“Your unabridged edition, while it has no doubt 281 saved my sanity, has robbed us both of food and drink,” he stated. “There’s no time left, even for friendly argument, if you want to be there when it happens. You won’t need any ticket this time––you’ll be with me.”
Even at that they were late, for when they paused a moment in the entrance of the huge, bowl-shaped amphitheater, a sharp gust of hand-clapping, broken by shrill whistling and shriller cat-calls, met them. Far out across that room Old Jerry saw two figures, glistening damp under the lights, crawl through the ropes that penned in a high-raised platform in the very center of the building, and disappear up an aisle.
He turned a dismayed face to Morehouse who, with one hand clutching his arm, was deeply engrossed in a whispered conversation with a man at the entrance––too engrossed to see. But when the newspaperman turned at last to lead the way down into the body of the house he explained in one brief word:
“Preliminary,” he said.
Old Jerry did not understand. But half dragged, half led, he followed blindly after his guide, until he found himself wedged into a seat at the very edge of that roped-off, canvas-padded area. It was a single long bench with a narrow board desk, set elbow high, running the entire length in front of it. Peering half fearfully from the corner of his eye Old Jerry realized 282 that there were at least a full dozen men beside themselves wedged in before it, and that, like Morehouse, there was a block of paper before each man.
The awe with which the immensity of the place had stunned him began to lessen a little and allowed him to look around. Wherever he turned a sea of faces met him––faces strangely set and strained. Even under the joviality of those closest to him he saw the tightened sinews of their jaws. Those further away were blurred by the smoke that rose in a never-thinning cloud, blurred until there was nothing but indistinct blotches of white in the outer circles of seats.
And when he lifted his head and looked above him, he gasped. They were there, too, tiny, featureless dots of white, like nothing so much as holes in a black wall, in the smoke-drift that alternately hid and revealed them.
Faces of men––faces of men, wherever he turned his head! Faces strained and tense as they waited. That terrible tensity got under his skin after a while; it crept in upon him until his spine crawled a little, as if from cold. It was quiet, too; oddly quiet in spite of the dull mumble that rose from thousands of throats.
Twice that hush was broken––twice when men laden with pails of water, and bottles and sponges, and thick white towels crowded through the ropes in front of him. Then the whole house was swept by 283 a premature storm of hand-clapping for the men who, stripped save for the flat shoes upon their feet and the trunks about their hips, followed them into the ring.
“Preliminary!” Morehouse had said, and there had been something of disinterested contempt in his voice. Old Jerry felt, too, the entire great crowd’s disinterested, good-natured tolerance. They were waiting for something else.