Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Those Times and These

This was what Midsylvania must go up against this coming Saturday afternoon. Wherefore the apprehension of disaster was that thick you could slice it with a knife.

They played the game out at Morehead Downs, where every year the Derby was run. Neither the baseball park nor the rutty common at the back of the University campus, where the Varsity scrubs and regulars did their stint at practise, could begin to hold the number that was due to attend this game, decent weather being vouchsafed. So Morehead Downs it was, with the lines blocked out in the turf on the inner side of the white fence that bounded the track, a little way up the home stretch, so that the judges’ stand should not cut off the view of any considerable number of the spectators sitting across in the grand stand.

For the newspaper fellows they rigged up elbowroom accommodations of bench and table against the base of the judges’ kiosk. There we sat – Ike Webb and the Major and Gil Boyd, who was our sporting editor, and myself, all in a row – and there we had been sitting for nearly an hour before the time for starting. Ike Webb was to do the introduction and Gil Boyd the running account of the game, play by play. My job was to keep tab of incidents and local-colour stuff generally. But the old Major was there as a spectator merely.

He certainly saw a sight. In that town we always measured multitudes by our Derby Day figures; yet even Derby Days did not often turn out a bigger crowd than the crowd that swarmed to the Downs that bright gusty December afternoon. The governor came down from the capital and most of the statehouse force came with him. There were excursions by rail in from out in the state, all of them mighty well patronised.

As for the local attendance – well, so far as compiling a directory of the able-bodied adult white population and a fair sprinkling of the black was concerned, the enumerators could have simplified and expedited their task considerably by going up and down the aisles and jotting down the names as they went. They could have made a fairly complete census of our prominent families without straying beyond the confines of the reserved-seat section at the front, or fashionable, side of the grand stand. And if a single society girl in town was absent it was because her parents or her guardian kept her at home under lock and key.

Before two o’clock, the slanting floor beneath the high-peaked red roof of the structure made you think of a big hanging garden, what with the faces and the figures of all those thousands packed in together, row after row of them, with the finery of the women standing out from the massed background in brighter patches of colour, and the little red pennons that the venders had peddled in the audience all dancing and swaying, like the petals of wind-blown flowers. That spectacle alone, viewed from our vantage place over across the race course, was worth the price of admission to anybody.

Carrying the simile a bit farther, you might have likened two sections of space in the stand to hothouses where noise was being brought into bloom, by both artificial and natural means. One of these forcing beds of sound was where Midsylvania grouped herself – faculty and students and old graduates. The other, a smaller area, held the visitors from Sangamon, two hundred strong and more, who had come down three hundred miles by special train, to root for the challengers, bringing with them a brass band and their own glee club – or a good part of it, anyhow – and their own cheer leader.

This cheer leader, being the first of a now common species ever seen in our parts, succeeded in holding the public eye mighty closely, as he stood, bareheaded and long-haired, down below on the track, with his gaudy blue-and-gold sweater on, and his big megaphone in his hand, jerking his arms and his body back and forth as he directed his chorus above in its organised cheering and its well-drilled singing of college songs.

Compared with this output, Midsylvania’s cheering arose in larger volume, which was to be expected, seeing that Midsylvania so greatly excelled in numbers present, and had behind its delegations the favour of the onlookers almost to a unit’; but, even so, it seemed to lack the force and fervour of those vocal volleys arising from the ranks of the enemy. Each time Sangamon let off a yell it was platoon firing, steady and rapid and brisk; and literally it crackled on the air. When this had died away, and Midsylvania had answered back, the result somehow put you in mind of a boy whistling to keep up his courage while passing a cemetery after dark.

It is hard to express the difference in words, but, had you been there that day, you would have caught it in a jiffy. One group was certain of victory impending and expressed its certainty; the other was doubtful and betrayed it. In the intervals between the whooping and the singing Sangamon’s imported band would play snatches of some rousing air, or else Midsyl-vania’s band would play; between the two of them pumping up the pulsebeats of all and sundry.

I was struck by one thing – the Major maintained calm and dignity through all the preliminary excitement. In the moment of the first really big outburst, which was when the Varsity’s students and former students marched in behind their band, out of the tail of my eye I caught the Major with a pencil, checking off the names of the home squad on his copy of the official programme. Knowing the old fellow as I did, I guessed he was figuring up to see how many of the players were members of Old Families. Nearly all of them were, for that matter. He even held himself in when, at two-fifteen or thereabouts, first one of the teams and then the other trotted out from under opposite ends of the grand stand and crossed the track to the field to warm up.

He asked me to point out young Morehead to him; and when I did he nodded as if in affirmation of a previous decision of his own. On my own initiative I pointed out some of the other stars to him too.

In advance we knew Sangamon was going to have the advantage of beef on her side; but I do not think anybody realised just how great the advantage was until we saw the two teams on the same ground and had opportunity to compare and appraise them, man for man. Then we saw, with an added sinking of the spirit – at least I knew my spirit sank at the inequality of the comparison – that her front line outweighed ours by pounds upon pounds of brawn.

In another regard as well, and a more essential regard, too, she showed superiority. For these champions from the upper Corn Belt had what plainly their opponents always before during the season had likewise had, but now lacked: they had an enormous conceit of themselves, a mountainous and a monumental belief in their ability to take this game away from the rival team.

They had brought it with them – this assurance – and they had fed it stall-fat beforehand; and now, with the easy and splendid insolence of lusty, pampered youth, they exhibited it openly before all these hostile eyes upon the enemy’s soil. It showed in them individually and as a unit. Almost as visibly as though words of defiance had been stencilled upon their tight-laced jerkins fore and aft, they flaunted forth their confidence in themselves, somehow expressing it in their rippling leg muscles and in their broad backs and in their hunched shoulders as they bunched up into formidable close formation, and in everything they did and said in the few minutes of practice intervening before they should be at grips with their opponents.

They accepted the handclaps from the onlookers – a tribute of hospitality this was, extended by people to whom hospitality for the stranger was as sacred as their religion and as sincere as their politics – with an air which betokened, most evidently, that presently they meant to repay those who greeted them for the greeting, by achieving one of Sangamon’s customary victories in Sangamon’s customary workmanlike fashion. Among them Vretson, the much-advertised, loomed a greater giant above lesser giants, justifying by bulk alone his title of the Terrible Swede.

As for Midsylvania’s players, upon the other hand, it seemed to me, as I watched them, that they, in turn, watched the young Gogs and Magogs who were to grapple with them in a half-fearsome, half-furtive fashion. I marked that they flinched nervously, like débutantes, before the volleys of friendly applause from the crowd. It occurred to me that their thoughts must be studded with big black question marks; whereas we all could understand that no suggestion of doubtfulness punctuated the anticipations of the opposing eleven touching on the possibilities of the next two hours.

The feeling of foreboding spread like a cold contagion from the field to the press stand, affecting the newspaper men; and, becoming generally epidemic, it reached the spectators. That earlier lustiness was almost altogether lacking from the outbreak signalling the beginning of play. In the salvo there was nothing heartening. It appeared rather to be pitched in the tone of sympathetic consolation for a predestined and an impending catastrophe; and even the bark and roar of Midsylvania’s yell, as all Midsylvania gave it,’ seemed to have almost a hollow daunted sound to it. Where we sat we could sense this abatement of spirit with particular plainness; in fact, I rather think Major Stone was the only person there who did not sense it in its full effect and its full import.

I am not going to spend overmuch space in describing the first half of that game; this was in the days when games were divided into halves, and not quartered up into periods. Anyhow, I have forgotten a good many of the details. The principal points are what stick out in my memory. I remember that on the toss of the coin Sangamon won and kicked off. It was Vretson – no less – who drove his talented punting toe into the pigskin.

