Date: 1923-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: fiction; Marriage; Baseball Players; Feminists
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public Domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

THE SUN FIELD

HEYWOOD BROUN

MobileRead Edition
2021

A highly autobiographical novel, revolving around a love triangle between the narrator, a newspaperman named George Wallace, the independent feminist writer Judith Winthrop (based on Broun’s real-life wife, Ruth Hale), and the record-breaking home-run king Tiny Tyler (loosely based on Babe Ruth), who Judith marries.

Heywood Campbell Broun Jr. (December 7, 1888 – December 18, 1939) was an American journalist. He worked as a sportswriter, drama critic, newspaper columnist, and editor in New York City. He founded the American Newspaper Guild, later known as The Newspaper Guild and now as The NewsGuild-CWA. Often referred to as a “crusading journalist,” he is best remembered for his writing on social issues and his championing of the underdog. He believed that journalists could help right wrongs, especially social ills.

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Originally published 1924. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

THE SUN FIELD

ONE

The trouble with me is—

Judith said if I ever wrote a novel it should begin like that. She also said, “For God’s sake don’t write one of those autobiographical novels.” Judith swears a good deal. The trouble with her is that she’s afraid people will think of her as a lady or, worse than that, “Oh, that nice wholesome girl!”

But it isn’t really an autobiographical novel. Only part of it is about myself. Judith comes in much more. Probably there is much to be said on the ground of good taste against using things which really happened to people as the basis of a novel. I did get Judith’s permission. “Who am I to stand in the way of literature?” was what she said.

Still, after I told her that I was going to put her in a novel she was much more reticent. She dried up on purpose. “A novel isn’t any good if it’s just about things that happened,” she explained. “You’ve been a newspaper reporter already. You must be something more. Unless there’s imagination in the thing it’ll be a bust.”

Now, as a matter of fact, there’s plenty of imagination in it. There had to be. I wasn’t always there when things were happening. And even if I was, I don’t remember now the exact words Judith used. More than that my memory has colored the things she did. That’s my bid to be considered an artist. There is an attempt to recreate reality. Not as it was, but as it seemed to me. That might be quite different. Besides there were long stretches when we didn’t see each other and it has been necessary to fill those in. Pretty nearly all the dialogue is made up. Frankly her name isn’t Judith at all. That’s just put in to conceal her identity. Judith would have been a better name for her. She was big, and husky, and brave and strong minded. In one of those books which were left out of the Bible because there was some suspicion they weren’t literally true, Judith comes in. She went to the tent of Holofernes and made him drunk and then she killed him to liberate her people. This Judith could have done that. She wouldn’t have been afraid of Holofernes and she wouldn’t even have minded if anybody had seen her going into his tent and suspected that it wasn’t to free her people.

Her whole name was Judith W. Winthrop. The W. is from life. It stood for Wigglesworth. I couldn’t begin to make up a name as funny as that. Judith hated it and tried to forget it. She didn’t use the W. That was one of the things I teased her about. There’s no point in protecting myself. Nobody objects to having a man’s name bandied about. And so that might as well be real. My name’s George Wallace.

“Don’t begin your novel by telling how you were born,” was one of the things Judith said to me. Of course, she isn’t writing this book, but I wouldn’t have done that anyway. It doesn’t matter. All I need is the fact that I was born in Detroit on March II, 1889. But something important did happen when I was six years old. I’ve never read a book of Freud’s all through or any of the books about him, but naturally I’ve picked up a good deal from hearing people talk about it. I’ve even talked it myself and interpreted people’s dreams. I can do flying and swimming and skating and all those simple things if I know the people well enough. If a psychanalist ever got hold of me I’m sure he’d say that an old nursery rhyme did me a lot of harm. Aunt Ella taught it to me when I was six, or just about six. You know, it runs:

“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie

Kissed the girls and made them cry.”

Well, I’ve said my name was George and when I was a kid everybody called me Georgie. Naturally I thought there wasn’t anybody else in the world called that and that the Georgie in the rhyme must be me. Up till then I hadn’t kissed any girls, but it set me not wanting to. No, that isn’t it exactly. Later on, I wanted to a good deal, but I was frightened. That early slant about Georgie making the girls cry stuck in my mind. I thought they wouldn’t like it. Of course by and by it became translated into the idea of repugnance and not actual tears. I’m thirty-three years old now and naturally I’ve put the thing to the test. They didn’t cry – none of them – but it was just as bad to think it was distasteful to them and that they were merely exercising great self-control.

The trouble with me is that I’m not physically attractive. I’m exactly five feet six inches tall. Judith is one inch taller. Being a man, I actually am stronger, but I don’t look it. Anybody would think Judith could toss me out the window with one hand.

A good many short men compensate by getting the Napoleonic complex. They look inscrutable and all that, but I never could get the hang of it. I do look a little bit like him. In a Yale show I once played Napoleon in Shaw’s “The Man of Destiny.” It wasn’t so much of a performance, but in the make-up the resemblance was very striking. I did have a picture of myself in the costume over my desk at home. The trouble with me was I never could feel like Napoleon. That’s the thing that counts. Still if he’d been around with Judith as much as I have she wouldn’t have let him feel like Napoleon either. Any forthright woman about an inch and a half taller could have taken all the tuck out of Napoleon by looking him straight in the eye and laughing at him. The Battle of Waterloo needn’t have been won on the playing fields of Eton if some girl had only had the gumption to win it in a ballroom at Versailles.

With me it’s more than a facial resemblance. There’s forehead, hair, and just a suggestion of his coloring, and besides that I’ve got his build. During my first two years at Yale everybody called me Pudge. In my junior and senior years it was changed to Wee Wallace and finally just Wee. That happened on account of a poor pun made by a man named Baker. He was one of those natural tackles who never heard about poetry until he met William Lyon Phelps. One day in class Phelps was reading Burns and he came to that line about, “Scots wae hae wi’ Wallace bled.” I was sitting right behind Baker and we came out of the hall together. “Hello, Wee Wallace,” he said and a lot of people standing around laughed and the thing stuck.

I liked Pudge better although I put in a lot of work trying to keep from being fat. It never did any good. But I’ve got one trouble that Napoleon never had. At least it isn’t mentioned in any of the histories. Judith said, “If you’ve just got to write an autobiographical novel go ahead and shoot the works.” She talked a good deal of slang to show she wasn’t like the others on “Tomorrow.” This is pretty personal, but it’s important. I blush a little (I’m getting over that) and I perspire dreadfully. Whenever I get embarrassed I perspire and when I perspire I get embarrassed so it’s one of those vicious circles.

They used to kid me a lot about it in college. I remember once there were three of us went out to supper with three chorus girls from a show called “Sunlight” that was playing in New Haven. It was on the evening of December 16, 1908. Baker fixed up the party. I didn’t know any of them, but he was quite a hand with chorus girls. The one I got was named Sylvia. Supper was in a private dining room and naturally I kissed Sylvia three or four times during the supper. It seemed the thing to do. The rest got to joshing us and Baker said, “Go ahead, Sylvia; sit on his lap if you can find it.”

There didn’t seem to be any chance for me to say “No” and she went ahead and sat on my lap. It embarrassed me a lot and I had to get out my handkerchief and just keep mopping my forehead. Baker thought it was a great joke and I was glad that he made an ass of himself before the party was over. He didn’t have very much money and he used to say that a chorus girl would rather go out and have a ham sandwich and a glass of beer with him than eat lobster and drink champagne with anybody else. As a matter of fact, when he fixed up a party we used to pay for it. He thought that the arranging covered his share . Well, at this particular party his girl was Maxie. At least that was what he called her. Her last name was Maxwell. Baker made more or less of a point of knowing the last names of chorus girls. He used to go round and call on them at their homes in New York and meet their mothers. It was his notion that he wasn’t just a college boy to them. But he was more stuck on Maxie than on anybody else. Late in the evening he began to show off and he said, “Maxie, if there was a million dollars at one end of the table and I was at the other end and you had your choice, which would you take.”

She said, “I’d take the million dollars.”

That made him mad. I was glad she said it, but it didn’t show much sense on her part. There wasn’t really a million dollars on the table. She might just as well have said she’d choose Jack Baker.

But I don’t want to give the idea that I spent all my time at college chasing after chorus girls. It was only now and then. I could have been one of the best students in my class. That’s not boasting. Truthfully it was hard work for me to miss Phi Beta Kappa. If you know anything about Phi Beta Kappa men you’ll realize that that isn’t so much. I worked fairly hard and I learned fast. My memory was a good deal better than the average and that counts a lot. But Phi Beta Kappa would have ruined me. A man that’s short and fat and blushes a little and perspires when he gets embarrassed can’t afford to make Phi Beta Kappa. It’s all right if you’re on the football team like Baker, but otherwise it doesn’t seem quite manly. One of the things I’m proud of is that I had energy and character enough to miss being Phi Beta Kappa.

Another thing that I did well and could have done much better if it hadn’t been for the fear of getting joshed was to write poetry. That was before the days of the Benets and Johnny Farrar and the young Yale poets movement. We licked the life out of Harvard and Princeton at football every year and the duty of an undergraduate was to play on the team or the scrub and if he couldn’t do that it was up to him to think football, and talk football and cheer and sing the Undertaker song. Writing poetry was one of the things that was a little queer. Perhaps there isn’t anything I’ve said so far that makes it seem likely that I’m telling the truth when I say that I was a good poet. Of course it may be that I’m just fooling myself. I realize perfectly well that my prose is exceedingly bald, but I always had a different feeling about poetry. I could get excited about that. Since I’ve learned about the subconscious I understand where it came from. It boiled out. There was a lot more emotion in my stuff than you usually find in undergraduate poetry. The “Yale Record” published two of my poems and “Munsey’s Magazine” took another and paid me $25. That was the poem Baker read aloud to Sylvia and Maxie and the other girl who was named Octavia. He had the clipping in his pocket. It was called “Corsica” and it was about a very young Napoleon. He was bragging to a girl and telling her what he was going to do with his life and with hers. As a matter of fact it was early morning and he was holding her in his arms. Maxie giggled and Octavia almost had hysterics. The other man in the party, Frank Parrish, and Sylvia sat on me over in one corner of the room. That was in my junior year and I never wrote another line of poetry, except some sport stuff for the New York “Tribune,” until I met Judith four years later.

TWO

Judith couldn’t have been much more than eighteen when I first met her and by that time I was twenty-three with two years of newspaper work behind me and yet even to me she seemed a mature person. It was at a dance given by a man named Homer Brale who lived at No. 333 West 85th street. He introduced us, and just at that moment the musicians began to play “The Blue Danube.” She said, “Don’t you want to sit it out?” Of course I’ve learned that there’s only one answer to that and we went and sat on the stairs. She was a step higher and had to peer down at me. For quite awhile neither of us said anything and finally she asked, “Don’t you think that’s the stickiest piece of music ever written?” And so I said, “Yes,” to that. The trouble with me is that I have a bad habit of agreeing with people whenever they state anything very definitely. As a matter of fact, I like “The Blue Danube.” After that we didn’t get along so well. There wasn’t much conversation. Finally she leaned down and said, “Not that it makes any earthly difference, but what is your name?” I told her. She repeated it in a puzzled way, “George Wallace. George Wallace. Wait a minute, I’ve heard that before. I don’t think I’m going to ask you if you know the Kaufmans in Rochester. It’s something else. Do you write? Do you write poetry?”

“Well I do some verse for the sport page on the New York ‘Tribune.’”

“That’s cold. I hate sports. People are always saying, ‘I’ll just bet you’re one of those athletic girls.’ I have to make it a point not to know anything about sports. That isn’t it. Did you write a poem two or three years ago called ‘Corsica’ that was printed in ‘Munsey’s?’”

“Yes, I did.” I said it quite defiantly. “But it wasn’t two or three years ago. It was four years ago. I was a junior in college then. I’m much older than that now. I’ve gotten all over that.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Judith. She looked right at me and recited the first two lines of “Corsica.” It was the first romantic thing that had ever happened to me in my life. I didn’t know what to say. Yes, I had to mop my forehead.

“How do you happen to know that?” I asked her.

“Well, in the beginning it was Fate or an accident or whatever you want to call it. I had to come down from boarding school at Tarrytown and when I asked the boy on the train for ‘The New Republic’ or ‘The Atlantic’ he said he had ‘Munsey’s’ and ‘The All Story.’ The rest of it’s sense and free will. ‘Corsica’ is one of the finest poems that’s ever been written by an American, pretty nearly the only authentically romantic thing I know, and so I cut it out and learned it by heart. And you wrote it and try to palm it off as a juvenile indiscretion. I’ve always said that whenever an artist of any kind did something really fine the State ought to take him out and have him shot so that he couldn’t wander around apologizing and explaining and getting in between people and his work.”

“I suppose I spoil the illusion,” I suggested. “I don’t seem the sort of person you thought I’d be.”

“Almost exactly,” she said. “Only not quite so frail. Don’t you realize that romanticism in art is always an escape? I feel sure that Shelley snored.”

“But I don’t snore.”

She smiled at me and I began to mop my forehead again.

“Snoring isn’t obligatory. There are any number of things that you might want to get away from. But don’t tell me you haven’t got an inferiority complex or I’ll have to throw away all my observation of life up to now and begin all over again.”

Now this was eleven years ago and at that time I’d never heard the phrase “inferiority complex.” Of course that deficiency has been rather more than made up since. I just blurted out, “What’s an inferiority complex?”

She broke into one of the happiest smiles I’ve ever seen in my life. “There really ought to be a movement for the higher education of men,” she said and she began to tell me about Freud and (Edipus and all the rest of them. I was five years older than this girl and a Yale man and a veteran newspaper reporter but she talked with the utmost frankness about things that even men shy away from unless they can put them into stories about Pat and Mike. She didn’t mind a bit and somehow I didn’t either. It wasn’t solemn and it wasn’t frivolous. Just informative. When Brale came out and found us on the stairs she’d already cut six dances. She was going back to Vassar the next day. “To finish her education,” she said although I wondered then what more there could be for this girl to learn. I saw her for a minute before she went home. I did ask her if I couldn’t see her there, but it seems she came with somebody. “I’m going to send you some of my verse if you’ll read it,” she said. “I know it’s bad but maybe you can tell me why.”

“It can’t be bad. That’s not possible,” I told her. But two days later the poems came and they were bad. Well not exactly bad, but they weren’t good which is pretty much the same thing. She had taste and precision and skill and not a single spark of emotion. I felt that there was emotion some place in the neighborhood but not in the poems. It was as if a powerful swimmer was caught in an undertow. Two impulses were fighting desperately and nothing happened but a good draw. Naturally, I didn’t know just what to tell her. I wrote, “I liked the poems enormously. They were all very interesting. But as you suggested there is something wrong. You don’t put over an emotion. Perhaps the trouble lies in that escape theory you were telling me about. There isn’t anything sufficiently wrong with you to impel you to write.”

“Why don’t you begin your letters with the ‘But’ and leave out the rest,” she answered. “You are a singularly unobservant young man. Nothing wrong with me! One might as well greet Prometheus with ‘How’s tricks?’ Don’t fall back on the plea that you have only seen me once. That should have been enough for you to mark the fact that I was born a woman and baptized a Presbyterian. I didn’t tell you that, but I’m sure it shows. Here stand the two curses which have been put upon me – the curse of Eve and the curse of Calvin. Please make researches and let me know if you can find any estate in life much wronger than that – Judith the Obscure.”

THREE

Judith began to write for “Tomorrow” while she was still a senior at Vassar. I’m not sure that she wasn’t the person who discovered Charlie Chaplin. Of course, millions of people had been going to see him and laughing at him for five or six years, but it was Judith who began the business of pointing out that he was an artist and that there was an inner significance in his work and all that. She was the first person who ever wrote that he ought to play Hamlet. I went with her to a Chaplin film called “The Bank.” It started with Charlie coming in and opening a lot of combinations on the door of a big safe. Then he swung it open and came out with a mop and a pail and began to clean up the office. Later on he went to sleep with his arm around the mop and he had a dream that it was the beautiful blonde girl who worked in the president’s office. Everybody in the theater was roaring with laughter and it was a long time before I noticed that Judith wasn’t. When I turned around to find out why not I saw that she was blazing with anger.

“The swine,” she said. “Isn’t there any such thing as compassion?”

“What’s the matter now?”

“Can’t you see it either? This is one of the finest tragic performances ever done by man. Here’s Charlie tearing all the pretensions off humanity and showing the naked hide of futility underneath and everybody thinks it’s funny. I’m going home.”

Later on Judith did most of the suffrage stories for “Tomorrow” and she was arrested in a riot at a birth control meeting but let off. The Magistrate said that he was sure she was fundamentally a good girl and that she’d just happened to fall in with evil companions. If it hadn’t been for me and two lawyers she would undoubtedly have committed contempt of court, but we managed to pull her back into her seat and hustle her out of the room.

I don’t know that Judith was actually beginning to care for me, but we were fine friends and around together all the time until the war came along. She went to England in 1915 to write for “Tomorrow” and when America came in she joined the YMCA. She had the effrontery to write down “Presbyterian” where it said “Religion” on the card because she was very eager to be out in a canteen.

I never got over. They wouldn’t even take me in the draft. It was a heart murmur under slight exertion, the doctors said. That was the first I ever heard about it and I began to pay a lot of attention to my heart. A young doctor I knew taught me how to take my pulse and things got so that if anybody with a stethoscope so much as came into the same room I’d raise the beat to a hundred and twenty. On the streets I had dizzy spells and of course I saw a lot of doctors. One of them said I ought to play three sets of tennis a day and another thought two or three holes of golf once a month would be enough. “The next street car is good enough,” he told me. “Don’t run for anything.”

Well, as a matter of fact, I use taxis almost all the time but his advice affected my life just the same. I began to live very carefully. It was necessary to think all the time about the possibility of dying all of a sudden. Out on a party one night with Jack Baker and two pretty tough girls we picked up at Coney Island I had a fearful dizzy spell and the thing that bothered me was thinking about how it would look if I fell dead in the restaurant with those girls along. Even the baseball games I had to report for “The Tribune” used to make me skip a few beats whenever there were three men on base and so I was glad when they made the big leagues cut their seasons. Around about this time, my uncle, Sloane Walker, dropped dead in the corridor of a hotel in Lansing, Michigan. His heart went back on him and that made things worse than ever. I hardly knew him, but he was my mother’s brother and it looked as if the thing ran in the family.

Doctor Carver tried to cheer me up by pointing out that Sloane Walker was eighty-two years old and that I might linger just as long. But it wasn’t any particular desire to live to be eighty that bothered me but the thought that the end might come any time at all. I used to carry a little piece of cloth sewn inside my coat with my name and address and a request that my mother in Detroit be advised by telegraph. Still things got quite a little better after Uncle Sloane’s death. He left me a good deal of money, all tied up, but the interest was $6,000 a year and I was able to quit my job on the “Trib” and live even more carefully than I had before. And it was about this time I tried out a doctor called Mac Kenzie and after he’d listened to all I had to tell him and had sounded me he said, “I don’t think anybody can tell much about hearts anyway until after the autopsy. Maybe you’ve an organic murmur and maybe you haven’t. My advice is that you go out and try living wild for a time and see what happens. Get drunk and if your heart’s very bad perhaps you’ll die and if it doesn’t seem to hurt you much then as likely as not there isn’t much the matter. Run after a few street cars and other things and see what happens. It will be very interesting.”

I got drunk three days later on the morning of the fake Armistice and I found Jack Baker, and he’d kept the telephone numbers of the two tough girls. I started for home in seventy-third street at four o’clock in the morning and rode up to Van Cortlandt Park twice and back to Atlantic Avenue the same number of times before I could hit seventy-second street. The trouble with me is that when I get drunk I’m only gay for about half an hour and after that I get sick and then very sleepy. But I didn’t feel any worse than usual the next morning and I never went back to Mac Kenzie or any of the other doctors. The only thing I do now is to rest on the landing for awhile if I go any place more than three flights up.

Judith was back a month after the Armistice. During the last year of the war I’d been so busy about my heart that I had only written a couple of times. She said she wrote a lot more often than that but I received just one letter. Judith thought maybe I didn’t get the others because she spent so much space cursing out the Y. M. C. A. that the censors didn’t think it was worth while sending along what was left. The day after the Armistice was signed Judith became a pacifist and “Tomorrow” took her back on the staff and put her on the job of trying to help defeat the treaty of Versailles. After Wilson’s Fourteen Points came out Judith countered with a list which she called “The Twenty-One Demands” but nobody paid much attention and after awhile she took up Sherwood Anderson. She said that he was the only man in America who brought authentic passion into fiction. The trouble with America, Judith said, was that nobody cared enough about anything. We didn’t want life but something just as good and people, who would have been scared out of their wits at the possibility of romance so much as patting them on the head, went to movie houses and cheered for characters who chased each other in autos around winding roads and fired pistols.

It was the Sunday after that article appeared that Judith let me kiss her for the first time. I kissed her twice but she said she didn’t want to marry me. “Don’t feel you’ve got to make an honest woman of me,” was the way she put it. She didn’t seem to know at all how rotten I felt. Judith wasn’t so very different from the people she wrote about. Because I wasn’t Charlie Chaplin she couldn’t see the tragedy of it.

