The Whirligig of Time Part 15

"Cheer up, old cow; you probably won't make one anyway," suggested Trotty rea.s.suringly, and Harry laughed.

The football game with Harvard was played in New Haven that year, and Harry took Aunt Selina to it. Aunt Selina had never seen James play, and was anxious to go on that account, though she had not been to a game for many years, and even the last one she had seen was baseball.

"You must explain the fine points of the game to me, my dear," she told him as they drove grandly out to the field in her victoria. "You see, I have not been to a game since the seventies, and I daresay the rules have changed somewhat since then. I used to take a great interest in it, but I've forgotten all about it, now."

They were obliged to abandon the victoria at some distance from the stands, rather to Aunt Selina's consternation, for she had secretly supposed that they would watch the play from the carriage, as of old.

She was consequently somewhat bewildered when, after fifteen or twenty minutes of such shoving and shouldering as she had never experienced, she found herself in a vast amphitheater which forty thousand people were trying to convert into pandemonium, with very fair success. As they wormed their way along the sidelines toward their seats, a deafening roar suddenly burst from the stands on the other side of the field, which caused Aunt Selina to clutch her nephew's arm in affright.

"Harry, what _is_ it?" she asked. "_What_ are they making that frightful noise about?"

"That's the Harvard cheer," replied Harry calmly. "You'll hear the Yale people answering with theirs in just a minute."

The Yale people did answer, but it would be too much to say that Aunt Selina heard. She was vaguely conscious of going up some steps and being propelled past a line of people to what Harry told her were their seats, though she could see nothing but a narrow bit of board. Nevertheless she sat down, and tried to accustom her ears and eyes to chaos; just such a chaos, she thought, as Satan fell into, only larger and noisier.

"Here we are," Harry was saying cheerfully, "just in time, too. The teams will be coming on in a minute or two. What splendid seats James has got us, bang on the forty yard line. Why, we're practically in the cheering section! Do you know the Yale cheer, Aunt Selina? You must cheer too, you know; it's expected of you.... Here comes the Yale team...."

Aunt Selina lost the rest, as chaos broke forth with redoubled vigor.

She saw a group of blue-sweatered figures run diagonally across the field, and thought the game had begun.

"Which is James?" she asked feverishly, feeling chaos work its way into her own bosom. "Do you think he'll win, Harry? Oh, I do hope he'll win!"

When the team lined up for its short preliminary practise Harry pointed James out to her in his place at right halfback.

"I see," she said, gazing intently through her field gla.s.ses, "he's one of those three little ones at the back. Does that mean that he'll be the one to kick the ball? I'd rather he kicked it than be in the middle of all that tearing about. Poor boy, how pale he looks!"

"He won't look pale long," said Harry grimly.

Aunt Selina by this time felt every drop of sporting blood in her course through her veins. "Which is the pitcher, Harry?" she inquired knowingly, and was not in the least abashed when her nephew informed her that there was no pitcher in football.

"Well, well," said she indulgently, "isn't there really? Things do change so; I can't pretend to keep up with them. I remember there used to be a pitcher in my time, and Loring Ainsworth used to be it."

Just then the teams set to in deadly earnest, and conversation died. In bewildered silence Aunt Selina watched the twenty-two players as they ran madly and inexplicably up and down the field, pursued by the fiendish yells of the spectators, and wondered if in truth, she were dead and this--well, purgatory.

She made no attempt to understand anything that was going on down on the field, or even to watch it. She turned her attention to Harry; he seemed to be the most familiar and explicable object in sight, though she wondered why he should leap to his feet from time to time shouting such nonsense as "Block it, you a.s.s!" or "Nail him, Sammy, nail him!" or "First down! Yay-y-y!" Presently she became aware of a growing intensity in the excitement. The players seemed to be moving gradually down toward one end of the field, and short periods of breathless silence in the audience punctuated the shouts. She heard cries of "Touchdown!

Touchdown!" emanate from all directions, but they meant nothing to her.

The players moved further and further away, till they were all huddled into one little corner of the field. Every time they tumbled over together in that awful human sc.r.a.p-heap she shut her eyes, and did not open them again till she was sure it was all right. Finally, after one of those painful moments, there was a relapse of chaos, fifty times more severe than any of the previous attacks. Women, as well as men, shrieked like maniacs, and threw things into the air. Trumpets bellowed and rattles rattled; somewhere in the background was a sound of a bra.s.s band, of an organized cheer. Hats and straw mats flew through the air in swarms.

"What is it?" shrieked Aunt Selina. "Who won? Who won?"

"It's a touchdown!" Harry shouted in her ear. "For Yale! It counts five!" (It did, then.) "And James did it! James has made a touchdown!"

And in a moment Aunt Selina had the unusual pleasure of hearing her own name shouted in concert by ten or fifteen thousand people at the top of their voices.

"--rah rah rah Wimbourne! Wimbourne! Wimbourne!" shouted the crowd, at the end of the long Yale cheer, and they went on shouting it, nine times; then another long cheer, and nine more Wimbournes, and so on.

