Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

It did not lie within his capabilities to share their youthful and, therefore, profound conviction that all which was desirable in life, here or hereafter, centred on the results of this struggle; and that the youth who failed now to acquit himself to the greater glory of his comrades and his class and his college—and, most of all, himself—would droop an abased and shameful head through all the years to come. For, as I may have remarked before, Major Stone was not a bright person, but rather a stupid one; and his viewpoint on most subjects had not altered materially since Appomattox.

That was it—it had not altered since Appomattox; and because it had not he was viewing the present event as a struggle between North and South—as a conflict into which Civil War causes and Civil War effects directly entered. Possibly you cannot understand that. But you could if you had known Major Stone and men like him, most of whom are now dead and gone. His face turned from a hot pink to a dull brick-dust red, and he gnawed at his moustache.

“It is monstrous!” I heard him say. “It is incredible! Southern sons of Southern sires, every damned one of them! And because the odds are against them they have weakened! I myself can see that they are weakening every minute. Why, the thing's incredible—that's what it is! Incredible!”

Just then the whistle blew, and the teams, which had been in a mix-up, unsnarled themselves. The Sangamon eleven came off the field; some of them were briskly trotting to prove their fitness, and some were swaggering a little as their band hit up the tune of Marching Through Georgia to play them into their quarters under the stand. But the Varsity eleven passed out of sight with shoulders that drooped and with no spring in their gaits.

Back at the tail end of their line went little Morehead, wiping his damp eyes with the dirty sleeve of his jersey. Morehead was no young Saint Laurence, to expire smilingly on a gridiron. He was not of the stuff that martyrs are made of; he was a creature, part man and part boy, and the man part of him made him furious with self-reproach, but the boy in him made him cry. I take it, some of the spectators felt almost like crying too; certainly their cheering sounded so.

One of the Red tackles—Rodney—had been disabled just before the breakaway, and I ran over to Midsylvania's quarters to find out for the paper whether he was injured to the degree of being definitely incapacitated for further participation in the game. In what, during race meets, was a refreshment establishment, under the grand stand, I obtruded upon a veritable grand lodge of sorrow.

Gadsden, the coach, who had played with the team the year before, which was his graduating year, was out in the centre of the floor making a brave pretense at being hopeful; but I do not think anybody present suffered himself to be deceived thereby. His pleas to the team to buck up and to brace up, and to go back in and fight for every point, lacked sincerity. He appeared to be haranguing them because that was the ordained thing for him to do, and not because he expected to infuse into them any part of his make-believe optimism. Lying on their backs upon blankets, with limbs relaxed, some of his hearers turned dejected faces upward. Others, sitting upright or squatted on their knees, kept their abashed heads on their breasts, staring down steadfastly at nothing at all.

Morehead was sulking by himself in a corner, winking his eyelids and wrinkling his face up to hold back the tears of his mortification. He blamed himself, I take it, for what was the fault of all. Cabell was a tousled heap, against a wall. He was flexing a bruised wrist, as though that small hurt was just now the most important thing in the world to him. Even the darky rubbers and the darky water carrier showed their sensations by their dejected faces. There was enough of downcastness in that room to supply half a dozen funerals with all the gloom they might require; the whole place exhaled the essence of a resentful depression that was as plainly to be sniffed up into the nostrils as the smells of alcohol and arnica and liniment which burdened the air and gave the accompaniment of a drug-store smell to the picture.

As I halted at the door on my way out of this melancholy spot to the scarcely less melancholy atmosphere of the open, having learned that Rodney was not really injured, somebody bumped into me, jostling me to one side; and, to my astonishment, I saw that the impetuous intruder was Major Stone. I had not known until then that he had followed me here, and I did not know now what errand could have brought him along. But he did not keep me wondering long; in fact, he did not keep me wondering at all. He burst in on them with a great “Woof!” of indignation.

Before scarcely any one there had realised that a newcomer, arriving unheralded and all unexpected, was in their midst, he stood in the middle of the littered floor, glaring about him and snorting loudly. His first words, too, were calculated not only to startle them but deeply to profane the semi-privacy of their grief and their humiliation.