Fortunately Judith’s not wanting to marry me made no difference in our going around together. We had lunch almost every day and generally at different places. There was a little Italian place where you had to wait outside the door while a man looked at you through a barred window. When he’d looked at you long enough the thing to say was, “I’m a friend of Jack Baker’s.” After that they’d open the door and you could come in and buy the regular dinner. And we went ever so many times to an Armenian place and ordered on different occasions every queer dish on the list. We always hoped it would be something that wasn’t lamb stew but it always was. We both liked the opera and books and pictures (not the ones that move) and plays. As a rule we liked the same things, but the difference was that Judith invariably had a reason. It was enough for me that the music was pleasing to my ear or that I liked a picture. “You’ve got taste and I’ve got intelligence,” was the way Judith explained it. “Probably that means you’re a little bit of a genius and I’m not any. Still it is more comforting to have sense.”

But when I wrote “After Austerlitz” Judith said, “I’ll never make fun of you any more, Georgie. That’s better than ‘Corsica’. A man that can do a thing like that doesn’t have to know anything. But after all I guess you do. Of course you don’t know that you know. It’s all stuffed down so deep you can’t get at it most of the time. On top there’s grass and weeds but every once and so often you blow all that away and the fire comes out.”

And another time she said, “Georgie, even if you don’t always answer back with something you’re a person worth talking to. There isn’t a thing I say that won’t come back to me out of you even if I have to wait twenty or thirty years for it. Talking to you is like investing in a savings bank. You’re the best listener in the world.” But she wouldn’t marry me.

Late in May “Tomorrow” began to plan what they called a “Summer Book Supplement” and they wanted Judith to do something long and imposing of about four or five thousand words. She promised a piece to be called “Sherwood Anderson – The Sublimation of the Inferiority Complex.”

It turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded, and Judith began to say she couldn’t go out to lunch, or dinner or the theater because she had to work on Sherwood Anderson. I let this job of hers spoil a whole week for me and then I went to her flat. This time I had sense enough not to call up on the phone before going. It was June and blazing, the sort of day to make even somebody from Los Angeles say “My! My!” When it’s gray or raining I’d almost as soon be by myself. Weather like that makes me want to kill myself and people don’t help much. Fine days are different. Anyway this was one. I just couldn’t stand it not to go and see somebody and say, “Isn’t this great weather.” Perhaps there’s some vestige of my old newspaper instinct in that. You might think everybody would know about the weather without being told but some people don’t. For instance Judith didn’t know. The door of her flat was open and when I rang she shouted at me to come in. I found her in the little room in back that she uses for a study. It opens on an air shaft and so she had switched on the electric light over her desk.

“Do you want to see the finest day you ever saw in your life?” I began.

“Not specially,” said Judith. “But what about it?”

That made it harder. I tried to explain. “Well,” I started, “I’ve just come up the drive in a taxi and it’s so clear that every little house over on the Jersey side seems about a foot away. You could reach over and pat the Palisades.”

“Not me; I’d like to spank ’em. Jersey’s no treat for me. Do you know, George, that with the exception of Alabama and Mississippi, Jersey’s got the most iniquitous laws about women of any state in the country. For instance, if we were married and you didn’t have any job and I had, you could just sit around on the lower part of your back and take my money. If Jersey looks closer than usual today I guess I’ll stay in.”

“But you don’t have to look at Jersey. Just look up at the sky. Maybe the laws about women are just right up there. And anyhow it’s all blue and the brightest sun you ever saw. Honest, Judith, it’s great outside. Why don’t you come along and we’ll go to the ball game? It’s the Tigers playing today.”

“I can’t. I’ve got to get some more done on this Sherwood Anderson piece.”

“What’s so important about him that you’ve got to stay in on a day like this?”

“If I told you that, it would spoil your fun waiting for the ‘Summer Book Supplement’ of ‘Tomorrow.’ I want you to be surprised.”

“I don’t want to be surprised. I want to know now.”

“Briefly.”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes before it’s time to go to the ball game.”

“Well, he’s the only writing man in America that’s going dead straight after things. He isn’t trying to get out of life by writing stories. They just sweep you and him and everybody in deeper like an undertow.”

“All right. That just goes to prove you ought to go to the ball game. That’s getting after life directly. Sitting in this dark room’s just cheating. Turn out that electric light and come out and see the sun. There’s something real for you.”

Judith did go after awhile but she refused to let me have any sense of triumph. “You understand,” she said, “it isn’t the ball game or the bright day or anything like that. I hate bright days, but there’s a woman coming here at half past three twice as empty as this sky you’re talking about. I’ve got to go some place so it might as well be the ball game. Come on.”

Looking back on it all, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Judith had stuck to her first refusal. It was a crucial game for her, for both of us. On that day I happened to turn and twist the life of Judith. I didn’t plan it or even know at the time. But I did it.

FOUR

To us the field was something like a great chess board for we sat in the press box with our noses in the wire screen. The players waiting their turn at bat were scarcely ten feet away. The checkered diamond seemed our private lawn and even the distant kingdoms were foreshortened so that we felt afraid to lean forward suddenly for fear of bumping into an outfielder. But even though the game was in our laps Judith was not thrilled at all. She said she couldn’t understand why they got excited about it. What was the difference whether Detroit won or the Yankees. “This is sillier than patriotism.”

I explained that the teams were playing a crucial series. If the Yankees won that would put us in first place and of course if we could stay in first place that would give us the championship of the American League and the right to play the champions in the National League for the World’s Championship.

“And what happens after that?” Judith wanted to know.

“Why, the team that wins in the series gets a pennant and all next year they can wear ‘World’s Champions’ on their shirts.”

“And I’m supposed to bleed and die for that?”

That made me mad and I let her alone and watched the game even though it was one of those pitchers’ battles. Hoyt was working against Pillette and nobody could touch them. In the fifth inning Hoyt sneaked a curve over for a third strike on Ty Cobb. Naturally, Cobb started to bawl out the umpire and the crowd began to ride Ty. As Ty trotted away from the plate and as the din died down I heard Judith’s voice in my ear. It sounded as if she had been talking for some time, but I was just getting in on the middle of it on account of the rooting.

“What on earth are you saying?” I asked crossly and she started all over again.

“I owe an apology to literature. Perhaps I gave you the impression up at the flat that I thought it was too tame.”

“I don’t remember your saying anything like that.”

“Well I thought it, so don’t interrupt and spoil my point. As I was telling you I owe an apology to literature. Maybe it is too tame but life is much worse. Here are thirty thousand people, men, women and a few small children. That ought to be an endless potentiality for romance. We ought to be able to get a dozen murders and a thousand love affairs out of that. We ought to be getting them right now. You understand that when I say ‘we’ I mean life in general. I ask you, George, what are they doing?”

“Having sense enough to watch the ball game.”

“Quite right. Living vicariously. They wouldn’t be a bit worse off reading Robert W. Chambers. Not one of the whole thirty thousand is doing anything in his own right except eat a few peanuts. Those men down there on the grass are living, and the thirty thousand are just watching. After I get through with Sherwood Anderson I think I’ll write a piece for ‘Tomorrow’ about it.”

If it had been anything but one of those pitchers’ battles she couldn’t have egged me on into an argument, but nobody was hitting anything. It was mostly pop flies.

“You think this is your intellect working,” I told her, “but it’s the dregs of a rotten Puritanism circulating around. You just can’t stand it to see a whole lot of people having a good time.”

“All right,” said Judith, “I accept the indictment. Taking a whack at the Puritans is one of those convenient things that people have come to substitute for truth. They weren’t tame. They had religion and Indians. This crowd feels that it’s lived when it hollers, ‘Kill the umpire.’ Actually, it has no intention of killing the umpire. The image of the death of the umpire is sufficient. It prefers a picture to a deed. Puritans weren’t like that Instead of yelling, ‘Burn the witch!’ they went out and burned her. That may have been cruel but at any rate—”

I never did hear the end of Judith’s sentence. I don’t think she said it. I shouted, “There goes the ball game.” In spite of all the arguing I knew that we had a one-run lead and that it was the ninth inning. There was a smack when Harry Heilman swung for the ball and got a piece of it. A man on first and second and two out. But what a smash I Everybody seemed to be running. Two Tigers tearing for the plate and big Harry Heilman charging for first. He ran like one of Dunsany’s Gods of the Mountain. You could feel his great stone feet on the baselines. The man out in left field didn’t run like that although he was probably three inches taller than Heilman. I didn’t see him start. He seemed to have sensed the fact that something terrible was going to happen the moment Hoyt pitched the ball. By the time I got him in my eye it looked as if he had always been running. Everything went into his stride. The smash seemed to alter the whole course of his life. Nothing at his back mattered at all. He just went on and on. But there was a high bleacher wall ahead of him. It said “United States Tires Are Good Tires.” And to prove it there was a picture of a tire.

The big man ran straight toward the center of this circle. He ran as if there were a gate to open fields ahead of him. The wall was almost on him before he threw up his hands and even then he didn’t try to ward off the impact. Instead he leaped up and forward and with his bare hand he dragged the ball down. “As a God might pick a comet.” He tried to turn in order to get clear space to slacken speed, but it was too sudden a twist for his body. Every nerve and muscle in him had been committed to the forward rush. The conflict of command made him stumble. He tried to paw away the bleacher wall as he fell but his speed swept him slap against the wooden barrier. First his shoulder hit and then his head. He went down in a heap and still held the ball.

The player in center field started towards him, but the big man got up, shook himself a couple of times like a dog out of a river and then ran at top speed for the exit gate in deep right field. The fans poured out of the bleachers, dropping over the twelve foot wall, but they couldn’t catch him. I got up and Judith didn’t move.

“The game’s over,” I said and still she sat there. I tapped her on the shoulder. “They’re not going to play any more. We’ve won it. What a whale of a catch! Come on.”

“Wait a minute,” she whispered. “I’ve got to sit here. Will you please stand in front of me? I think I’m going to cry.”

Of course that scared the life out of me. I couldn’t understand what was the matter. “Are you sick? What’s the matter? Do you need a doctor?” I suppose I said all this pretty quickly as I bent over. She looked up and I saw that she was crying but she said, “Don’t be a damn fool/’ and that reassured me a little. But I couldn’t stop hovering. It was all so strange. “Did I say anything to hurt you or offend you?” I asked. “You’re not crying about the Puritans?”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask me questions. Stand there in front of me. If I knew what was the matter with me I’d have sense enough not to cry. Just don’t hustle me for a minute.”

“You know there isn’t anything to cry about. The Yankees won. We lead the league by half a game or eight percentage points.”

She didn’t answer and I must have stood there in front of her for thirty seconds. Then I couldn’t stand it any more. “What is the matter?”

“Maybe it’s because I heard it when he hit up against that wall,” Judith said.

“He never felt it. He’s all right. Didn’t you see him get up and run to the dressing room?” “Well, maybe it’s because he’s so beautiful.”

“Who?”

“That man. You know – Apollo or whatever his name is.”

“Don’t you get literary with me, Judith. You know as well as anybody else that his name’s Tiny Tyler.”

“Tiny Tyler?”

“His real name’s John W. Tyler. Tiny’s what they call him. How do you feel now?”

“All right. You needn’t protect me any more. You can stand wherever you want to. I’m not going to disgrace you.”

The crowd had pretty much all cleared out by now except three or four small boys who were running around the bases. Neither one of us spoke until we were out in right field. Then Judith said, “Hell!”

“What have I done now?”

“You haven’t done anything. It’s what I’m going to do with the rest of this afternoon.”

“Finish your piece about Sherwood Anderson?”

“No, I’ve got to go down to a tea to discuss what’s the matter with ‘Tomorrow.’ We have ’em every Saturday.”

“That doesn’t sound like any job at all. I could talk for ten hours on that myself.”

“But I don’t want to talk,” she said. “I just want to sit some place all by myself and say, ‘Why Judith!’ And after that I want to sit and not say anything at all.”

We walked over to the subway and as we came out of the stadium Judith did a second queer thing in a single afternoon. The crying was remarkable enough but this amazed me even more. She made a concession. After a long look up the river toward High Bridge Judith gave my arm a little squeeze.

“You were right, George,” she said. “It is a grand day.”

FIVE

I’ve always found that there isn’t much use trying to talk on the subway except right at the stations. That’s the way we talked this time. As we pulled into one hundred and forty-fifth street I said, “What’s it all about, crying and all that?” It wasn’t until we got to one hundred and thirty-seventh street that Judith answered, “I don’t know.”

She amplified that as we were walking over toward “Tomorrow.” It was edited at that time in a brown stone private house deep west on forty-seventh street. “I don’t know,” seemed a good enough answer but somehow or other Judith wanted to come back to it. She brought the subject up again. She said abruptly, “It was a little like listening to music or reading Shelley.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“The catch that man made. You won’t tell anybody about my crying, George, will you? Nobody down at ‘Tomorrow’ has ever seen me cry. I don’t believe you ever did. Did you?”

I granted her claim.

“I can only remember doing it once before,” she went on, “and that was a long time ago. I was eight years old and it was because they made me mad.”

“Who made you mad?”

“The people in the theater. My aunt took me to see ‘Peter Pan’ and when Tinker Bell, or whoever it is, was dying, Maude Adams came down to the footlights and said, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ I spoke right up in my loudest voice and said, ‘Certainly not and I think it’s very ignorant of you to ask me such a question.’ And then everybody around began to laugh and I cried and my aunt took me home.”

“And you’ve kept on saying ‘Certainly not’ ever since.”

“Yes, I’m proud to say I have.” Neither of us said anything then for almost half a block. Judith was stepping along so fast that I had to hustle to keep up with her. Finally I pulled at her wrist. “There isn’t so much hurry,” I said. “I don’t want to walk so fast. It’s bad for my heart.”

She slowed down then, but she didn’t say anything about my heart. It was a subject I never could get her to take any interest in. We had to wait at a corner to let three or four trucks go by. Some big black clouds had come up by this time over the river straight ahead of us. A flash of lightning ran through them. “It was beauty that got me,” Judith said as we stood there. “It came so fast.”

“If you won’t talk about my heart,” I told her, “I don’t want to discuss your ideas about the aesthetic aspects of baseball. When you condescend to like something that other people like, you insist on taking it all up to another plane. You like Charlie Chaplin – not because he’s a little funnier than anybody else when he gets kicked in the pants – but because of his tragic overtones. I know, you want to see him do Hamlet.”

Judith swung around and faced me. “Look here young man,” she said, “you’re taking too much on yourself. You want to tell me what I ought to like and then on top of that why I ought to like it. There’s nothing we do on ‘Tomorrow’ more arrogant than that. You’re as arrogant as – as arrogant as the driver of a mail truck.”

“I’m ashamed of you, Judith. That’s journalese. I didn’t expect it of you.”

“Well, do you want a plain and simple statement of what I’ve been trying to tell you, an answer to the best of my knowledge and belief, so help me God?”

“Of course, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

“What I want to say is, that I think the man who caught that ball created the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. No sculptor ever achieved anything like that arm and shoulder of his when he reached out for the ball.”

“You mean Tiny Tyler?”

“I don’t know his name. His name doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. It’s just that fugitive thing he created this afternoon.”

“You know his name perfectly well. I’ve been telling it to you all afternoon. Tiny Tyler. Your emotion and interest is reasonable and justified but why do you have to doll it up that way? He isn’t a romantic symbol or anything like that. He’s a person. A ball player and a good one. Not quite as good as he was a few seasons ago but still hanging on. I can get you an introduction. Would you like to meet him?”

“What difference does he make? It isn’t anything as personal as that.”

“Oh, he didn’t have anything to do with it? I thought he made that catch you were raving about.”

“I tell you what,” interrupted Judith. “All I want to meet is the arm and shoulder.”

That irritated me. Judith always did that. She’d hang on to a pose as if it were a principle. During this talk we’d just stood there on the corner. “Come on,” I said and I forgot about my heart and we almost raced the rest of the way to “Tomorrow” without either one of us saying a word.

The What’s-the-matter-with-Tomorrow meeting was dull. To me anyway. But I sat and listened. Hugh Coler, the editor, always frightens me. He knows so much, so many facts I mean. We were in college together and even then it seemed to me that he was all finished. There wasn’t room to put any more education on him. That is one of the things there ought to be a law about. A city ordinance or a federal statute should lay down the principle that nobody shall be educated above the twenty-second story. Coler just goes on and on up into the mists. A person might be thrilled to gaze at him on a moonlight night but there’s no comfort in him. Still, he is polite. That’s the most objectionable part of him. Judith doesn’t know more than about sixty per cent as much as Coler, but she’s always ready to assail people and call them fools and argue with them and correct their errors violently. Coler won’t demean himself. He has a trick of pressing his fingertips together and smiling and his smile seems to say, “What a hopelessly ignorant person you are.” But he never says it. I’d just as soon fight a duel with one of those fellows in the fairy stories who had a cloak which made him invisible. Talking with Coler is like that. He cuts you up so neatly that you don’t even know where the sword goes in.

Before the afternoon was over, I tried to get square in a rather low way. The talk about “Tomorrow” had ended and we were all drinking tea. Fred Spates, who contributes the articles on finance, and Mildred Deagon, the poet, were there. I never could see anything exciting about Mildred but there are a lot of stories about her. Even the people on “Tomorrow” are a little proud of the rumor that Mildred has had more lovers than any woman poet of the first rank in America. The legend is that she invariably says, “This must never happen again.” And she sticks to it. Apparently she has managed to make promiscuity an aggressively moral scheme of conduct. And so I turned the conversation around to sex appeal. It was a sort of game that started, to the best of my knowledge, up in Mabel McCann’s studio one afternoon. Any number can play. It simply consists of rating your friends and acquaintances on a scale of one hundred. Of course everybody participating must be informed in the first place that charm has nothing to do with it. Beauty is also irrelevant and intelligence and all such things. You just figure on the supposition “How many women out of a hundred would be strongly drawn to this particular man if he walked into a room.” And of course his fame and reputation ought not to be a factor.

“It sounds like a silly game,” said Judith and Coler just smiled politely and pressed his fingers together. But Fred Spates and Mildred Deagon were interested.

“I tell you what,” said Spates, “let’s do it with the Australian secret ballot. Everybody here writes down the sex appeal of every other person in the room, except himself of course.”

“That would be a give away,” objected Mildred.

“No,” said Spates, “not if they do them on separate slips of paper.” He began tearing up paper and distributing pencils. Coler smiled one of his light without heat smiles and waved him away.

“I think I’ll sit this one out if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Sure,” replied Spates, “that’s fine. That supplies the necessary neutral. You can collect the slips and tabulate them and make up the averages.” Coler pressed the tips of his fingers together a little more tightly.

“I don’t think we ought to confine it just to people in this room,” Mildred Deagon broke in. “If we do we won’t have any standard of comparison. Each player ought to have at least one candidate at large. Let’s say the person in all the world who she thinks has the most sex appeal.”

“All right, but not more than one,” Spates conceded.

The rest of us finished up quickly, but Mildred lingered over her last slip.

“Oh, come on,” said Judith impatiently. “It can’t be as difficult as all that.”

“But it is,” said Mildred. “It’s a fearful decision. The superman is the one that’s bothering me. You say charm has nothing to do with it. Just sex appeal. That’s rather difficult to define.”

“Oh you can define it all right if you put your mind to it,” Judith snapped a little rudely.

Mildred fussed around over the slips she had already prepared and then finished her final one and turned them in.

As Coler began to sort out the slips I found to my mortification that I was nervous and embarrassed. I felt very much the same sense of strain as when a doctor listened to my heart and I waited to find out whether I was going to live or die. I didn’t care what Spates or Mildred wrote down about me, but I was acutely conscious that Judith, under the frankness of secrecy, was going to express her opinion of me as a romantic person. And then suddenly I realized that everybody else in the room except Coler was taking the game pretty seriously.

“George Wallace stock,” I ventured, “may be pretty low just now but I think it’s an excellent speculation. As a matter of fact it’s very closely held – mostly by widows and orphans.”

The joke had gone well at Mabel McCann’s but here nobody laughed. Coler turned from the table where he had been making his tabulations. “I think,” he said, “that it is fitting that I read my own ratings first as I am sure you are all waiting with breathless interest to find out just what estimate the community makes of me as a sex person. I find that I am rated by the several persons present at 3, 11, o, and 2. That makes a grand average of four and I can assure you that I think it is much too high. Since Wallace was debarred from voting for himself only three ratings are presented concerning him. They are 5, 15 and 70, making a grand total of ninety or an average of 30.”

Of course, I was delighted. My average at Mabel McCann’s was only 18, and it wasn’t the higher average which pleased me so much as that single seventy. I tried to catch Judith’s eye but she didn’t turn.

“Spates,” continued Coler, “gets 15, 10 and 25 for an average of 17 and Miss Deagon is 40, 50 and 30 which gives her a ranking of 40. Miss Winthrop is rated 3, 70, 98, and 98.”

“Hold on,” interrupted Spates, “how did she get four votes. Did you vote for yourself, Judith?”

“What do you think, Fred,” asked Judith, “do you suspect me of the three or one of the ninety-eights?”

“I think I can explain,” said Coler. “Evidently some young woman, or young man, has voted for Judith twice, once as a person in this room and again as the outstanding person of sex appeal whom he has known in all the world.

“The rest of the votes for outsiders are scattering. I find 95 for Cleopatra, 97 for Shelley – I had not realized that the contest was retroactive or I might have participated in order to indicate my passion for Helen of Troy – and one hundred for a name which I cannot quite decipher. It looks like Tommy Tyler, a gentleman unknown to me.”