It was a great moment. Is it to be wondered that Aunt Selina, who did not know a touchdown from a nose-guard, shrieked with the others and wept like a baby? Is it strange that Harry, to whom the event meant more than to any other person among the forty thousand, should have forgotten himself in the expression of his natural joy; should have forgotten where and what and who he was, everything but the one absorbing fact that James had made a touchdown? We think not, and we have reason to believe that every man jack out of the forty thousand would have agreed with us. One did, we know. She thought it was the most natural thing in the world, though it did set her coughing and disarranged her hat and veil beyond all hope of recovery without the a.s.sistance of a mirror, not to mention a comb and hairbrush. And Harry needn't apologize any more, for she wouldn't hear of it; and the way she had behaved herself, in the first excruciating moment, was a Perfect Disgrace. So they were quits on that matter, and might she introduce Mr. Carruthers? Mr. Wimbourne. Was Harry surprised that she knew who he was? Well, she would explain, and also tell him who she was herself, if she could ever get the hair out of her mouth and eyes.

For it must be explained that Harry, in his transports of exultation, had behaved in a very unseemly manner toward his next-door neighbor on the right hand. Aunt Selina, who sat on his left, had sunk, exhausted with joy and excitement, to her seat as soon as she was told that James had made a touchdown, and Harry, whose feelings were of a nature that demanded immediate physical expression, had unconsciously relieved them on the person of his other neighbor, who still remained standing; never noticing who or what she was, even that she happened to be a young and attractive woman. Harry never could remember what he had done in those hectic seconds that immediately preceded his awareness of her existence; according to her own subsequent account he had slapped her violently several times on the back, put his arm around her, shaken her by the scruff of her neck and shouted inarticulate and impossible things in her ear.

The interval of hair-recovery was tactfully designed to give Harry a moment's grace in which to recall, if possible, his neighbor's ident.i.ty; she was perfectly able to tell who she was with the hair in her mouth and eyes, proof of which was that she had been talking in that condition for the past few minutes. Harry was grateful for the intermission.

"Why of course I know you!" he exclaimed, as soon as the dying away of the last nine Wimbournes made conversation feasible. "It was stupid of me not to remember before. Do you remember; dancing school?.... It must have been ten years ago, though; and you _have_ changed!"

"Yes, I suppose I have changed--thank Heaven!" The exclamation given with a smile through a now unimpeachably neat veil, seemed in some subtle, curious way to vindicate Harry, to emphasize his innocence in failing to recognize her. "I know what I looked like then, all long black legs and stringy yellow hair--"

"Not stringy," said Harry, recognizing his cue; "silky. I remember the long black--the stockings, too. And lots of white fluffy stuff in between; lace, and all that.... And we used to dance a good deal together, because we were the two youngest there, and you were so nice about it, too, when you wanted to dance with the older boys. But how did you know me? Haven't I changed, too?"

"Oh, yes; but not so much. Boys don't. Beside, I knew your aunt by sight...."

"I'm sorry, I forgot," said Harry. "Aunt Selina, do you know Miss Elliston? And Mr. Carruthers, my aunt."

"Madge Elliston," corrected the girl, smiling, "you know my mother, I think, Miss Wimbourne."

"Indeed I do, my dear; I am delighted to meet her daughter," said Aunt Selina, who had had time to recover her customary _grande dame_ air, "I knew her when she was Margaret Seymour; we used to be great friends."

And so forth, through the brief but blessed respite that follows a touchdown. There is no need to quote the conversation in full, for it degenerated immediately into the polite and commonplace. If we could give you a picture of Madge Elliston during it, if we could do justice to the sweetness and deference of her manner toward Aunt Selina, her occasional smile, and the easy way she managed to bring both Harry and Mr. Carruthers into the conversation, that would be a different thing.

The next kick-off brought it to an end, and all parties concerned turned their attention once more to the field. Harry attempted to explain some of the rudiments of the game to Aunt Selina, who confessed that her recollections of the rules of the seventies were not of material a.s.sistance to her enjoyment. And so pa.s.sed the first half.

"Do you know, I believe I know exactly what you're thinking of?" was the next thing Harry heard from his right. It was between the halves; Miss Elliston was in an intermission of Mr. Carruthers, and Harry was listening in silence to "Fair Harvard," which was being rendered across the field.

"Do you?" he replied. "Well, I'll tell you if you're right."

"You were thinking of 'Forty Years On.'"

The smile died from Harry's face, and he paused a moment before replying, almost gruffly:

"Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. How did you guess it?"

"Oh, I know all about you, you see." She stopped, and her silence seemed to Harry to mean "I'm sorry if I've hurt you; but I wish you'd go on and talk to me, and not be absurd." So he threw off his pique and went on:

"I don't know how you know about my going to Harrow, nor how you know anything about 'Forty Years On,' and I don't care much; but I put it to you, as man to man, isn't it a song that's worth thinking about?"

"It is! There never was such a song."

"Not even 'Fair Harvard'?"

"No."

"Not even 'Bright College Years,' to which you will shortly be treated?"

"Not even that." They exchanged smiles, and Harry continued, with pleasure in his voice:

"Well, it is a relief to hear some one say that, in a place where 'For G.o.d, for country, and for Yale' is considered the greatest line in the whole range of English poetry. But of course I'm a heretic."

"You like being a heretic?" The question took him by surprise; it was out of keeping, both in substance and in the way it was asked, with Miss Elliston's behavior up to this point. He gathered his wits and replied: