Kitobni o'qish: «Weatherby's Inning: A Story of College Life and Baseball»

CHAPTER I
COWARD!

University Baseball. – All men who wish to try for the team report in the cage on Monday, February 25th, at 3.30 sharp.

Jos. L. Perkins, Capt.

Jack Weatherby, on his way out of the gymnasium, paused before the bulletin-board in the little drafty hall and read the call.

“That’s next Monday,” he muttered. “All right, I’ll be there.”

Then, putting a shoulder against the big oak door, he pushed his way out on to the granite steps and stood there a moment in scowling contemplation of the cheerless scene. Before him the board-walk was almost afloat in a shallow rivulet of melted snow that filled the gravel-path from side to side. A few steps away the path ended at the Washington Street gate in a veritable lake. The crossing was inches deep in water and the Common was a dismal waste of pools and streams out of which the soldiers’ monument reared itself as though agonizedly searching for a dry spot to which to move. There was an incessant and monotonous dripping and trickling and gurgling as the snow, which two days before had covered the ground to a depth of over a foot, disappeared as by magic under the breath of an unseasonable south wind. The sky was leaden and lowering, and against it the bare branches of the numberless elm-trees swayed complainingly. The Common and so much of the college grounds as was in sight were deserted. Altogether it was a dispiriting prospect that met Jack’s eyes, and one little likely to aid him in the task of fighting the “blues,” which had oppressed him all day.

He went listlessly down the steps, heroically striving to whistle a tune. But the tune had died out ere the sidewalk was reached. He looked with misgiving from the crossing to his shoes – shoes which even when new had been scarcely adapted to wet weather – and after a moment of hesitation gave up the idea of taking the usual short cut across the Common, and went on down Washington Street. As he began to pick his way gingerly across the wet pavement at the corner of Elm Street, two men ran down the steps of a boarding-house. They were talking in high, excited tones, and Jack could hear them until they had gone some distance toward the railroad.

“The water’s away up to the road, they say,” one of them declared loudly, “and it’s still rising. They’re afraid the bridge’ll go. There’s a lot of ice coming down.”

“Should think it might go,” said the other. “The old thing looks as though you could push it over if you tried.”

“Yes, don’t it? Let’s get a move on. We had a flood once up home that – ”

Then a heavy gust of wind, sweeping around the corner of the tumble-down livery-stable, drowned the conversation. Jack paused and silently weighed the respective attractions of a dark and not overcomfortable room in the green-shuttered house a few steps away, and a swollen river which might, if there was any such thing as good luck – which he had begun to doubt – sweep away the tottering old wooden bridge. Well, his feet were already wet, and so – He retraced his steps to the corner and went on down Washington Street in the wake of the others. They were a block or so ahead, splashing their thick boots through all kinds of puddles. They were evidently the best of friends, for one kept his hand on the other’s shoulder. Once the prankish wind bore a scrap of merry laughter up the street, and Jack, plodding along behind, wary of puddles, as befits a fellow who is wearing his only pair of winter shoes, heard it and felt gloomier and more forlorn than ever.

He wondered what it was like to have real friends and a chum; to be well known and liked. He had come to Erskine College in September fully expecting such things to fall to his share. But he had been there five months now and during that time his life had been very lonely. At first he had tried to make friends in a diffident way. Perhaps he had tried with the wrong men; perhaps his manner had been against him; the result had been discouraging, and after a while, smarting under what to his oversensitive feelings seemed rebuffs, he had ceased looking for friends and had retired into a shell of pessimism and injured pride, masking his loneliness under simulated indifference. Since then he had undoubtedly lost many a chance to find the companionship he craved; but he had learned his lesson, he told himself bitterly, and so he rejected advances as though they were the deadliest of insults.

He didn’t look the least bit like a misanthrope. He was seventeen years old, large for his age, lithe, muscular and healthy-looking, as is proper in a boy who has never been pampered, with a face which even at the present moment, in spite of the expression of settled bitterness that marred it, was eminently attractive. His eyes were well apart and gray in color; his hair was light brown, and his mouth, which of late had formed the unfortunate habit of wearing a little supercilious sneer in public, looked generous and honest, and, with the firmly rounded chin beneath, suggested force and capability. On the whole he was a clean-cut, manly-looking boy to whom fortune, you would have said, owed much.