“It’s Tiny Tyler,” I broke in.

“But still,” said Coler, “I am not enlightened. However, enlightenment hardly seems to have been the purpose of our afternoon.” He looked at his watch. “Spates, if you can make it I would like to have you lunch with me at the Players tomorrow. I want to talk over your Ruhr article. I don’t think you’ve got the point of view we want to bring out. It isn’t the financial problem we’re so much in terested in as the aspect of the situation as it touches on world politics. I still think you can do it. Judith, you won’t fail to let me have the Sherwood Anderson article by Wednesday at the latest, please. Mr. Wallace, I hope we shall see you here again. Your light touch is needed at our little gatherings.”

He went out then and I was following closely behind Judith when Mildred Deagon put her hand on my elbow.

“Why don’t you come and have tea with me sometime?” she asked.

I hope I gave a polite answer but probably I didn’t for I suddenly and painfully realized where I had earned my 70.

SIX

Judith tried to teach me, but I never could learn to blow rings. At any rate not the way she did. She lay back on the lounge in her living room and one of the rings floated up and up like Mercutio’s ghost until it lost form and identity against the gray ceiling. We had been sitting silent for a long time. It was that kind of a room. I don’t remember now just what was in it. Perhaps I never noticed anything more than gray and green. The walls and the ceiling were gray and the books which ran all around the room were mostly green, Bernard Shaw green. Of course, Shaw wasn’t the only author represented even if he did manage to color the room. Judith probably had in that library every important book written after 1900. And so it was the sort of room you could lie around in and squint at the books and pretend to be thinking and blow rings. Still I had to say something after Judith launched the one which hit the ceiling. “You blow rings like a man,” I said.

Judith sat up and shook her shoulders. She was wearing something loose. I don’t know whether you call it a tea-gown or a kimono, but it showed what powerful high-boxed shoulders she had.

“Do you want to stay or get thrown out?” she asked. I don’t believe she really could throw me out, but I was polite and said I didn’t want to get thrown out and asked what was the trouble.

“Oh it’s this business of using ‘masculine’ as a synonym for ‘excellent.’ If a woman succeeds at law they say she has a mind like a man; if she writes a good book they call it ‘virile’ and now I find I’m blowing rings like a man. It almost tempts me to have a baby and then there won’t be any fool to say that I did it almost as well as a man.”

In spite of her bluster I thought for a second that I caught just the shading of a touch of surrender in her voice. “Judith,” I said, “why don’t you marry me?”

“Because you can’t blow rings,” she answered. “The father of my child, the fathers of all my children, must be able to blow rings better than I can or it won’t be possible for me to treat them with proper respect and have babies.”

“But I’m serious.”

She just sat there and blew more and better rings.

“Why did you only give me 5 on sex appeal?” I asked her.

“You don’t know what I gave you. It may be that I was the one that gave you 15 or 70.”

“I know you didn’t give me the 70. Mildred Deagon stopped me as I was going out and asked me to come and have tea.”

“Are you going?” asked Judith with what seemed to me to be interest.

“Yes, next Saturday.”

It may have been interest but only a flash for I had to start the conversation up again.

“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“Good Lord, no,” said Judith.

“Everybody thinks she is.”

“Oh, I didn’t understand your question. I thought you wanted my opinion. Of course, as a community commodity Mildred’s ideal. She could sweep through these United States just as if Harold Bell Wright had written her.”

“But why don’t you think she’s pretty?”

“My poor, dear boy did you ever look at her feet?”

“What have her feet got to do with it?”

“Everything to a person with any claims to fastidiousness. If the feet are wrong you just waste your time in looking for a mind or a soul.”

“But Mildred doesn’t make much money out of poetry; she can’t afford to spend a lot of money on shoes.”

“Expense has nothing to do with it. The cheapest ones in the world may be right and the most expensive all wrong. That’s what Mildred’s are. And let me tell you one thing more, young man. Anybody who takes a good look at Mildred’s feet ought to know enough not to look at her poetry. It’s wrong in just the same way. She’s a cockney off on a half holiday. She can’t even look at a tree or a piece of blue sky without vulgarizing it and she thinks love is something you do with your shoulders. But don’t let me discourage you from going to tea with her. It’s none of my business.”

“That’s all right, Judith, but you didn’t bother to take a look at Tiny Tyler’s feet before you gave him 100 in sex appeal.”

“I hope you don’t think I was such a chump as to take that game seriously. Where’s that sense of humor that all men are supposed to have? Anyhow nobody could be so right in all the rest of him and have bad feet. The man that reached up for that ball just couldn’t go into a shoe store and buy a pair of the male equivalents for the things that Mildred wears. Some power would stop him. It would be just like running up against that fence the other day. I’ve never quite made up my mind whether there is a God, but certainly there is a power which makes for the eternal fitness of things.”

It all ended up by my not going to tea at Mildred’s and taking Judith to the ball game instead. As the game went on I thought Judith’s infatuation for Tiny Tyler would wane because he was certainly having a bad afternoon and when he was bad he could be just terrible. As a matter of fact he never was much of a fielder. There must have been something accidental in the catch he made that first afternoon. But he certainly could throw and he could hit when he managed to meet the ball. On this particular afternoon he misjudged two flies that should have been easy outs and let them fall for two base hits. He didn’t have any chances to throw and at the bat he was pitiful. Red Faber of the White Sox was feeding him slow balls and poor Tiny nearly broke his back swinging at them. He fanned the first three times up and never even got a foul.

“He doesn’t look so good today, does he?” I suggested to Judith along about the seventh inning.

“I think he’s marvelous,” she said.

“What do you mean marvelous? Marvelous at what?”

“Those terrific lunges he makes at the ball. Doesn’t it give you a thrill to hear that swish as he comes round? It’s like Thor hurling a thunderbolt. I never saw such power.”

“Hold on. Thor used to hit the things he aimed at sometimes. Tiny’s just churning all the air out of the park. If you must have an idol why don’t you pick little Whitey Witt? He’s hit safely every time he came up.”

“Safely!” said Judith scornfully. ‘You want me to worship safety. I’d have to bow down to somebody every two feet if I followed a faith like that. We’re all of us being smothered in safety. Those little pokes that your small rabbit-headed man is making may be safe enough but I don’t find them particularly thrilling. Don’t you see Tiny Tyler’s trying every minute for something supreme? He’d rather fail than succeed meanly.”

I was able to laugh at Judith’s naive conception of true baseball greatness for just one inning. In the eighth Red Faber grew bored with throwing slow balls to Tiny, or foolish, or something, and he tried to sneak over a fast one. Thunder roared, a great tree fell in the forest and down tumbled the walls of Jericho. The White Sox outfielders just stood and watched the ball. Of course the newspapers always say, “It was the longest hit ever seen on the grounds,” but this time it must have been. The line of flight was a gorgeous thing. The drive started low and kept climbing as it sailed along. It had not even begun to droop when it smashed against the high fence back of the center field bleachers and fell into a crowd of fans. People began to throw straw hats into the diamond as Tiny trotted around the bases. I was afraid Judith might toss hers, too, and I was ready to grab her arm but she sat tight and white-faced. “George,” she whispered, “don’t use it against me tomorrow, but right now at this minute I believe there is a God.”

SEVEN

Sometimes I get to thinking that I’m not quick at sizing up things but I knew that Judith didn’t really mean it when she said that she only wanted to be introduced to the arm and shoulder. It was inevitable that she should set about meeting Tiny Tyler and I wanted to help her. By this time it seemed the best chance. It so happened that I never had seen him off the field but there was at least the possibility that his shoes wouldn’t be right in spite of Judith’s belief in a power that makes for the eternal fitness of things. A western trip took Tiny and his team away for a month and in the meantime I made the suggestion that Judith might like such information about Tyler as I could glean from the “Tribune” morgue. She professed indifference but I went ahead with it. The material was rather scant. Of course there were columns and columns concerning Tiny’s feats on the field but not very much of a personal character. I made my report in writing and submitted it to Judith. I can’t remember it exactly but a novelist has a right to be wrong about some of his facts so I’ll just say that it ran as follows:

“John Wheeler Tyler bats and throws left-handed. He stands six feet three and weighs one hundred and ninety-eight pounds. He was born in Jason, Long Island (1891), where his father was and is the minister of the First Baptist Church. John (Tiny) Tyler was educated in the local public schools. At the age of sixteen he attracted attention by winning a semi-professional game from the Patchogue A. C. He shut out his opponents with four hits and struck out fifteen men. In 1909 he entered Holy Cross—”

“You’re fooling,” interrupted Judith. “A Baptist, a Catholic and a college boy. It can’t be true. You’re just trying to discourage me.”

“No,” I insisted, “this is all true. At least it’s all in the papers. I’m not making up anything. Wait awhile, it gets better. ‘In his freshman year at Holy Cross young Tyler shut out Harvard twice and pitched a no hit game against Boston College. In June he joined Fall River where he had only in different success as the records show that he won 6 games and lost 12.’”

“What’s Fall River,” Judith wanted to know. “I never heard of it. I suppose that’s a Presbyterian university.”

“No, it isn’t a college at all. It’s a team in the New England League. Let me get on with the story. ‘In the fall of the same year Tyler hurt his shoulder while playing football for Holy Cross against Georgetown.’”

“I wish he wouldn’t jump around so much. Here he’s back again at college.”

“I suppose he played professional baseball under an assumed name. The records go on to say, ‘As his injury did not yield readily to treatment Tyler was obliged to forgo pitching that spring and played first base on the Holy Cross nine where he compiled the enviable batting average of .481. He hit fourteen home runs. In June Tyler gave up his college career and definitely threw in his lot with professional baseball. He received a trial with the Boston Braves but it was short-lived. He was used in the outfield but was evidently in need of further seasoning and the Boston club shipped him to Cedar Rapids. Although his stay in the Hub was short it was at this time that he earned his nickname. In the second game of the season the umpire announced that Tyler was batting for Rudolph. As the tall and gawky recruit approached the plate, Tim Kelliher of “The Boston Globe” remarked in an audible voice, “First name Tiny, I suppose.” The press box roared at the good-natured quip and the name stuck. Tiny Tyler, as he was known from henceforth, stayed with Cedar Rapids for two seasons. In spite of his prodigious hitting in the sticks the big league scouts passed him up on the theory that he was just a slugger and would be a sucker for smart pitching. But in 1914 Dick Fennell of the White Sox took a chance and signed the big fellow. His achievements from that time on are too familiar to need chronicling. In 1916 he came to the Yankees for Pigeon Stebbins and $75,000 in cash which was a record price in those days. During his first year he was of little use to the club as he drew a two months suspension for assaulting Umpire Finneran in the opening game of the season.’”

“Oh yes,” said Judith, “it is beginning to sound much better. Let’s be fair and assume, that his college training didn’t hurt him much.”

“‘In 1917 Tyler joined the American army and later served in France where he saw action in the Argonne and received a croix de guerre with palm.’”

“And now I know it’s malice,” exclaimed Judith. “You’ve gone and made him a member of the American Legion.”

“I tell you I haven’t gone and done anything. As a matter of fact I didn’t even write this piece. It’s an article that appeared on the Sunday sport page of the ‘New York Tribune.’ I just curtailed it a little by cutting out a few figures about batting averages, and fielding averages and stolen bases and things that wouldn’t interest a woman.”

“Why wouldn’t they interest a woman?” she inquired hotly.

“I didn’t mean that. I just meant that maybe they’d make the thing too long for anybody not passionately addicted to the details of baseball. I thought probably you only wanted to know about his character. Anyhow he never did steal many bases. He was too slow.”

“All right, go on with his character but stop before you get to the paragraph where he joins the Ku Klux Klan. I couldn’t endure that.”

“Well the story says, ‘Out of the bloody mire of Flanders and the hell of the trenches Tiny Tyler came back to baseball with his eye undimmed and his vigor undiminished. It may well be that each time he stepped to the plate there rang in his ears that slogan of our immortal allies, “They shall not pass.”’”

“That’s the worst piece of curtailing I ever listened to,” broke in Judith. “I thought you said you’d left out the parts that wouldn’t interest me.”

“Well maybe I could skip a little of this. The writer draws an analogy between baseball and war and calls Tyler ‘the long range gun of our national pastime.’ Anyhow it all winds up by saying that he broke the home run record in 1919, in 1920, and again in 1921, but that he didn’t do so well in 1922 and that probably he is beginning to slow up on account of old age and won’t do so well this year.”

“Old age,” said Judith, “why he must be a grizzled veteran of at least 31.”

“Yes, but that actually is old for baseball. By all the rules he’s begun to go back. He’ll be in Cedar Rapids again before he’s through.”

“And when he does Cedar Rapids will become the artistic center of America. Do you remember that time a ball was hit over his head and he ran after it and threw it back. Well for just that fraction of a second that he stood with his arm drawn back there was a line from his shoulder to the tip of his fingers as fine as anything in Greek sculpture.”

“If you want a realist’s opinion it wasn’t much of a throw and the ball went over his head only because Tiny Tyler ran in and misjudged it. The most charitable thing that can be said is that maybe he lost it in the sun.”

“He did. Yes, that’s it. The sun was right in his eyes.”

“But it always is. He ought to be used to it. That’s his job – the sun field – and the big boob has been trying to play it for the last two years without smoked glasses.”

Judith had the selective process developed to a high degree. She picked out the one phrase she liked and ignored the rest. “The sun field,” she said. “It’s a fine name and a fine job. All jobs ought to be like that. All of us alive should be set to looking straight at the sun and getting our light first hand instead of having it reflected for us out of little cracked mirrors that we call novels and poems and paintings.”

She would have gone on with more of the same sort but I interrupted. “You wanted a character sketch more than a record of achievement. There is one more item that I haven’t read yet and I think you ought to hear it. It wasn’t in that article that I curtailed for you. In fact I’ve only got it in my head but I’m sure I won’t misquote. It’s from an article Damon Runyon wrote about Tiny Tyler just before the world’s series of 1922 when everybody said he would break things wide open with his hitting. Runyon thought so too. Anyhow he wrote, ‘His only weakness is a fast blonde on the outside corner of the park.’ If you do meet him, Judith, you’ll probably have to look out or he’ll get fresh with you.”

“That settles it,” said Judith. “You may arrange an audience for me the minute the team comes back. Maybe I’m not a blonde but just on account of that gratuitous and protective warning you’ve thrown at me I’ll show you I don’t need to be slow. Don’t you dare have the audacity to come around here right into my own flat and respect me.”

And all of a sudden to my intense surprise I found that she was in deadly earnest and wasn’t

EIGHT

When the Summer Book Number of “Tomorrow” appeared there wasn’t anything in it about Sherwood Anderson. Judith never finished her article on “The Sublimation of the Inferiority Complex.” She tried to appease Coler by offering him as a substitute a piece called “The Sun Field.” It was a study in pure aesthetics with Tiny Tyler as the subject. I doubt whether Coler was appeased, but he did run the article. A good deal of it was familiar to me. Judith has a trick of saying things, apparently on the spur of the moment, and then later you find out that she’s simply been trying out phrases that she has written or is going to write. She spoke of looking straight into the sun instead of getting reflected light from those cracked mirrors that we call novels, poems and paintings. And there was something about the futility of mean success as compared with the magnificence of splendid failure.

The great catch was mentioned incidentally. It was in this portion of the article that Tiny seized upon the ball, “as a god might pluck a comet from the sky.” It seemed to me just a little strained and over-written, but there were undeniably moments of great beauty in the article and it was more alive than anything I had seen in “Tomorrow” for a year. More than that it gave me the only possible jumping off place I could think of in arranging for Judith to meet Tiny. I went to her flat the day after the quarrel and apologized just as humbly as I could for presuming even to give hints about the preservation of her reputation and good name. She accepted the apology, but insisted on penance. “Don’t come back,” she said, “until you’ve fixed it up for me to meet Tiny Tyler.”

Now, I didn’t know him at all and the few men on the team whom I had met were acquaintances of the most casual sort and so I took my problem to Johnny Keenan who had succeeded me as baseball writer on the “Tribune.”

“He’s tough,” said Johnny. “What sort of a girl is this who wants to meet him?”

Judith wasn’t around and so I answered promptly, “A nice girl, a lady.”

“Why does she want to meet him?” Johnny insisted.

I told him about the great catch and the home run and the lines in Tiny’s back being as fine as anything in Greek sculpture. And after that I showed him “The Sun Field.”

“It’s a good piece for a woman,” said Johnny. “I’ll show it to Tiny but I’ll have to explain it to him.”

“We can fix it up all right,” he continued. “This girl, your friend, is she good looking?”

“Terrific,” I replied with perhaps unnecessary fervor.

Keenan grinned knowingly. “I don’t want to be inquisitive,” he said, “but I hope I’m not assuming too much in guessing that you’re smitten. This business of meeting Tiny Tyler is a sort of slumming trip she’s set her heart on. Is that right?”

“It’s near enough.”

“Well, here’s the way I look at it. Of course if I go to Tiny and tell him that there’s a good looking girl who wants to meet him he’ll come all right, but he may get the wrong impression. He can be pretty crude. He doesn’t have to be. After all, he is a college man.”

“Yes, I know; two years at Holy Cross.”

“What’s the matter with Holy Cross?” Keenan asked aggressively.

“I didn’t say there was anything the matter,” I reassured him.

“A fellow can learn just as much at Holy Cross as at Harvard or Yale – yes, and a lot more. I’m not saying that Tiny did. I guess he spent most of his time at athletics. I haven’t got any idea whether he knows anything or not. You see he’s always under cover. He just had to get tough in a hurry when he came into professional baseball because everybody kidded him so much.”

“You mean about Holy Cross?”

“Oh, no; not about that. It isn’t like Harvard or Yale; they don’t make you effete up at Holy Cross. We haven’t got any Holy Cross young poets’ movement or anything like that. It was about his father’s being a Baptist minister. The fans and the players got hold of that in the very beginning and they’d just have ridden him ragged. You remember that time he got suspended for two months for slugging Finneran? Do you know what it was the umpire said to him?”

I shook my head.

“Well, they tell me Tiny came walking up to the plate moderately peaceful to make a kick on a drive Finneran had called foul. Finneran saw him coming and said, ‘We will now all join in singing “Lead, Kindly Light.”’ Tiny just went crazy mad and walloped him four times before anybody could drag him away. That took something of the Baptist curse off Tiny, but he decided to play it safe right through and in a single season he taught himself to be the toughest talking player in the league. And after awhile it jelled on him. Still, I don’t think he had to train very much for women. That came natural from the beginning. He does put on a little dog for them sometimes and I’ll say he’s the fastest worker I ever saw in my life.”

“You don’t think you’re encouraging me, do you Johnny?”

“Well, this may be different. I don’t suppose Tiny’s met a whole lot of girls that write for ‘Tomorrow’ and use words like ‘libido.’ And then can I say she’s from a swell family and all that?”

“She is. Her grandfather was a Wigglesworth.”

“That don’t mean anything to me, but maybe Tiny’s heard of the Wigglesworths. Anyhow I’ll put most of her ancestors on the Mayflower.”

“They were on the Mayflower, all of them.”

“All right, it doesn’t hurt it any that it’s true. Maybe if I talk it up enough I can put the fear of God into Tiny and he’ll come along and behave himself and keep his mouth shut.

“And say,” continued Johnny, “if this girl is all you say and I’m getting up the party and acting as chaperone and head keeper for Tiny I think I’d better come along.”

“I thought I asked you already.”

“You didn’t,” said Johnny, “but that’s all right. I accepted right away when you said ‘terrific’”

–     –     –     –

The party was fixed up for the Ritz on Tuesday night. It was to be just dinner and general conversation. I brought Judith, and Keenan came with Tiny Tyler and met us there. Naturally enough the thing about which I had been wondering all the time was what sort of an impression he would make on her, but when we came to the Ritz a curious thing happened. I began to worry as to whether Tiny would like Judith. I mean I wanted him to like her. It would have hurt a strange impartial sort of pride I had in Judith if Tiny had been indifferent. That issue never remained in doubt for a second after they met. She was beautiful to Tiny. It was easy to see that. Any attempt to tell just why and how Judith was beautiful is sure to fail. A person can’t argue about a thing like that and demonstrate it. The objection may be made that I am the last person in the world to be accepted as a judge because I was so much in love with her.

But she was beautiful I tell you, never more so than on that night. There was a bold, free look to her. She was Elizabeth of England, but she looked like Mary Queen of Scots. Bonny is probably the best word, but there isn’t any single adjective which will suffice. If you don’t believe me take the word of Tiny for it even though he didn’t speak. But then, he was in love with her too. It all happened in thirty seconds. Judith has always said that there is no such thing as love at first sight, but it doesn’t make any difference what you call it. Nobody could have been in that hotel lobby with Judith and Tiny without realizing that something had happened. You felt it just as you can feel thunder on a hot night long before you can hear it. Somehow it seemed to me that we had been through all this before. Perhaps it was in a play. There was that acceleration of pace that sends fate riding break neck. And come to think of it Judith was very like a person in a play, like Ethel Barrymore in “Captain Jinks.” It isn’t a likeness I mean to convey so much as a general effect. The vitality of Judith was her most striking quality. She was as ready to move in any direction as a quarterback who has just caught a punt. And to think in any direction.

