way wid them, after
all's said and done."
Meanwhile in the old-fashioned reception room with its tinkly crystal
chandelier aquiver, as it were, in sympathetic excitement, the old
gentleman was greeting his young guest.
"Old age!" he said, with a smile of half-mock ruefulness. "Old age!
When ladies come to call on us, we understand, we old beaux, that it is
because we are no longer considered dangerous. Yet the bitterness of
that knowledge, were it twice as bitter as it is, would be more than
offset by my honor and pleasure in receiving you."
Helen beamed on him for reply, and his swift, penetrating eyes observed
her.
"You have grown up to be beautiful, my child," observed old Mr.
Lispenard. "There is nothing about you of this new generation, which I
hate. Indeed, if you would wear crinolines and a curl of that dark
hair on your shoulder, you would be quite perfect."
His young caller blushed a little, but she laughingly retorted:--
"Did you say you had ceased to be dangerous? No one of my generation
could have said that. You will turn my head, sir--and isn't that being
dangerous? For the heads of my generation, the new generation, as you
call it, are not easy to turn."
"No. True enough," said Mr. Lispenard, nodding with cynical approval.
"Their heads are on so tight there is no turning them; no flexibility
about the young people to-day. The maids are sad enough, but the young
men are worse. Gallants is what we used to call young men, but they
make none to-day that could answer to that term. Gallants! There is
no more courtesy in the land than among the fishes below sea!"
Helen felt inclined to defend her contemporaries, but as she looked at
the old aristocrat before her and contrasted his manner with that of
some of the men in her own set, she did not know quite what to say.
Pelgram's poses seemed cheap and shallow, and Charlie Wilkinson's
free-and-easy carriage might have its virtues, but it certainly was not
marked by dignity, nor did it make particularly for respect.
"They have no reverence for age, none for the great things, the great
days that some of us remember. I confess that I do not like them. I
am quite an old man, and for some years past I have met scarcely a
young man whom my mother would have permitted in her drawing room."
"I know what you mean," Helen said thoughtfully; "and in one way, at
least, I'm afraid you're right. But don't you think that most of the
difference is on the surface, and the young people of to-day are not
really so irreverent as they appear to be? The fashion now is toward
plain, blunt unaffectedness; reverence is a polish of manners which
implies insincerity, and the young men who are really reverent are most
of them ashamed of it and work all the harder to conceal it."
"They are not obliged to overexert themselves," replied Mr. Lispenard.
"But perhaps you are right, my dear. I admit that I am out of sympathy
with the younger generation. They might possess a thousand virtues,
and I could see none of them."
"I'm of the younger generation," said his visitor, with humorous
apologeticalness. "I hope you won't be too hard on it."
"One of its few virtues--that it numbers you among its members," her
host gallantly rejoined. "But they are not all like you--or there
would be fewer bachelors in your town of Boston."
Helen laughed outright.
"No bachelor yet have I unmade," she replied, somewhat enigmatically.
"Indeed?" said Mr. Lispenard. "I may not think very highly of the
young men of to-day, but my opinion of them is not so low as that.
Come, now--I am an old gentleman and the model of reticence--I will
never tell. I'll wager you a box of roses against anything you like
that you had a proposal no later than last week. Perhaps you even came
to New York to escape him."
Considering that Pelgram's studio tea was barely a week in the past,
Helen's face betrayed her confusion.
"_Touché_!" said her host, with a laugh. "Really, I may have to revise
in part my idea of modern young men. After all, they're not blind."
Helen found that time passed quickly during her first few days in New
York. Miss Wardrop was a self-sufficient personage, with a decided
opinion upon everything in heaven and on earth, and a preference no
less decided for that opinion over those held by others. She had,
however, a great fondness for her niece, whom she honored, as she
expressed it, by making not one iota of change in her menage or habits
on account of the presence of her visitor.
"It would be a poor arrangement for both of us if I were to put myself
out for you," she had once explained to the girl. "I would be certain
to regret having done so; and if I did, so would you. So I will pay
you the compliment of going on precisely as though you weren't here."
