CHAPTER XXIV
HUGH GOES TO THE VILLAGE
There was the lightest sort of practice on Thursday for the regular, but the third-string players, reinforced by three or four first subs, among them Bert, gave the second a hard tussle for two fifteen-minute halves. Hugh didn’t see that game, for with the other first-choice players he was dispatched to the showers the minute practice was done, but he heard about it afterwards from Peet, who, at least according to his own story, was the one particular bright spot in the second team’s back-field. Peet wasn’t a very eloquent conversationalist and his report was vague and jerky, but Hugh gathered that Bert had more than distinguished himself that afternoon. There had, said Peet, been one burst through the whole second team that had netted forty-odd yards. And he had frequently piled through Myatt and Bowen for three and four at a whack. You just couldn’t stop him! He’d gained two once with both Hanser and Ayer hanging around his neck! And, in the end, he had crashed his way through the second team’s center from the six yards for the only touchdown scored by the substitutes. Hugh was very glad and hoped that Coach Bonner, who, according to Peet, had watched the game through, would change his mind and let Bert start on Saturday.
That was the second team’s final game of the season and they won it 10 to 6. When it was over they cheered the first team, the coaches, the school, themselves and whatever else they could think of, and joyfully—and perhaps a little regretfully—disbanded.
Bert was in good spirits that evening. He had had a fine time in the game and told Hugh all about it while they sat on the steps of Lothrop after supper and waited until it was time to go over to the mass meeting. But when Hugh suggested that perhaps, because of the good showing he had made, Mr. Bonner might put him into the line-up instead of one Hobo Ordway, Bert shrugged.
“He won’t. I know Bonner pretty well. Anyway, I don’t care so much now. I had a bully time knocking around this afternoon and I’ll get a whack at Mount Morris if only for five minutes or so, I guess, and that’ll do. What time is it? We’ve got to sit on the stage tonight like a lot of wax figures. That’s what I always feel like when I’m on exhibition. Joe Leslie’s going to talk tonight. Have you heard him? Oh, yes, he jawed at Lit one time you were there, didn’t he? Well, he’s a dandy at it and no mistake. Joe always calls the turn, too. Last year he said we’d lose and we did. Year before he said neither team would score more than once, and, by Jove, he was right then, too. We played a nothing-to-nothing tie! Joe knows football from A to Izzard, and he would have been a peach of a player if he could have gone in for it.”
“What was the trouble?”
“Folks didn’t want him to. He—what?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Thought you did. Well, let’s go over.”
Sitting on the stage to be admired was a little uncomfortable, Hugh thought, even though he and Bert secured chairs in the third row and were not much in evidence from the floor. As on previous occasions of the kind, the Mandolin and Banjo Club did its best—and sometimes it sounded like its worst!—speeches were made, cheers were given and songs were sung. To the delight of everyone, the prophetic Joe Leslie, senior class president, predicted a Grafton victory, although he warned his hearers that the team would have to work for it and that its margin of points would be scanty. Joe could talk to the fellows in what Vail, who sat at Hugh’s other side, called “words of one syllabub,” and he was always a big success as a speaker. Tonight he had his audience with him from the first moment and before he was through had worked them up to such a stage of enthusiasm that they threatened to lift the roof off the building.
When the meeting was over the football players disappeared quickly, for tonight and tomorrow night they were supposed to be in bed by ten o’clock, and, lest they be disturbed, all noise in rooms or corridors after that hour was taboo. Hugh, who had been noticeably distrait all the evening save when Joe Leslie’s eloquence had absorbed him, piled promptly into bed, beating the clock by ten minutes. Bert was disposed toward conversation, but found scant encouragement from his chum, and at ten all lights were out in Number 29. Bert was just falling into a delicious state of drowsiness when a sound from the opposite bedroom brought him back to consciousness and he sat up suddenly. It seemed to him that Hugh had said “That’s it!” very loudly. However, as all was silent, he concluded that he had dreamed it, and so sank back again and went to sleep.
The next forenoon, clad in a yellow slicker, since it was drizzling, Hugh inconspicuously let himself out the service door on the basement floor of Lothrop, climbed two fences, cut across a corner of a meadow, and finally, a bit wet as to lower extremities, reached the village road and trudged off into the mist. He was back a half-hour later, in time for French, and, so far as he knew, his absence was passed unnoticed.
