The Quitter

YOUNG Mr. Collingwood sat on the bleachers in a perfectly lovely new suit of flannels and wearing: a new straw hat, with a very aesthetic hat-band, which shone airily in the afternoon sunshine. He was looking very fit, he was quite free from every care, all the other admirers of Miss Darrow were gnashing their teeth in envy, and young Mr. Collingwood was convinced that the world was a very comfortable place indeed.

For one thing, he was going to see a race in peace. He had slept like a babe all the night before and he hadn't spent the morning rubbing his damp hands together, and wishing for some hygienic anaesthetic which would put one to sleep the day before the games and let one wake up fresh, and rather pleasantly surprised, just as one's race was called. These were invitation games, so that nothing particular hung on any particular race—unless, perhaps, that mile run in which several of the Mott Haven men from New Haven had entered—and Collingwood could sit at his ease, with a free conscience and with that interest which only an outsider can have, and watch a lot of young men whom he knew very well and whose particular abilities and failings he knew all about, running themselves out for his amusement. It was a very beautiful day, so beautiful—with the fresh green in the grass and the Willows, and the warm May sun smiling down from the blue, and the nice-looking people in nice-looking clothes sitting all about and chattering quietly, in a garden party sort of way—that he didn't even bother to talk to the girl very much, but just sat back and smiled at her now and then and let himself bask in things. And as he watched the shot-putters poised for the throw, with their right arms drawn back into a tensely coiled living spring and their outstretched left arms outlined against the trees, and the sprinters practising starts at the top of the track below the Willows, and the white figures and the crimson and blue sweaters dotting the green near the starting line and about the field-house steps, he was pleasantly conscious of the fragrant beauty of it all and what a great thing it was to be young and fit and about to jump into the running—which you don't at all feel when you're actually about to race, and you're doubling the knots in your spiked shoes, and licking your lips with your cottony tongue and listening to your heart thump and wondering why that blanked Eli—who, by the way, feels just as you do and is worried to death at your maddening coolness—should look as though he were made of rawhide and steel springs and was ready to eat glass and bite the heads off ten-penny wire nails.

"Whee-ee-eel!"

Good gracious! What was that shiver up his backbone and that quick throb under his handkerchief pocket? And why did he feel as though someone had suddenly called on him for a speech? It was only the hurdlers crouching for the start of the first heat away down there at the other end of the straightaway.

"You must know just how they feel!" cried Miss Darrow. She was sitting very straight and looking out across the field.

"I guess I do!" said Collingwood, taking off his hat and fanning himself. There was a far-away snap, a little puff of smoke floated off over the grass and the four runners were already taking the first hurdle. And how prettily! Thud-thud-thud-clip! Thud-thud-thud-clip! With each stride perfectly calculated, seeming to step over the obstacles rather than to hurdle them, how the four white figures fairly ate up the ground and sailed toward the finish-line! In the nice calculation of stride and take-off, in the clever lifting of the front and in the trailing of the rear leg, in the swift rush and rise and sail and recover, smoothed into one motion as the notes of a violin are drawn out in one sweep of the bow, what a rhythm and thrill!

"Pre-e-etty!" whispered the girl.

"Um-m-m!" murmured Collingwood.

He had never had an idea that track games could be so much fun, that one would watch the runners with thrilled senses as one watches the glorious swing of shoulders and backs, and feels the "beat" of the stroke as the crew rows by on the river. He had run many races in his four years and he knew very well the feeling of numbed legs, and the whistling snatch for breath, and the hopeless, helpless pounding on "upstairs," in the last fifty yards when the track is swaying and the better man sweeps up and on ahead of one toward the tape. And he did not know the other side. He had always been like the man who beats the cymbals in the band, and now for the first time he was out and away from it all and he could catch the tone of the swift sweet music.

