White Ashes Part 20

"Not at all. Why, do you know that baseball is the most American thing in America? And it's about the only wholly American thing, as we like to think of America. There is only one other place besides the ball ground where the spirit of genuine democracy shows itself, and that is in politics. There you will find the high and low together--the judge putting off his ermine and getting down from the bench elbow to elbow with Tom Radigan, the East Side barkeep, when the Patrick J. O'Dowd a.s.sociation of the Eighty-eighth a.s.sembly District gives its annual outing or its ball. But that's not true democracy because it's very largely selfish--inspired by the desire of votes. Now baseball--that's different. Inspired by no desire but to see a good game--and for the home team to win. Nowhere else in the world can you see democracy in its fine flower--at its best. There you can see them all--judges and dock rats, brokers and bricklayers, cotillion leaders and truck drivers, historians and elevator starters, lawyers and the men they keep out of jail, college boys, grocers, retired capitalists, and the lady friends of the whole collection. You'll find them all there. Oh, you ought to go to a game yourself. Then you'd understand."

It seemed to Miss Maitland that this Smith was a very unusual person.

And his enthusiasms were strangely contagious. Fire insurance, New York, and now baseball, things in none of which had she ever felt more than a flicker of interest, suddenly, seen through his eyes, a.s.sumed a reality, a vital quality she had never dreamed they could possess. Was it all the difference in point of view?

"It isn't because baseball in my opinion does more real good than all the socialistic doc.u.ments put out by high-browed agitators will ever do," Smith was continuing, "that I go to it. Not at all. I go to it because I like it, and because I like to yell."

"Do you yell?" asked Miss Maitland of Boston.

"You do--that is, I do," said Smith, tersely. "At all events, when things go our way."

"And don't you think I would be likely to--yell?"

"Well, hardly, at first," the underwriter answered. "After a while, probably. If you'd like to go and see, though, whether you'd yell or not, I should like awfully to take you."

Thinking the matter over afterward, Helen was at a loss to discover why she had so readily accepted this somewhat unusual invitation. To see this young man at an office on a matter of business was all very well; it was one thing to meet him casually on the street and walk with him a few blocks up the Avenue--but it was decidedly another to promise she would accompany him to a professional baseball game. Baseball, of all things! Yet she had accepted, and on the whole she could not seem to be quite sorry that she had. But it would never do to tell Aunt Mary.

Yet Miss Wardrop must of course be told. Helen was twenty-five years of age and her own mistress, but Boston in the blood dies hard.

It was moribund, however, on the afternoon that Smith called to escort her northward to the field where those idols of Gotham, the Giants, were indulging in a death grapple with their rivals from Chicago in the closing series of the year, with the National League pennant hanging on its result. Her companion had, to be sure, called formally and in due order upon Miss Wardrop and her niece on an evening of the intervening period, so that Helen felt her sharp New England sense of the proprieties lulled to a state of pleasing and comfortable coma.

The elevated train which took them to the grounds was jammed to the very doors with cheerfully suffering humanity, and Miss Maitland, most of whose previous experience with crowds had been with those decorous gatherings in the subway beneath the Common, regarded the struggling mult.i.tude with covert dismay.

"If you should find the elbows of the populace unduly insinuated into you, don't worry," her companion advised. "It will merely be part of your general education. Getting back to the soil is nowhere beside the democratic experience you are about to enjoy," he added.

"I--I didn't expect to be quite as democratic as that," the girl said.

"Well, I'll try to see that the more intimate personal demonstrations are spared you," her escort rea.s.sured her.

Presently they left the train, and pa.s.sing down the platform they joined the crowd that was now forcing its slow course along the inclosed runway which led to the Polo Grounds. There was considerable jostling, much talking and laughter, deep trampling and shuffling of many feet. At last Smith reached the window before which for some five minutes he stood in line.

"Of course I could have gotten box seats," he explained as he purchased two score cards; "but I wanted you to get this thing in its entirety."

"You are the doctor," replied Miss Maitland, cheerfully; at which form of acquiescence her companion regarded her in such surprise that she burst into a laugh.

"I heard that just now," she confessed; "and it seemed to fit the case.

You know you are really prescribing this game as a cure for acute Bostonitis."

"Right!" said he, laughing, "I fancy I was. But I didn't mean to be unpleasantly Aesculapian."

"You weren't," she said. "And do you know, I think you were correct.

Even if you didn't consciously prescribe this as a remedy, I myself admit--or I almost admit--that I was feeling the need of a tonic a little different from any I had ever tried at home. And I believe this is it."

Surely it was. They reached their seats, which they found back of first base, and sat down between neighbors of uncommon parts. Next to Helen was a large red man of Hibernian extraction, with a long upper lip tamed but little by civilization or by razor; on his head he wore a dilapidated cloth cap; he was, to appearances, driver for an ice company or a brewery.