It drizzled all day, and toward evening grew colder. The gridiron, covered with a sprinkling of marsh hay, remained deserted. At four o’clock the team met in the gymnasium and had a half-hour’s drill on signals, and then again, at half-past eight, there was a blackboard talk. But the day went slowly to most of the fellows and the weather affected tight-strung nerves, and everyone from Coach Bonner down to the least important third-string substitute was heartily glad when bedtime came. The school held an impromptu celebration—if you can call it a celebration when the thing to be celebrated hasn’t occurred—on the campus and did a good deal of singing and cheering and shouting while it marched around the buildings. But the drizzle soon discouraged it and long before ten o’clock Grafton School was as quiet as the proverbial mouse. Hugh had a good deal of trouble getting to sleep that night. He could hear Bert’s hearty and regular snores from the opposite room and envied him. Probably, he reflected, Bert had a clear conscience, while his own—well, he didn’t quite know whether it was clear or not. He only knew that he had done something that morning which might or might not prove to have been for the best. Sometimes, he concluded, as he thumped his pillow into a new shape, life was most beastly complicated.
When he awoke after a none too refreshing night it was still dull and foggy outside, although the drizzle had ceased. There was a light glaze of ice over everything and the limbs of the trees outside the windows crackled when a slight puff of wind blew the gray mist across the campus. It was a dispiriting scene, Hugh thought, but Bert, who came yawning in a moment later, appeared to find it quite to his liking.
“Ugh! Put that window down! Say, this is a bully day for the game, isn’t it? Just snappy enough!”
“The field will be wet, though, won’t it?” asked Hugh.
“Not to mention. The sun will be out before noon, and that hay will keep it pretty dry, anyway. Had your bath—pardon me, tub?”
“No. You go ahead if you like.”
“All right, your ’Ighness, I’ll do that very thing. Say, what’s wrong with you? Got the pip or anything? You look like a last summer’s straw!”
“Me? Oh, I’m all right, I fancy, thanks. I—didn’t sleep very well.”
Bert chuckled and playfully shied a pillow at him. “Nerves, me dear boy, nerves! You’ll feel better after you’ve got some food—that is, chow, inside you. I’ll yell if there’s a tub not working.”
Bert’s prediction was verified. Hugh did feel better after his breakfast. Possibly the discovery that he was not the only fellow at the training table that morning who resembled a last summer’s straw helped as much as the food. As has been said before, Hugh had a horror of being “different.”
There was no school that day. Experience had proved to the faculty that holding recitations on the morning of the Big Game was about as useless a thing as could be imagined. Many fellows headed for the village shortly after breakfast, but the players were not allowed that means of working off any superabundance of spirits. Instead, being instructed to remain out of doors as much as possible, they dawdled around from one set of steps to another and tried to be very jovial and carefree. The sun came through about ten and the trees glittered as though strung with diamonds. Then the diamonds turned into very wet water and dripped down fellows’ necks.
Bert and Hugh and Nick and several others were seated on the steps of Trow at about ten-thirty. Talk had been desultory and fragmentary for some time, and Nick, the only one of the group apparently unaffected by nerves, had just informed the rest candidly but for their own good that they were a “bunch of nuts,” when Mr. Bonner came into view down the steps of School Hall, looked this way and that and then walked briskly along to Trow. He had the appearance of one who, having completed a home-run, is informed by the umpire that he is out for not having touched second. Every fellow in the group there knew that something had greatly disturbed the coach’s equanimity, and when, pausing a dozen yards away, he called to Hugh, his tone confirmed the look on his face.
“Ordway, please!” he called. “Just a moment!”
Hugh arose and wormed his way between the others. Probably they all glanced curiously at him as he passed down the steps, but I doubt if any save Bert read the expression on his face aright. To Bert it was one of relief.
Hugh joined Coach Bonner and together they walked toward School Hall and disappeared through the entrance. Speculation was rife in front of Trow. Nick shook his head dubiously.
“Something’s gone to pot,” he said.
“Faculty’s jumped on Hobo, probably,” suggested another. “Thought, though, he was rather a shark for study.”
“It isn’t that,” said Nick. “What do you think, Bert?”
But Bert only shook his head. If it was what he really thought, it wasn’t a thing for him to talk about.
Five minutes later Hugh came out of School Hall and walked toward them again. Seeing his face, Nick breathed easier. If it was anything bad the Duke wouldn’t smile like that. When he reached the steps Hugh stopped. By that time the smile didn’t look so good to Nick. There was something not quite regular about it!
“Anything wrong?” asked Yetter.