How easy and simple it seemed, sitting there in the stands! That quarter-mile dash—merely a swift and pretty bit of running! And yet he could feel even now the tense straining at the start of the only four-forty he had ever raced, the wild fight round the first turn for the pole, the heartbreaking two-twenty down the long side, the sudden dropping-from-under of things as they fought round the turn into the stretch, the wobbling struggle through quicksand to the finish and the tape—and here, watching it from the outside, it was a swift pretty bit of running, and that was all! How easy it was to see that the second man was really all out at the 300 mark, and that if Willy Gray, who was only a scant five yards behind him, had sprinted then instead of waiting, he could easily have had second, and perhaps beat out Davis for first. How ridiculously simple it was to know that that Freshman who went clean up in the air as though he had been hamstrung in the middle of the lower turn, was running himself out in the first two-twenty. And what a different matter it all was from the way it seemed clown there in the track, locked into the stride of the pacemaker, with the cinders from the spikes of the man in front of you splashing your shins and the breath of the man behind you blowing hot on your neck.

This new point of view filled young Mr. Collingwood with excitement and delight; he began to feel most extraordinarily strong and keen, sitting there with nothing to do, in his good clothes, and he started talking to Miss Darrow at such a rate, and with such vivacity and charm, that she was presently compelled to cast him a look from under her eyebrows, which completely transfixed him, and to murmur:

"I'm awfully glad that you didn't have to run."

That was, of course, one way of putting it, although he couldn't remember when the team had exactly had to have his services, and he was just telling her that although he'd rather run than eat, there were some things that meant more to a man than running when—

"Whee-ee-eel!" And over the grass came the far away cry of, "All out for the mile!"

As the sound struck his ear he started instinctively, and he forgot on the instant all about the beautiful day and the girl and how fit he felt, and he was back with the rest of them in the contestants' room, back in the close hot air and the smell of sweaty clothes and wintergreen oil, just jumping up out of his blanket with his knees shaky and his heart knocking against his ribs. He leaned forward as the runners, wrapped in their bathrobes, came out of the field-house door and started walking across the field. His heart was thumping so that he could almost hear it. He took out his stop-watch and carefully set it. Was it because this was his own event that he knew all about it; that the men seemed to look more worried as they took their places at the starting line? Young Merriman looked positively ghostly. Collingwood kept his eye on him.

"Do you see that one on the outside?" whispered Collingwood; "I've beaten that man time and again!" It was rather a curious thing to say, particularly as young Merriman was running in what was supposed to be a picked team of four against the four from Yale. It was the only race that "made any difference," and, although the intercollegiates were over for the year, to run in this special mile was for young Merriman a sort of consolation prize for not making the team.

"Why—then why aren't you running?" inquired Miss Darrow. They do ask such difficult questions. The truth was that in the trial to pick the four this man Merriman, who looked about as much like a runner as a clothes figure, and whom Collingwood had, indeed, beaten every time he had been in the same race with him before, had hit up the most impossible sprint the moment they rounded the first turn of the last lap. It isn't at all easy, after you have run three laps, to come up into your sprint that far from home and perhaps Collingwood lost his nerve a bit. At any rate, when he finally let himself out—if such an ironical phrase may be used to describe the groggy battle of the last fifty yards—young Merriman beat him out for fourth place by a wabbly neck. Their elbows were bumping as they crossed the line and Collingwood had run himself completely out—as he rather had a way of doing after it was too late to do any good—and when everybody cursed him out and wanted to know what the deuce he had been afraid of and why he hadn't sprinted before, he became a bit sore on the whole business and swore to himself that he had had enough of being a tortured mannikin, with spikes on his feet, and that for once he would be young Mr. Collingwood and survey the games like a gentleman in his proper raiment and his right mind. It is much easier to put this down here than it was for Collingwood to explain it to Miss Darrow, and he had hardly begun when the starter's pistol snapped and they were off.

Collingwood leaned forward and pressed the spring of his stop-watch. In his mind he had just leaped off the line and he was jostling with the others for the pole. It was a terrific moment. The girl laughed lightly.