And Tiny saw all this or something like it. Obviously this wasn’t just an introduction. It was a situation. At first glance Tiny seemed a great deal less impressive than on the ball field. The man who made his dinner coat didn’t begin to be as good a tailor as the fellow who made his baseball uniform. One less button on either sleeve would have been better. The diamond shirt studs were gross. But even the dinner coat couldn’t hide the fine line as his big shoulders sloped down to a thin waist. It takes a good build to carry off six feet three with no jutting suggestion of somebody just out of a circus. I think his eyes were blue, his cheekbones rather high and he had a big straight slit of a mouth with a nice smile. The fact that he was obviously embarrassed, helped rather than hurt. Nobody could have endured a man with those shirt studs if he had been aggressive. He looked uncomfortable and a little pitiful. Without waiting for Keenan to introduce me to him I said, “Miss Winthrop, this is Mr. Tyler.”

He said, “I’m pleased to meet you,” and added quickly, “Excuse my glove.” “Miss Winthrop,” he continued, “shake hands with Mr. Keenan.”

The Ritz and the Mayflower lay heavily upon the deep chest of Tiny Tyler. Not only was he silent, but he was ill at ease. Judith talked directly at him but not very intelligently. She also seemed a little ill at ease. She wanted to know if the sun field didn’t bother him a good deal. Tiny said “Yes” and the subject dropped. Judith said that she had once spent a summer near Jason, Long Island, and asked Tiny if he had been there recently. He said, “No” and that faded out as a conversational possibility. Some of Tiny’s affirmatives and negatives were a little indistinct. Once I thought I caught him saying, “No ma’m,” but I wasn’t quite sure. Judith told him of being present the day he made the great catch. This time he smiled with a little more confidence and said, “I guess I was a little lucky.”

“And I saw you make the home run off Red Faber into the center field bleachers,” she went on with animation, trying to keep him on the upward swing, but apparently her remark depressed him. “Then you must have seen him whiff me three times,” he said. “I’d like to tell you about that.”

“Why don’t you?” she asked.

“I’d tell you, but it’s a secret – too many newspaper men around. I’ll tell you some other time.”

“We can get rid of them. I want to hear now.”

She turned to Keenan, “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you see this is going to be an exclusive story. You might get me some Piedmonts if you will be so kind. They don’t keep them at this hotel, but there’s a store just a bit down the street.”

Keenan rose and grinned knowingly at me.

“George,” said Judith, “you’re not proposing to let Mr. Keenan go alone.”

“The ban’s not on me,” I protested, “I’m not a newspaper man.”

“It’s enough that you used to be,” replied Judith. “Help Keenan carry the cigarettes.”

“Do you think that’s just a stall of his to get us out of the way so he can get fresh?” I asked Keenan as we left the hotel and started after the cigarettes.

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so. I never saw any woman have him as scared as she’s got him. You needn’t worry. That girl can handle him all right – in that room.”

We walked a while in silence and then Keenan said, “Say, there is one tip I’m going to give you. He’s scared and embarrassed and all that, but unless I’m all off, that girl has knocked him for a row of wash tubs. I know the only sound has been a dull sickening thud, but just the same he’s fallen harder for that girl than I ever saw him fall for anybody in his life. While I’ve been around anyway.”

The rest of it was more or less like an old fashioned soliloquy. “And why wouldn’t he fall? She doesn’t know much. On baseball she’s just plain dumb, but a girl who looks like that doesn’t need to know anything.”

As we came up to the table Judith and Tiny seemed to be talking together with a good deal of animation but he grew silent again when we arrived and the party broke up soon after. I took Judith home. In the taxi I asked, “What did he say while I was gone?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“Was it fresh?”

“I couldn’t answer that without knowing your standards. It was personal.”

“Please tell me, Judith.”

“Stop teasing at me, George. He told you it was going to be a secret and it was a secret. That’s enough. Your motto may be ‘sieve and let sieve’ but mine isn’t.”

I had to ask her to invite me in before she did so. We sat in the Shaw-green room for a long time and then I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Let me finish this all out, Judith, before you say anything. I have to know what happened after you and Tyler were left alone there in the restaurant. I know perfectly well that I haven’t any right to ask you and that it’s none of my business and all the rest of it. I realize that it’s unmanly of me to ask. The truth is I’m just all bitten up with jealousy. I can’t control it. I’ve got to know.”

“You’re sure it would make you happier?”

“Yes, the only thing I can’t stand is not knowing.

“I’ll tell you. You touched me by saying that your request was unmanly. If you’re willing to make the sacrifice of giving up, even for a minute, your position as a dominant male it ought to get you something.”

She paused a second. “You promise me that you will never tell anybody else.”

“I promise.”

Judith took a long deep puff and sat up straight. “I’m going to do this right. First of all I’ve got to set the scene. You may not remember it as vividly as I do. It was in the Japanese room of the Ritz. Just to the left of our table a fountain was splashing. The lights were shaded. From the other end of the room came sensuous music. I can’t remember whether it was ‘Aggravating Papa’ or ‘Yes, |We Have No Bananas,’ but it was music a little muted. At last we were alone. The god wanted to speak to me alone. I listened. He said, ‘I want to tell you something I’ve never told another living soul.’ I leaned forward and so did he. ‘It’s like this,’ he went on, ‘I’m a guess hitter. I don’t just meet the ball or tap it; I take a cut at it. And so I’ve got to make up my mind pretty near the time it leaves the pitcher’s hand whether I’m going to take it or swing. Now, there’re a lot of fellows try strategy on me. You know what that is. They give me a slow ball and the next is a fast one. That’s what you call strategy and it’s a cinch. I just lay for that fast ball and whang it. But this Red Faber that was striking me out the day you were at the park, he’s different. He doesn’t use strategy at all. He throws me a slow ball and then when I get all set he just goes ahead and throws me another slow ball and sometimes the next one will be just the same. You see it’s tough. That’s why sometimes I don’t look so good when I’m hitting against him.’”

“Was that all?” I asked.

“That was all that was important. I did ask him if he liked to go to the theater and he said he’d seen ‘The Follies’ and he liked Will Rogers. And he said that he’d seen ‘Dew Drop Inn’ and he liked Jim Barton. And I said I hadn’t seen Jim Barton and he said I ought to and then you and Mr. Keenan came back with the cigarettes.”

“What did you think of him?”

“I don’t know. I know the impulse I had all the time I was alone with him.”

“What?” I asked.

“I wanted to reach across the table and pat him on the head and say, ‘Don’t be frightened – Judith won’t hurt you.’”

NINE

For two days my mind was at rest and then Judith got a letter from Tiny Tyler. We were lunching at the Algonquin and she suddenly fished it out of her bag.

“Do you want to read it yourself or will you trust me not to leave out anything?”

I said I’d trust her.

“It begins, ‘My Dear Miss Winthrop’ and he says, “I enjoyed meeting you at dinner so much. And I want so much to have you come and take dinner with me. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble could you meet me at the ball park right after the game on Friday? I think we’re going to pitch Joe Bush so it ought to be a fast game as his control is very good this year and they don’t hit him much this year. Not those Red Sox anyhow. You see I keep my car up at the park. It’s a 1923 Cadillac. I could just shoot you up to a place called Long View, a little above Yonkers. If you want to, ask that little man that went out and got the cigarettes. I don’t happen to remember his name so will you tip me off if he comes? Some people get kind of mad if you don’t remember their names. The place where I come out of the park after the game is right out in front where the ticket windows are. It’s the door that says ‘Club Offices’ over it. It will only take me about twenty minutes to get ready after the game. Will you send me a letter at the Ansonia Hotel where I am living? Don’t mark it ‘personal’ and that will make it easier for me to pick out. I get a lot of letters from nuts and other people. Very sincerely – John W. Tyler.’”

“I’m going even if he doesn’t remember my name.”

Tiny got a home run in the sixth inning, but it wasn’t so much. It was high and dropped into the short right field stand. After the game we waited around the door where it said “Club Offices.” There were only a few other people hanging around. I went across the street to get some cigarettes, never dreaming that Judith wouldn’t be all right, but two or three minutes later a couple of youngish sports sidled up to her and one of them said, “How did you like the game, kid?”

I told her afterwards that probably it would have been all right if she’d said “Sir!” right then and there, but she stuck it out that she would rather be insulted than act like a chump. She said the man had asked her a fair question and so she answered, “I liked the game all right.”

Next he wanted to know, “Who are you waiting for?”

“Mr. Tyler,” she told him.

“He’s got a lot of girls,” the man said. “He’ll never miss one. Why not take a ride with me? I’ve got a car here.”

Judith just said, “No,” and tried to make it curt and final, but the man put his hand on her arm. “Be a sport, kid,” and it was then that she slapped him in the face. Maybe it was more than a slap because he grabbed hold of her wrist. That was just the second I came up and I behaved all wrong from the very start. Instead of sailing in for him I said, “Leave that young lady alone.” Of course, I was going to hit him right after that if he didn’t let go, but the other sport that had only been watching up till then came up alongside me and swung his fist right into the middle of my stomach. I don’t know whether it knocked me down or not but I went down. And right here comes the most shameful part of my whole performance in the business. I’ve never told anybody before. Even Judith won’t know until she reads this. I didn’t bounce right up again and fight. I was hurt and I was horribly sick at my stomach but I wasn’t unconscious or paralyzed or anything like that. I didn’t get up. Not right off. Probably I said to myself, “A policeman will be right along.” I didn’t get up. Maybe it wasn’t more than five or six seconds, but I am absolutely sure that I was waiting hoping somebody else would come along and take on the job. Tyler did. I suppose he saw me get hit just as he came out of the door at the head of the stairs. He didn’t say anything or ask any questions, but just slid in between the two men. One of them he pushed sharply so that he shot away three or four feet, and then he wheeled suddenly and hit the other man twice in the face. The second blow knocked him down. Tyler flashed around expecting to find the fellow he’d pushed away coming back at him, but that man was standing with both hands up to his face which was covered with blood.

“Don’t hit him, Tiny,” said Judith, “I’m afraid I’ve broken his nose with my parasol.”

Both men started to run and turned at the first corner and were gone. By this time I was up and leaning against a wall, deathly sick, faint, with my heart going in fast runs of ten or twelve beats and then stopping to rest. Tyler went into the club house and brought me out some whiskey. After a bit he took me home in his car.

“Are you sure you’re all right now?” Judith kept asking when I got to my flat. I knew by then that I wasn’t going to die and anyhow I knew the answer she wanted so I told her, “I’m just a little sickish, but there’s nothing the matter. I’ll feel all right the minute I lie down. Don’t you two bother about me.” They went away in Tyler’s car to Long View.

I didn’t feel so very sick any more. Not in my stomach. I just lay there and wondered whether there really was a power that made for the eternal fitness of things. If I could have put my finger on him I would have made him tell me why he failed to give me size and courage. I was a little man anyway and it seemed excessive to add the heart murmur on top of everything else.

Fortunately my reason did function. I realized that I might go all to pieces if I kept on pitying myself. I’ve learned that when things go terribly wrong the only saving emotion is anger. But I didn’t know just who or what to pick on. The power that makes for the eternal fitness of things was too shadowy. Being mad at myself wouldn’t do any good. Suddenly I saw the picture of Napoleon over my desk. It was really me, but it was enough like Napoleon to make it possible to blame it on him. There it hung in the same spot where I had put it the first year I got out of college. I took it off the wall and dropped it down five stories into the court from the bath room window. The glass and the frame were shattered. But I wasn’t done yet. I leaned out and shook my fist at the wreckage and said, “You dirty militarist!”

TEN

Judith called the next day, but I was out and we didn’t meet for more than a week. I found that people around town were beginning to talk about Judith and “her ball player.” The news came to me that they had been seen together at the Ziegfeld Follies and then at the Music Box Review. All this I took calmly enough, but when Fred Spates reported finding them two rows in front of him at “Romeo and Juliet” I was worried. Jane Cowl and Rollo Peters were much too good for me to be easy about Judith and her ball player wading together in the moonlight of the balcony scene. I hunted up Judith the next day. “How are you getting along with the education of Tiny Tyler?” I asked her. She pretended to look blank. “Fred Spates saw you together on Thursday at ‘Romeo and Juliet.’”

“That’s true,” said Judith, “but the inference is unfair. I didn’t pick the play. Tiny did. The first two times he left it to me and naturally I picked out the Follies and the Music Box Review. I think Will Rogers is probably the finest satirist in America and the other show had Bobby Clark whom I’d never seen before and he’s a superb comedian. Naturally, I had a fine time, but poor Tiny seemed depressed. There was something on his mind. I didn’t find out till afterwards. It seems he began to worry that I was sacrificing myself for his sake. A lot of men think that women are always up to tricks like that. He got the idea that I was picking out lowbrow shows just so he wouldn’t get out of his depth. And so one night without so much as asking me by your leave he turned up with tickets for ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ He said, ‘I wanted to take you to something you could really enjoy.’”

“And did you?”

“Yes, I hadn’t seen it since my junior year in Vassar and it’s a much better show than I thought. I remember when I saw it then I thought it was just sentimental slop. Of course I was almost twenty at the time and pretty much scarred up by life and jaded no end, and the Romeo was thirty years too old and fifty pounds overweight. It does make a difference.”

“I’m glad,” I said sourly, “that Tiny Tyler’s brought you to an appreciation of Shakespeare.”

“That’s unfair, too,” said Judith. “I challenge you to show me that I ever attempted to hurt Shakespeare by spoken or written word. I may have said that the actors have to be geniuses to keep him alive, but that’s nothing against him. Second rate interpretations of first rate work are always terrible. Of course, I’m not going to swallow Shakespeare whole. He had his off days and he wasn’t smart enough or strong-minded enough to take them off and go out poaching or drinking or making love. He was too indolent to stop writing. He insisted on putting words down on paper even when he had nothing to say. A man like Shakespeare ought to be ashamed of himself to have written ‘As You Like It.’”

“But ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ I understand, gets by.”

“It does. At least most of it. The last part is twaddle, but on the whole it stands as the finest play anybody’s ever written about lust at first sight.”

At the moment I was annoyed. “You’re just trying to be smart and different. Why don’t you want to say love at first sight?”

“Because it is different. I don’t believe there is any such thing as love at first sight. You’re not in a hurry or anything?”

“No, education comes before everything else with me.”

“Well, then, consider the circumstances. Juliet, a warm and ardent young Italian girl, and Romeo, a warm and ardent young Italian boy, see each other and are immediately smitten. Now what do you suppose was the idea in the head of each. Why simply Juliet thought, either consciously or unconsciously, ‘There’s the most beautiful young fellow I’ve ever seen in my life and I must have him.’ And Romeo thought precisely the same thing. And they both had sense enough to go ahead and have an affair. But what indication did Shakespeare give, or what indication could he possibly give, that these two people were in love? When you’re in love with a person it means that you want to be around with him over a considerable stretch of time. I won’t say forever. You’re excited by his looks and all that but there must be a lot more. The way his mind works is interesting. His character and his personality appeal to you. If you happen to read a new book he’s the fellow you’d like to talk it over with. You want to show him the piece you wrote for ‘Tomorrow’ and see what he thinks of it. Your minds don’t have to agree, usually they don’t, but somehow or other they have to fit together. You can’t very well be in love with a man if his idea of a grand way to spend the summer is to take a cottage in Newport and you want to go for a walking trip in Italy. For instance, I could have a mad desire for a man who thought Billy Sunday a philosopher, but I couldn’t possibly be in love with that man.”

“Your interpretation of the character of Judith Wigglesworth Winthrop is superb and convincing, but after all you started off to tell me about Mrs. Romeo Montague.”

“Her name,” said Judith severely, “wasn’t Mrs. Montague. She was and ever shall be Juliet Capulet, and if I seem to turn away from her to discuss myself it’s only because any interpretation of a character must be in the light of one’s own personal experience. Naturally I’m expecting a little mental cooperation from you. When I say things about myself I expect you to apply them to Juliet. They hold true. Juliet knew Romeo simply as a lover and nothing more. They never discussed or engaged in any enterprise except love. If they’d begun to talk about music, or the theater, or free speech or birth control, it’s entirely possible that Juliet would have found that Romeo had a ratty and wholly objectionable mind and that she simply couldn’t stand him except briefly after sundown.”

“But they did die for each other,” I remonstrated.

“That’s the silly part of it unless you choose, as I do, to give Shakespeare credit for more sense than lies on the surface. He was dealing with a boob audience and so he adopted symbols which are invariably the easiest form of expression for simple minds to grasp. He killed off Romeo and Juliet to indicate that desire, although an entirely laudable and beautiful emotion, is transitory and must die.”

“You would have done it differently, I suppose.”

“I would. My last act would be: ‘The balcony twenty years later.’ I’d have the same moonlight and the same roses and Romeo and Juliet about the same. They could indicate the passing of time by both padding up a little. As the curtain rose Romeo would be wandering around the garden and Juliet would be leaning on the rail of the balcony a little heavily. By and by Romeo looks up and sees her and says, ‘Hello.’ In my version that is the only word spoken in the entire scene. Juliet replies merely by waving a couple of fingers at him. There is a long pause and then Juliet’s mouth begins to open. It continues to open wider and wider. As a matter of fact she yawns and the curtain comes down upon one of the most poignant tragedies in human experience.”

I applauded and cried “Author!” and Judith rose and bowed.

“It was most diverting and instructive,” I said, “but I didn’t come here to talk about the relations of Romeo and Juliet.”

“I’m so sorry but I suppose it’s too late now. I’ve gone and done it.”

“We can get to the point right off if you don’t mind impertinence.”

“I’m starving for it, Georgie.”

“Well, then, what is your feeling for Tiny Tyler? Is it love or is it lust?”

She didn’t grow angry. Instead she smiled and said, “Sometimes I think you’re a fool.”

“Why, wasn’t it a fair question?”

“Fair but unnecessary. Just a minute ago you complained that my talk about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was too autobiographical. You could have had your answer if you’d only been smart enough to keep substituting ‘Judith’ for ‘Juliet’ and ‘Tiny’ for ‘Romeo’ all through my lecture.”

“You mean you’re not in love with Tiny Tyler?”

“Symbols won’t do?”

“Don’t tease me, Judith, I’ve got to know.”

“Of course I’m not in love with him. I wasn’t just fooling in the things I said about love. I meant them. Perhaps, I do know him a little better than Juliet knew her Romeo but I’ve never got half an inch into his mind. I don’t even know if he has one. All I know is that in addition to being beautiful, he’s kind and sweet and good mannered.”

“Excuse my glove,” I parroted.

“You are a fool, Georgie, if you think forms have anything to do with good manners. It’s only the spirit that counts. He has that.”

A sudden fear struck at me. Her words “I do know him a little better than Juliet knew her Romeo” came bounding back.

“This question may pass the limits of impertinence,” I said.

“I’ll take my chances on that. Why is it everybody insists on maintaining this protective attitude toward me?”

“But the thing really is none of my business.”

“Never mind that, Georgie, let’s go ahead on the basis of being an unlimited corporation.”

“Well then, have you had an affair with Tiny Tyler?”

She flushed a little. “Did I offend you?” I asked hastily. She bit her lip. “If you really meant it as a question it’s all right, but I don’t want to be taunted. No, I haven’t had an affair with Tiny Tyler. If you must have an exact and comprehensive report I kissed him lightly on the lips coming home from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and he nearly jumped out of his Cadillac.”

My pulse fell from 118 to 83. The figures are exact. I counted. “It says in the Bible,” I remarked with no intent except to make a little joke, “that if a person looks at another with lust in his heart he might as well have an affair.”

“I think she might much better,” said Judith.

It gave me a jolt. “Don’t talk that way,” I told her. “You know you’re just talking nonsense. You mustn’t do such a thing. You couldn’t. In spite of all this fooling and theorizing and all that you are a good woman.”

“You have gone over the line, now,” she said. “I told you I didn’t mind questions, but that I didn’t like taunts. When you say I’m a good woman what you really mean is that I’m a timid woman and an ineffective woman. I won’t let you say that. I’ll show you I’m not a good woman. I’ll show him.”

And for the second time in my life I saw Judith cry. “Don’t stand there,” she said. “Get out and don’t come back.”

ELEVEN

On Monday morning there came a letter from Judith. It said: “Miss Judith Winthrop wishes to see Mr. George Wallace. Nature of business – abject apology.” I went straight to her house. She seemed very glad to see me and held out both hands. “I’m so sorry I was rotten the last time you were here,” she said.

“That’s all right; forget about it.”

“I can’t. The thing’s got to be settled right. You said harsh things to me, Georgie.”

Here I felt I had to protest. “Harsh things? What harsh things?”

“You kept insisting I was a good woman until I made a fool of myself and began to cry. It wasn’t tactful of you, but I had no right to get angry because what you said was true.”

“I don’t know; maybe you’re not a good woman,” I said in an attempt to console her.

“That’s no use. I know now. I’ve tried.”

“You’ve tried?”

“Yes, in the last four days I’ve used every wile on Tiny Tyler and my return is affection and profound respect. So long as we’re being frank with each other I might as well say right out that he is in love with me. I assure you I’m not wrong about that but it doesn’t do me any good. It doesn’t help at all to knock down his respect. I suppose I’ve got you to thank for his knowing that my family came over on the Mayflower?”

“Well, that’s privileged. It’s true.”