There was a sound as though some one had smote a taut bladder with a slapstick, and the ball soared upward and away, shrinking from the size of a watermelon to the size of a gourd, and from a gourd to a goose egg; and then it came whirling downward again, growing bigger as it dropped. Woolwine, our quarter, caught it and took a flying start off his shoe hobs. Fay and the other Sangamon end, whose name I have forgotten, were after him like a pair of coursing beagles after a doubling hare; and together they nailed him before he had gone twenty yards, and down he went, with Fay on top of him and What’shisname on top of Fay. When they dug the three of them out of their heap little Woolwine still had the ball under him.

As the teams lined up, boring their heads forward to a common centre, billy-goat fashion, and Morehead, who was playing end, called out the signals, “Six – eight – twenty-eight – thirty-one” – or some such combination of figures – we caught the quaver in his voice. Ike Webb, sitting next to me, gave a little groan and laid down his pencil, and put his pessimistic face in his sheltering hands.

“Listen to that tremolo note, will you?” he lamented from between his fingers. “Licked, by golly, before they start! They won’t play to win, because they’re scared to death already. They’ll play to keep from being licked by too big a score, and that means they won’t have a chance. Just you fellows watch and see if I’m not right. Ah-h! There she goes!”

We watched all right; and we saw that our boys meant to try to carry the ball through for gains. There was not a chance of that, though. They butted their heads against a stone wall until they fairly addled the football instincts in their brains. In two attempts they did not advance the ball six feet; so they tried kicking it. Young Railey punted well into Sangamon territory and now Sangamon had the ball. She lost it on a fumble, but got it back a minute or two later on a fumble slip by the other side. In their respective shortcomings as regards fumbling it was even-Stephen between the teams; but Ike Webb couldn’t view the thing in any such optimistic light. He had turned into a merciless critic of the Varsity outfit.

“Aha!” he muttered dolorously as a scrimmaging tangle of forms disentangled and showed that Sangamon, by a smart bit of strategy, had gained three yards. “What did I tell you not five minutes back? Those boys lost their hearts before they even began, and now they’re due to lose their heads too.”

It really looked as though Ike Webb was qualifying for clairvoyant honours, for promptly Midsylvania’s defence became more and more inefficient, more and more uncertain. Sangamon had a smart field commander, and he took leeway of the advantage. He set his men to the job of jamming through; and jam through they did. It took time, though, because Midsylvania, of course, offered a measure of resistance. To me, however, it appeared to be the mechanical resistance of bodies in action rather than anything guided by a spiritual determination – if you get what I mean. It took a good deal of time; but after a while, by dint of shoving ahead with all her tonnage against Midsyl-vania’s slighter and lighter displacement, the visitors forced the ball along to Midsylvania’s thirty-yard line.

At this point, Sangamon suddenly changed her tactics. Collop, her captain, made a gesture with his arms and the Blue tackles dropped back a little. From the centre of the massed wedge of shapes a signal was barked out. So swiftly that the spectacle made you think of a pyramid of pool balls scattering over a pool table when the cue ball hits it hard on the nose, the visiting players shifted positions.

For ten seconds we lost sight of the ball altogether. When we saw it again it was cuddling in Vretson’s vast, outspread paws. Who had passed it, or how it got there after being passed, I never knew. Magically it had materialised in his grasp in the same way that a prestidigitator’s china egg is produced from a countryjake’s whiskers. He tucked it into the bight of his left arm and, with his mighty right arm swinging behind him as a rudder and before him as a flail, he tore down the field, going away out to the right.

He was fast for his size – wonderfully fast, and besides, he had perfect interference to help him along. His mates, skirmishing out on his flank, threw back and bowled over the men who bored in to tackle him. In his flight he himself accounted for at least two Varsity players who sprang round the wings of his protecting line, hoping to intercept the big sprinter. One he dodged, the other he flung aside; and then he kept on and on until after a run of thirty-five yards, he flung himself through the air; and, with Cabell, of Midsylvania, clutching at the wideness between his shoulder blades, he dropped flat across Midsylvania’s goal line. A groan went up from the grand stand.