"Look at them elbow each other!" she cried. Collingwood glowered at her absentmindedly, and back at the track. There was nothing to laugh at. It was a mighty serious matter. A man he knew, coming up to get a better view, sat down in the aisle beside him.

"Too bad about Foote, wasn't it?" he said. "Slipped on the stairs in the locker building and sprained his ankle!" Collingwood suddenly saw that there were only seven men running. That meant—it meant, among other things, that with the only real first-class man of the four out of it, young Merriman stood a chance of a place—stood a chance—blank it all—of winning the race!

The line trailed out. Could that be a mile gait they were running? How slow and dog-trot it looked from the stands! And yet he knew that every sense in every man of the seven was stretched taut as a bowstring; every man was squeezing his corks and holding his pace-maker's back with his eyes and "feeling" the whole of those four long laps and the precise part that each succeeding stride subtracted from that precious reserve of strength which must be hurled recklessly into the running in the final battle for the tape.

Young Merriman was third. As the pack trailed on round the first lap, he pressed his pace-maker and at the upper turn, starting the second lap, he swung out, sprinted a couple of steps and cut in just behind the leader. There was some cheering and polite applause. The boy was evidently out for the race of his life. Collingwood knew him well enough to see, by the look of his face as he strode past, that he was pretty well up in the air. Two things were likely to happen. He might go to pieces all at once, or his over-wrought nerves might carry him through to win as he had never run before. Collingwood settled back with a pleasantly barbaric satisfaction at what he was about to see.

Round the second lap they strode, in Indian file—slow enough it seemed to the eye, but the stop-watch second-hand told only too plainly how they were keeping up the pace. On and on, thud-thud! thud-thud! to the five-eighths, round the lower turn, and up past the Willows toward the finish of the third lap. The order had not changed since Merriman took his nervous jump ahead at the beginning of the three-eighths. Collingwood glanced at his watch.

"Good heavens!" he whispered, "that's a pretty stiff pace!" There had been no let down in the third quarter. It ought to be run slow. The watch showed 3:20 for the three-quarters as they passed the mark.

All at once there were little breaks in the machine-like file. It was that vague premonitory stir which shows that the point is being reached where the race ceases to be a dogged up-hill pound, and suddenly shifts into the sprint for home. To know when this point has been reached is extremely important. If you start to jump a fence tipped with sharp pickets, and you yield for the least fraction of a second to that qualmish feeling which comes just at the take-off you will balk your leap altogether, or land ignominiously tripping. If you blow it aside, leap hard and trust to luck, a sort of outside force seems to come, after you are in the air, which lifts you over handily. There is the same psychological instant in a race. The men who "never know when they are beaten," take it without knowing it. The veteran runner feels it by instinct, or arranges it. From the outside one can easily see the spot where the change begins; to direct it from the inside, with senses jaded and goaded by the running, is very hard indeed.

Very suddenly, just as they passed the three-quarter-mile stone, the Blue runner who had led all the way, broke into a half sprint. Before young Merriman could hit up his pace he was ten yards behind. Collingwood saw his startled, haggard face, saw his fists go up as he responded to the challenge and his head snap back—a bit too far with a quarter mile yet to go—and he knew that, one way or the other, within the next two-twenty the race would be all over but the shouting.

In an instant the wavering file was disarranged and broken. Gray, trailing at the foot, swung out into the middle of the track and started to cut down those ahead of him. The first man he passed went up and out in half a dozen strides. The man following young Merriman's pace hooked himself into it as it was increased, and stride and stride alike they set out to overhaul the leader. Down the backstretch they all went in a mad run, the three in front keeping their relative places, the others jostling like bumpy shuttles back and forth as they struggled toward the front.

All at once everybody began to yell. Collingwood, beside himself with excitement jumped up and began to shout, too. The leader was weakening. He had set the pace from the breakaway and young Merriman's hysterical speed in the third quarter had not let him lower it as he ought to have done. Collingwood's practiced eyes caught all the subtle signals of distress, and the sight nearly drove him off his seat. All the strength and nervous energy stored up in his two days' rest and lack of worry seemed shouting for release.

