by Frank Norris
The cheers and the yelling were deafening; old men were standing up, waving their hats and screaming like schoolboys. The bleachers were frantic and roaring from end to end; everyone was on his feet, and the thunder of the shouting was as the thunder of artillery. Those of the rival college were tensely silent, holding their breath, and digging their nails into their palms.
It might have been a touchdown from the middle of the field had not the runner slipped in trying to dodge the full back. But he staggered an instant upon a strip of slippery turf, and before he could recover himself, the full back flung himself at him, caught him around the thighs between waist and knee, and threw him backward to the ground.
“Forty yards, anyhow!” shouted Travis.
At the same time, while the teams were streaming up for the next scrimmage, a young man with a policeman’s rattle jumped up on the railing of the bleachers, and raising a very hoarse voice to the limit of its pitch, inquired if there was anything in particular the matter with Adler. As one man the bleachers thundered back, “He is all right, you bet, every time!”
He of the rattle seemed to fail to understand, for he asked again, Who was all right? — and as the shout lifted itself again, Travis joined her treble to the huge gamut of sounds and cried back, “Adler!”
“Who?” asked the policeman’s rattle again.
“Adler!” shouted Travis and the rest.
And this was the way they were first introduced.
Travis saw him again after the game was over, as their carriage passed close to the coach that held the team. He was just from the field. His nose guard was flung back over his head like the raised visor of a knight’s helmet, and his long straight hair hung far over his eyes. He had not yet recovered his wind, and was panting just as you have seen a locomotive pant at the terminus of its run. He was yet chewing his gum, and was alternately shouting for a lime or a cigarette.
She remembered now having seen him before at the practice game early in the season. At that time he had been under the whip and spur of the coach. She remembered this coach as a big man in a blue cloth cap, who continually wore an expression of hopeless disgust upon his face, who never seemed pleased at anything the team could do, and who went about the campus shouting, “Play it up sharp, now!” from principle. It seemed very strange now to see him delightedly slapping Adler on the back and almost leaping in the air for joy. So she began to feel an admiration for this great Adler, and commenced to experience a share of that hero worship which was paid by the men of his own college.
As they were all talking of the game all the way home, Travis’s brother remarked to her escort, “Did you catch on to that trick of Adler’s of grabbing the runner around the waist and pulling him through the line with him?”
The escort, who was opposed to football, made a vague sound of assent.
“I noticed it!” exclaimed Travis.
“He’s just got on to that this season,” said the brother. “Jove! but that was a fine run of his,” he continued. “Why, those tackles could not hold him at all; they were just fruit for him.”
“I will never go to see another game of football again,” said Mrs. Hallett, “and I don’t think your father ought to allow you to go, Travis. I don’t see where it is any better than a prize fight, and so brutal, too. Time and again I saw eight or ten men pile right up on top of the one with the ball; it was just a mercy that his life was not crushed out of him. It is shameful. Someone ought to do something.”
“I quite agree with you, Mrs. Hallett,” said the escort, “and, besides, the effects upon these young men are very bad, too; they think that that is all college is for. It takes their mind from their regular work and teaches them coarse and brutal habits.”
“And then,” went on Mrs. Hallett, “what is the use of it all? What benefit do they derive from it? Can it ever be of any use to them afterwards? To me, it seems very silly to see twenty-two young men in the field and twenty-two thousand around it get so worked up over such a triviality.”
“That is so,” said the escort. “If it was baseball, now, where one can see some display of science and skill, I could see the attraction; but this is a mere pushing and slugging contest.”
“What fruit!” said Travis’s brother, under his breath.
A week later Travis met Adler at a tennis tournament where he was the winner. She could hardly recognize the graceful young man in the white flannels and dainty-coloured sash as the dirty, gasping, canvas-clad savage of the game. There was a picturesqueness about both costumes, but it was hard to reconcile them as being the outward adornments of the same person. Later on, however, she had occasion to admire him in a full-dress suit, for he fell in love with her at once, and began to call with unvarying regularity.
Adler took Travis to the theatre about a month later, after he had gone out of training and was permitted to be up after ten o’clock. It was the first time he had been out with her in the evening without a chaperon. They had never been very much alone together, and so on this occasion felt very mildly and vaguely adventurous. Adler thought he had never seen Travis in better spirits.
It was a good company and a good play, but in a scene of the fourth act one of the actors was atrociously and unpardonably weak, and the audience began to laugh.
“It’s too bad!” said Travis. “Why do they laugh? — it only spoils the play for themselves. When I go to a play I go to be amused and not to criticize. I can get just as much fun out of a Wild West melodrama or a real-fire-engine-and-live-horses play as the very worst gallery god. Don’t you know, you don’t get your money’s worth if you don’t. It’s just a matter of cheating yourself.”
