At the Old Ballgame (17 page)

“Captain,” says Tom, “listen to reason! I tell you this girl was flirting with me all through the show—”

“That's what they all say! If she was flirting with you, why did she make a holler when you braced her?”

“I—I don't know,” says Tom. “Maybe she didn't recognise me.”

“No, I'll bet she didn't!”

“But, captain, I sent her my card and she sent back word—”

“Oh, shut up! What's your name?” Murray shot that one at him quick and Tom took a good long time to answer it.

“Smith,” says he at last. “John Smith.” That raised a laugh on the other side of the screen.

“Well,” says the captain, “unless we can get him identified he can do his bit on the rock pile under the name of Smith as well as any other, eh, boys?”

“Sure thing!” said the plain-clothes men.

“The rock pile!” says Toms.

“That's what I said—rock pile! Kind of scares you, don't it. There won't be any bail for you to jump or any fine for you to pay. We've had a lot of complaints about mashers lately and some squeals in the newspapers. You'll be made an example of. Chickens are protected by the game laws of this state, and it's time some of the lady-killers found it out.”

Tom began to plead, but he might just as well have kept quiet. They whirled in and gave him the third degree—asked him what he had been pinched for the last time and a whole lot of stuff. We expected he'd tell his name and send for Uncle Billy to get him out, but for some reason or other he fought shy of that. We couldn't understand his play at first, but we knew why soon enough. The door back of the screen opened again.

“Cap'n,” says a strange voice, “there's some newspaper men here.”

Well, that was all a stall, of course. We didn't let the newspaper men in on it because we wanted them for a whip to hold over Tom's head in the future.

“What do they want?” asks Murray.

“They're after this masher story,” says the stranger. “I don't know who tipped it off to 'em, but they've seen the woman and got a statement from her. She says she thinks this fellow is a baseball player.”

“I wouldn't care if he was the president of the League!” says the captain. “You know the orders we got to break up mashing and bring 'em in, no matter who they are. Here we've got one of 'em dead to rights; and it's the rock pile for him, you can bet your life on it!”

“And serve him right,” says the stranger. “But, cap'n, wouldn't it be a good thing to identify him? These newspapermen say they know all the ballplayers. Shall we have 'em in to give him the once-over?”

“I'll send for 'em in a minute,” says Murray.

That was the shot that brought Tom off his perch with a yell.

“Captain,” he begs, “anything but that! I'd rather you sent me up for six months—yes, or shot me! If this gets into the papers it'll——! Oh, say, if you have any heart at all—please—please——Oh, you don't understand!”

We didn't understand either, but Tom made it plain. I'm not going to write all he said; it made my face burn to sit there and listen to it. It took all the fun out of the joke for me. It seems that this rough kidder—this practical joker who never cared a rap how much he hurt anybody else's feelings—had some pretty tender feelings of his own. He opened up his heart and told that police captain something that he never had told us—told him about the little girl back in the home town who was waiting for him, and how she wouldn't ever be able to hold up her head again if the story got into the papers and he was disgraced.

“It ain't for me, captain,” he begs; “it's for her. You wouldn't want her shamed just because I've acted like a fool, would you? Think what it means to the girl, captain! Oh, if there's anything you can do——”

Uncle Billy beat me to it. I was already on my feet when he took two jumps and knocked the screen flat on the floor.

“That's enough!” says Uncle Billy. We had planned to give Tom the horse-laugh when the screen came down, but somehow none of us could laugh just then. If I live to be as old as Hans Wagner I'll never forget the expression on Tom O'Connor's face as he blinked across the room and saw us all sitting there, like an audience in a theatre.

“Tom,” says Uncle Bill, “I'm sorry, but this is what always happens with a practical joke. It starts out to be funny, but it gets away from you and then the first thing you know somebody is hurt. You've had a lot of fun with this ball club, my boy, and some of it was pretty rough fun, but—I guess we'll all agree to call it square.”

Tom got on his feet, shaking a little and white to the lips. He couldn't seem to find his voice for a minute and he ran his fingers across his mouth before he spoke.

“Is—is this a joke?” says he.

“It started out to be,” says Uncle Billy. “I'm sorry.”

Tom didn't say another word and he didn't look at any of us. He went out of the room alone and left us there. I wanted to go after him and tell him not to take it so hard; but I thought of the way he had shamed Al Jorgenson, I thought of the girl who wouldn't even speak to Holliday again, I thought of the four kids who went home broken-hearted, all on Tom's account—and I changed my mind. It was a bitter dose, but I decided not to sweeten it any for him.