At Smith's elbow was a small, black-haired Jew with a pock-marked face.

In front of them were four people who could have been the s.h.i.+pping clerk for a hardware house, his fiancee, who presided conceivably over a switchboard in some uptown hotel, a gentleman who looked like a college professor and who was probably night clerk in a drug store, and lastly a chunky and well-fed person who, from his turning at once to the cotton reports, could probably be put down as holding some responsible position in a Wall Street house. The farther the eye strayed, the more motley became the array, the more difficult any generalization.

"It's really useless," said Smith, guessing the girl's thought. "If any one's missing, it's because he's home sick in bed. Now, tell me how much you need to be told."

Nearly everything, it seemed; so for the next ten minutes her companion held forth in a compendious but concise exordium on the great American game. During this interim the huge concrete stands filled entirely, and the populace began to spill over onto the field.

"That means ground rules--hit into the crowd good for only two bases,"

said several critics, for the general information of an ambient air fully as well informed as the speakers.

Down on the field the interesting machinery was in process of oiling--the batting and fielding practice of either side in turn, the pitchers lazily warming up, the motley crew on the side lines in their amusing and alert play of high-low. Helen, fascinated by the players'

movements, the accurate interception of stinging grounders, the graceful parabolas of long flies to the deep outfield, as well as by the spectacle of the orderly base and coaching lines laid out on the smooth, close-clipped greensward, watched as though in a new medium of sight. This was little like anything she had ever seen.

A yell from ten thousand throats announced that the Giants'--and the crowd's--favorite was to pitch. Another yell, though less in volume, indicated that the opposing pitcher also was named and approved, not from any delight in the selection, but merely that the choice was made.

The umpires in their sober blue uniforms took their places; the home team went into the field; the pitcher picked up the new white ball and settled his foot firmly on the slab--and the game was on.

It can serve no useful purpose now, when that game is done and its year's pennant determined, to play over the two hours' traffic of it.

Suffice it to say that the tide of battle rose and fell sufficiently to keep forty thousand delirious spectators on their feet at least one quarter of the time. Nothing of Oriental calm about the crowd that day; nothing of pa.s.sive acceptance of whatever the Fates might have in store. Every soul within that enclosure was a rabid partisan, bound up in the fortune of the fray; and if the concentrated desire of forty thousand minds could avail aught, the home team should certainly have felt the psychic urge.

But apparently they did not, or perhaps the opposing cohorts felt a far-off urge more potent still, for the game wore on to the seventh inning with the home team still one run behind.

"Seventh inning; everybody up!" twenty thousand informed the other twenty thousand. And everybody rose, the forty thousand almost as one man.

"Now then, you Tim!" shrieked a voice behind Helen's ear. And Tim responded with a two-base hit to the left field crowd. Another sharp crack of the ball against the bat, and men running at lightning speed, one to first base, one desperately rounding third and toward the home plate with the run needed to tie the score. But the Chicago team were busy as well. As from a catapult the ball shot home to the catcher, waiting astride the rubber.

A flash, a slide, a cloud of dust. Then the umpire, flapping a flippant thumb skyward. Then a berserker roar of rage, a pandemonium of fury beside which Babel was a soundless desert. And from leather-like lungs four inches from Helen's ear, in a voice which could have brought the glad news from Ghent to Aix without leaving the first-named city at all, came:--

"Hey, you big wart! The bush for yours!"

But the umpire thus unflatteringly described and a.s.signed was obdurate, the run did not count, and the game went on. However, it was won in that inning by the combination of two more safe hits, and the checked paeans rang their fill. If there was a heart in all that great amphitheater not beating to the tune of the forty thousand, it must have been some unfortunate outlander who could only watch, reserving his own delirium until some more fortunate era beneath more friendly stars.

But at last, when all was over and the great crowd reluctantly dissolved, swarming the diamond, Smith and Miss Maitland sought the exit in silence.

"When it puts one in such intimate touch with forty thousand of your fellow beings," said Smith, reflectively, "it seems worth while, now and then, to be what is commonly termed a low-brow."

"Is it really worth while," asked Helen, "to be anything else?"

CHAPTER XI

If Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch had had nothing to do but attend the meetings of the various boards of which he was a director, his time would still have been reasonably well employed and he would have enjoyed an income sufficient at least to keep him in cigars of the standard to which his eminence ent.i.tled him. Mr. Murch's private secretary held a position requiring quick-wittedness and suavity in no common degree. Hardly a day went by that the ring of the phone did not serve as preamble for some such colloquy as this:

"h.e.l.lo. Mr. Murch's office?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Murch in?"

"No. Can I do anything for you?"

"The W., T., and G. have called their annual meeting for election of officers on Friday the sixth. How about ten-thirty? Is that all right with Mr. Murch?"

"Wait a minute. Ten-thirty, you said? No, Mr. Murch has the International Corkscrew meeting at ten. Can't they push W., T., and G.