"He's got him! He's got him!" he shouted. He wasn't thinking of the fact that at the seven-eighths mark a man is about as well-fixed for intelligent calculation as an exhausted swimmer going down for the second time, but of what he could do to that man in front if he could only jump out on the track now.

"Yay-yay-yay!" echoed the crowd. And at that moment the man in third place who had been paced by Merriman all this time, swung out, jostled Merriman's elbow as he passed, and with a burst of speed which he had picked out of the air, so to speak, began to walk away from him. It was a heart-breaking challenge, coming just then. The boy responded. He held his own for a dozen strides. He looked almost to be gaining, but there were two hundred yards yet to go. All at once he stopped. He didn't fall, he wasn't quite "out." He just stopped. And with his head down and his arms hanging limp and stepping unsteadily he started back across the grass toward the field-house. Something was said afterward about his losing his shoe, but the fact remained for all that that he had quit with the two men ahead of him in distress and two hundred yards yet to go.

"Look at him!" cried Collingwood, "look at him! He's stopped! Why, the man's stopped!" He could not believe his eyes. He had forgotten any jealousy that he might have had of young Merriman, and from the moment the sprint had started he had been running the race in his rival's shoes. His blood was up, and in each of young Merriman's strides he had felt himself fighting toward and overhauling the men ahead.

"If I could only get out there!" He was pounding his knees in despair. "I could beat 'em—I could beat 'em! Just look how easy it would be!" The girl looked from Collingwood to the track and back again anxiously.

"And he's going to win—that Eli—do you see? He's all out and he's going to win! Here I've beaten that man Merriman every time I raced him, and I could have beaten him easy enough the other day if—if I'd only known. And I could beat that Eli now—don't you see—I could beat him! And there's that man, Merriman, he's—"

"Maybe he's hurt!" suggested the girl, watching the beaten boy walking slowly across the field.

"Hurt! Hurt!" Collingwood removed his hat and began to give an imitation of a man tearing out his hair. "Had the race in his pocket—could have had 'em dead in another thirty yards! Hurt! He's a quitter—that's what he is—he's a quitter!"

The girl looked at him inquiringly and something of his chagrin and desperation communicated itself to her.

"If only you could have run!" she cried.

"Yes!" wailed Collingwood. "If only I had run! If I had run I would have beaten him in the trial and been in that race! But I can't run! It's too late—don't you see, it's too late."

"Quitter!" repeated the girl in a whisper. She was looking across the field at young Merriman, now stretched on the ground near the starting line, with his face buried in his sweater, and the word was only a sort of awestruck echo of her sympathy, but it came out at a strange instant and Collingwood looked round quickly and flushed. She lifted her eyes to his, quite frank and open as the sky, and he was somehow conscious of a sort of remorse and shame.

"O, if you only could have run!" she said. There was a lot of yelling about the finish line, which told that the race was being finished out, but Collingwood did not even turn his head. He was thinking very fast.

"I think I shall run!" he said, quietly. And at this he arose.

"Yes," he went on slowly, as though he were talking to himself. "I've got to run. I think that that's about the only thing to do." Of course the girl didn't know at all what he meant, so she merely smiled on him kindly. Collingwood gazed down at her absent-mindedly for a moment, twisting his program between his fingers, murmured something like "who knows?" and then he suddenly seemed to wake up.

"Yes, sir!" he cried, "That's precisely what I'm going to do! I'm going to take off these clothes, and I'm going to run in that open handicap-half with a lot of mucker gentlemen, and I'm going to give them the race of their lives and I think—I think—" concluded young Collingwood, smiling brightly, "that I'm going to win that enormous cup that you can see out there on the table shining in the sun." And with this he took off the beautiful straw hat and bowed pleasantly to the girl and he said, "You see, it's my last year, and my last chance and—I'm awfully sorry, but I don't see how I can get out of it—and anyway I shall be back in a couple of minutes."