Tom O'Connor isn't funny any more, and I think he is slowly making up his mind that we're not such a bad outfit after all. To this day the mention of the name of Smith makes him blush, so I guess that in spite of the fact that he's never opened his mouth about it since, he hasn't forgotten what his own stuff feels like.

The Pitcher and the Plutocrat

P.G. Wodehouse

The main difficulty in writing a story is to convey to
the reader clearly yet tersely the natures and dispositions of one's leading characters. Brevity, brevity—that is the cry. Perhaps, after all, the playbill style is the best. In this drama of love, baseball, frenzied finance, and tainted millions, then, the principals are as follows, in their order of entry:

 

Isabel Rackstraw (a peach)

Clarence Van Puyster (a Greek god)

Old Man Van Puyster (a proud old aristocrat)

Old Man Rackstraw (a tainted millionaire)

 

More about Clarence later. For the moment let him go as a Greek god. There were other sides, too, to Old Man Rackstraw's character; but for the moment let him go as a Tainted Millionaire. Not that it is satisfactory. It is too mild. He was
the
Tainted Millionaire. The Tainted Millions of other Tainted Millionaires were as attar of roses compared with the Tainted Millions of Tainted Millionaire Rackstraw. He preferred his millions tainted. His attitude toward an untainted million was that of the sportsman toward the sitting bird. These things are purely a matter of taste. Some people like Limburger cheese.

It was at a charity bazaar that Isabel and Clarence first met. Isabel was presiding over the Billiken, Teddy Bear, and Fancy Goods stall. There she stood, that slim, radiant girl, buncoing the Younger Set out of its father's hard-earned with a smile that alone was nearly worth the money, when she observed, approaching, the handsomest man she had ever seen. It was—this is not one of those mystery stories—it was Clarence Van Puyster. Over the heads of the bevy of gilded youths who clustered round the stall their eyes met. A thrill ran through Isabel. She dropped her eyes. The next moment Clarence had bucked center; the Younger Set had shredded away like a mist; and he was leaning toward her, opening negotiations for the purchase of a yellow Teddy Bear at sixteen times its face value.

He returned at intervals during the afternoon. Over the second Teddy Bear they became friendly; over the third, intimate. He proposed as she was wrapping up the fourth Golliwog, and she gave him her heart and the parcel simultaneously. At six o'clock, carrying four Teddy Bears, seven photograph frames, five Golliwogs, and a Billiken, Clarence went home to tell the news to his father.

Clarence, when not at college, lived with his only surviving parent in an old red-brick house at the north end of Washington Square. The original Van Puyster had come over in Governor Stuyvesant's time in one of the then fashionable ninety-four-day boats. Those were the stirring days when they were giving away chunks of Manhattan Island in exchange for trading-stamps; for the bright brain which conceived the idea that the city might possibly at some remote date extend above Liberty Street had not come into existence. The original Van Puyster had acquired a square mile or so in the heart of things for ten dollars cash and a quarter interest in a pedler's outfit. “The Columbus Echo and Vespucci Intelligencer” gave him a column and a half under the heading: “Reckless Speculator. Prominent Citizen's Gamble in Land.” On the proceeds of that deal his descendants had led quiet, peaceful lives ever since. If any of them ever did a day's work, the family records are silent on the point. Blood was their long suit, not Energy. They were plain, homely folk, with a refined distaste for wealth and vulgar hustle. They lived simply, without envy of their richer fellow citizens, on their three hundred thousand dollars a year. They asked no more. It enabled them to entertain on a modest scale; the boys could go to college, the girls buy an occasional new frock. They were satisfied.

Having dressed for dinner, Clarence proceeded to the library, where he found his father slowly pacing the room. Silver-haired old Vansuyther Van Puyster seemed wrapped in thought. And this was unusual, for he was not given to thinking. To be absolutely frank, the old man had just about enough brain to make a jay-bird fly crooked, and no more.

“Ah, my boy,” he said, looking up as Clarence entered. “Let us go in to dinner. I have been awaiting you for some little time now. I was about to inquire as to your whereabouts. Let us be going.”

Mr. Van Puyster always spoke like that. This was due to Blood.