“Rather, in a way,” answered Hugh. Bert noticed that his friend avoided looking at him as he made the announcement. “My folks—that is, my mother doesn’t want me to play. She telegraphed the faculty. Bonner—Bonner’s a bit—peevish.”
The silence was broken by the dry tones of Nick.
“Strange he should be,” he murmured.
Hugh nodded, smiled, and turned away in the direction of Lothrop. A chorus of regrets, of protests, of questions went after him, but he kept on. Bert watched him disappear into the building before he jumped up and hurried after.
“What,” demanded Bert, as he closed the door behind him, “what is this—this”—unconsciously he adopted Hugh’s phrase of the other evening—“this piffling poppycock?”
Hugh, standing at the window, one knee on the cushion, turned and smiled conciliatingly. “Mother telegraphed to faculty. She doesn’t want me to play. She—she’s afraid I’d get hurt, don’t you know. Of course, it’s bally nonsense, but there you are, what?”
Bert advanced into the room and shied his cap to the table. Then he plunged his hands in his pockets and observed sweetly:
“Must have been an awful surprise to you!”
Hugh colored. “Well, there it is, eh?”
“Most breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” continued Bert with suspicious sympathy.
“Oh, well, now, old chap, of course a fellow’s disappointed, and all that, but——”
Then Bert let loose. I’m not going to try to say what he did, partly because it was all dreadfully incoherent and partly because he used expressions and called names that barely escaped being in shocking bad taste. One of the nicest things he called Hugh was a “dunder-headed ass”! And Hugh took it all quite good-naturedly and very calmly, even seating himself as though in order to listen more attentively. And when, at last, Bert petered out for lack of breath or language, Hugh only grinned at him!
“You can’t prove anything you’ve said,” he remarked finally, just when Bert showed a disposition to go on again. “And, anyway——”
“I don’t have to prove it; I know it!” bellowed the other. “I’m not a complete fool!” He glared at Hugh a space longer and then subsided in the Morris chair. “What—what did you do it for, Hugh?” he asked almost pathetically.
Hugh blustered weakly. “I haven’t said I’d done anything, have I? That’s your story. If you don’t believe me when I tell you that—that——”
“Well, go on,” said Bert sarcastically.
But Hugh didn’t. “Anyway, it’s done and that’s all there is to it. What’s the good of cutting up rough?”
“Hugh, you’re an ass.”
Hugh smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “I say, you know, you’ve told me that before a number of times.”
“And I tell it to you again, you—you chump! If this ever gets out Bonner will scalp you and the school will chase you from here to the Junction!”
“Why should it get out, as you say? And—and what is there to get out, anyway?”
“There’s this. You wrote home and got your mother to send that telegram, and if that isn’t——”
“I didn’t!” denied Hugh.
“You didn’t! Look here, can you look me in the eyes and say you didn’t put your mother up to it?”
“I didn’t write home,” replied Hugh evasively.
“Oh, that’s it! You telegraphed! Of course you did! And that’s what you were thinking of when you said ‘Oh!’ or something when we were talking about Joe Leslie. That put the silly stunt into your head, didn’t it?”
“I say, what’s the good of getting all excited about it?” said Hugh soothingly. “It’s quite all right, old dear. All you’ve got to do, you know, is calm down and go in this afternoon and give ’em ballywhack!”
Bert was silent for a moment. Then: “What did Bonner say?” he demanded.
Hugh smiled ruefully. “He was crusty a bit, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” said Bert grimly. “Does he—suspect anything?”
“Oh, dear, no! Why should he?”
“Well, he might. Hang it, Hugh, I’ve got a half a mind not to play!”
Hugh laughed. “Change it, old dear! Bonner’s fit to be tied now. If you tried anything like that on he’d just simply blow up—Bing! Just like that! Don’t be a silly ass, please.”
“But, Hugh, I wish you hadn’t! I feel so mean, don’t you see? And suppose Bonner doesn’t put me in, after all! Suppose he plays Siedhof or Zanetti! Suppose, even if he does put me in, I don’t play decently, or——”
“Suppose you’re a piffling idiot, and shut up! Bonner’s got to put you in. And you’ve got to play the way you did Thursday and you’re going to! Now come on out and get some air.”
Bert didn’t stir at once, though. Instead, he studied his knuckles a long moment, leaning forward in his chair. Then, rather huskily: “Hugh, you’re a mighty good sort,” he faltered. “And I’ve been such a rotter that I don’t see why you want to—to——”
“Piffling poppycock!” said Hugh.