Adler was not listening to her at all. His eyes were fixed just above the heavy stucco mouldings at the angle of one of the topmost boxes, which was vacant, and he was in a fair way to make his teeth meet through his nether lip in his effort to keep from crying out, and was holding himself to his seat with both hands to avoid springing to his feet. At the point in the plaster ornamentation where he was looking there was a deep joint, or fissure, where two parts of the mouldings had not been properly joined, and had by the settling of the building widened to form a long deep crack, that reached back to the lathing and woodwork behind. Down this crack Adler saw a dull and vibrating glow of red, and out of it was curling a very faint blue haze.
Mechanically he reached underneath his seat for his hat. Then he said very quietly to Travis, “Come, let’s get out of this.”
She turned to him, surprised.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said, “when we get outside; only come now, and quick — quietly,” he added as she hurriedly reached for her cape.
With one hand under her arm and half-risen from his seat, he was listening very intently for the sound of one certain word which might at any moment now be shouted through the house. He was still listening for it as he passed out into the aisle with her, and took her arm in a larger and surer grip, and braced himself for a sudden start at an instant’s warning.
“Are you sick?” whispered Travis, as they moved toward the door.
Adler did not hear her, because he was measuring the distance that yet lay between him and the dull green valves marked “Exit.”
One third of the way up the aisle he heard something drop with a crash and knew without turning his head that it was the plaster cornice falling in. Then he heard what he had been listening for, and a man sitting near the boxes in the gallery jumped back over his seat and shouted, “Fire!” Adler was ready, and started forward at the sound as a sprinter starts from the pistol. He was nearly halfway up the aisle with her before it became blocked and his headway checked. In the midst of the rising tumult in the house behind him he heard a little strident bell whirring, and the asbestos curtain dropped with a long whish and a bang, the iron curtain rattling down behind it. Then a fire detail with a pick hatchet in his hand swung himself from the prompt side of the flies over into the highest gallery, and began hastily loosening a fire plug.
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br /> Since the first warning shout there had been no outcry, and as yet the only sounds were the whirring of the fire-drill signal, a furious chopping and pounding somewhere over the stage, and the ominous shuffle and grind of the thousands of feet. Now Adler saw the helmet and blue shoulders of a lieutenant of police above the heads of the crowd against the wall of the auditorium, and heard him shouting:
“There is no danger. For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t crowd, and we’ll all get safely out!”
Adler could hear him repeating this long after he was unable to see him.
Several others in the crowd took up his cry, and soon many were crying out, “Don’t crowd! Don’t crowd!” So far, the audience on the whole had behaved very well, and as yet there was no panic.
“It’s all right, little girl,” he said to Travis. “Don’t you be afraid; we’ll get out of this all right.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” she answered bravely.
They were moving forward slowly, and were even near enough to the door to hear the clang of the engines arriving in the street outside. A broad feather of water spurted out across the auditorium from the section of hose that the detail had screwed to the fire plug, and the fire-drill bell still whirred steadily on.
“Don’t crowd, gentlemen!” cried the officer. “Don’t crowd. There is plenty of time. We’re all going to get safely out!”
As he was speaking the last words a whole section of plaster on the wall back of the top gallery leaned outward and fell with a great noise, and a huge cloud of dense black smoke, shot through with flickering tongues of fire and hundreds of winking sparks, came billowing out into the body of the house.
“No danger, gentlemen!” shouted the police lieutenant. “For God’s sake, don’t crowd.”
He might as well have spoken to stampeded cattle.
Adler and Travis were now in the middle of a solid jam, mad with terror and excitement, and men and women were fighting with each other with their teeth and their nails for the life they loved. People jumped over one another’s shoulders and were borne along by the crowd like floats upon a stream. There was a fearful noise of shouting and screaming, and the sounds of the trampling and stamping of feet, and the worse sounds of blows and grappling. A thick, yellow smoke surrounded them now, choking and blinding them. Adler had to throw back his head and gasp for air, like a drowning man. Sparks and little charred chips began falling upon them from the galleries, and he could catch the pungent smell of burning hair as the cushioned upholstery of the seats burned. Then a part of the highest gallery crumbled in, and a man began to scream that he was burning; and for the first time Adler heard the roar and crackle of the fire. It might have been behind him or above him — he could not tell. The smoke was so thick that he could only see for a radius of a few feet. Through the murk he could catch glimpses of struggling, shadowy forms, of clutching hands coming up from the depths below, and now and then a face would be turned toward him, horribly white and writhing — just such sights and faces as one sees in a Doré Inferno.