There wasn’t a sound from any quarter, though, as Vretson squared off to kick for a goal; but whoops of relief arose when the ball, after soaring high and straight, veered off under pressure of a puff of air and, instead of passing over the bar, struck one of the goal posts with a mellow smack and dropped back. So the score, by the rules of those times, stood four to naught.

Nearly everybody there, I guess, figured that Sangamon would promptly buttress her lead by at least four additional points, and very possibly more; but she didn’t. True, she played all round and all over and all through Midsylvania during the remaining portion of the first half, but she did not score again. This was due not so much to the rebuttal fight the defenders offered, for now their playing sagged more woefully weak than ever, but to small misplays and slip-ups and seeming overconfidence on the part of Sangamon.

It may have been they were cocksure of their power to score again when they chose. Maybe they were a trifle tired. Maybe they were satisfied to postpone the slaughter-house work until toward the end of the game and make a spectacular, overwhelming finish of it. Anyhow, it struck us, in the press stand, that the reason behind their failure to push their advantage still farther, during the next ten minutes or so, was rather because of their own disinclination than because of any strategy or strength Midsylvania’s plainly despondent eleven presented against them.

Along here I became aware, subconsciously at first, and then in a minute or so with a fuller sense of realisation, that Major Stone had waked up. I felt him wriggling on the bench, joggling me in the side with his elbow; and when I looked at him his face was an indignant pink and his little white goatee was bristling like a thistle pod.

He was saying something to himself, and by listening, I caught from his muttered words the purport of the change that had come into the old man’s emotions, which change, as I speedily divined, was exactly what might have been expected of him. He did not have the attitude of the average spectator over in the grand stand, for his bump of local pride was not being bruised, as theirs was, by this exhibition. Nor had he grasped and assimilated the feelings of those two groups of youngsters whose cleated feet ripped up the turf in front of him.

It did not lie within his capabilities to share their youthful and, therefore, profound conviction that all which was desirable in life, here or hereafter, centred on the results of this struggle; and that the youth who failed now to acquit himself to the greater glory of his comrades and his class and his college – and, most of all, himself – would droop an abased and shameful head through all the years to come. For, as I may have remarked before, Major Stone was not a bright person, but rather a stupid one; and his viewpoint on most subjects had not altered materially since Appomattox.

That was it – it had not altered since Appomattox; and because it had not he was viewing the present event as a struggle between North and South – as a conflict into which Civil War causes and Civil War effects directly entered. Possibly you cannot understand that. But you could if you had known Major Stone and men like him, most of whom are now dead and gone. His face turned from a hot pink to a dull brick-dust red, and he gnawed at his moustache.

“It is monstrous!” I heard him say. “It is incredible! Southern sons of Southern sires, every damned one of them! And because the odds are against them they have weakened! I myself can see that they are weakening every minute. Why, the thing’s incredible – that’s what it is! Incredible!”

Just then the whistle blew, and the teams, which had been in a mix-up, unsnarled themselves. The Sangamon eleven came off the field; some of them were briskly trotting to prove their fitness, and some were swaggering a little as their band hit up the tune of Marching Through Georgia to play them into their quarters under the stand. But the Varsity eleven passed out of sight with shoulders that drooped and with no spring in their gaits.

Back at the tail end of their line went little Morehead, wiping his damp eyes with the dirty sleeve of his jersey. Morehead was no young Saint Laurence, to expire smilingly on a gridiron. He was not of the stuff that martyrs are made of; he was a creature, part man and part boy, and the man part of him made him furious with self-reproach, but the boy in him made him cry. I take it, some of the spectators felt almost like crying too; certainly their cheering sounded so.

One of the Red tackles – Rodney – had been disabled just before the breakaway, and I ran over to Midsylvania’s quarters to find out for the paper whether he was injured to the degree of being definitely incapacitated for further participation in the game. In what, during race meets, was a refreshment establishment, under the grand stand, I obtruded upon a veritable grand lodge of sorrow.