When Jack Weatherby reached the river he found that the report of its depredations was not exaggerated. To be sure, River Street was still above water, but the flood was well over the bank in places, and farther along, in front of the coal-yards, several of the wharves were awash. The broad stream, usually a quiet, even sluggish body, was sending up a new sound, a low, threatening roar which, without his having realized it, had reached Jack’s ears long before he had sighted the river.

He wormed his way through the crowd of townfolk that lined the street, and, passing through an empty coal-pocket, found himself on a spray-drenched string-piece a foot above the water. To his right and left piers ran some distance into the river. They were untenanted. But beyond them the open spaces used by the coal company as storage ground for wagons were black with watchers. A short way off was the bridge, a low, wooden structure connecting Centerport with the little village of Kirkplain across the river. Jack was on the up-stream side of the bridge and could see the havoc that the drifting ice was making with the worn spiling and hear the crashing and grinding as cake after cake was hurled and jammed against it. Several of the supports were already broken, and the entrance to the bridge was barred with a rope and guarded by a member of Centerport’s small police force.

Jack drew back as far as he could from the edge of the beam and with his shoulders against the boards of the big bin watched in strange fascination the black, angry water rushing past. It frightened and repelled him, and yet he found it difficult to remove his gaze. For as long as he could remember he had been afraid of water. Once, when he was only five years old, he had fallen into the brook that crossed his father’s farm and had almost drowned before his mother, hastening after the runaway, had dragged him out. His recollection of the escapade was very hazy, but it had left him with a dread of water that was almost a mania. All efforts to combat it had proved futile. He had never learned to swim, and had never in all his life trusted himself in a boat. And yet, as a boy, he had devoured ravenously all the stories of the sea he could lay hands on, and had shuddered over shipwrecks and similar disasters, at once repelled and fascinated.

Suddenly his contemplation of the river was disturbed by shouts of alarm from up-stream. With an effort he withdrew his gaze from the water and looked in the direction of the cries. At that instant, around the corner of the pier to his right, floated something that thrashed the water wildly and sent up shrill appeals for help. After the first second of bewilderment Jack saw that it was a boy of thirteen or fourteen years. The white face, horribly drawn with terror, turned toward him, and, for an instant, the frightened, staring eyes looked into his. Jack sickened and groped blindly for support. A trick of the current shot the struggling body into the little harbor afforded by the two piers, almost at his feet. In his ears was a meaningless babel of shouts and in his heart an awful fear. He leaned back with outstretched hands clinging to the planks behind him and closed his eyes to avoid the sight of the appealing face below. Then, with a gasp, he sank to his knees, seized the string-piece with one hand, and with the other reached downward. But he was too late. The current, sweeping out again, had already borne the boy beyond reach. There was a final despairing shriek, then the arms ceased to struggle and the eddies closed over the body. Jack joined his voice impotently with the others and looked wildly about for a plank or a rope – anything that he could throw into the water. But there was nothing. Sick and dizzy he subsided against the timbers.

Then, just at the corner of the down-stream wharf, the body came to the surface again, the eyes sightless, the lips silent. And, almost too late, came help.

Jack, leaning near the opening in the coal-bin, felt rather than saw some one push by him. The rescuer, a man several years Jack’s senior, had discarded his coat and vest, and now, stooping and placing a hand lightly on the string-piece, he dropped into the water. A half dozen strokes took him to the end of the pier, and just as the drowning boy was again sinking he caught him. Turning, he struck out toward Jack, swimming desperately against the swirling current. For a minute it was difficult work; then he reached stiller water, and Jack, leaning over the edge, stretched forth eager hands to help. But ere he could do so he was pushed aside, narrowly saving himself from pitching head foremost into the water, and a middle-aged man, whom Jack a moment later saw to be Professor White, relieved the rescuer of his burden.

By that time the narrow foothold along the edge of the river was thronged with students and townfolk. Quickly the apparently lifeless body was borne past them through the yard and into a small office. Jack, trembling in every limb, followed. But near the door he suddenly became aware of a hostile atmosphere. The crowd, which had grown every minute, were observing him curiously, contemptuously, muttering and whispering. The blood rushed into his face and then receded, leaving it deathly pale. For a moment he faced them. Then a small boy somewhere on the edge of the throng sent up a shrill cry:

“That’s him! That’s the feller that didn’t make no try ter save him! ’Fraid of wettin’ his feet, he was!”