The pressure of the crowd around him became almost unbearable; and what with this and the choking smoke there were times when he could not breathe. Ladies were separated from their escorts, or else deserted by them, and once Adler caught sight of a man with a sword-cane, trying with it to open a passage for himself through the press. Several of the crowd had either fainted or succumbed to the smoke; and as Adler went trampling on, driven by the momentum behind, he felt hands and arms reaching and clutching at his legs and feet. But there were other heaps that he trod upon which were quite still and inert.
At last he was vomited forth into the foyer, and still dragging Travis with him, stumbled out into a freer space, where the smoke was not so dense, and the press not so close, and where he had a chance to pause an instant and determine the situation.
He and Travis had been sitting in one of the front rows of the house, so that when the rush came, although they had managed to get a considerable start, they were, nevertheless, among the last to reach the foyer. Here, upon either side, the stairways from the galleries led down to the common entrance of the house. When the real rush began two solid columns had streamed down these stairways and, meeting before the door, had by means of the greater impetus gained by coming down the stairs forced a way through that part of the crowd coming from the lower portion of the house, and had now cut them off from the entrance entirely. A greater part of those in the pit had, however, managed to make their escape before the rush down the gallery stairways had begun, so when Adler and Travis reached this point they found themselves in comparatively freer space, but cut off from further progress by the struggling columns from the galleries in front of them.
Adler cast a quick glance around him. Behind him the auditorium seemed like a furnace, and he felt the hot breath of the fire coming by puffs through the scorched valves of the doors. There was no time to lose. Outside he could catch the rapid panting and coughing of the engines at work pumping.
Directly in front of him he saw that the crowd from the galleries, meeting each other head on, had come to a deadlock, and that the only chance of breaking through the masses was at their point of impact; a sudden pressure at this point might succeed in breaking up the deadlock, and bending the opposing forces outward in a V-shaped form, through which one might be able to struggle to the street beyond.
But where did he get the trained eye and the coolness of judgment that told him this was the thing to do, or what experience had given him the faculty of rapid thought in emergency and the power of acting quickly upon it? How had he kept his head through the fierce excitement of the last few moments, or how had he managed not to lose his feet while he was clutched at and dragged at from behind and from below? The crush and lurch of the crowd was but the old scrimmage of gridiron field, and the confused, blind rush that enveloped him was no worse than the trained and disciplined charges of the revolving V or the flying wedge, and for one brief instant Adler thanked his God that he was a’Varsity half back and knew how to use his weight and wits.
There was not one minute to be wasted now, because the heads of the brass nails on the exits behind him were fiercely hot. Adler knew just what was to be done and how he was to do it.
He stepped back to gain headway, put his arm tightly around Travis, and ran in with head and shoulders bent very low. He had done this hundreds of times before in practice and match games, when his captain called upon him to buck the centre, but never before had he done it with such iron determination as now. He had Travis around the waist and was dragging her with him through the way he was opening in the crowd. It was the same trick that Travis’s brother had seen him use in the game, and it worked with the same success.
He had rammed the throngs in front of him just at the point where they had met, and so great was the pressure from the rear of either column that it required only a comparatively insignificant force to break them apart — and Adler supplied this force. You can get perfectly analogous conditions by pressing the tips of your index fingers against each other point to point. As long as you maintain them in a straight line with one another they will remain as they are, but deviate them from this position by ever so little, and they will at once break outward or inward in the shape of a V.
Adler began to be really frightened only after they got out into the street, and someone was helping him to carry Travis, who had fainted, into a drug store at the corner. He had ceased to feel brave and cool; his knees knocked together when he thought of what they had both escaped. He was quite unfit to pose as a hero, because he felt weak, and sick at his stomach, and because his hat was jammed down immovably over his eyes and ears.
But he forgot all about this, and the world and all things visible were turned upside down when he went home in the hired coupe with Travis, with her head on his shoulder, and his arm around her waist.
Adler is captain of the team now, and next season his name will be in everyone’s mouth, and you will see his picture in the dai
lies and illustrated weeklies, and you will hear his weight and condition discussed by young ladies and gentlemen who do not know him, across supper tables and between dances. And the year after that he graduates and is to be married to Travis Hallett, and is to go with her to Europe for a while, after which he will go into business in old Mr. Hallett’s office.
“But,” said the escort, who did not approve of the game of football, “nothing was proved. A man does not spend his life in pulling young ladies out of burning theatres. Because his football training was of service to him on that occasion, it does not go to show that it will ever be of any other material benefit to him hereafter.”
“I think you will find, however,” answered Mr. Hallett, rubbing the stubble on his chin the wrong way, “I think you will find that the same qualities that make a good football man would make a good soldier; and a good soldier, sir, is a man good enough to be any girl’s husband.”