Until the servants had left them to their coffee and cigarettes, the conversation was desultory and commonplace. But when the door had closed, Mr. Van Puyster leaned forward.

“My boy,” he said quietly, “we are ruined.”

Clarence looked at him inquiringly.

“Ruined much?” he asked.

“Paupers,” said his father. “I doubt if when all is over, I shall have much more than a bare fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year.”

A lesser man would have betrayed agitation, but Clarence was a Van Puyster. He lit a cigarette.

“Ah,” he said calmly. “How's that?”

Mr. Van Puyster toyed with his coffee-spoon.

“I was induced to speculate—rashly, I fear—on the advice of a man I chanced to meet at a public dinner, in the shares of a certain mine. I did not thoroughly understand the matter, but my acquaintance appeared to be well versed in such operations, so I allowed him to—and, well, in fact, to cut a long story short, I am ruined.”

“Who was the fellow?”

“A man of the name of Rackstraw. Daniel Rackstraw.”

“Daniel Rackstraw!”

Not even Clarence's training and traditions could prevent a slight start as he heard the name.

“Daniel Rackstraw,” repeated his father. “A man, I fear, not entirely honest. In fact it seems that he has made a very large fortune by similar transactions. Friends of mine, acquainted with these matters, tell me his behavior toward me amounted practically to theft. However, for myself I care little. We can rough it, we of the old Van Puyster stock. If there is but fifty thousand a year left, well—I must make it serve. It is for your sake that I am troubled, my poor boy. I shall be compelled to stop your allowance. I fear you will be obliged to adopt some profession.” He hesitated for a moment. “In fact, work,” he added.

Clarence drew at his cigarette.

“Work?” he echoed thoughtfully. “Well, of course, mind you, fellows
do
work. I met a man at the club only yesterday who knew a fellow who had met a man whose cousin worked.”

He reflected for a while.

“I shall pitch,” he said suddenly.

“Pitch, my boy?”

“Sign on as a professional ballplayer.”

His father's fine old eyebrows rose a little.

“But, my boy, er—the—ah—family name. Our—shall I say
noblesse oblige
? Can a Van Puyster pitch and not be defiled?”

“I shall take a new name,” said Clarence. “I will call myself Brown.” He lit another cigarette. “I can get signed on in a minute. McGraw will jump at me.”

This was no idle boast. Clarence had had a good college education, and was now an exceedingly fine pitcher. It was a pleasing sight to see him, poised on one foot in the attitude of a Salome dancer, with one eye on the batter, the other gazing coldly at the man who was trying to steal third, uncurl abruptly like the main spring of a watch and sneak over a swift one. Under Clarence's guidance a ball could do practically everything except talk. It could fly like a shot from a gun, hesitate, take the first turning to the left, go up two blocks, take the second to the right, bound in mid-air like a jack-rabbit, and end by dropping as the gentle dew from heaven upon the plate beneath. Briefly, there was class to Clarence. He was the goods.

Scarcely had he uttered these momentous words when the butler entered with the announcement that he was wanted by a lady at the telephone.

It was Isabel.

Isabel was disturbed.

“Oh, Clarence,” she cried, “my precious angel wonder-child, I don't know how to begin.”

“Begin just like that,” said Clarence approvingly. “It's fine. You can't beat it.”

“Clarence, a terrible thing has happened. I told papa of our engagement, and he wouldn't hear of it. He was furious. He c-called you a b-b-b—

“A p-p-p—”

“That a new one on me,” said Clarence, wondering.

“A b-beggarly p-pauper. I knew you weren't well off, but I thought you had two or three millions. I told him so. But he said no, your father had lost all his money.”

“It is too true, dearest,” said Clarence. “I am a pauper. But I'm going to work. Something tells me I shall be rather good at work. I am going to work with all the accumulated energy of generations of ancestors who have never done a hand's turn. And some day when I—”

“Good-by,” said Isabel hastily, “I hear papa coming.”

The season during which Clarence Van Puyster pitched for the Giants is destined to live long in the memory of followers of baseball. Probably never in the history of the game has there been such persistent and widespread mortality among the more distant relatives of office-boys and junior clerks. Statisticians have estimated that if all the grandmothers alone who perished between the months of April and October that year could have been placed end to end they would have reached considerably further than Minneapolis. And it was Clarence who was responsible for this holocaust. Previous to the opening of the season skeptics had shaken their heads over the Giants' chances for the pennant. It had been assumed that as little new blood would be forthcoming as in other years, and that the fate of Our City would rest, as usual, on the shoulders of the white-haired veterans who were boys with Lafayette.