“Yes, but you might have left it to me to break it to him. I don’t believe a woman’s under any obligation to tell a man everything about herself. He need never have known. It’s made a terrible impression on him. He acts a little bit as if the Statue of Liberty had suddenly come to life and deigned to notice him, a humble ball player.”

“Where on earth do you suppose Damon Runyon got this stuff about, ‘His only weakness is a fast blonde on the outside corner of the park’?”

“That can be true. In fact I know it is true. Tiny’s simply bombarded me with confessions about his evil past and his resolutions to lead a better life. You see the trouble is I’m not a fast blonde. He’s got all women divided into two classes – bad women and good women. And I’m not only over on the side of the river where the good women live but I find I’m set on the highest peak in the county.”

“Why not just let it go at that and stop worrying about it, Judith? You can’t make him over.”

“But it isn’t entirely his fault. A lot of the blame is mine. I look like a good woman, I talk like a good woman and if you must have the bitter truth I act like a good woman.”

“Then, that must mean that down in the bottom of your heart you want to be a good woman.”

“Georgie, you just get wronger and wronger. We can leave the heart out because it’s only a fictional source of impulses, but if you said down in the bottom of my mind—”

“Well then, what did I say that was wrong?”

“You said I wanted to be. That’s something else again. I didn’t drive these stakes and chains in the sub-cellar of my consciousness. They’re legacies I had no chance to refuse. I come from a long line of good women. Maybe they wanted to be good or at any rate they believed they ought to be good. The belief they couldn’t hand on to me. That was a matter of the conscious mind and I was able to refuse, but they got around me just the same. They left me the habit. I haven’t a scrap of their religious conviction or their ethical concepts. I believe something entirely different and yet I act in exactly the same way. A person can reason out his conduct until he’s black in the face and then there’s something else that grabs hold of him and makes him do things which he knows are utterly silly. The most confirmed and thorough-going pacifist I ever met was killed winning the Victoria Cross.”

I looked at the Shaw-green bookcases and wondered whether Judith was actually baring her own convictions or merely remembering “The Devil’s Disciple” and “The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet.”

“It’s probably a little more complex than this,” she continued. “It isn’t fair to blame my ancestors for the whole business. Even without inhibitions I might fail. The fast blonde has more advantages over me than liberal ancestors. In her own right she has technique. She knows things that I’ve never learned. I only thought of one device and it was too shameless. One evening after Tiny had been doing a lot of talking about good women and bad ones I contemplated sending him Kipling and underscoring ‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skin,’ but I couldn’t stand the thought of employing a jingo poet as a pander.”

“You might ask me to go and speak to him.”

She seemed to take me seriously and shook her head. “It wouldn’t do any good. Seduction is women’s business. Men haven’t any capacity at all. I had an old grandmother who used to give me very solemn warnings while I was still a small girl. She said, ‘Remember, my dear, a man’ll always go just as far as you let him.’ I didn’t know enough then to hoot at her. I wish I could run into her at a spiritualist seance and say, ‘Yes indeed, grandma, he will if you meet him seven eighths of the way.’ Men are fond of saying with a smirk, “Of course, I’m no Joseph,’ but they lie. They are; every one of them. Let Mrs. Potiphar loose on any of them and he’ll turn and run for his life.”

“But after all, Judith,” I objected, “women do get betrayed.”

“Only the strong minded ones,” she said. “I’m not just theorizing. The first year I worked on ‘Tomorrow’ there was a young, pestering, uppity, objectionable Irishman on the magazine. He was always hanging around in corners and squeezing my hand and wanting to know if I wouldn’t go on a little trip with him. I got pretty sick of it and there didn’t seem to be any way to get rid of him and so I finally tried out my theory. I turned on him all of a sudden and said, ‘Yes, indeed, I’ll go with you to Atlantic City at four o’clock this afternoon.’ He grew pale and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean this afternoon’ and after that he never bothered me again.”

I reached out and took Judith’s hand. “You needn’t ask me to go to Atlantic City,” I said, “this isn’t meant to be ardor. I just want to tell you that I feel sorry because you’re so depressed. Of course, you oughtn’t to expect me to be terribly gloomy about it because it all sounds as if you’d given up your idea of having an affair with Tiny Tyler.”

Judith patted the back of my hand. “Yes,” she said, “I’m going to marry him.”

I sat and looked at her. She wasn’t fooling. “But you can’t do that.”

“Yes, I can,” she replied. “After all I have had ancestors who got married. I may not have character enough to make this man seduce me but I’m not such a blithering idiot that I can’t get him to marry me.”

“But you’re marrying just for lust.”

“Just for lust,” said Judith.

“It’s bound to” turn out terribly.”

“I suppose it will,” she agreed. “Yes, I’m pretty sure it will after a little. It’s the little that I’m buying. But there might be something in the long run. There might be a child and then her child, and in the third generation a Judith that would have spunk enough to be a bad woman if she wanted to.

TWELVE

I’m going to tell now about the most caddish thing I ever did in my life. It must go in. Judith says that she doesn’t think it was caddish at all. She just thinks it was funny. Perhaps it is at this distance. Anyhow it isn’t my business to pass judgment. The thing happened. That’s enough. After leaving Judith, I walked. There wasn’t any place I wanted to go, but somehow it seemed easier to keep moving. I thought that if I went on walking long enough my heart might begin to act up and I could worry about that instead of tormenting myself about Judith. All sorts of crazy schemes came into my head. I considered going to Judith and telling her that she must marry me and that if she didn’t I’d kill myself, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me. The satisfaction of fooling her wouldn’t be good enough. I didn’t have the nerve to kill myself. I knew that.

By and by I was all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park and my heart had failed to provide any distraction. My pulse didn’t pound. My head did. It kept saying, “Judith! Judith! Judith!” If she had gone through with her original intention of having a love affair with Tiny Tyler I could have nerved myself up to stand it. There was the chance of waiting that out. Of course even a marriage needn’t last forever, but there would have to be unhappiness and a mess to end it. You see I wasn’t thinking entirely of myself. I didn’t want her to be wretched. For just a minute or two I tried to comfort myself with the thought that she might be wrong about Tiny Tyler. Perhaps he didn’t want her. Maybe marriage was the last thing in his mind. I couldn’t hang on to that. The thing was unthinkable. It was almost easier to face losing her than to have her come up against any shattering humiliation like that.

I’m trying to show that I wasn’t just a mutt. It was a chance not of my own making that took me to see Tyler. With walking and sitting around and cursing it was after nine o’clock at night that I got back to my flat. The hallboy had a message for me. Mr. Tyler had called up and wanted me to telephone to him the minute I came in. I called his hotel and he said, “I don’t want to bother you but will you see me here right away. It’s very important.” I had no idea what it was all about but naturally I went. He was alone in his room and fidgety but not at all explicit. He wanted to know if I had quite recovered from the blow in the stomach and I said that I had. We talked in a noncommittal way about baseball for a while and then he went to a closet and brought out a large package. When he opened it I saw some two hundred little paper covered books.

“Did you ever see any of those?” he asked.

I put my hand into the pile and came up with “Schopenhauer’s Essays.” I was puzzled and said, “What have you got?”

“It’s all the great books in the world,” Tiny Tyler explained. “They’re published by a company named Haldeman-Julius out in Kansas and you get the whole lot for about $20. I read about them in an advertisement and it said that reading these books was just as much of an education as going to college. You know Mr. Wallace, I am a college man myself, but I didn’t work very hard and I’ve forgotten a lot about it and so I thought I’d get these books and try ’em out. Do you think it’s all right?”

“All right for what?”

“Will they educate you, I mean.”

“I’m no authority on education,” I told him. “I don’t know. It isn’t always so much what’s in a book as what you get out of it.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Tiny said. “I’m going to plug on ’em. Some of the stuff I’m learning by heart. Look at this one.”

He tossed me over a book called “Wit and Wisdom of Japan.” I noticed that some of the paragraphs were underscored. “They’re some pretty smart cracks in there,” said Tiny. “Listen, ‘Going downhill, no one is old.’ Now that’s the truth. Carl Mays don’t know he’s slowing up. Every time he gets walloped he says the ball is livelier this year. He’s slipping and he just don’t know he’s slipping. Some of those baseball writers think I’m slowing up, but they don’t know so much. They think all baseball’s knocking home runs. They don’t figure that often you can help your team just as much with a single. They haven’t even tumbled that I’m choking my bat. And listen, this is a good one, ‘To the ant, a few drops of rain is a flood.’ Do you get that?”

“How many do you know?”

“I’ve learned thirty or forty of them. Listen to this one. This is a deep one. This is from the other book, ‘Wit and Wisdom of China.’ You’ve got to watch this one; it’s got a hook in it – ‘In shallow water dragons become the joke of shrimps.’ It was a wise old boy said that.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “they’re very interesting,” but I couldn’t help wondering why Tiny Tyler thought that it was important for me to come over to his room at night to hear about the wit and wisdom of the Chinese and the Japanese. Fortunately, I kept this wonder out of my voice.

Tiny took me up. “Interesting is right. You said it, but I’ll tell you my trouble. I’ve got all these things learned but it isn’t easy to spring ’em. The talk’s got to be set for you. I can’t just say right off cold, ‘In shallow water dragons become the joke of shrimps.’ I can’t do that, can I?”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, I’ve had that learned for two weeks now and I haven’t had one chance. Would you believe that? Of course, I don’t expect anybody’s very likely to say anything about dragons. You don’t get breaks like that, but the other day in a restaurant I saw on the menu ‘shrimp omelette.’ That looked like my chance. I said to the waiter, ‘Bring me a shrimp omelette. It looked like my chance and he said, ‘Very sorry, sir, but shrimps are out of season.’ And then it was cold.”

I was getting a little less patient. “What was it, Mr. Tyler,” I asked, “that made you decide that you wanted to get educated – I mean brushed up on your education?”

“It was a play,” he said, “a play I saw the other night called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by William Shakespeare.”

“Good lord,” I thought to myself, “am I going to get a second lecture in a week on ‘Romeo and Juliet?’”

“You went with Judith?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “I went with Miss Winthrop.” “You’re an old friend of hers, aren’t you?” he added. Perhaps I was supersensitive. It seemed to me that he rather over-emphasized the word friend.”

“I’ve known her a long time,” I replied, curtly.

“That play started me thinking,” he said, softly. “I told you I went to college. I suppose I read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ before but I didn’t remember anything about it. It might have been brand new to me and it gave me a kick.”

“It’s a beautiful performance by Jane Cowl,” I ventured.

“Yes, she can act all right, but it was Romeo gave me the kick. He made me get wise to myself.”

Here he paused and I thought I had to say something so I asked “Why?”

“You’ve seen the play?”

I nodded.

“Well, you remember about Romeo; at the beginning he’s just around loose. He’ll fall for any girl that’ll fall for him. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s just out having a good time. And then he just sees one other girl and he knows right away that it’s different. He says to himself, ‘This is a good woman. This is the woman I ought to marry if she’ll have me.’ There are all sorts of reasons why they shouldn’t get married. Her family wouldn’t like it. They don’t think anything of him. But Romeo don’t pay any attention to that. This is the one good woman in the world for him. It don’t matter that he’s been a girl chaser around the town. He forgets all about that when he sees her. Juliet’s different and that’s enough to make him different.”

During all this Tiny’s head had been hanging while he talked directly into his lap. He straightened up with a sort of defiance. “Now,” he said, “do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

“You understand I’m not trying to soften my fall. I’m not asking you do you think she’ll turn me down. That’s not up to me or up to you. That’s her business. I’m not kicking before the decision. What I want you to tell me is do you think there’s a chance for me by working and reading to make myself educated enough to be fit for her in time?”

“I can’t answer that. Don’t ask me anything. She’ll have to decide.”

He didn’t seem to pay any attention, but went right on. “She mustn’t hold it against me that I’ve been so wild and rotten with women…. That’s all past. I couldn’t look at anybody else. I couldn’t think about anybody else. I’ve never had an unclean thought about her. I can swear to that. I keep dreaming about her. It’s always about places a long time back home in Jason when I was just a kid. It’s Winter and we’re skating together on the Otis Pond. I’m just touching her with the tips of my fingers, mind you, and we’re skating round and round the Otis Pond.”

I knew perfectly well that he had no idea what he was telling me and that he couldn’t understand that he was burning me with hot irons, but I stopped him.

“It’s no good talking to me,” I said. “You’ll have to talk to her.”

He looked like a small boy who has just been scolded. “All I want is a little advice,” he pleaded.

And so I let him have it. “All right, you’ve asked for advice and I’ll give it to you. Maybe you won’t take it, but it’s good advice just the same. Marriage would be a mistake. I don’t think it’s what you really want. I know it isn’t what she wants.”

He was looking at me in wide-eyed amazement.

“You’re two young people and you’ve got a crush on each other. All right. Go away some place and have an affair. Go away and have done with it. Go away. You don’t want to marry her. She doesn’t want to marry you. She just wants you for a lover.”

Tiny was out of his chair and half way across the room to me before he checked himself. My voice may have grown a little loud as I talked, but he was shouting. “It’s a damn lie.” He cursed me as if I’d been an umpire. “When you say it about me,” he went on, “it isn’t true, but you’ve got a right to say it because I’ve been that sort. But you can’t say it about her. Not if you were twice as small. I’ll beat the head off you, you dirty rat. Here—”

He suddenly seized both my wrists in one big hand. “Now you say something and say it quick before I break your face. You say, and say it good and loud, ‘I lied. Miss Judith Winthrop is a good woman.’”

I didn’t mind saying it. I said it at the top of my voice. I felt perfectly safe. Judith couldn’t hear me.

THIRTEEN

I wasn’t at the wedding. Judith wrote me a note the day before. “Tiny has told me of the terrible things you said about me,” she exclaimed. “We are to be married at ten o’clock tomorrow morning which doesn’t give me nearly enough time to make him understand the sort of woman I really am and convince him that you didn’t insult me. I couldn’t begin to tackle the job under a year and of course I don’t know if my little while will last as long as that. Of course if there actually was a principle involved I’d go down fighting for it. You are the best friend I have in the world but even so it doesn’t seem to me at all important that you should be at the wedding. Tiny’s rage at you is convenient. I want the degrading ceremony to be as furtive as possible. It is bad business at best and you know that this case is a little more heinous than most. This compromise is exceptionally cowardly. I am appealing to the State to help me out in something I wasn’t forthright enough to do for myself. I have agreed to let them make a dishonest woman of me because I didn’t have nerve enough to be a direct and honest one.

“Naturally I have no desire to ask you to see my shame. It isn’t going to be a religious ceremony, of course, but only an alderman, although I don’t know why it should be any less a sin to lie to a politician than to a priest. Still I believe this way is shorter. And anyhow the State ought not to be naive enough to believe me. My only consolation is that it is braver for me to marry Tiny than to back away from him altogether. At least the thing is adventurous although hardly as fine and free as it ought to be. Moreover, I am defying most of the rules. Nobody can accuse me of not marrying in haste and with the worst motives in the world. I shall try to hang on to that thought in the darkest hour while the man in the City Hall is mumbling and prating. It will happen as I told you in the neighborhood of ten o’clock a.m. and if you are awake so early stop whatever you are doing for a minute or two and wish luck to – Judith.”

It can hardly have been as furtive as Judith wished because the papers were full of it. The story made every first page in town. “Home Run King Wins Society Queen” was the general interpretation placed upon the happening by the metropolitan press. Practically all the stories mentioned the Mayflower and Judith’s great, great grandfather Josiah Wigglesworth who happened to be a passenger. Only one paper mentioned the fact that Judith was a writer and even that account took occasion to call her “a parlor Bolshevik.” Judith and Tiny had their day on the front page and then almost everybody forgot about it. Two days after the wedding the Yankees left for Chicago for a succession of crucial series in one of the hottest pennant races the league had ever known. In a short paragraph on the sporting page of the “World” I found “Mrs. Tiny Tyler, who was a Miss Winthrop, accompanied her husband on the trip.”

And then came silence. I heard nothing for a month although I observed from the sport pages that Tiny made seven home runs on the trip and the Yankees gained three full games on their nearest rival, so I assumed that their married life must be tolerably happy. At the end of a month Judith wrote from Washington where the team was playing its last series before coming home.

“I think I have effected a reconciliation between you and Tiny,” she began, “but at any rate I shall see you in New York next Monday when we get back. Tell Coler I haven’t finished that Sherwood Anderson piece yet but I have an excellent article ready for him on ‘Tribal Rites In America’ which begins with ‘The Golden Bough’ and ends with a discussion of the custom of standing up in the seventh inning. It was my intention when the trip began to see every game, but I couldn’t stand the strain. You had me well started on the road to being a rooter but that’s all spoiled now. I’m just a bum sport. The only sort of game I enjoy is one in which we make eight runs in the first inning and then quickly increase the lead. Tiny got tickets for me in Chicago from the secretary of the club and when I arrived at the park I found to my horror that I was in a box with the wives of four other players. Cattish or not, I don’t mind confiding to you that they were a low grade lot. One of them was Mrs. Sturm, the wife of that young lefthander who came up from the Southern League last season. The worst of it was that he happened to be pitching. At the beginning of the game I mean. In the third inning Bib Falk hit a tremendous drive into left field. The sun was blazing fiercely in Tiny’s eyes but he turned pretty fast and ran for all he was worth. He just managed to get his fingertips on the ball but couldn’t hold it. It went for a three base hit and then young Sturm got excited and passed two batters and Schalk hit a home run into the right field bleachers. Huggins waved Sturm out of the box and sent in Joe Bush.

“Mrs. Sturm began to cry and I suppose I can’t be snooty about that because you know I once did the same thing at a ball game. However, I defy you to say I was hysterical. She was. You see there happened to be two out at the time Falk hit the ball over Tiny’s head. Mrs. Sturm began to rage at me. ‘If your husband hadn’t dropped that ball,’ she said, ‘they wouldn’t have had all those runs and Sugar would still be in there pitching.’ I learned later that she calls Sturm, ‘Sugar.’ (Of course, I suspected it at the time.) In the beginning my conduct was above reproach. I replied very mildly that it was true that Tiny Tyler and I had been married but that we remained for all that two distinct individual people. I explained to her that my business was writing and that his was playing left field for the New York Yankees. I said that he had no responsibility whatsoever for anything I wrote and that likewise the manner in which he played the outfield was none of my business.

“It may be that I overdid the mildness of my reply. There’s nothing like a soft answer for kindling wrath and the more I modulated my voice the higher rose the voice of Mrs. Sturm. She said, ‘They ought to get that old man out of there. He’s just a showoff player. That’s what he is – that Tiny Tyler. They have to hit the balls right to him – that’s what they do. They might as well put him in a rocking chair out there.’ Now the thing which makes me blush and burn is that all this was still none of .my business but I couldn’t help getting angry. ‘That,’ I said, ‘was a three base hit. It couldn’t have been caught.’ As a matter of fact that was exactly the way in which the official scorer scored it, but at the time I didn’t know it. Mrs. Sturm and I were in the unfortunate position of matching sheer opinion against opinion. The question at issue could not be demonstrated by either of us. There was no dictionary or book of statistics or anything like that to which we could refer. This was a new sort of dispute. I felt my deficiencies in actual contact with life keenly. Mrs. Sturm roared back at me, ‘It wasn’t a hit.’ I fumbled for a suitable reply for several seconds but the very best I could do was to answer, ‘It was a hit.’ It may even be that at this point I raised my voice a little. But she quite outdid me. ‘It wasn’t a hit,’ she shouted. I began to realize that we were becalmed in a vicious circle. The thing could go on endlessly. I had lost my temper, but a few shreds of dignity remained and I managed to pull myself together and leave the box without even hurling a final ‘It was a hit’ over my shoulder.

“I told the club secretary that night that I would rather have a seat out with the crowd than a chair in the box. He said that he could get me one but first he issued a warning. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the fans ride Tiny pretty hard all over the circuit and they may shout things at him that will make you feel uncomfortable. Chicago isn’t like New York. They’re not cosmopolitan like us. They haven’t got any manners.’ I told him that I hated manners and that anyway it was a matter of complete indifference to me what people shouted at Tiny. In fact I repeated my assertion that it was no business of mine what he did at the bat or in the field. The sequel was humiliating. I sat all by myself in the stand with local rooters all around me. Now, I have no prejudice against Chicagoans. Some of my best friends are Chicagoans, but I had never seen so many all together at the same time. It does make a difference.

“The rooting began in the first inning. Next me there sat a particularly Chicago-like young man. He was, I believe, of Polish extraction and he wore a pink necktie with green spots. When Tiny came to bat the young man cupped his hands and shouted directly in my ear, ‘You big bum!’ I was pleased to find that this didn’t bother me in the least. Do you remember that talk about Freud and marriage at Myra’s house and the argument I had with her? She said that in marriage or any relation between a woman and a man an identification must take place. Usually, according to her theory the woman identified herself with the man. An actual fusion of personality took place. Anything that was done to him beat directly upon her. You remember that I denied it, but there wasn’t any way of settling the issue. All this came back to me when the young man cupped his hands and shouted, ‘You big bum !’ I didn’t mind in the least. I had no feeling that anything had been done to me. Cvengros was pitching and he threw a high one to Tiny who let it go by. The young man cupped his hands and shouted in my ear again, ‘You big bum!’ He shouted with exactly the same tone and inflection as before but with all the air of a man who has suddenly hit upon a mot. Tiny eventually got a base on balls and while he was at bat the young man shouted, ‘You big bum!’ exactly seven times. I contend that it was the repetition and not the sentiment which annoyed me. I wouldn’t even enjoy hearing General Pershing called a ‘big bum’ so many times in so short a compass. In fact I made an experiment to test my psychological reflexes. As Tiny took a lead off first the young man cupped his hands for the eighth successive rendition of his quip and I shut him out with a louder shout. I cupped my hands and yelled, ‘You big loafer!’ I wanted to make the young man realize the richness of our language and convince him that a vocabulary is like a great jungle in its potentiality for variety and venture. Instead he took it as a sign of tastes in common and we began to talk. He began, ‘I give that big bum about one year more in the big leagues.’ ‘Do you think so?’ I said. ‘Yeh, he’s slowing up all the time. He’s getting old. It’s his feet’ll go back on him first. Pounding around on the baselines don’t do a man any good.’