Jack looked about him and read in the faces that confronted him only merciless condemnation. Something in his throat hurt him and refused to be dislodged. With head up he turned and made his way through the crowd, the old sneer on his lips. But there was worse in store. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Professor White beside him.

“What’s your name?” asked the professor sternly.

“Weatherby, sir,” muttered Jack.

“Are you a student?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What class?”

“Six.”

The professor looked at him searchingly, then dropped the hand from his shoulder.

“I find that hard to believe,” he said contemptuously. “I didn’t think we had any cowards here at Erskine!”

He turned away, and Jack, after a moment of hesitation, a moment in which his first inclination to protest against the injustice of the verdict was drowned in a sudden dumbing surge of anger, made his way out of the throng and stumbled back to his room through the gathering twilight.

CHAPTER II
AN INTERRUPTION

Erskine College, at Centerport, is not large. Like many another New England college its importance lies rather in its works than in wealth or magnificence. Its enrolment in all departments at the time of which I write was about 600. I am not going to describe the college, it would take too long; and besides, it has been done very frequently and very well, and if the reader, after studyingthe accompanying plan, which is reproduced with the kind permission of the authorities, feels the need of further description, I would respectfully refer him to Balcom’s Handbook of Erskine (photographically illustrated) and May’s History of Erskine College. And if in connection with these he examines the annual catalogue he will know about all there is to be known of the subject.

Leaving Washington Street and going west on Elm Street, he will find, facing the apex of the Common, a small white frame cottage profusely adorned with blinds of a most vivid green. That is Mrs. Dorlon’s. It is by far the tiniest of the many boarding- and lodging-houses that line the outer curve of Elm Street, and, as might be supposed, its rooms are few and not commodious. Mrs. Dorlon, a small, middle-aged widow, with a perpetual cold in the head, reserves the lower floor for her own use and rents the two up-stairs rooms to students. Between these second-floor apartments there is little to choose. The western one gets the afternoon sunlight, while the one on the other side of the hall gets none. To make up for this, however, the eastern room is, or was, at the time of my story, the proud possessor of a register, supposed, somewhat erroneously, to conduct warm air into the apartment; while the western room, to use the language of Mrs. Dorlon, was “het by gas.”

Aside from these differences, apparent rather than real, the two chambers were similar. In each there was a strip of narrow territory in which it was possible to stand upright, flanked on either side by abruptly sloping ceilings whose flaking expanses were broken by dormer-windows, admitting a little light and a deal of cold. It was the eastern room that Jack Weatherby at present called home, a feat which implied the possession of a great deal of imagination on his part. For when, having escaped the hostile throng by the river and made his way up Washington into Elm Street, and so to the house with the painfully green blinds, the room in which he found himself didn’t look the least bit in the world like home.

The iron cot-bed, despite its vivid imitation Bagdad covering, failed to deceive the beholder into mistaking it for a Turkish divan. The faded and threadbare ingrain carpet, much too small to cover the floor, was of a chilly, inhospitable shade of blue. The occupant had made little attempt at decoration, partly because the amount of wall space adapted to pictures was extremely limited, partly because from the first the cheerless ugliness of the room discouraged him. The green-topped study table near the end window was a sorry piece of furniture. Former users had carved cabalistic designs into the walnut rim and adorned the imitation leather covering with even more mysterious figures; there were evidences, too, of overturned ink-bottles. A yellow-grained wardrobe beside the door leaned wearily against the supporting angle of the ceiling.

The brightest note in the room was a patent rocker upholstered in vivid green and yellow Brussels carpet. If we except a walnut book-shelf hanging beside the end window and a wash-stand jammed under one dormer, the enumeration of the furnishings is complete. Even on days when the sun shone against the white gable of the next house, the apartment could scarcely be called cheerful, and this afternoon with the evening shadows closing down and the wind whipping the branches of the elms outside and buffeting the house until it creaked complainingly, the room was forlorn to a degree.

After slamming the door behind him Jack tossed aside his cap, and subsiding into the rocker stretched his legs and stared miserably through the window into a swaying world of gray branches and darkening sky. The overmastering anger that had sent him striding home as though pursued dwindled away and left in its place a loneliness and discouragement that hurt like a physical pain. Things had been bad before, he thought, but now, branded in public a coward and despised by his fellows, life would be unbearable! He pictured the glances of contempt that would meet him on the morrow in hall and yard, or wherever he went, and groaned. He recalled the professor’s biting words: “I didn’t think we had any cowards here at Erskine!” and clenched his hands in sudden overmastering rage. The injustice of it maddened him. Would Professor White, he asked himself, have gone into the river after the drowning boy if, like himself, he were unable to swim a stroke and sickened at the mere thought of contact with the icy flood?

