The Obvious Athlete

JUST why a decrepit, pedagogue like me should have been called out to judge an event in the field sports, is much of a mystery. But so the matter fell out; and I came from the stadium at the end of the day well primed with thought. In fact, no better morsel of mental pabulum could have come to me had I lain in wait for it a solid year.

One is likely to sit behind his desk and do a deal of thinking in the course of a high-school semester. He has opportunity to peer into the faces of the youth, to hear their voices, and to fancy sometimes in a flight of enthusiasm over the Knight’s Tale or the Faerie Queene, that he has laid hold of t he popular mind and is guiding it surely into habits of high thinking. At such times he feels the leaven working, and working toward a glorious end. Well, I once liked to believe in the efficacy of a literary education. Perhaps I do still. But let me tell you what I learned on the field that afternoon in May.

In the stadium ten high schools of the Northwest were at odds for the championship. Section after section of gayly ribboned boys and girls waved their pennants and shouted for their favorites. Now and again the cheer-leaders, tanned and alert with hatless exercise, stood out on tiptoe before the crowd and brandished their megaphones. Scattered promiscuously among the ‘rooters,’ solid business men smoked and chatted with a holiday air. The town was out for the championship; it was the people’s stadium, the people’s school. The athletes themselves were flesh and bone of the people who sat on the concrete benches, and the spectators were heart and soul in the games. Proud of it all, of course; for any business man amongst them could look back a decade to the time when his elder children went to school in a wooden building, and the boys preempted vacant lots for athletic exercise. Then a house-to-house canvass for money had ended with a subscription of $100,000, and this solid structure on which they were sitting was a monument to the energy and public spirit of the town.

’That’s Wayland,’ remarked a comfortable-looking father as he pointed across the field. ‘Coaches the team, you know. They pay him nineteen hundred — a trifle more than the ordinary profs get. The school board had to stretch the salary schedule to get him, but they fixed it all up by a little private subscription on the side. He’s worth it, too; fine clean fellow to have working with the boys. And then just think of the advertising the town gets from a record-smashing team like this.’

As I worked my way down through the crowd toward the training-quarters I passed a table set out in full view of the spectators, and here were arranged the trophies of the meet. One large loving-cup was engraved with the compliments of the University Club to the school which could win the contest for three years in succession; two smaller receptacles of like nature represented the local alumni of two eastern colleges and were to be awarded respectively to the winning team and to the individual athlete scoring the highest number of points for the day. A congregation of near-athletes, boys who had not quite qualified for the Interscholastic, encircled the table and fingered the trophies enviously. Others of the crowd trailed out devotedly in the wake of particular heroes who strode up and down the track, majestic in their panoply of bath-robe and calked shoes.

Records were to shift that day; one could feel it in the air. There was full consent for such business in the weather and in the admiring throng of fathers, mothers, and sweethearts filling the horseshoe above. Heron, the highjumper, was classed an easy winner and was confessedly out for the national championship. The dashes and hurdles were already ours by right of public concession. I was aware of all this as I took the list of entries and called the roll for the high jump.

The coach was a man of affairs; he knew what the public wanted and was there to give them entertainment, with no dawdling between events. So the 100-yard dash and the low hurdles were out of the way before my men on the field had fairly warmed up. Then the first lap of the 440 came by, and I halted the jump while we watched the finish of the race. There was Billings in the lead, his broad nostrils dilated racehorse-wise, and a collected expression on his face that he had never shown to me in our discussions of Emerson. I began to feel a certain admiration for Billings, he was so evidently efficient; the muscles of his clean-cut calves were sliding in poetic rhythm and his whole body was beautifully concentrated in the race. I found myself shouting incontinently as he sprang by me on the third lap; and, truth to tell, I was enjoying the unwonted sense of abandon hugely. You know, we fellows behind the desk get so accustomed to furnishing the show that we can’t walk down street of a Saturday afternoon without feeling that all eyes are upon us. Well, I shed that feeling then and there, I had stepped down, and was protagonist no longer. I had begun to feel thoroughly lost and happy in the crowd, when suddenly, as the quarter-milers swung into the fourth lap, a snarl went up from the jumpers around me. Looking across the home-stretch I caught sight of a frail boy with thin legs and a kodak climbing from the balustrade to the cinder-path below.

