Interference and Other Football Stories

by Harold M. Sherman

Every year since his graduation, C. R. D. had gone back on the occasion of the Yale game—gone either to Cambridge or New Haven—and he intended to keep on doing it as many years as he was permitted to draw breath.

As Davies took the train at the Grand Central Station, New York, he glanced apprehensively at the gray sky overhead and hoped that the weather man who had prophesied rain was wrong. Harvard would need a dry field this year to stand an even chance at winning. Her back field was light, fast, and shifty. It depended on a quick get-away and a sure under-footing. Yale's eleven was solid, heavy from end to end, with a stubborn defense that had allowed but two touchdowns so far that season, and a pile-driving back field that moved slowly but surely behind a battering forward wall. If it rained, Davies reflected, Harvard's last vestige of hope was due to be trampled in the mud.

And yet twenty years before, almost to the day, with a driving rain falling and Yale dangerously near Harvard's goal in the last quarter, the game locked in a grim nothing-nothing tie, a bespattered, sandy-haired youth with a crimson bow encircling his right wrist, had scooped up a fumble at his very goal line and dodged and slipped through the whole Eli team for a frenzied touchdown.

The final score of that heart-blasting contest had been five to nothing, and the sensational length-of-the-field run had clinched for the Harvard quarterback his right to All-American honors. The feat was talked about yet, wherever Harvard men gathered who had witnessed the spectacle of victory jerked from the grinning jaws of defeat. At the Harvard Club on Forty-fourth Street, New York, Carrington frequently ran into brother alumni who said, "I remember you when——" and then he was forced to listen to their versions of his crowning football achievement.

Davies found solace in going over old times. The Harvard Club was his haven of refuge. He was one of the best known men there. To enter the dining room was to nod to men at practically every table. There was a joy in feeling that he was among friends; in having his praises sung to younger grads by those who had chummed with him in college; to have his football prowess perpetuated by retelling.

It was nothing to C. R. D. that he was recognized also as one of the leading architects in New York City. He had worked hard the past twenty years, but perhaps it was not so much because he had yearned to go forward as it was to keep him from thinking too much on certain closed incidents of his life.

At times, like this morning, he found himself trying to piece together what his father, Martin S. Davies, would have told him had he not died with the words on his lips. It was only four years back. The elder Davies had been stricken suddenly while Carrington was in the West, and a wire had brought the son on the first train. He was told, on arrival, that the father was desperately ill; that he had held to the weakening thread of life and consciousness because of a strong-willed desire to impart some vital information to his son.

However, when Carrington Davies had been led into the sick room, the father, overcome with emotion, died from the shock, his fingers clutching the arms of his son, his eyes set upon his son's face, and the words: "Your wife—I—she's at——" trailing off into the darkness with him.

For days after, when all his father's effects had been painfully gone over, Davies had sat in frenzied study. It had been years since he had given serious thought to the brief, tragic romance of his college days. He had suffered keenly for a time, but his father's counsel had held weight with him, held weight even though he could never forget the girl, nor that day of days when she had plighted her faith in him with the dainty crimson bow and he had gone out on the field of battle feeling like a gladiator. A silly, lovesick fool he had been, perhaps, on that glorious day; but no incident in his entire life thereafter quite came up to this.

When he had become older and more mature, when he had reached an age at which he could better judge the sort of woman he should marry, Davies, as his father said he would, had come upon the discovery that all feminine creatures were hopeless bores. Thus his unattached state grew to be recognized as perennial, and whatever romance he enjoyed came to him through the cultivated channels of his memory.