And then, like a mentor, Clarence Van Puyster had flashed upon the world of fans, bugs, chewing-gum, and nuts (pea and human). In the opening game he had done horrid things to nine men from Boston; and from then onward, except for an occasional check, the Giants had never looked back.

Among the spectators who thronged the bleachers to watch Clarence perform there appeared week after week a little, gray, dried-up man, insignificant except for a certain happy choice of language in moments of emotion and an enthusiasm far surpassing that of the ordinary spectator. To the trained eye there is a subtle but well-marked difference between the fan, the bug, and—the last phase—the nut of the baseball world. This man was an undoubted nut. It was writ clear across his brow.

Fate had made Daniel Rackstraw—for it was he—a tainted millionaire, but at heart he was a baseball spectator. He never missed a game. His baseball museum had but one equal, that of Mr. Jacob Dodson of Detroit. Between them the two had cornered, at enormous expense, the curio market of the game. It was Rackstraw who had secured the glove worn by Neal Ball, the Cleveland shortstop, when he made the only unassisted triple play in the history of the game; but it was Dodson who possessed the bat which Hans Wagner used as a boy. The two men were friends, as far as rival connoisseurs can be friends; and Mr. Dodson, when at leisure, would frequently pay a visit to Mr. Rackstraw's country home, where he would spend hours gazing wistfully at the Neal Ball glove buoyed up only by the thought of the Wagner bat at home.

Isabel saw little of Clarence during the summer months, except from a distance. She contented herself with clipping photographs of him from the evening papers. Each was a little more unlike him than the last, and this lent variety to the collection. Her father marked her new-born enthusiasm for the national game with approval. It had been secretly a great grief of the old buccaneer that his only child did not know the difference between a bunt and a swat, and, more, did not seem to care to know. He felt himself drawn closer to her. An understanding, as pleasant as it was new and strange, began to spring up between parent and child.

As for Clarence, how easy it would be to cut loose to practically an unlimited extent on the subject of his emotions at this time. One can figure him, after the game is over and the gay throng has dispersed, creeping moodily—but what's the use? Brevity. That is the cry, Brevity. Let us on.

The months sped by. August came and went, and September; and soon it was plain to even the casual follower of the game that, unless something untoward should happen, the Giants must secure the National League pennant. Those were delirious days for Daniel Rackstraw. Long before the beginning of October his voice had dwindled to a husky whisper. Deep lines appeared on his forehead; for it is an awful thing for a baseball nut to be compelled to root, in the very crisis of the season, purely by means of facial expression. In this time of affliction he found Isabel an ever-increasing comfort to him. Side by side they would sit at the Polo Grounds, and the old man's face would lose its drawn look, and light up, as her clear young soprano pealed out above the din, urging this player to slide for second, that to knock the stitching off the ball; or describing the umpire in no uncertain voice as a reincarnation of the late Mr. Jesse James.

Meanwhile, in the American League, Detroit had been heading the list with equal pertinacity; and in far-off Michigan Mr. Jacob Dodson's enthusiasm had been every whit as great as Mr. Rackstraw's in New York. It was universally admitted that when the championship series came to be played, there would certainly be something doing.

But, alas! How truly does Epictetus observe: “We know not what awaiteth us around the corner, and the hand that counteth its chickens ere they be hatched ofttimes graspeth but a lemon.” The prophets who anticipated a struggle closer than any on record were destined to be proved false.

It was not that their judgment of form was at fault. By every law of averages the Giants and the Tigers should have been the two most evenly matched nines in the history of the game. In fielding there was nothing to choose between them. At hitting the Tigers held a slight superiority; but this was balanced by the inspired pitching of Clarence Van Puyster. Even the keenest supporters of either side were not confident. They argued at length, figuring out the odds with the aid of stubs of pencils and the backs of envelopes, but they were not confident. Out of all those frenzied millions two men alone had no doubts. Mr. Daniel Rackstraw said that he did not desire to be unfair to Detroit. He wished it to be clearly understood that in their own class the Tigers might quite possibly show to considerable advantage. In some rural league down South, for instance, he did not deny that they might sweep all before them. But when it came to competing with the Giants—Here words failed Mr. Rackstraw, and he had to rush to Wall Street and collect several tainted millions before he could recover his composure.