"And with the big shiny cup!" said Miss Darrow, who didn't quite understand, but was a very good sort of girl indeed.

Collingwood hurried over to the field-house and burst into the locker room with about the same pictorial effect that would be produced by throwing a basket of roses into a boiler-room full of stokers. He pulled off the perfectly lovely flannels, tossed the new straw hat on top of a dusty locker and jumped into his old running clothes.

There was a two-mile handicap, a 60-yard dash and the handicap-half left on the card, and he chose the latter because it came first. Sherwood, the trainer, had entered everybody for everything, as is the enthusiastic custom in open-handicap games, and there were enough men in the half, if all of them had run, to fill the track solid.

"Good heavens, Colley, what's wrong with you?"

"There's nothing at all wrong with me!" cried Collingwood, "that's just the point! What I want to know is, what I get, that's what I want to know!"

"You don't mean to say that you're going to run!"

"O, yes, indeed!" chirped Collingwood, tying double knots in his running shoes, "I'm running the half. Never tried a half before, but going to-day. And what I want to know is where they've put me. Do I get fifty yards, or what do I get, that's all I want to know?"

Collingwood was already on his way down the field-house stairs and his friend, Apley, who wore a scorer's badge, had to trot to keep up with him.

"You get twenty yards," puffed Apley, running one finger down the list of entries. "But the scratch men aren't going in, and that New York A. C. man on the ten yards didn't come up—and you're running scratch, that's what you're doing, you're running scratch!"

"O—great!" cried Collingwood ironically. "Scratch for mine!"

"Jerry Devanny gets twenty yards, too!" piped Apley. It seemed to amuse him immensely. "But that won't bother you much! You know Jerry! Comes from Worcester, or some such place—thirty years old—hard as nails—eats 'em alive—runs all the winter meets—runs all the time—runs in his sleep—"

"O, that will be all right!" waved Collingwood, with polite irony. "Who else?"

"And Corrigan from the Knickerbocker's. Ought to be scratch, but happens to get twenty-five. And that red-headed man from Cambridgeport—lovely! And—why—if here isn't—"

Collingwood looked at the card where Apley's finger was pointing and saw a name with a "Y" after it. It was nobody that they had ever heard of, but in that race the unknown stood for his whole college, and the shock was so great that Collingwood could only throw his arms about Apley's neck and muss up the latter youth's hair, while he declared that he died happy and moaned for joy.

And, of course, Collingwood won the race. At the quarter he had cut down his field. When honest Jerry Devanny, who ran races as methodically as he might saw wood, started to move up at the back-stretch turn, Collingwood, thinking only of how slow the pace would appear if he were looking on, swung out into the middle of the track, where the going was smooth as asphalt, and took the bit in his teeth. At the three-eighths he had fought old Devanny to a standstill, and he felt that same lift coming, which, when you have once got up in the air, seems to carry you over the impossible wall. Rounding the lower turn he pulled away and took the pole, and, with his friends laughing and the trainer nearly falling over in a fit, he romped down to the tape, winning—as expressed in the classic phrase of young Apley, who kept a horse and affected a dialect—"under double wraps and going away."

"Always thought he had it in him," rattled young Apley to Miss Darrow, when he and young Collingwood had gone back to the stands; "but trouble with Colly's been, you know, he was a most awful quitter."

"Sir!" Miss Darrow raised menacingly her limp and sorry parasol, which, curiously enough, had chanced to break just as Collingwood drew away from his field and swung round the stretch turn. "What shall we do to him!" she cried.

Collingwood tossed Apley a benign acknowledgment of the "we" and, "I don't believe I would do anything," he smiled. Then he suddenly squared his jaws, and the lid of the big shiny mug came down with a vicious snap. "Because," he said, "the grand-stand point of view is very illuminating. Because I'm afraid he's quite right."