So she continued to breakfast in bed at the conservative hour of ten
o'clock; continued to superintend the rehabilitation of two rooms on
the second floor which Jenks, to his rheumatic distress, was
redecorating in accordance with the latest whim of his mistress;
continued in all things to order her life exactly as she had ordered it
for twenty years.
It was now the very end of September, and autumn was more than ever in
the air. There was none of the chill ocean breath which in Boston had
already begun to make itself unpleasantly evident, and Helen found the
keenest enjoyment in walking about the city, which heretofore she had
seen principally from the windows of street cars and taxicabs.
It was about three o'clock of a Saturday afternoon at the close of her
second week in New York that she started northward up Fifth Avenue,
casting, as she turned, one backward look at the beauty of the
Washington Arch, white in the sunshine. She herself, after the first
few blocks, took the west side of the avenue, for the afternoon sun was
unexpectedly warm. When she came to Fourteenth Street, she paused to
allow the passage of a number of street cars and other vehicles which
were figuratively champing their bits till the Jove-like person in blue
set them free to move. And as she stood there, she became aware of a
voice behind her, which said:--
"You have chosen a beautiful day for a walk, Miss Maitland," and
turning, she faced Mr. Richard Smith of the Guardian.
"Why, how do you do!" the girl said, holding out her hand with frank
cordiality. "I'm very glad to see you. Would it flatter you if I said
I was thinking of you this morning?"
"It would," said Smith, soberly. "It does not do to flatter me. I
don't get over it easily. I don't go so far as to forbid it, you
understand, to those who know me, but I recognize it as being as
seductive and alluring and dangerous as any delightful but deadly drug,
and I usually flee from it accordingly."
"Well, there's really no reason why you should flee from it now--unless
it is a pecuniary reason," said Miss Maitland, smiling. "But in case
you should start to escape, perhaps I had better modify my statement
and say that I was actually thinking of that old harness maker and
wondering when you were coming to tell me about ways and means of
keeping him in business."
"I had hoped to do so before this," the other replied. "I wrote the
Guardian agent at Robbinsville on the same day you visited the office,
but I've had nothing to report until to-day."
"And have you now? What is it?"
"This morning I received a letter from our agent. He said that the
creditors had held a protracted meeting, and there was one irritating
old party who kept suggesting that the poorhouse was the inevitable
solution; but finally arrangements were made by which our old friend
can keep his shop as long as he lives. They trusteed the business, I
believe."
Helen was silent, and for a little space the two walked forward without
a word. At last the girl lifted her eyes to Smith's a little wistfully.
"I'm glad he can keep his shop," she said; "and yet in one way I'm
rather sorry that the creditors agreed. I would have liked to have
helped the old man, myself, and I think it would have been rather good
fun to have financed a harness business."
"Yes; it would," Smith rejoined, with a laugh. "But I confess I'm a
little relieved. I'm afraid that for me it would have meant attaching
another mortgage to the old homestead, which already looks like a
popular bill board, it is so plastered with prior liens."
The girl did not know exactly what answer to make to this, so she made
none. Smith presently went on.
"But I'm sure he would like to know that you would have assisted him if
it had been necessary. If I am ever anywhere near Robbinsville, I
shall make a point to see him and tell him."
"Why, I had nothing to do with it!" said the girl. "It was entirely
your plan--I merely said I'd go halves with you."
"Yes. But I would really have never done anything by myself," Smith
replied frankly. "And for a very good reason. But in any event the
old man would be much more interested in thinking it was you."
"If I am ever in Robbinsville, I shall see that he knows the real
facts," said Miss Maitland, with a slight flush in her cheeks.
"Here is Twenty-third Street," the underwriter said abruptly. "Where
are you bound for, if I may ask?"
"Nowhere in particular," the girl answered. She stopped. "Isn't that
a wonderful sight, now, in the sunlight?" She indicated the white
tower of the Metropolitan Life building, pointing far up into the clear
blue of the eastern sky, across Madison Square.
"Wonderful indeed," agreed Smith, so thoughtfully that his companion
glanced at him. "By the way, you didn't happen to be here half a
century ago, did you?" he asked whimsically.
"No," said Miss Maitland. "If I had been anywhere, it would have been
around Back Bay, I presume."
