Dana hauled Stover to his feet, a little groggy.
“Some tackling, freshman! Bout’s yours! Call out the heavyweights!”
Scarcely realizing that it was his captain who had spoken, Dink stood staring down at Fisher, white and conquered, struggling to his feet in the grip of friends.
“I say, Fisher,” he said impulsively, “I hope I didn’t shake you up too much. I saw red; I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You did me all right,” said the sophomore, giving his hand. “That tackle of yours would break a horse in two. Shake!”
“Thank you,” said Stover, flustered and almost ashamed before the other’s perfect sportsmanship. “Thank you very much, sir!”
He went to his corner, smothered under frantic slaps and embraces, hearing his name resounding again and again on the thunders of his classmates. The bout had been spectacular; everyone was asking who he was.
“Stover, eh, of Lawrenceville!”
“Gee, what a fierce tackler!”
“Ridiculous for Fisher to be beaten!”
“Oh, is it? How’d you like to get a fall like that?”
“Played end.”
“Captain at Lawrenceville.”
“He ought to be a wonder.”
“Say, did you see the face he got on him?”
“Enough to scare you to death.”
“It got Fisher, all right.”
While he was being rubbed down and having his clothes thrust upon him, shivering in every tense muscle, which, now the issue was decided, seemed to have broken from his control, suddenly a hand gripped his, and, looking up, he saw the face of Tompkins, ablaze with the fire of the professional spectator.
“I’m not shaking hands on your brutal old tackling,” he said, with a look that belied his words. “It’s the other thing—the losing the first fall. Good brain-work, boy; that’s what’ll count in football.”
The grip of the veteran cut into his hand; in Tompkins’s face also was a reminiscent flash of the fighting face that somehow, in any test, wins half the battle.
The third bout went to the sophomores, Regan, the choice of the class, being nowhere to be found. But the victory was with the freshmen, who, knit suddenly together by the consciousness of a power to rise to emergencies, carried home the candidates in triumph.
McCarthy, with his arms around Stover as he had done in the old school days after a grueling football contest, bore Dink up to their rooms with joyful, bearlike hugs. Other hands were on him, wafting him up the stairs as though riding a gale.
“Here, let me down will you, you galoots!” he cried vainly from time to time.
Hilariously they carried him into the room and dumped him down. Other freshmen, following, came to him, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back.
“Good boy, Stover!”
“What’s the use of wrestling, anyhow?”
“You’re it!”
“We’re all for you!”
“The old sophomores thought they had it cinched.”
“Three cheers for Dink Stover!”
“One more!”
“And again!”
“Yippi!”
McCarthy, doubled up with laughter, stood in front of him, gazing hilariously, proudly down.
“You old Dink, you, what right had you to go out for it?”
“None at all.”
“How the deuce did you have the nerve?”
“How?” For the first time the question impressed itself on him. He scratched his head and said simply, unconscious of the wide application of what he said: “Gee! guess I didn’t stop to think how rotten I was.”
He went to bed, gorgeously happy with the first throbbing, satisfying intoxication of success. The whole world must be concerned with him now. He was no longer unknown; he had emerged, freed himself from the thralling oblivion of the mass.
VI
Stover fondly dreamed, that night, of his triumphal appearance on the field the following day, greeted by admiring glances and cordial handshakes, placed at once on the second eleven, watched with new interest by curious coaches, earning an approving word from the captain himself.
When he did come on the field, embarrassed and reluctantly conscious of his sudden leap to worldwide fame, no one took the slightest notice of him. Tompkins did not vouchsafe a word of greeting. To his amazement, Dana again passed him over and left him restless on the bench, chafing for the opportunity that did not come. The second and the third afternoon it was the same—the same indifference, the same forgetfulness. And then he suddenly realized the stern discipline of it all—unnecessary and stamping out individuality, it seemed to him at first, but subordinating everything to the one purpose, eliminating the individual factor, demanding absolute subordination to the whole, submerging everything into the machine—that was not a machine only, when once accomplished, but an immense idea of sacrifice and self-abnegation. Directly, clearly visualized, he perceived, for the first time, what he was to perceive in every side of his college career, that a standard had been fashioned to which, irresistibly, subtly, he would have to conform; only here, in the free domain of combat, the standard that imposed itself upon him was something bigger than his own.
Meanwhile the college in all its activities opened before him, absorbing him in its routine. The great mass of his comrades to be gradually emerged from the blurred mists of the first day. He began to perceive hundreds of faces, faces that fixed themselves in his memory, ranging themselves, dividing according to his first impression into sharply defined groups. Fellows sought him out, joined him when he crossed the campus, asked him to drop in.
In chapel he found himself between Bob Story, a quiet, self-contained, likable fellow, popular from the first from a certain genuine sweetness and charity in his character, son of Judge Story of New Haven, one of the most influential of the older graduates; and on the other side Swazey, a man of twenty-five or six, of a type that frankly amazed him—rough, uncouth, with thick head and neck, rather flat in the face, intrusive, yellowish eyes, under lip overshot, one ear maimed by a scar, badly dressed, badly combed, and badly shod. Belying this cloutish exterior was a quietness of manner and the dreamy vision of a passionate student. Where he came from Stover could not guess, nor by what strange chance of life he had been thrown