Presently his thoughts reverted to the morrow and the punishment he must undergo. His courage faltered, and the alternative, that of packing his few things there and then and leaving college by an early train in the morning, seemed the only course possible. Well, he would do it. It would mean disappointment to his parents and a loss of money they could ill afford. To him it would mean five months of study wasted. But better that than staying on there despised and ridiculed, to be pointed out behind his back as The Coward.

With a gasp he leaped to his feet, his cheeks tingling and his eyes moist with sudden tears. The room was in darkness. He fumbled over the desk until he found the match-box. When the gas was lighted he remembered the condition of his feet, and drawing a chair before the register he removed his wet shoes and placed them against the warm grating that they might dry overnight. His battered silver watch showed the time to be a few minutes before six. He found dry socks, and drawing them over his chilled feet donned a pair of carpet slippers. Then he washed for supper, bathing his flushed face over and over, and got back into his coat just as a weak-voiced bell below summoned the small household to the evening meal. As he went out he noted with surprise that the door of the opposite room was ajar, allowing a streak of light to illumine the upper hall with unaccustomed radiance. The room had been vacant all the year, but now, evidently, Mrs. Dorlon had found a tenant. But the fact interested him little, for his mind was firmly made up, and on the morrow his own room would be for rent.

When he entered the tiny dining-room Mrs. Dorlon and her daughter, a shy wisp of a girl some twelve or thirteen years of age, were already seated at the table. Jack muttered greetings and applied himself silently to the cold meat and graham bread which, with crab-apple jelly and weak tea, comprised the meal. But his hostess was plainly elated, and after a few pregnant snuffles the secret was out. The western chamber was rented!

“And such a nice, pleasant-mannered young man he is,” she declared. “A Mr. Tidball, a junior. Perhaps you have met him?”

Jack shook his head.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll like him, and it’ll be real pleasant for you to have another student in the house. I know what it is to be alone” – she sniffed sadly – “since Mr. Dorlon died, and I guess you feel downright lonely sometimes up there. If you like I’ll introduce Mr. Tidball after supper?”

The widow appeared to find a mild excitement at the thought, and her face fell when Jack begged off. “Not this evening, please,” he said. “I’m going to be very busy, Mrs. Dorlon.”

“Oh, very well. I only thought – ” What she thought he never knew, for excusing himself he pushed back his chair and returned to his room. As he closed his door he heard the new lodger whistling cheerfully and tunelessly across the hallway.

He dragged a steamer trunk from under the bed, threw back the lid and unceremoniously hustled the contents on to the floor. Then he took a valise from the wardrobe and proceeded to pack into it what few belongings would serve him until he could send for his trunk. The latter he couldn’t take with him. In the first place, there was no way of getting it to the depot in time for the early train; in the second place, as he was not now able to pay Mrs. Dorlon the present month’s rent, he felt that he ought to leave something behind him as security. The prospect of going home raised his spirits, and he felt happier than he had for many months. He even hummed an air as he tramped busily between the wardrobe and the trunk, and the result was that the first knock on the door passed unheeded. After a moment the knock was repeated, and this time Jack heard it and paused in the act of spreading his Sunday trousers in the till and looked the consternation he felt. Who was it, he wondered. Perhaps Mrs. Dorlon come to hint about the rent; perhaps – but whoever it might be, Jack didn’t want his preparations seen. He softly closed the trunk lid and wished that he had locked the door. He waited silently. Perhaps the caller would go away. Then, as he began to think with relief that this had already happened, the knob turned, the door swung open, and a lean, spectacled face peered through the opening.

“I thought maybe you didn’t hear me knock,” said a queer, drawling voice. “I’ve taken the room across the way, and as we’re going to be neighbors I thought I’d just step over and get acquainted.”

The caller came in and closed the door behind him, casting an interested look about the shabby apartment. Jack, after an instant of surprise and dismay, muttered a few words of embarrassed greeting. As he did so he recognized in the odd, lanky figure at the door the hero of the accident at the river.