"Then you miss part of this. Unless you had been here then, you can't
appreciate how marvelous all this is now," he went on. "Of course I
wasn't here either; but I am a New Yorker, and I know how it used to
look."
"Do you?" she asked with interest. "And how did it look then?"
"Well, suppose we go back another ten years and make it sixty in all.
There was no tower there and no Flatiron building here beside us. And
there was no open square before us. Oh, it was open, but not a
square--more of a prairie. Broadway came up and intersected Fifth
Avenue just as it does to-day. But on this Flatiron corner there stood
just one thing. And what do you suppose that was?"
"I couldn't imagine."
"One solitary, lonesome lamp post. And over there, on the site of that
monstrous building, was the little frame structure that gave the Square
its name--the Madison cottage. And that was the only building to be
seen."
"The only one! But when was this?"
"In the fifties--in fact, up to eighteen fifty-eight, when they began
to put up the Fifth Avenue Hotel on the same ground. Next year that
was finished, and in eighteen sixty came the Prince of Wales and
honored it by leading the grand march in its great dining hall."
They had crossed Twenty-third Street by this time, and were standing on
the memorable corner. An electric bus whirred by on the east side of
Broadway, and Smith drew Helen's notice to it.
"On a post that stood near here," he said, "there used to be a sign
that read, 'Buses every four minutes.' And if you wanted to go down
town, there was exactly one other way besides taking a bus, and that
was to walk."
"And that was quite enough," declared Miss Maitland.
"Well, it served, anyway," Smith conceded.
They walked on up the Avenue. Finally the girl broke a long pause.
"I was thinking," she said slowly, "that I would like to have you meet
Mr. Augustus Lispenard."
"And who is he, may I ask?"
"Well, he is an old gentleman who lives on Washington Square, and you
will probably never see one another, but he seems to love New York more
than anything in the world--and you seem to, also."
"Well . . . it's my town," confessed her companion. "That is, it's not
my native town, for I was born out in Iowa, but I've lived here nearly
all my life. And it's a good town. Even a Bostonian will have to
admit that," he added laughingly.
"Yes--I admit it," said the Bostonian. And it struck her that her
admission came more readily than it ever before could have come. "By
the way," she returned, more conventionally, "I'm afraid I must be
taking you out of your way. What would you have done if you hadn't
been kind enough to act as my guide this afternoon?" she inquired
carelessly.
Smith looked across at her.
"To tell the truth, I was thinking of going to the ball game up at the
Polo Grounds," he said promptly; "but I didn't leave the office soon
enough. I'm very much interested in this present series."
"You're interested in lots of things, I should say," his companion
commented. "Fire insurance and New York I have found out already. And
here is something else. Are you really interested in baseball?"
"I certainly am," said Smith; "and I think every one else ought to be,
if he or she has any interest in this country of ours."
Helen glanced at him in surprise.
"What possible connection can those two things have?" she asked.
"Oh, it's not a thing you can understand unless you've seen it. From
the way you speak, I presume you've never seen a game of professional
baseball."
"No," Miss Maitland replied with docility, "I'm afraid I never have.
I've been to a few college games--Harvard mostly--but I've never seen a
professional game. Is it very different?"
"Absolutely. You ought to go to one. You can't really understand the
United States of America until you do."
"Are you serious? I'm afraid you're just joking with me."
"Not at all. Why, do you know that baseball is the most American thing
in America? And it's about the only wholly American thing, as we like
to think of America. There is only one other place besides the ball
ground where the spirit of genuine democracy shows itself, and that is
in politics. There you will find the high and low together--the judge
putting off his ermine and getting down from the bench elbow to elbow
with Tom Radigan, the East Side barkeep, when the Patrick J. O'Dowd
Association of the Eighty-eighth Assembly District gives its annual
outing or its ball. But that's not true democracy because it's very
largely selfish--inspired by the desire of votes. Now baseball--that's
different. Inspired by no desire but to see a good game--and for the
home team to win. Nowhere else in the world can you see democracy in
its fine flower--at its best. There you can see them all--judges and
dock rats, brokers and bricklayers, cotillion leaders and truck
drivers, historians and elevator starters, lawyers and the men they
keep out of jail, college boys, grocers, retired capitalists, and the
lady friends of the whole collection. You'll find them all there. Oh,
you ought to go to a game yourself. Then you'd understand."