‘Get out of that,’ I shouted indiscreetly. ‘Don’t you see they’re coming?’ And as the fellow climbed sheepishly back to his seat I recognized him. It was Chalmers, the boy who reads Emerson and Thoreau with an understanding heart. There was reproach in his eye, but while the magnificent Billings was pounding past to the finish I could feel only a sort of tolerant pity for a boy who understands Emerson.

The grand-stand was ready now for the high jump, for the weaker men had dropped off, and Heron had begun to knead his calves as he sat sunning himself in his bath-robe. Now Heron was no mean fellow. He had proved himself much of a gentleman in his ordinary dealings with me, and had a reputation for brains. But this matter of the high jump seemed to have gone to his head a bit, for he shouted at old Jim, the handy man about the place, to dig up the ground beneath the standards, abusing him roundly meanwhile for his negligence in so important a situation. Old Jim was in demand for hurdles just then, so he came running up with his pick and threw it to the crowd of athletes sitting about in an idle group. But as he turned away hurriedly to complete his other task Heron called him back.

’Don’t you touch that pick, you fellows,’ he bawled. ‘Let the old man do it; that’s what he’s here for.’

So while Heron nursed his precious legs in t he sun, old gray-haired Jim dug up the soil, and then, with bent back and shuffling gait, hastened off to make himself as ubiquitous as possible. And as I watched him go I felt a little put out at Jim, for had n’t he tried to impose a bit upon these splendid fellows here who were conserving every ounce of energy for public exhibition? As I watched Heron relax his body and gather himself beautifully to clear the bar at six feet, I became very sure that old Jim deserved a reprimand at least. Then came the great preparation for a record jump, and in the confusion old Jim for the time was forgotten. A flurry in the grand stand followed the cheerleader’s announcement that Heron had cleared six feet and would now try for the world’s interscholastic record. Old men and matronly ladies, policemen, coaches, students, all crushed and strained toward a favorable outlook from the grand stand. Three press photographers, their tripods fixed in the cinder-path, and their heads cowled, stood tense to catch and fix the great reality of the afternoon. It was done — six feet two and a half. The congestion in the grand stand found relief, and Heron was borne to the training quarters on the shoulders of his fellows.

‘A good jump that was,’ remarked Jim as he tipped the standards into a wheelbarrow. I nodded and forced an expression of bonhomie, for Jim and I were really friends, and we had consulted now and then over some of Jim’s domestic difficulties. Now, there may have been ordinarily some discrepancy between my point of view and his, for I had read the philosophers in my youth and still clung tight to certain well-tested notions of reality. It had been my diversion particularly to philosophize on Jim’s relation to the universe, and I had often watched him from my window in the morning hours making a careful round of the stadium, filling here and scraping there, and tamping portions of the cinder-path with a butt of heavy timber, I used to wonder how long the old man would last at t he work, for he was getting frail and could scarcely drag himself home of an evening. Then the whole tragedy of his life would push itself forward in my mind, the old, old tragedy of the working man: home mortgaged, wife with child, industrious boy working his way through school, the father spending each day more than his allowance of strength to keep his family under cover.

It was just as new and terrible to me as if there had been no such strait in the world before. This was the real matter that counted, or ought to count, with some intelligence somewhere. It was the real tragedy underlying the daily comedy of the athletic field, — a business of the soul, which must crop out and make its appeal some time. Perhaps the whole splendid school-plant, with its Romanesque towers, its halls hung with paintings of the masters, its classrooms equipped with the best apparatus of our Aryan civilization, the great amphitheatre lighted and parked and set with thirty thousand seats of stone, where the youth of the town took their pleasure — perhaps all this existed only for the sake of Jim who was down there working with a lame back, but in some unintelligible manner working out his own salvation under the dead weight of it all.

I used to speculate in this wise, peeping beneath the surface of things to catch glimpses of reality; but at the present moment, when Jim was tipping the standards into the wheelbarrow, I felt that my metaphysical insight had deserted me. Instead, I was intensely conscious that Jim was slow in moving those standards, and that much remained to be done which he was n’t getting at. But I was keenly alive also to a new kind of comradeship between us.