“Just then Tiny made a break for second and came whirling into the bag with the dust flying. He slid right under Eddie Collins. I jumped out of my seat and shouted ecstatically, ‘Tiny!’ The young man gave me a look in which surprise, horror and reproach were all mingled. I had broken the bond between us. I almost feared for a moment that from a distance I might hear a cock crow. Still I couldn’t have heard for the young man resolutely turned a shoulder on me and shouted twice as loudly as ever before, ‘You big bum!’ The thing had developed into a situation and I knew that if I remained there might be words and arguments and that for the second time in two days I might be led into a display of wifely loyalty. And so I walked out on that game too. When I get back you and I can go around and see Myra and continue the argument, – Judith.”

FOURTEEN

Judith’s letter didn’t please me. Obviously she was growing more married. The little time for which she bargained now stretched ahead of her like a straight road in a flat country. And it seemed to me that it was a desert across which she was traveling. Every now and then I am going to pause in this narrative to justify myself. It isn’t fair for anybody to think that I was merely enviously waiting for Judith to be done with her ball player. I was sorry because I had lost her, but I was also sorry because she had lost herself. Tiny Tyler with all his home runs wasn’t good enough to blot out a person like Judith. Here was a mind fine, inquisitive and challenging, now reduced to thinking up arguments to fling at stray rooters and the wives of lefthanded pitchers. That’s why I was sad. And so I welcomed her second letter because it began:

“I’m worried about my name and I’ve decided to fight for it. Please find out the address of the Lucy Stone League. I believe the president’s name is Ruth Hale. Will you get all the literature they have on my right to remain Judith Winthrop though married? I’m pretty sure there are no legal obstacles but no matter what law or custom may be, Judith Winthrop I was and Judith Winthrop I am. In theory I was always for a woman’s keeping her own name, but it didn’t seem important. I used to say in effect why do the poor dears fret about that while Armenians are dying. Now it will take a world plague to divert my attention. It isn’t a theory which confronts me; it’s a condition. The thing happened just as I came out of the City Hall. Your baseball writer friend, Mr. Keenan, rushed up to me to shake hands and said, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Tyler?’ I almost looked around to find this person whom he mentioned. ‘Where’s Judith Winthrop?’ I asked myself. She had been swallowed up. A ceremony had gone over her head. Judith Winthrop was more than a name; it was me. I have a name; therefore I exist as Descartes might have said and didn’t. Mrs. Tyler was somebody else. If I had been christened that at birth it would be a good enough name, but I grew up with the other. It meant something. Not to many but to a few people and it was all I had. This rebellion kept seething around in my head all day and it grew worse when we got on the train to go to Chicago. Tiny introduced me to Miller Huggins, the small fretful man who manages the team. In justice to Tiny I ought to say that he was embarrassed, but there’s no getting away from what he said to the small little Huggins person. ‘Miller,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet the wife.’ He might just as well have said, ‘Take a look at the new suitcase I’ve brought along on this trip.’ Marriage had reduced me so low that I wasn’t even a proper noun.

“I didn’t announce my rebellion to Tiny for three or four days, but then I explained it very carefully. Perhaps you’ve noticed that his mind moves cautiously. He immediately leaped to the conclusion that he had angered me in some way and that it was revenge. I knocked that down. Next he hit on the notion that I couldn’t bear to have people forget that I was related to the first governor of Massachusetts. He had picked up that fact in a newspaper story of the wedding. I assured him that my feeling was much more personal. Then he got on to the practical difficulties of my remaining Judith Winthrop. Did I think it was decent? What would they say at hotels? That was easy. I pointed out that the traditional ‘And Wife’ could hardly stand as unmistakable evidence of respectability. I grew personal and under severe cross questioning he admitted that in his lurid past he had upon occasion used the words without any legal or moral sanction whatsoever. ‘But I never signed “John Tyler and wife,”’ he declared with a good deal of heat. Apparently his practice was to register ‘Thomas Finneran and wife,’ Finneran being the umpire whom he hates most. This I threw out as irrelevant. His present attitude toward my decision to use my own name is that of course it may seem queer and eccentric and all that, but that I believe in it and so it must be all right even if he can’t understand. In fact upon occasion he has defended me strongly. That has been necessary very often. Five wives of players are on this trip and they are all rip snorting about my being Judith Winthrop instead of Mrs. Tiny Tyler. Mrs. Samuel Owen, wife of the well known catcher, was the most aggressive. She sailed into me in the lobby of the Auditorium one day and said, ‘Well, if I was married to a man who hit sixty-two home runs in one year I’d be proud to bear his name.’

“Every one of those home runs was made without any help from me, without even so much as mental suggestion. At the time of their making I had only the dimmest notion of the nature of a home run and I had never even heard of Tiny Tyler. More than that I had not hinted to Mrs. Owen that I was interested in her opinion. I think I was entitled to a catty answer and so I said, ‘Yes, it is a pity that Mr. Owen only batted .243 last season.’

“‘My husband doesn’t have to hit,’ she answered, ‘he’s the brains of the team.’ I let it go at that. It would have been wrong for me to say anything more for I had touched upon the most shameful thing in her husband’s career. And he and she were one. I remember that on a later occasion she remarked, ‘Our contract with the club runs for three years more.’ Naturally she meant Samuel Owen’s contract, but it set me to picturing fat little Mrs. Owen running after fouls and not catching them. And it confirmed me in the resolve to keep on being Judith Winthrop. I have yet to talk about ‘our home run record.’

“But to get back to the insult, even though true, which I offered to Samuel Owen. You may say almost anything about a ball player to his wife except one thing – and that is to intimate that he can’t hit. It would be much safer to tell the average woman that she had no chastity or the average man that he had no sense of humor. Those I believe are the grossest insults which may be passed in the world which lies beyond us ball playing folk. I wish I had more human sympathy and understanding, for the purely selfish reason that if I had I could write a marvelous story about a baseball player and his wife and how their happiness from day to day and the hope of a comfortable old age hang upon those three figures which indicate the bread winner’s batting average. I knew, well for that matter I suppose I still know, many brokers’ wives. I can remember that Ruth Grant always used to ask Tom, ‘How’s the market today?’ but they could be quite cheerful in front of company even when he said, ‘Rotten.’ Come to think of it I can’t remember that he ever said anything else. The wife of a ball player, I have observed, never asks her husband, ‘How did you hit today?’ She knows the minute he comes into the hotel. The grouchiest, most poisonous and unlovable individual in the world is a ball player when he’s not hitting. That’s why few of them try to keep house even when they’re not on the road. Hardly one of them would get through a season if he came home every day to a place where there was a gas range handy.

“I’ve found time for only a little reading on this trip. I’ve read just two books. One was Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Many Marriages’ and the other John McGraw’s ‘My Thirty Years In Baseball.’ As for Anderson, I still find him one of the outstanding writing men who has pushed his head up through our civilization, but the book is a little disappointing. There is more emotion in him than he can get into words. Language never seems quite enough for Sherwood. He ought to have a symphony orchestra and a Russian Ballet to help him out. Inside, the man is raging flame, but when he tries to tell you about it nothing more comes out than ‘passion’ or ‘beauty,’ both weak words and inadequate. He’s handicapped by the fact that he wants to write about emotion and anatomy, and the English language provides almost no attendant vocabulary for either theme. There’s no getting away from the fact that he is clumsy. Still he is fearfully and contagiously excited about things. That’s enough to make him a master in a country where practically not a soul gives a damn about anything.

“John McGraw I found rather more facile than Sherwood, but then McGraw is dealing with more superficial aspects of life. Not altogether. Indeed the thing that attracted me to the book as I skimmed the table of contents at the news stand was a chapter called, ‘The Wives Of Ball Players.’ McGraw isn’t actually against ball players getting married, although he does say that he thinks the ideal wedding should take place immediately after the world’s series. And he goes on to pay a tribute to the one perfect baseball wife he has ever known. She had a flat overlooking the Polo Grounds and it was her custom to watch the proceedings through a spyglass. On days when she observed that her husband was playing badly she would rush out to the butcher’s and order her husband’s favorite dish, which happened to be corned-beef and cabbage, and have it ready for him on the table when he returned home. Of course, McGraw is idealizing this fine woman beyond the bounds of human credulity. I don’t care how good a wife and mother she may have been – she couldn’t cook corned-beef as fast as that. Domestic science was required at Vassar in my day. But the notion which McGraw’s book put in my head was along other lines. I accepted the plan as feasible and I began to wonder how it would work with Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Owen. I’m afraid poor Mr. Owen would grow fearfully tired of corned-beef and cabbage before the end of a single season unless he can get over his habit of stepping away from the plate.

“But this letter is too full of shop already. We’ll talk about something else when I get back. I hear the Moscow Art Theatre is giving a return engagement. Please take me to a matinee next week. It will be a relief. I’ve watched fifteen movies this month and I don’t understand the language – Judith.”

FIFTEEN

I called for Judith the day after the Yankees got back to New York. We met at her apartment. She and Tiny lived at the Ansonia. In fact I think that Tiny never even came to the Shaw-green room. She didn’t want him there because this was her own place entirely separate from him. She clung to it just as she clung to her name as a badge and symbol of the fact that Judith Winthrop existed as a person in her own right aside from Tiny Tyler. There was no one and no thing in the place to leer at her and cry out, “Mrs. Tyler.”

During Judith’s absence I had prepared a surprise for her but it fell flat. “What do you notice that’s different about me?” I asked her. She looked me up and down.

“It’s a new suit,” she guessed.

That annoyed me. It seemed an effort on her part to be mannish. Men are always supposed not to know whether a hat’s new or not and things like that. Although as a matter of fact I generally do notice. The suit was three years old. She must have seen it a hundred times.

“It isn’t a new suit,” I said.

She looked at me again closely.

“If it’s a riddle I give up. You look just the same.”

That wasn’t possible. During the month Judith had been away I had gone every afternoon to Fred Haven’s Gymnasium. I threw a medicine ball and worked on the rowing machine and sat in a cabinet with electric lights. It was dull hard work, but a stern resolution had carried me on. In marrying Tiny Tyler, Judith had declared herself for physical perfection and if she wanted to live in a world of Greeks it seemed to me that my best chance was to be a Greek, too, even though a little one. In four weeks I lost twelve and a half pounds. The first week I dropped five pounds, but of course as I got in better condition weight came off more slowly. “What you were supposed to notice,” I said to Judith, “is how much thinner I’ve grown. When you saw me a month ago I weighed exactly one hundred and seventy-eight and a half pounds stripped. Now I’m down to one hundred and sixty- six.”

“That’s fine, Georgie, but you mustn’t blame me for not noticing. You’re not stating the conditions fairly. You weren’t stripped when I saw you a month ago and you’re not stripped now. It is as you say an old suit and it conceals from me the rippling of the newly unearthed muscles which would have shown me the change in a minute if I’d only seen them. Now that you call my attention to it I do notice that you’ve lost a chin.”

I was a little hurt but we had a pleasant talk for more than an hour about modern American poetry and then we went to see “The Three Sisters.” In the last act when Katchalov says goodbye to the girl just before he goes out to fight the duel, Judith reached out and put her hand in mine but as the curtain fell she drew it away again and I don’t even know if she was at all conscious of what she had done during the scene.

“I wish Coler would let me write something for him about the Moscow Art Theatre,” she said as we were going out of the theater. “He doesn’t seem to give a rap whether he gets anything from me any more. I know he’s had one piece about the Russians already but it didn’t bring out the things which interested me. I was a little bit timid about them because I’d heard so much about this being an art theater. It’s much better than that sounds. They let life go ahead on their stage.”

“You mean the way they eliminate all the concentration on the single figure who has a line to say.”

“Yes. In most plays everybody is struck dumb and motionless as soon as any important character begins speaking. They act as if he were going to drive off the first tee. These Russians are smarter than that. The man who has something to say just has to shoot it through and over all the commotion around him. As far as I’m concerned, that makes it much more emphatic than if it came out of a prepared and artificial stillness. The actor has to break through in order to make himself heard.”

“I know, Judith. It’s a trick I’ve been trying to pick up during all the ten years I’ve been talking to you.”

I took her home in a taxicab and left her at the Ansonia.

Later in the week I dined with them both in their room at the hotel. Tiny was rather formally friendly to me, but I thought just a little patronizing. He noticed right away what exercise and diet had done for me. “You’re a lot thinner,” he said. “That’s fine. When I saw you last you were too fat.” He asked me whether I liked the Russian actors and I said they were fine.

He shook his head doubtfully. “I should think it would be hard to get anything out of what’s happening,” he remarked, “if you don’t understand what they’re talking about.”

“Don’t be silly,” Judith broke in, “I saw you talking to the umpire in Cleveland when he called you out at second. I was so far away I couldn’t hear a word and yet I knew exactly what you were saying and you’re not an actor.”

“He was put out of the game in Cleveland,” Judith continued to me while Tiny frowned at her, “for calling the umpire a name. He didn’t want to tell me what it was. I had to beg and plead before he’d tell. And then what do you suppose it was?”

Tiny looked so uncomfortable that I was a little abashed myself. Judith paid no attention.

“He called the umpire a bastard,” she said. “And he thought that was much too dreadful a word for me to hear. I had to reassure him that I used it all the time. I’m going to be a good influence on Tiny yet. He needs to be toughened up. Before I’m done with him I’ll knock the modesty out of him.”

When Judith was in a mood like this, Tiny was completely bewildered. One night near the end of the western trip she had said, “Tiny, you’ve got to cut loose. I’m not going to sit here and watch you walk up and down the room and fidget around being faithful to me. It’s ruining you as a person and as a baseball player. A year ago you were the most remarkable player the game has ever known because you broke all the rules. You could stay out all night and then show up at the park and knock a couple of home runs. That was glamorous and remarkable. Now you’re playing and living by strength of character. You’re getting to be reliable and conscientious. I tell you I won’t stand it. Get out of this hotel this minute. Go and lose all your money gambling or get drunk or find one of your old girls. If you’re just going to be a husband I don’t want you.”

The tirade merely amazed Tiny. He did go out and rolled duck pins in an open game for an hour and was back at the hotel before eleven o’clock.

But things went much better in New York than on the road. The apartment represented a place of escape to Judith even when she didn’t use it and in New York Tiny had his car and they could drive together. This was better than a western movie. Tiny drove enormously well, but he compromised his ability by recklessness. If a policeman stopped him nothing came of it because he was immediately recognized as Tiny Tyler and allowed to go on his way. Mostly he drove Judith up the Hudson on the Albany Post Road. They went so fast that she never felt safe and she didn’t want to. It was not a nerve racking danger. She knew that some sudden object in the road might leap up in front of them and send them crashing off the road, but whatever happened would happen fast. It would all be over in a second and that was nothing to worry about. They drove on and on at night with the blackness ahead of them and the telegraph poles shooting by. Neither one ever said a word. There wasn’t even a title for Tiny to read; just the incredibly swift surge forward. It was as if they said to Death, “Come and take us if you can catch us.” If anything did happen it would find them on the crest of the wave. The night was a great sea through which they slashed side by side. And they were two bodies, fine bodies, but just bodies. Why should anybody want to talk? What on earth was there to talk about?

SIXTEEN

In one of her letters Judith complained that American writers have inadequate vocabularies for stories of emotion and anatomy. As a matter of fact it isn’t altogether a lack of words so much as a reluctance to use them. During the recent agitation in New York for a book censorship, disguised as “The Clean Books Bill,” all the advocates of suppression spoke as if they thought that frankness was a quality easily within the reach of any author who wanted to shock the community and profit thereby. Anybody who has ever tried to write knows how false this is. Let the State say to the average author, “Go ahead and abandon all reticence and set down the most in timate things on paper,” and nothing in particular would happen. This flood of outrageous and devastating expression which is supposed to be threatening the community, but for the dams of vice societies and organizations of pure and militant mothers, simply doesn’t exist.

Sex comes sparsely into the American novel not because the author is afraid of the law or even conscience-stricken, but because he doesn’t know much about it. This story of Judith and Tiny Tyler ought to be more intimate than I can possibly make it. The vast rolling stretches of reticence are not brought about by my timidity but my ignorance. I know that Judith married Tiny because she felt that a potential and compelling physical bond existed between them. It must have been the realization of this passion which carried her through many terrific tribulations of these early weeks. Even when she came to New York and we met, she said almost nothing that was in any way personal about her life with Tiny, but there was much which I could read be tween the lines of her second letter, information so obvious that even the casual reader who knows Judith far more imperfectly than I do cannot fail to supply it.

Much of what I am going to say frofn now on is supposition, though a little of it came more definitely to me from time to time. But the things I know and the things which I have guessed I believe to be equally true. There were a good many times during the first month of Judith’s marriage when she felt that she had paid a staggering price for her little while. Boredom was the most acute of all the dangers which threatened her happiness. Passion is strong but gusty. It was hard to talk to Tiny. There came long stretches when she felt herself be calmed in an alien existence. Marriage failed to break down all the barriers between Judith and Tiny. The chief source of trouble was his deep-rooted and disturbing conviction that she was a lady and therefore a person apart. He was constantly under the strain of playing up to her. When a young woman has made up her mind to stoop to conquer it is rather disappointing to find that she is dealing with a young man who overlooks these friendly advances and persists in regarding her as a towering and snow-capped peak on a foggy day.

Specifically Judith was forced to remain a little lonely. She took up the study of baseball with a passionate eagerness, feeling that she and Tiny must develop a common interest. He blocked her at a good many turns. For instance, she saw almost nothing of the other players on the team. She liked young Grasty, the little righthander from the coast. He was the man who said to her on the train, “It’s great to be young and a Yankee.” After he shut out the Tigers with three hits in the first game at Detroit she told Tiny she thought Grasty was an amusing and a joyful person and she suggested that they give a party for him and take him out to dinner.

“Bill’s all right,” said Tiny, “but I don’t think he’s the sort of fellow you ought to meet.”

By stern resolve Tiny abandoned almost every phase of his usual life after he married Judith. Even recreations of an entirely harmless sort were set aside because they weren’t good enough for Judith and he had nothing to offer in their stead. When they got to Chicago, Judith was anxious to visit some of the big Negro cabarets of which she had heard, but Tiny was shocked at the suggestion. Yes, of course, he knew where they were but certainly they were no places for her to visit and he refused to take her. Largely as a matter of principle, she called up Stephen Conrad of “The Chicago Evening Post” whom she had known years before on “Tomorrow.” He took her around but it was no fun at all. He couldn’t dance and he insisted on discussing economic phases of the Negro problem in America. That was not the spirit in which she wanted to do her slumming and the adventure was a failure. Tiny quarreled with her about it, but she stood him down and he finally was forced into his more or less traditional attitude that this was queer and eccentric but that if Judith did it the thing must be all right. But he was never moved to do more than tolerate Judith’s eccentricities. He was by no means willing to aid and abet them.

The ball players’ wives she did meet, but not one of them was congenial and Judith was undoubtedly tactless and overbearing. A certain haughtiness they might have pardoned. All of them would have felt that it was entirely reasonable for a woman to swagger on the ground of being the wife of Tiny Tyler, the home run king of the American League. But Judith insisted on being up stage in her own right and that they could not forgive at all.

Tiny secretly took along with him his set of little blue books of informative reading, but Judith discovered the volumes and made him give them up. She said that this dogged sort of reading made him much too self-righteous and mournful to be endured and the entire set of books was given to a young elevator man in the Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis who wanted to improve himself.

Judith made the discovery of Tiny’s secret vice quite by accident. She happened to tax him one day with being basically a gloomy man. “The great Schopenhauer,” answered Tiny, “bids us direct our aim, not toward securing what is pleasurable and agreeable in life, but toward avoiding, as far as possible, its innumerable evils.”

“Schopenhauer’s all right,” said Judith testily, “but I don’t think he’s the sort of a man you ought to meet. How long has this been going on?”

With a good deal of pride Tiny brought out the two hundred and ninety-one books.

“I’ve read eleven of them all through,” he told her.

Judith was touched but she made him give away the books just the same. She encouraged him to read, but it was hard to tell just where to make a beginning. When questioned Tiny could hardly remember any book he had ever read. He said vaguely that he had read a lot of books when he was getting ready to go to Holy Cross, but he couldn’t remember the names of any of them.

“It was all general,” he explained, “you see I took the regular course in the arts.”