It seemed to Miss Maitland that this Smith was a very unusual person.
And his enthusiasms were strangely contagious. Fire insurance, New
York, and now baseball, things in none of which had she ever felt more
than a flicker of interest, suddenly, seen through his eyes, assumed a
reality, a vital quality she had never dreamed they could possess. Was
it all the difference in point of view?
"It isn't because baseball in my opinion does more real good than all
the socialistic documents put out by high-browed agitators will ever
do," Smith was continuing, "that I go to it. Not at all. I go to it
because I like it, and because I like to yell."
"Do you yell?" asked Miss Maitland of Boston.
"You do--that is, I do," said Smith, tersely. "At all events, when
things go our way."
"And don't you think I would be likely to--yell?"
"Well, hardly, at first," the underwriter answered. "After a while,
probably. If you'd like to go and see, though, whether you'd yell or
not, I should like awfully to take you."
Thinking the matter over afterward, Helen was at a loss to discover why
she had so readily accepted this somewhat unusual invitation. To see
this young man at an office on a matter of business was all very well;
it was one thing to meet him casually on the street and walk with him a
few blocks up the Avenue--but it was decidedly another to promise she
would accompany him to a professional baseball game. Baseball, of all
things! Yet she had accepted, and on the whole she could not seem to
be quite sorry that she had. But it would never do to tell Aunt Mary.
Yet Miss Wardrop must of course be told. Helen was twenty-five years
of age and her own mistress, but Boston in the blood dies hard.
It was moribund, however, on the afternoon that Smith called to escort
her northward to the field where those idols of Gotham, the Giants,
were indulging in a death grapple with their rivals from Chicago in the
closing series of the year, with the National League pennant hanging on
its result. Her companion had, to be sure, called formally and in due
order upon Miss Wardrop and her niece on an evening of the intervening
period, so that Helen felt her sharp New England sense of the
proprieties lulled to a state of pleasing and comfortable coma.
The elevated train which took them to the grounds was jammed to the
very doors with cheerfully suffering humanity, and Miss Maitland, most
of whose previous experience with crowds had been with those decorous
gatherings in the subway beneath the Common, regarded the struggling
multitude with covert dismay.
"If you should find the elbows of the populace unduly insinuated into
you, don't worry," her companion advised. "It will merely be part of
your general education. Getting back to the soil is nowhere beside the
democratic experience you are about to enjoy," he added.
"I--I didn't expect to be quite as democratic as that," the girl said.
"Well, I'll try to see that the more intimate personal demonstrations
are spared you," her escort reassured her.
Presently they left the train, and passing down the platform they
joined the crowd that was now forcing its slow course along the
inclosed runway which led to the Polo Grounds. There was considerable
jostling, much talking and laughter, deep trampling and shuffling of
many feet. At last Smith reached the window before which for some five
minutes he stood in line.
"Of course I could have gotten box seats," he explained as he purchased
two score cards; "but I wanted you to get this thing in its entirety."
"You are the doctor," replied Miss Maitland, cheerfully; at which form
of acquiescence her companion regarded her in such surprise that she
burst into a laugh.
"I heard that just now," she confessed; "and it seemed to fit the case.
You know you are really prescribing this game as a cure for acute
Bostonitis."
"Right!" said he, laughing, "I fancy I was. But I didn't mean to be
unpleasantly Aesculapian."
"You weren't," she said. "And do you know, I think you were correct.
Even if you didn't consciously prescribe this as a remedy, I myself
admit--or I almost admit--that I was feeling the need of a tonic a
little different from any I had ever tried at home. And I believe this
is it."
Surely it was. They reached their seats, which they found back of
first base, and sat down between neighbors of uncommon parts. Next to
Helen was a large red man of Hibernian extraction, with a long upper
lip tamed but little by civilization or by razor; on his head he wore a
dilapidated cloth cap; he was, to appearances, driver for an ice
company or a brewery.
At Smith's elbow was a small, black-haired Jew with a pock-marked face.