‘Jim,’ I said, ‘we’re lucky to be here to-day. It’s magnificent — a world’s record, and you and I officiating. You set up those standards for the jump, did n’t you, Jim? and I held the upper end of the tape when the A.A.U. committee took the measurement. How’d you like to be in Heron’s shoes today, Jim? His name is flashing over the wires right now to every corner of the continent, and the New York papers are clamoring for his photograph. I tell you, Jim, it’s the real thing. I’d slave another twenty years behind the desk and never whine if I knew that it would help the school breed one more world-beater like that. How about it? It’s worth the money, is n’t it? We’re the under-dogs, you and I; the load’s pretty heavy on us sometimes, but as the poet used to say back in New England,

So smile, Jim, smile. You know what I used to say: it’s the great social age, the era of upward-surging mediocrity, one man pulling for the other, and all for the uplift of the mass. You’ve said these things yourself at a Socialist meeting; I’ve heard you say them. But we were wrong, Jim. We’re not humble servants of the community any longer. That idea’s obsolete, and we ’ ve got to get over it. We’re working for Heron; he’s the man for the time. Don’t you see that every living body in the crowd has given him its heart and soul? There was a meeting, one time, of the Chinese Imperial Academy to honor a poet of the empire; and before the assembled gray-heads the Emperor Kien Lung spoke in thiswise: “An hundred years of æsthetic culture culminate in the jubilee of to-day.” That sentiment fits right here, so smile, Jim; we’ve been making history this afternoon.’

Jim smiled broadly and rubbed his lame back. ’I used to go in for wrestling some on the back lots when I was a lad, and the young bucks used to say that I was cock of the walk. I know how the lad feels. That was a fine jump for a boy; he’s got the making of a man in him sure.’

So Jim departed with his wheelbarrow, and the immortal Heron, a silver trophy in each hand, was bowing gracefully to the dispersing throng as I passed out to the street. I was in holiday mood, so I searched my pocket for a penny and bought an ‘ extra,’ opening it to the athletic page where Heron’s face appeared almost life-size. Aboard the street car I was still engaged in a cursory perusal of the sporting print when I caught sight of the studious Chalmers edging his way toward me through the crowd.

‘My boy,’ I said, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder, ‘my boy, give it up, it’s no go any more. Forget your Thoreau and be a world’s champion in the high jump. That’s the real thing.’

O Youth, Youth, what are you driving at, or what arc we driving you to? Who am I with my paltry baits of poetry and art to lure you in the path which I profess to tread ? What hold have I on your love or thought or will, I who peddle my unrealities through five disrupted hours of the week? I had looked to your minds for enthusiasm over the baubles in my peddler’s pack, and at one time fondly convinced myself that I had won it. Foolish fellow! I must have forgotten the lust of youth, to plume myself on such an achievement, or ever to mistake your urbane curiosity for anything so spontaneous as a thrill.

What are the Transcendentalists to you who transcend thought in action every hour you live; and by what known authority can I lay claim to your interest? Do your mothers and fathers and elder brothers wax warm of an evening over the poets, or have you ever heard the names Rembrandt or Holbein upon the market-place? I wonder now at the power tradition has placed upon me, and pray God that I have not been too arrogant in the use of it. I thank you kindly for the proper show of attention with which you have regarded my vagaries.

Matthew Arnold once spoke of the power of the man and the power of the time. When these two forces meet in fortunate consent we gallop onward at a happy pace, pedagogues, parents, children and all. I thought last week that we were going this pace together and might arrive ere long at the sunny borders of some Pantisocracy and all be glad together. But then I was unlearned in the wisdom of youth; perhaps if I had graciously held my tongue for a season you might have taught me the trend of things. You might have told me that somewhere beyond the walls of my classroom the man and the hour had met; you might even have challenged me to battle in the arena till I could rightly gauge them both. In fact you did that very thing, and I thank you heartily for the instruction. I have entered your territory naked and empty-handed, stripped bare of the armor which tradition gave. Your champion has swept me off my feet and tossed me against the paling of the lists. Nay more, he has won me to his side, so that I pick myself up and rush onward, mad and happy as yourselves. I have pitted my power against yours and I have lost. How can you follow me further?