Gadsden, the coach, who had played with the team the year before, which was his graduating year, was out in the centre of the floor making a brave pretense at being hopeful; but I do not think anybody present suffered himself to be deceived thereby. His pleas to the team to buck up and to brace up, and to go back in and fight for every point, lacked sincerity. He appeared to be haranguing them because that was the ordained thing for him to do, and not because he expected to infuse into them any part of his make-believe optimism. Lying on their backs upon blankets, with limbs relaxed, some of his hearers turned dejected faces upward. Others, sitting upright or squatted on their knees, kept their abashed heads on their breasts, staring down steadfastly at nothing at all.

Morehead was sulking by himself in a corner, winking his eyelids and wrinkling his face up to hold back the tears of his mortification. He blamed himself, I take it, for what was the fault of all. Cabell was a tousled heap, against a wall. He was flexing a bruised wrist, as though that small hurt was just now the most important thing in the world to him. Even the darky rubbers and the darky water carrier showed their sensations by their dejected faces. There was enough of downcastness in that room to supply half a dozen funerals with all the gloom they might require; the whole place exhaled the essence of a resentful depression that was as plainly to be sniffed up into the nostrils as the smells of alcohol and arnica and liniment which burdened the air and gave the accompaniment of a drug-store smell to the picture.

As I halted at the door on my way out of this melancholy spot to the scarcely less melancholy atmosphere of the open, having learned that Rodney was not really injured, somebody bumped into me, jostling me to one side; and, to my astonishment, I saw that the impetuous intruder was Major Stone. I had not known until then that he had followed me here, and I did not know now what errand could have brought him along. But he did not keep me wondering long; in fact, he did not keep me wondering at all. He burst in on them with a great “Woof!” of indignation.

Before scarcely any one there had realised that a newcomer, arriving unheralded and all unexpected, was in their midst, he stood in the middle of the littered floor, glaring about him and snorting loudly. His first words, too, were calculated not only to startle them but deeply to profane the semi-privacy of their grief and their humiliation.

“Young gentlemen,” he fairly shouted, “I am ashamed of you! And I have come here to tell you so, and to tell you why I am ashamed.”

By sight, even, he was probably a stranger to most of those who, with one accord, now stared at the little, old-fashioned figure of this invader. They straightened up. There was a rustle and a creaking of their harnessed and padded bodies. Perhaps surprise held them dumb; or perhaps they were in a humour to take a scolding, even from an outsider, feeling that they deserved it. At any rate, only one of them spoke. I think it was the voice of Gadsden, the coach, that answered back.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked. “And who the devil let you in here, anyhow?”

“You may not know me,” snapped the Major; “but I know you.” He wheeled on his heels, aiming a jabbing forefinger at this man and that. “And I know you – and I know you – and I know you – and you, and you, too, young sir, over there in the corner. What is more, I knew your fathers before you.”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it? This much of it: Your fathers before you were gallant Southern gentlemen – the bearers of honoured names; names revered in this state and in the Southern armies. That is what your fathers were. And what have you, their sons, proved yourselves to be this day? Cravens – that is the word. Cravens! Out of all the South you were chosen to represent your native land against these Northerners; and how have you repaid the trust imposed in you? By quitting – by showing the white feather, like a flock of dunghill cockerels – by raising the white flag at the first attack!” A babble of resentful voices arose:

“Say, look here; now – ”

“What do you know about football?”

“Who gave you any license to butt in here?”

“Say, that’s pretty rough!”

He broke into the confused chorus of their protests, silencing the interrupters by the stormy blare of his rejoinder. He was so terribly in earnest that they just had to hearken.

“I know nothing of this game you have essayed to play. Before to-day I never saw it played; and if this miserable exhibition by you is a sample of the game I hope never to see it played again. But I know courage when I see it and I know cowardice when I see it.”

He levelled his condemning finger at little Morehead and focused his glare upon that un-happy youth.

“Your name is Morehead! Your grandfather was a great governor of this great state. Your father was my companion in arms upon the field of battle – and no braver man ever breathed, sir. This historic inclosure bears the honoured name of your honoured line – Morehead Downs. You are the chosen leader of these companions of yours. And how have you led them to-day? How have you acquitted yourself of your trust? I ask you that – how?” He halted, out of breath.