In front of them were four people who could have been the shipping
clerk for a hardware house, his fiancée, who presided conceivably over
a switchboard in some uptown hotel, a gentleman who looked like a
college professor and who was probably night clerk in a drug store, and
lastly a chunky and well-fed person who, from his turning at once to
the cotton reports, could probably be put down as holding some
responsible position in a Wall Street house. The farther the eye
strayed, the more motley became the array, the more difficult any
generalization.
"It's really useless," said Smith, guessing the girl's thought. "If
any one's missing, it's because he's home sick in bed. Now, tell me
how much you need to be told."
Nearly everything, it seemed; so for the next ten minutes her companion
held forth in a compendious but concise exordium on the great American
game. During this interim the huge concrete stands filled entirely,
and the populace began to spill over onto the field.
"That means ground rules--hit into the crowd good for only two bases,"
said several critics, for the general information of an ambient air
fully as well informed as the speakers.
Down on the field the interesting machinery was in process of
oiling--the batting and fielding practice of either side in turn, the
pitchers lazily warming up, the motley crew on the side lines in their
amusing and alert play of high-low. Helen, fascinated by the players'
movements, the accurate interception of stinging grounders, the
graceful parabolas of long flies to the deep outfield, as well as by
the spectacle of the orderly base and coaching lines laid out on the
smooth, close-clipped greensward, watched as though in a new medium of
sight. This was little like anything she had ever seen.
A yell from ten thousand throats announced that the Giants'--and the
crowd's--favorite was to pitch. Another yell, though less in volume,
indicated that the opposing pitcher also was named and approved, not
from any delight in the selection, but merely that the choice was made.
The umpires in their sober blue uniforms took their places; the home
team went into the field; the pitcher picked up the new white ball and
settled his foot firmly on the slab--and the game was on.
It can serve no useful purpose now, when that game is done and its
year's pennant determined, to play over the two hours' traffic of it.
Suffice it to say that the tide of battle rose and fell sufficiently to
keep forty thousand delirious spectators on their feet at least one
quarter of the time. Nothing of Oriental calm about the crowd that
day; nothing of passive acceptance of whatever the Fates might have in
store. Every soul within that enclosure was a rabid partisan, bound up
in the fortune of the fray; and if the concentrated desire of forty
thousand minds could avail aught, the home team should certainly have
felt the psychic urge.
But apparently they did not, or perhaps the opposing cohorts felt a
far-off urge more potent still, for the game wore on to the seventh
inning with the home team still one run behind.
"Seventh inning; everybody up!" twenty thousand informed the other
twenty thousand. And everybody rose, the forty thousand almost as one
man.
"Now then, you Tim!" shrieked a voice behind Helen's ear. And Tim
responded with a two-base hit to the left field crowd. Another sharp
crack of the ball against the bat, and men running at lightning speed,
one to first base, one desperately rounding third and toward the home
plate with the run needed to tie the score. But the Chicago team were
busy as well. As from a catapult the ball shot home to the catcher,
waiting astride the rubber.
A flash, a slide, a cloud of dust. Then the umpire, flapping a
flippant thumb skyward. Then a berserker roar of rage, a pandemonium
of fury beside which Babel was a soundless desert. And from
leather-like lungs four inches from Helen's ear, in a voice which could
have brought the glad news from Ghent to Aix without leaving the
first-named city at all, came:--
"Hey, you big wart! The bush for yours!"
But the umpire thus unflatteringly described and assigned was obdurate,
the run did not count, and the game went on. However, it was won in
that inning by the combination of two more safe hits, and the checked
paeans rang their fill. If there was a heart in all that great
amphitheater not beating to the tune of the forty thousand, it must
have been some unfortunate outlander who could only watch, reserving
his own delirium until some more fortunate era beneath more friendly
stars.
But at last, when all was over and the great crowd reluctantly
dissolved, swarming the diamond, Smith and Miss Maitland sought the
exit in silence.
"When it puts one in such intimate touch with forty thousand of your
fellow beings," said Smith, reflectively, "it seems worth while, now
and then, to be what is commonly termed a low-brow."
"Is it really worth while," asked Helen, "to be anything else?"