After a good deal of thought Judith selected “Huckleberry Finn” as the point at which Tiny should renew his pursuit of the arts. He seemed to enjoy it a good deal but not without misgivings. At least half a dozen times he asked Judith, “Are you sure this is a good book?” Judith replied dogmatically that it was a great book and each time Tiny returned to the story eagerly enough. The thing which bothered him was that “Huckleberry Finn” was simple, understandable and enjoyable throughout. He had a deeply ingrained feeling that the thing which people called “literature” was intensely painful and could only be endured and mastered by sacrifice and terrific concentration of the will.

Judith’s next move was a mistake. She was talking to Tiny about something she had read in a book by W. H. Hudson (I think it was “A Hind In Richmond Park”). Hudson told of an old plainsman in Argentine who could neither read nor write and was blessed with an unfailing sense of locality and direction. On the darkest night he would allow himself to be driven far out on the pampas, blindfolded. Then the experimenters would whirl him about several times to destroy all sense of direction and abandon him. Each time the old man walked straight home to his tiny cottage without any difficulty at all. Sight seemed to have nothing to do with it. The gaucho had some curious intuition which brought him unerringly to the spot from which he had started. It was almost the same sort of inexplicable power which enables the carrier pigeon to perform its marvels.

Tiny was enormously interested and broke in to say, “Yes and outfielders, some of ’em, have something like that I’ve got it a little but not so much, but you just watch old Tris Speaker sometime. Watch him go back after a ball hit over his head. They say he gets a tip from the sound, but I don’t believe that. And he can’t do it just with his eyes. With a ball coming up from a crowded grandstand you don’t really get a look at it till it’s past second base. But that old boy doesn’t have to wait a second. He’ll beat it right back the minute the ball leaves the bat. And he’ll run like a scared rabbit for fifteen or twenty yards and then turn around and wait for the ball. And the place where he turns is just the spot where the ball comes dropping in his hands nice and easy. That’s what I call instinct.”

And so Judith tried out Tiny with that most beautiful of all autobiographical narratives. “Far Away And Long Ago.” Tiny never asked Judith whether that was a good book or not. He just read and dozed and finally despaired. Tiny was quite a hand both at dozing and despairing. He professed to find no excitement in playing ball. That was just business, but this was probably a little less than wholly accurate. At any rate a close game was unquestionably an emotional strain. It left Tiny tired and edgy. In the old days he didn’t pay so much attention to being tired, but capitalized the edgy condition into a passion for excitement. It was an easy and unprofitable but by no means unpleasant path to follow into poker games or drinking and the two pursuits are not mutually exclusive. But now Tiny came straight back to the hotel and Judith.

Early in the trip, as she told in the letter, she had begun to avoid the games and so he told her a little about what had happened. After that he sat around the room for awhile. Ball players have an enormous capacity for sitting. Visit a hotel where a team is stopping and you will find half its members in the lobby of a morning or an evening. A few will be reading or talking but the majority will be sitting immobile, neither seeing, hearing or cogitating. The practice is understandable enough. The nervous energy which is so lavishly spent upon the ball field is slowly generating again as the player passes through these restful periods of sitting. It’s well enough for everybody but the spectator, and that was Judith’s job.

They even took their meals in the room. Tiny said he didn’t want to go down to the dining room and have people staring at him and pointing and saying, “That’s Tiny Tyler.” He was shrewd enough to put it on that ground which made it hard for Judith to object. Actually Tiny didn’t in the least object to having people stare at him, but he hated to have them look at Judith. Of course, she would not have minded particularly. Undoubtedly she would have preferred that to the oppressive monotony of the four walls of a small room.

Later in the evening came the picture show. As I remember Judith said in her letter that she saw fifteen during the trip, but it may well have been more. First came dinner and then a desultory attempt by Tiny to read, and after a bit his almost invariable “Let’s go to the movies.” I don’t believe Judith did like movies much although there may well have been something of pose in her professed horror of them. Still there was something wholly soothing and satisfactory to her to sit beside Tiny in the cool dark and watch dimly the simple proceedings on the screen. The good pictures were not so much fun but an old fashioned Western melodrama contributed something pleasurable to the experience of Judith. When the people in the picture play began to gallop across great stretches of open country with a wind in their faces Judith galloped too. She was riding with Tiny, swiftly, aimlessly, endlessly away from thought and reason. Life was simplified into emotion. The feeling was one of bodily satisfaction and of exultation.

Tiny could not have known just how much these moments meant to Judith. Evidently he did not understand that in those silent and shadowy scampers over hills and deserts he and Judith came more closely together than ever before in their lives, for he persisted in a habit which broke the spell.

Suddenly Judith would be seized from the saddle and dragged back to the realization that she was sitting with Tiny in a stuffy picture house. It was a voice which brought the disillusion, the voice of Tiny. “My God!” he would say, “the bridge is down.” Or, “Came the night and stars to the vast sierras.” He read the titles aloud.

Under the urging of Judith the habit grew less but the very necessity of urging was a slightly alienating influence. Unquestionably Judith was just a wee bit too masterful. She told Tiny what he should read and made him change his tailor and part his hair on the side instead of in the middle. “I married you for your beauty,” she told him, “and you’ve got to live up to it.”

Once on a rainy afternoon in Chicago she led him to the art museum and showed him a replica of the discus thrower.

“That’s what you can look like when you remember to brush your hair in the back and cut your finger nails,” she said.

In fact she went farther and told Tiny that the line of his arm and shoulder just before he let the ball go in a long throw was actually finer than anything anybody had ever done in bronze. Tiny may have been a little embarrassed but he was not altogether displeased.

SEVENTEEN

When the Yankees went west on the final trip which would win or lose them the championship, I supposed that Judith would remain in New York. But she went along with Tiny. The strain on everybody in that party must have been terrific. Little Miller Huggins snarled at everybody and the players snarled at each other. They had a comfortable lead but it was dwindling. They were all in Hell together, for the team wasn’t hitting. Tiny was trying much too hard and striking out. All over the circuit pitchers were slow balling him to death. He was frayed and frantic with impatience. Invariably he swung too soon and missed, or lifted easy flies to infielders. They staggered home and won their pennant, but only by half a game. Cleveland slumped, too, at the last minute and that faltering saved the Yanks and Tiny.

Three days later they went into the World’s Series against the Giants with the slump still heavy upon them. Of course everybody knows how badly Tiny played in that series. He could do nothing right. Judith was wise enough not to see a single game but still she suffered. She told me years afterward of the manner in which she watched the third game, the one in which Tiny was called out on strikes in the ninth inning with the bases full. She tried to sit in her apartment and wait for word from him or a sporting extra but the strain was too much and at last she wandered down to Times Square and watched the game reproduced on a score board with little wooden disks. One of them was numbered four and that was Tiny. A hand shoved him into place at the plate and then the figures popped up on the board.

“Ball one,” said the dial. “Ball two.” “Foul.” “Strike two.” “Ball three.” Here the sequence broke. Nothing happened for almost three minutes. “Strike three,” said the dial.

Tiny had been called out on strikes. The game was over. The roar of the crowd beat on Judith’s ears. A fat man behind Judith shook his fist at the scoreboard.

“Wake up, Tiny! Wake up, Tiny! You’re done. It’s all over.”

Judith turned on him like a flash.

“That ball was a foot outside the plate,” she cried and then she began to laugh. The little wooden disk at which the man had shaken his fist wasn’t really Tiny but for the moment she thought she saw him there before her.

Keenan got me a seat in the press box. It was in the fourth game that Tiny faltered worst. You remember that each team scored once in the first inning and that after that there was no scoring until the ninth. Bancroft opened the last half of the inning with a two base hit to left and Groh put him on third with a sacrifice. Then Frisch raised a fly for Tiny in left. It was a short fly and he had to come in for it, but he was set and waiting for the catch. Nobody dreamed that Bancroft would try to score. Still Tiny was watching him and as the Giant darted for the plate Tiny drew back his arm. He threw truly, but Bancroft beat the throw by at least five feet.

The series was over and the Giants had won the World’s Championship. The crowd was still shouting for Bancroft and Frisch and throwing straw hats on the diamond and doing the fool things a crowd will do. They were all Giant rooters now. All but Keenan. He seized me by the arm and screamed in my ear, cutting through the din like a Russian actor.

“Damn her!” he said. “Damn her!”

Evidently he saw that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You must have seen it,” he yelled. “You saw it. The hitch in his throw.”

“You mean Tiny was slow getting that throw away to the plate?”

“Slow! Of course he was slow and you ought to know why. Don’t you remember. She said it in that piece ‘The Sun Field.’ She must have told it to him a hundred times.”

“Judith told him what?” I asked impatiently.

“‘When you draw your arm back to throw the line is as fine as anything in Greek sculpture.’ You saw it. It must have been on his mind. He was thinking about what that fool woman told him. When he drew his arm back he held the pose and Beauty Bancroft came home. He was out there being a statue instead of an outfielder. I knew nothing good could happen out of getting Tiny mixed up with a girl on ‘Tomorrow’.”

I didn’t see Judith until the next day and it was my intention to say nothing about the game but she brought up the subject.

“You remember that power that makes for the eternal fitness of things?” she asked me. “Well, he visited his wrath on me yesterday for being sentimental. I was waiting at the hotel for Tiny when he came back from the game. Of course, he was fearfully depressed. I put my arm around him and said, ‘Never mind about the series, Tiny, you’ve still got me.’ He kept on frowning. ‘In the seventh inning,’ he said, ‘I’d have traded you for a base hit’”

EIGHTEEN

A mixed team of Giants and Yankees sailed for Havana a month after the series to barnstorm in Cuba. Tiny was in the party but not Judith. I think she would have gone but for the passport. When that matter came up the State Department ruled that Judith Winthrop must be duly set down on all their official documents as Mrs. John Tyler. She hired a lawyer and went to Washington. After a bitter battle the officials admitted that she had a legal right to the name of Judith Winthrop if she chose to preserve it, but that did not alter the decision. And so Judith stayed in New York. I’m under the impression that Tiny himself expressed no opinion in regard to the controversy. He let Judith fight her own battle without either help or interference, for which she was thankful.

My hope that we might again be on the terms of easy friendship which prevailed before her marriage to Tiny was not borne out. She seemed to avoid me. One of her friends told me that Judith was angry because I gave the story of Tiny’s remark to Keenan. That may have been true but soon something else came up which made me feel a little embarrassed about seeking her out. First it was a front page story about Tiny Tyler’s being arrested in a drunken brawl in Havana and fined $100. Only a few days later there was another story that he had lost $10,000 betting on the races and hard upon that came the news that a Cuban had tried to knife him in a dispute over a girl and that Tiny had hit him and broken his jaw. He was arrested for this, too, but acquitted.

The very next day Judith wrote and asked me to come to see her. I assumed, of course, that she wanted to talk about Tiny and it was the first thing she mentioned when we met.

“I told Tiny months ago,” she said, “that he was allowing himself to get into a rut and that he must step out and extend himself. You see, I have some influence over him.”

This I took to be a characteristic concealment of concern by flippancy. At last I mustered up enough courage to ask the question which I could not keep down.

“What are you going to do about it?” I said.

“About what?”

“About Tiny.”

She seemed provoked.

“What business is it of mine,” she answered frowning. “I’ve seen the papers. I suppose you have. They say he’s lost a great deal of money betting on the races. That was foolish, but after all it is his money. And he’s been drunk and disorderly. Well, he had a hard and disappointing season and what is there for him to do but get drunk. That doesn’t even seem foolish.”

Judith paused and I wondered whether she would say anything about the girl. Maybe that story had escaped her. I said nothing, but somehow she sensed my thoughts.

Her smile seemed to me the smile of a fighter who has been hit, but there was no hint of rancor or anything like that in her voice. She spoke in a matter of fact manner and lightly.

“I know that isn’t the limit of his offenses. He got into a row about a girl and broke a man’s jaw.”

She waited to see if I was going to dare a comment but I kept silent.

“Well,” said Judith, “I haven’t come to the stage yet where I pick his girls or his rights for him. All that’s included in the broad realm of his business. That completes the list, doesn’t it? There isn’t anything more in the papers yet?”

I shook my head and we sat and looked at each other.

“Say it,” said Judith.

“Doesn’t it make any difference in what you feel for him?” I blurted out.

This time she flushed a little before answering.

“You’ve raised a new point,” she said. “It belongs in territory I choose to call my business.”

Almost immediately she reached out and patted me on the shoulder.

“That wasn’t fair of me, Georgie, I’ve never drawn boundary lines against you before and I don’t know why I should now. But you ought to know the answer. I told you in the beginning that I was marrying Tiny Tyler for passion. It isn’t an emotion that carries over seas. Tiny’s so far away he’s even out of my mind. I’ve been very busy with other things. Maybe you’ve seen the series I’ve been writing for Coler on American women. How can you expect me to tell you what I feel about Tiny when he’s not here for me to see him. It’s a bond of the flesh and not the spirit. Don’t you see? It’s the same with him. I’m not there. I’m out of his mind too. We two are dead now. What happens now doesn’t count.”

I kept away from her until the day before Christmas. Then I felt that I must call her up. Except during the interruption of the war we had not missed a Christmas dinner together for years.

“You’re going to dine with me tomorrow,” I said over the telephone.

“I can’t,” she answered.

“But you must.”

“I can’t,” she repeated.

“You don’t expect Tiny back,” I said carelessly.

“No.”

Her tone was sharp and I felt that to cover up my slip I must go on with it.

“When is he coming back?”

“I don’t know,” said Judith. “I haven’t heard from him.”

And after a second she added, “He hasn’t heard from me either. I told you before. I told you he didn’t matter when he was away. It’s like that with us.”

“Are you going to be all alone for Christmas?”

“I suppose so. When is it? I’ve lost track?”

I knew she was lying but I humored her. “It’s tomorrow, Judith. You’ve got to have dinner with somebody. Won’t I do?”

“Not tomorrow. I can’t. I’ve got to work all day tomorrow.”

“Give ‘Women in America’ a rest for one day.”

“It’s not that. I’ve finished that long ago. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“Wait till it’s done.”

She cut me off sharply with “Goodbye.”

I at least ate Christmas dinner, but it was a lonely one. I didn’t see how I could make any more advances to Judith and keep my self respect. When I saw her again it was an accident. Early in January the newspapers announced that Tiny was coming back to America to play in vaudeville until the first of March when it was necessary for him to go to the Yankee training camp at Marlin, Texas. He was to have as his partner Sophie Trimble, a well known vaudeville soubrette. The engagement opened in Chicago early in January and for the next week I found that Tyler and Trimble were booked to appear at the Palace in their singing and dancing skit “Let’s Go.”

I don’t know just what moved me but I was at the theater for the opening matinee on a Monday afternoon. The house was packed, but I managed to get a seat in a box close to the stage. There were seals, a magician, two dancers, a monologist and then in the place of honor, just before the intermission, Tyler and Trimble. The orchestra blared something loud with a beat which dinned at the ears. Out walked Tiny Tyler and his partner. I had no chance to look at her in the beginning. His appearance was too shocking for me to watch anybody else. He was a Greek god with a double chin. He had put on thirty pounds and fifteen years and they had dressed him in a dinner coat with side pockets which slanted. The thing was smeared all over with white braid and there were pearl buttons on the cuffs.

But the worst of it was that all the time he smiled. It was not from mirth or ease or anything like that. Somebody had told him to smile and he did his best. The girl smiled too. Neither one of them ever stopped.

The applause was noisy but there was no warmth in it. This was merely a well advertised article which was receiving its due recognition. Tiny seemed to have no notion of what to do while the tumult was on. He just shifted from one foot to another and continued to smile. And he stood in a curious way leaning backward so noticeably that it seemed as if he might topple over. Every now and then he reached for his pockets with both hands, but somebody had told him not to do that. Each time he would remember instructions and suddenly pull his hands out again. They dangled.

After a bit I observed the girl. She was a stocky nondescript blonde. When the applause had continued for several minutes she tried to quell the racket by blowing kisses at the audience. Tiny seized his left hand in his right and shook violent greetings to himself, bowing stiffly. When silence had been won the girl began, “Oh Mr. Tyler,” she said, “I notice they gave you a lotta bases on balls last season.”

He didn’t quite wait for the end of her line, but plunged in, speaking too fast and too low. “Why yes, Miss Trimble, they certainly did. I was almost – it almost drove me crazy.”

“Drove you crazy! That was no drive. That was a putt.”

She doubled over as if convulsed with mirth and Tiny merely leaned back a little more perilously than ever.

“Mr. Tyler,” she began anew, “they tell me you’re a king.”

This time he was slow to pick up his cue and she repeated, “Why yes, Mr. Tyler, they tell me you’re a king.”

She accented the last word sharply and this time he remembered.

“Well, that’s what the boys call me – the Home Run King.”

“Yes, Mr. Tyler, but those Giant pitchers certainly made you look like a deuce.”

Fortunately I have forgotten most of the rest of the obscene spectacle. There was a parody of Gallagher and Shean and then Tiny and the girl did a fox trot. He danced well. After that he got off the stage and she did a song called “I’m the Belle of Main Street.” After a bit he came back and impeded her singing the chorus, and then they danced some more and the curtain came down.

As I walked up the aisle I saw a woman rise from a seat in the last row. It was Judith. Her face was very white. I don’t know whether she saw me or not, but she went out so hurriedly that I couldn’t catch up and when I reached the street she was gone.

NINETEEN

I heard rumors from various people, including Keenan, about Tiny and his dancing partner and late in February the story broke on the front pages. Fred Trimble, a motion picture actor, had brought suit for divorce against his wife Sophie Trimble and had named John (Tiny) Tyler as co-respondent. That same morning the phone in Judith’s apartment rang and the elevator boy announced, “Mr. Tyler is calling to see you.” Judith met him at the door and shook hands.

“How are you, Tiny?” she asked.

“I’m just pretty good,” he said.

She led the way into the library and flopped down on the sofa. Tiny perched himself on a chair near the door, leaving the whole length of the room between himself and Judith. It was a frail chair, but distinguished by age and value and worth. From where Judith sat it seemed as if the heirloom had disappeared. The wide frame of the ball player blotted it out of existence and he might have been sitting on a patch of air.

This was not altogether an illusion, for Tiny did not give himself to the chair utterly. Judith began to smoke and suddenly without a word she tossed the package to Tiny. She threw high and wide but he thrust out a long arm and caught the missile just in time to save a lamp shade.

“Good catch,” called Judith.

Tiny sat and fumbled with the package. Judith leaned back and blew rings.

“I know you don’t like Lucky Strikes,” she said, “but I didn’t expect you or I’d have had Deities. These are all I have. Go ahead and take one. I think this is going to be a talk that we can’t do without cigarettes.”

Tiny took two or three puffs and tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. He kept looking down at the floor.

“It’s hard for me to say what I want to,” he began.

“All right, I’ll do it for you. You want to ask me to please hurry up and divorce you so you can marry Miss Trimble.”

Tiny looked up startled and frightened.

“No,” he said. “No.”

And then suddenly he heaved up to his feet and ran down the long room toward Judith. It was grotesque. He might almost have been sliding for a base as he plunged forward and buried his head in Judith’s lap. She let it stay. After a moment she began to stroke his hair.

“I’m afraid she hasn’t been a very good influence for you, Tiny. I see you’re parting your hair in the middle again.”

“I’m not happy,” he said. “I’m not happy at all. Everything’s been awful. I want to be near you, but I’m afraid. I can’t look at you. I know I’m no good. That must be it. I’m just rotten. There wasn’t any sense to any of it. You know I wasn’t like that for a while. We were reading books together and everything and I was going to make something out of myself and then all this happened. I don’t know why. I guess it was – you know – just animal passion. But I tell you I wasn’t happy.”

Judith moved away and let his head bang against the edge of the couch. She walked over to the fire place before she turned.

“Tiny, there’s just one sort of thing I haven’t the patience to hear. And you’re beginning it now. It’s reasonable that you should do what you want to, but I won’t let you come and weep on my shoulder. You’ve had a rip-roaring time and now because you’re tired of it you come back to me and say that none of it was any fun at all. That’s just silly. This is the first time I’ve seen you since you went to Cuba and all you’ve got to say to me is apologies and regrets.”

“I didn’t feel I was fit to see you before,” said Tiny. “I’d have been ashamed to see you while all that was going on.”

“I recognize your high-mindedness, but there must have been an interval, even if it was brief, between the young woman in Cuba and the young woman in vaudeville. You might have come to see me then before acute repentance set in.”

“There wasn’t any interval,” Tiny replied almost indignantly. “It was the same girl.”

“I forgot,” said Judith, “that fidelity was one of your failings.”

He got up slowly and took one step toward Judith and then he stopped.

“Can you forgive me, Judith?”

“What does that include?”

“I mean won’t you give me another chance? Won’t you take me back? You ought to be able to see how sorry I am.”

“I can see that. It’s all I can see and I don’t like you that way. Sit down and listen.”

Tiny retreated and found the edge of the heirloom. It seemed to be the one spot in the room with which he had formed a friendly acquaintance.

“There’s just one thing I want out of the world,” continued Judith, “and that’s joy. And I’m going to get it. If anything sticks up in my way I’ll bust it or it will have to bust me. You haven’t come here to offer me any joy or fun. You’re full of repentance and you want to share it with somebody. When you’re around being high-minded it makes you unhappy and then you go off on a spree and you tell me that was just terrible too. What do you offer, what did you ever offer except gloom and mournfulness?”

For the first time a sharpness came into Tiny’s tone. He spoke before Judith was done. His answer came cascading into hers.

