I feel happier than I have for years—no early-season practice, no sweat and suffer, a little discomfort and inconvenience, but free. I feel as if I’ve outwitted a whole lot of people, and it’s nobody’s business but that of your
It didn’t sound like Dolly at all.
V
Once down at Princeton I asked Frank Kane—who sells sporting goods on Nassau Street and can tell you offhand the name of the scrub quarterback in 1901—what was the matter with Bob Tatnall’s team senior year.
“Injuries and tough luck,” he said. “They wouldn’t sweat after the hard games. Take Joe McDonald, for instance, All-American tackle the year before; he was slow and stale, and he knew it and didn’t care. It’s a wonder Bill got that outfit through the season at all.”
I sat in the stands with Dolly and watched them beat Lehigh 3–0 and tie Bucknell by a fluke. The next week we were trimmed 14–0 by Notre Dame. On the day of the Notre Dame game Dolly was in Washington with Vienna, but he was awfully curious about it when he came back next day. He had all the sporting pages of all the papers and he sat reading them and shaking his head. Then he stuffed them suddenly into the waste-paper basket.
“This college is football crazy,” he announced. “Do you know that English teams don’t even train for sports?”
I didn’t enjoy Dolly so much in those days. It was curious to see him with nothing to do. For the first time in his life he hung around—around the room, around the club, around casual groups—he who had always been going somewhere with dynamic indolence. His passage along a walk had once created groups—groups of classmates who wanted to walk with him, of underclassmen who followed with their eyes a moving shrine. He became democratic, he mixed around, and it was somehow not appropriate. He explained that he wanted to know more men in his class.
But people want their idols a little above them, and Dolly had been a sort of private and special idol. He began to hate to be alone, and that, of course, was most apparent to me. If I got up to go out and he didn’t happen to be writing a letter to Vienna, he’d ask “Where are you going?” in a rather alarmed way and make an excuse to limp along with me.
“Are you glad you did it, Dolly?” I asked him suddenly one day.
He looked at me with reproach behind the defiance in his eyes.
“Of course I’m glad.”
“I wish you were in that back field, all the same.”
“It wouldn’t matter a bit. This year’s game’s in the Bowl. I’d probably be dropping kicks for them.”
The week of the Navy game he suddenly began going to all the practices. He worried; that terrible sense of responsibility was at work. Once he had hated the mention of football; now he thought and talked of nothing else. The night before the Navy game I woke up several times to find the lights burning brightly in his room.
We lost 7 to 3 on Navy’s last-minute forward pass over Devlin’s head. After the first half Dolly left the stands and sat down with the players on the field. When he joined me afterward his face was smudgy and dirty as if he had been crying.
The game was in Baltimore that year. Dolly and I were going to spend the night in Washington with Vienna, who was giving a dance. We rode over there in an atmosphere of sullen gloom and it was all I could do to keep him from snapping out at two naval officers who were holding an exultant post mortem in the seat behind.
The dance was what Vienna called her second coming-out party. She was having only the people she liked this time, and these turned out to be chiefly importations from New York. The musicians, the playwrights, the vague supernumeraries of the arts, who had dropped in at Dolly’s house on Ram’s Point, were here in force. But Dolly, relieved of his obligations as host, made no clumsy attempt to talk their language that night. He stood moodily against the wall with some of that old air of superiority that had first made me want to know him. Afterward, on my way to bed, I passed Vienna’s sitting room and she called me to come in. She and Dolly, both a little white, were sitting across the room from each other and there was tensity in the air.
“Sit down, Jeff,” said Vienna wearily. “I want you to witness the collapse of a man into a schoolboy.” I sat down reluctantly. “Dolly’s changed his mind,” she said. “He prefers football to me.”
“That’s not it,” said Dolly stubbornly.
“I don’t see the point,” I objected. “Dolly can’t possibly play.”
“But he thinks he can. Jeff, just in case you imagine I’m being pigheaded about it, I want to tell you a story. Three years ago, when we first came back to the United States, father put my young brother in school. One afternoon we all went out to see him play football. Just after the game started he was hurt, but father said, ‘It’s all right. He’ll be up in a minute. It happens all the time.’ But, Jeff, he never got up. He lay there, and finally they carried him off the field and put a blanket over him. Just as we got to him he died.”
She looked from one to the other of us and began to sob convulsively. Dolly went over, frowning, and put his arm around her shoulder.
“Oh, Dolly,” she cried, “won’t you do this for me—just this