“The other team is stronger. They’ve got us outclassed. Look – why, look at the reputation they’ve got all over this country! What – what chance have we against them?”

The confession came from little Morehead haltingly, as though he spoke against his own will in his own defence.

“Damn their reputation!” shouted Major Stone. “Your very words are an admission of the things I allege against you, and against all of you here. Concede that your antagonists are stronger than you, man for man. Concede that they outclass you in experience. Is that any reason why they should outclass you in courage and in determination? Your father and the fathers of more than half of the rest of you served in an army that for four years defended our beloved country against a foe immensely stronger than they were – stronger in men, in money, in munitions, in food, in supplies, in guns – stronger in everything except valour.

“Suppose, because of the odds against them, your people had lost heart from the very outset, as you yourselves have lost heart here today. Would that great war have lasted for four years? Or would it have lasted for four months? Would the Southern Confederacy have endured until it no longer had the soldiers to fill the gaps and hold the lines; or food for the bellies of those soldiers who were left; or powder and lead for their guns? Or would it have surrendered after the first repulse, as you have surrendered? Answer me that, some of you!

“These Northerners are game clear through; I can tell that. Their ancestors before them were brave men – the Southern Confederacy could never have been starved out and bled white by a breed of cowards. And these young men here – these splendid young Americans from up yonder in that Northern country – have the same gallant spirit their people showed forty years ago against your people. But you – you have lost the spirit of your race, that surely must have been born in you. You are going to let these Yankees run right over you – your behaviour proves it – and not fight back. That is what I charge against you. That is what I am here to tell you.”

“How about me?” put in one of the blanketed contingent of his audience. “My people were all Unionists.”

“Your name?” demanded the Major of him. “Speedman.”

“A son of the late Colonel Henry T. Speedman?”

“His nephew.”

“I knew your uncle and your uncle’s brothers and your grandfather. They were Union-men from principle; and I admired them for it, even though we differed, and even though they took up arms against their own kinsmen and fought on the opposite side. They wore the blue from conviction; but when the war was over your uncle, being a Southerner, helped to save his native state from carpetbaggery and bayonet rule. That was the type of man your uncle was. I regret to note that you did not inherit his qualities. I particularly observed your behaviour out there on that field yonder a while ago. You quit, young man – you quit like a dog!”

“Say, look here; you’re an old man, and that’s enough to save you!” Speedman suddenly was sobbing in his mortification. “But – but you’ve got no right to say things like that to me. You’ve – you’ve-” A gulp cut the miserable youngster’s utterance short. He choked and plaintively tried again: “If we can’t win we can’t win – and that’s all there is to it! Isn’t it, fellows?”

He looked to his companions in distress for comfort; but all of them, as though mesmerised, were looking at Major Stone. It dawned on me, watching and listening across the threshold, that some influence – some electric appeal to an inner consciousness of theirs – was beginning to galvanise them, taking the droop out of their spines, and making their frames tense where there had been a sag of nonresistance, and putting sparks of resentment into their eyes. The transformation had been almost instantaneously accomplished, but it was plainly visible.

“I am not expecting that you should win,” snapped the Major, turning Speedman’s words into an admonition for all of them. “I do not believe it is humanly possible for you to win. There is nothing disgraceful in being fairly defeated; the disgrace is in accepting defeat without fighting back with all your strength and all your will and all your skill and all your strategy and all your tactics. And that is exactly what I have just seen you doing. And that, judging by all the indications, is exactly what you will go on doing during the remaining portion of this affair.”

There were no more interruptions. For perhaps two or three minutes more, then, the old Major went steadily on, saying his say to the end. Saying it, he wasn’t the Old Major I had known before; he was not pottering and ponderous; he did not clothe his thoughts in cumbersome, heavy phrases. He fairly bit the words off – short, bitter, scorching words – and spat them out in their faces. He did not plead with them; nor – except by indirection – did he invoke a sentiment that was bound to be as much a part of them as the nails on their fingers or the teeth in their mouths.