“Don’t say things that aren’t so. That isn’t so. You know it. You haven’t really forgotten what we’ve meant to each other.”

“Oh,” said Judith scornfully, “You’re talking about ecstasy. That isn’t enough. I’m talking about fun. It oughtn’t to but somehow or other passion goes under the head of serious business. I didn’t say you’d never thrilled me. But probably that’s past too. I said one thing that wasn’t so. I told you that this was the first time I’d seen you since you went to Cuba. I saw you in vaudeville.”

Some of the assertiveness faded from Tiny’s voice.

“Well, you see, they had to get the act up in a hurry. We only had three days for a tryout.”

“Three days? Yes, I suppose that explains it. Three days would be ample. Lucifer fell from Heaven in less.”

“She said I danced very well. There’re a lot of people she worked with in vaudeville, Toots said, don’t dance any better than me.”

“Toots?”

“You know, Miss Trimble.”

“You won’t mind, Tiny, if I’m impertinent for just a minute. I ask your pardon in advance. This isn’t my business at all except that it did make things a little harder.”

“What did?”

“You didn’t pay me much of a compliment in the girl you picked out. Just for the sake of old times, Tiny, please do better next time.”

“But I’ve come to tell you there isn’t going to be any next time. Never. I hope to drop dead if I’m not telling the truth. I know I’ve wronged you but I won’t ever do it again.”

“I won’t let you say that. You haven’t wronged me! It’s not in your power. I don’t exist by your favor or disfavor. Get it out of your head that you’ve done anything to me. I claim no rights over your conduct. I haven’t any. I won’t have any. What you’ve done doesn’t matter to me at all.”

“You mean that you’ll forget about it and forgive me?”

“I didn’t say that. What’s forgiveness got to do with it? If you want to know will I come and live with you again I can answer you simply. I won’t. But before you go I want you to know why. I won’t have you thinking I’m angry about a small time vaudeville actress. It’s what you are that I’m thinking about. I married you because you were beautiful and I thought you’d be gay and joyful. All the other men I knew were people who sat around and talked about things and never got more than one toe into life. Then I saw you in the sun field not even squinting at the light, and now you come back fat and moaning and repenting and expect me to like you. How can I like you? I don’t like you.”

As Judith was talking Tiny got up and stood behind the chair as if it were an intrenchment. Suddenly he wrenched at it with both hands and it came apart. The back remained in his hands.

“What did you do that for?” said Judith angrily. “That’s my best chair. It’s more than two hundred and fifty years old.”

Tiny’s voice was rising. “Never mind the chair. There’re other things getting busted. You tell me you haven’t got any say over what I do, but you did it all the time.”

“What, for instance?” challenged Judith.

“Well, you wouldn’t let me read out the captions at the movies.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Yes, you wouldn’t let me brush the back of my hair myself.”

“Is that all?”

“It isn’t all. You know it isn’t all. You put on airs with me. I come and tell you that I’m sorry I went out and stayed drunk and traveled around with a girl and you say that’s all right, but you didn’t like me in vaudeville. How can I understand that? There isn’t any sense to it.”

“‘The Giant pitchers certainly made a deuce of you, Mr. Tyler,’” sneered Judith. “That was much worse than getting drunk and lying in the middle of Times Square.”

“What do you mean?” “That touched your job and your honor. Being a good man isn’t your business. Making home runs is. And you stood up before that crowd in the theater and let them laugh at you. Laugh at you because you failed in the thing you wanted to do and couldn’t do. You tried to be comic about a thing that matters.”

“I didn’t write the act.”

“But you said it because they told you to.”

“Well, I was busted. I lost all my money in Cuba.”

“You might have bet your money without betting your soul.”

Tiny crumpled the back of the chair which he held in his hands. “What did you expect me to do? I had a bum season and I was alone and so I got drunk. What was there for me to do except get drunk? You left me flat. You wouldn’t come along to Cuba because you couldn’t be Judith Winthrop on a passport. I didn’t say anything, but you don’t suppose I understood that. There were a whole lot of things about you I didn’t understand. I tried hard but you wouldn’t let me. There were always these queer ideas of yours like right now that kept edging me off.”

“You didn’t try so hard,” interrupted Judith. “You go away for a month with a girl you pick up in Cuba and at the end of that time you’re calling her ‘Toots.’ You never had the gumption to call me anything but Judith. It took you almost the whole western trip to get over calling me ‘Miss Winthrop.’”

“Can’t you see that was different? It was so easy with her. She didn’t have any ideas at all.”

“All right,” said Judith, “all right. But why do you come here to be forgiven and ask me to take you back? Why did you ever want me?”

“You said some of it yourself. There was one thing I understood. You said you wanted to have fun. Sure you do and so do I. I didn’t have much fun most of the time before I saw you. Not the kind that would last. I’d always feel like a slob in the morning or anyway the second or third morning. I wanted to have fun and not be a slob. That was where you came in. I needn’t be ashamed about you. I could respect you.”

“No,” said Judith striding half way across the room from the fireplace. “You’ve got to understand this. It’s the thing that’s spoiled everything. I won’t be a good influence for any man. I won’t be respected. You can’t. I won’t let you.”

Tiny picked up what was left of the chair and dashed it three times against the floor until there were only splinters.

“Don’t ride me any more,” he screamed hysterically. “I’ll do what I want. I will respect you. You’re not like the rest. God damn you! I do respect you.”

TWENTY

Judith had two more callers within the week. The first was Miller Huggins. “I wish you’d come down to Marlin and take charge of Tiny,” he said. “You’re the only person who can possibly help him. He’s fat and out of condition. I can work him out of that. But I can’t put heart into him. He doesn’t care what happens. He’s licked. Somebody’s got to put a match to him. You could do it. Will you?”

“Why should I?” Judith asked him.

Huggins looked around as if someone might be listening. His face grew serious and he lowered his voice. “If you don’t Detroit’ll beat us out for the American League pennant this year.”

“Shake hands,” said Judith to the surprised little man. “I’m proud of you. I did you an injustice. I thought you were going to say that I ought to go back to Tiny because he was my husband and it was my duty. But you’ve put it on a higher plane. When you speak of the fidelity I owe to the New York American League Baseball Club you move me.”

“You’ll go.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t undertake the job. Unfortunately, I’m all tied up with a lot of work of my own this Spring.”

I was the other visitor and I came ten days after Huggins. The story of the divorce suit and the naming of Tiny Tyler was more than a week old when it reached me at White Sulphur Springs. I started back for New York at once. While I was away I had written a poem called “Elba” and I took that along to show to Judith. Some curious constraint seemed to hold us both when we met in the long room. It didn’t seem quite the familiar place I had known for so long. At last I noticed a change in the room itself.

“Where’s the Chippendale chair?” I asked. Judith smiled; no, it was a grin.

“It’s being reconstructed,” she said. “It got a little bit damaged.”

I showed her the poem and she read it very care fully, but I was disappointed in its effect.

“Very skilful, George,” she said. “It’s a nice conceit.”

“Only that?”

“Probably there’s much more in it, Georgie, but you mustn’t expect much rebound from me. My emotional content is low.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I came on to New York. I want you to marry me as soon as you’re free.”

“Thanks for the stimulant, but I’ve gone back to the position I always held in theory. The institution of marriage is basically wrong.”

“But you don’t need to marry me,” I insisted. “You can just live with me.”

“That’s chivalry, but still it’s a compliment. I appreciate it. You’re willing to sacrifice yourself to make me a dishonest woman. It’s nice of you, Georgie – I mean that. But I must refuse even your best offer.”

“But you’ve got to do something.”

“Not at all, I can perfectly well do nothing. As a matter of fact, I’m back in Coler’s good graces and he’s working me hard. I’m writing the leading article next month in a symposium on divorce.”

“You’re for it, I suppose.”

“Not so much. It’s just about as good as aspirin. It would be much better to get at the cause of things and make marriage something better.”

“How would you do that?”

“Kill the notion that it’s a miracle. Smash the idea that two people go into the church and only one comes out. Naturally that doesn’t really happen, but people keep up the pretense that it does, If the man and the woman didn’t try so hard to keep in step they wouldn’t stumble so much. But let’s suppose that the sleight-of-hand trick really occurs. Is that a sacramental wonder? I don’t think so. That’s diabolical black magic. It’s belittling God to take two divine souls and whittle them down to one. Two can’t live more cheaply than one, but they can live more fully and more gloriously.”

“Will I be able to read any of this in ‘Tomorrow’?”

“All of it,” said Judith. “You don’t suppose I just made it up for your benefit.”

“You’re sure you won’t marry me?”

“Not just now.”

“Well then, will you have dinner with me tonight?”

“I can’t. I’m taking a train in two hours.”

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“To Marlin.”

She tossed me a telegram which lay in her lap. “I suppose it’s bad taste for me to show you this, but it doesn’t matter. The Western Union operators have seen it too.”

I read: “Huggins tells me he saw you. Please believe I didn’t have anything to do with his coming. Home runs and the pennant haven’t anything to do with it. I can get along without home runs, but I must see you. I hit one over the right field fence today. Come down here where there aren’t so many books and I can talk to you better. If you come I’ll buy you a brand new chair. It’s Spring in Texas and I’ve lost eleven pounds already. I’ve sweated out all the repentance. Please come and I promise not to respect you much. I’ve been thinking over what you said and I understand some of it. About that nickname I’ve got one for you. I’m going to call you Dutch after Dutch Leonard a southpaw that used to be with the Red Sox. There’s something about the back of your neck and the way you swing your head that reminds me of him – Tiny.”

I tossed the telegram back. “Eleven pounds isn’t so much,” I told her. “I’ve lost fifteen since you saw me last, but you didn’t notice that. Why are you going?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Judith. “I have a feeling that I’d like to see him sweat.”

TWENTY-ONE

Judith got off at the Marlin station into bright sunlight. She found a man in a Ford and asked him to drive her to the field where the Yankees trained.

“Do they practice in the afternoon?”

“Yes,” he said. “It rained yesterday. And that’s very strange down here miss. It don’t hardly ever rain down here in Spring. And it was just a little sort of cold yesterday. I’ve been here thirty years and I never saw it so cold in March. If I hadn’t felt it myself I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s the way it was yesterday. The day before was sort of unusual too. I see in the papers that the sun’s getting colder. It must be something like that or we wouldn’t have this sort of weather in Marlin. But you see it’s all right today. Oh, yes, those Yankees’ve been working all day long today. They’ve been out at the field most an hour this afternoon.”

“Get along,” said Judith. “That’s where I want to go.”

The day was all right. The sun beat down and would not tolerate a haze. At the side of the road were trees and then as far as the eye could reach level black fields. But they were not desolate. It was evident that they were expecting. At length the Ford drew up in front of a large green field with a high board fence running all around it. The stand was a tiny one, lost in a little corner behind the home plate.

Judith looked into right field. The fence seemed miles away. That must have been a mighty blow. Then she looked into left. He stood shielding his eyes from the bright Texas sun with one hand. It was a strangely altered Tiny. A mere eleven pounds couldn’t make all that difference. Still he might possibly have lost some more while she had been traveling on the train from New York. No, part of the change was that she was seeing him again for the first time in many months in baseball uniform. The flapping flannel didn’t war with the line of the shoulder as did the brown suit he had worn to her apartment. For a moment she saw him in still more horrible guise. The fat figure in the white braided tuxedo danced before her eyes. She saw Tiny tilting back upon his heels and smiling a forced smile. “Well, that’s what the boys call me, the Home Run King.”

And then she looked out into the sun field and it wasn’t so. The grinning gargoyle had gone. He stood straight and alone. Now his hand was down and the Texas sun beat upon him so that the gray uniform seemed tinged with yellow. They were playing a practice game and there was a smack of bat against ball as the man at the plate singled sharply to left. The ball came to Tiny on a true, fast bound. From second scampered a runner tearing for the plate. Tiny was set and he drew back his arm and threw.

There was no hitch this time. He knew as well as anybody else that he was still twenty pounds over the recognized limit for Greek gods, but even in the sweep and hurry of it Judith saw his arm and shoulder reach and pass the line she had always remembered. At the plate came dust and commotion. “You’re out,” cried a player who was umpiring. Everybody came dashing in and gathered up gloves and sweaters. The workout for the day was over.

But not for Tiny. He picked up a heavy sweater which lay on the ground beside him and put it on. Turning his back upon the plate he trotted deeper into the vast pasture and began to jog around the circuit marked by the distant fences. The straggling crowd of townsmen left the stand. Judith was alone in her seat at the topmost row. In deepest center field Tiny was a distant figure. Now the fences cast long shadows reaching all the way to the edge of the diamond. Tiny invaded right field and swung around toward the plate. As he came nearer she saw that he was puffing, and she saw that he was as wet as a man fished from the sea. His baseball shirt, where it showed through the V-necked sweater, was black with sweat. Judith tingled. Tiny was melting back into the man who had leaped up and caught the ball that afternoon when she had cried at the Polo Grounds. Still trotting, and puffing and sweating Tiny passed through the gate. He did not see the lone spectator in the stand. Judith let him get a start on her before she climbed down. Outside the park she found the driver and his Ford.

“Thought I’d wait around on the chance,” he said.

“Where’s the team stopping?” she asked him.

“At the Marlin House.”

“Is there another place?”

“The Marlin House has a bath with every room.”

“I know, but I don’t want to stay there.”

“Well,” he said reluctantly. “There’s the other hotel.”

Of course, the place must have had a name but Judith never learned it. Indeed she never heard it called anything by anybody in Marlin except “the other hotel.” When she had eaten dinner there that night she realized that the implication was not unjust and she was glad to get out and stroll down the street. As she rounded a corner she heard someone call, “Dutch!”

“Dutch!” came the voice again and it was the voice and not the name which made her turn. It came from the middle of the road; Tiny was at the wheel of a two seated car.

“I heard you were here,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Without a word Judith climbed into the car and they started. At first the roads were bumpy, but at last they struck a level stretch. The car leaped ahead and their speed grew. A cold wind had padded the sky with clouds. Just as Judith had seen nothing so bright as Texas sun she now found that a black night in the big country was deeper darkness than she had known. It was scarcely nine o’clock, but as they raced away from the few lights of the town they found every farmhouse snuffed out for the night. It seemed as if the county and state were all in training. Presently, there were no houses. The world of seen things ended abruptly at the tip of their lights. A wizard had spread a cloak over Texas and made it invisible, and like a blazing knife they cut the vast stretch of cloth in two only to have the welt leap back into blackness behind them. Not all the senses were under the spell. They, could hear the wind lash at trees they could not see. They felt it in their faces. And there was the loam smell of the black fields. Mostly the road was straight, but once it looked suddenly like a fast ball. The car careened at the curve and swayed perilously before it righted itself. That was the only time Tiny spoke.

“Dutch,” he said, “you don’t holler, do you?”

“See if you can make me,” replied Judith, and they went faster. By the time they turned back toward Marlin they had even outdistanced the wizard. When their lights touched a tree or a house it seemed to shake itself and taking form hold to it, though still threatened by shadows. A deeper spell must have been placed upon the fields. Only the edges of them had crawled out of the blackness.

When they came to Marlin it was morning, but there was no one in the large square where Tiny stopped the car. He put his arm around Judith. “Do you remember what I said at your house when you got so mad. I said you were different and I respected you. That wasn’t just right. I couldn’t think of the word then or I couldn’t say it. The thing that’s different, Dutch, is that I love you.”

“Let’s ask waivers on respect,” said Judith.

They sat there until a man began to take down the shutters on Edward H. Smith – Drugs and Soda.

“Where do you live?” Tiny asked her.

“I’ve been stopping at the other hotel.”

“Why don’t you come to the Marlin House?”

“All right, I will.”

“That’s fine,” said Tiny.

“Yes, I know,” said Judith. “It’s got a bath with every room.”

TWENTY-TWO

For a whole day after Judith left New York I wandered about aimlessly. I wondered whether this trip meant the final smashup between them or a new understanding. I had to know and finally it seemed to me that if I chose to go to Marlin myself there was nothing to stop me. Anybody could get on a train and go there. It wasn’t private property. Besides I remembered what fun I had had on a training trip years ago. I wanted to see the team and get out of the slush of New York. It was six in the evening when I got to Marlin and I asked the driver at the station for the best hotel. It wasn’t my fault if the Yankees were staying there. Before I even got my bags to the desk I came face to face with Judith. She shook hands and didn’t seem in the least surprised.

“I’ve come,” I said, “to make you have dinner with me. You’re not taking a train tonight?”

“Can I bring a friend?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Tiny.”

“But I want to talk to you.”

“We can all talk. We can get a private room.”

Tiny stepped out of the elevator and stared at me.

“You know George Wallace,” she said.

Tiny continued to stare. “I know him,” he said after a long pause. We didn’t shake hands.

“Wait a minute, both of you, while I go and get the room,” and Judith left us standing in the middle of the lobby.

Almost a minute went by and then I asked, “Is it hot here?” “Yes,” said Tiny.

“It’s cold in New York,” I told him.

“Is it?”

Judith came back then and we went to a small room which was curtained off from the main dining room. Perhaps it was because they made us wait without soup or possibly a curious sense of the isolation of us three in this little town came to me, but at any rate I startled myself by beginning with the thing I had to say.

“You know why I’ve come?” I said.

Neither Judith nor Tiny spoke. I turned to her. “You can’t go on with him. The thing’s broken down. That’s true. Come back. There never was a chance for it.”

A flush began high on Tiny’s cheekbones and spread down over his face.

“George wants me to go away with him,” said Judith quietly.

A vein in Tiny’s forehead above his right eye stood out. He tapped on the table with both fists and then he opened his hands and closed them again, pressing his fingernails into his palms. He spoke as if he were addressing someone who sat between Judith and me.

“I’ll choke him. I’ll kill him. Please, please. I can only wait a minute.”

“Why are you going to choke somebody?” Judith asked.

“You heard him,” said Tiny. “You heard him. He insulted you. He wants you to go away with him.”

Judith’s tone was sharper. “Whom did Toots insult?”

He stared at her. “That was different. That was me. You know I’m no good.”

“Neither am I,” said Judith.

Somehow I couldn’t keep out of it. It sounded silly the minute I said it, but that didn’t stop me. “Judith knows that I love her.”

He turned to me, more puzzled now than angry. “You damn fool,” he said, “so do I.”

Judith laughed and it was honest. “That gives me a choice.”

“You’re married to me,” objected Tiny.

“No sir,” she broke in. “Not now. You busted that. I’m not blaming you, I’m glad. You made yourself free and that made me free at the same time.”

His eyes opened wide. “Don’t you like me?” he asked.

“Yes, Tiny, but that doesn’t keep me from liking George, too. It’s possible you know.”

“But are you going away with him?” he wanted to know. “Can’t I stop it?”

“How?” asked Judith.

He seemed then as helpless as on that afternoon in the theater. Terror again muted his voice.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to choke him. You’d go away sure if I did that.”

“I’m not so sure he can choke me,” I broke in. Neither one paid any attention.

“Maybe it’s just up to you,” continued Tiny. “But say, Dutch, if you do go away you’ll come back sometime won’t you. That’s square. I did.”

There were tears in Judith’s eyes and the same look which had swept across her face that day when she first saw Tiny in the sun field. Now that she was free to go I knew she would not. This was the miracle of which she had dreamed. I might as well have whistled across the wall to Juliet as she stood on her balcony and looked at Romeo. The curious part of it all was that even as my hopes died I was thrilled by the thing which had happened. Of course, I knew all along that Judith didn’t love me, but I was willing to have her on slighter terms. It seemed to me that there might come a time when she would take me just to get away from marriage. As long as Tiny was a husband even I might be more glamorous. If Judith and Tiny were one I was not outnumbered in this three cornered duel. But they were two. She wasn’t a wife. She was Judith. My love was lost to me but she was whole again.

I knew what her choice would be even before she reached across the table and patted Tiny’s hand. And I knew my place. I was the other man who has the big scene in the third act. The scene was done and I got up to go.

“Where are you going?” Judith asked.

“Into the night, Candida,” I said.

She started to pull me back to the table. “You’re not fair, George. I would have gone if he’d choked you.”

By now Tiny was beaming. “I think you were wrong about that,” he said pleasantly. “I’m getting in awful good shape this Spring. I think I could have choked you.”

“Who’s Candida,” he added as an afterthought. “What’s that?”

“She’s a person in a play,” I told him, “and she’s every woman in the world.”

A waiter came through the curtains. “We’ve got clam chowder and mock turtle,” he said

“Don’t take clam chowder, Dutch,” urged Tiny. “Way down here the clams could kill you.”

“That’s my choice again,” said Judith. “I can get killed if I want to. Bring me some clam chowder, waiter.”

I rose to go, but this time it was Tiny who called me back. “Don’t go. Stick around and have some chowder.”

TWENTY-THREE

The chowder proved harmless, but that’s the end of the story as far as I’m concerned. Of course, I can’t say that they lived happily ever after although it’s five years now since that dinner in Marlin and they seem to be happy. My theory is that almost any two people can live together with some degree of comfort if they don’t have to. And there were other factors which came along to strengthen the feeling between Judith and Tiny. I don’t know that even Judith would say it was only lust now although she insists that lust is an admirable emotion which has been unfairly discriminated against.

Probably you remember her novel which came out in June. (I was the first person to see it.) This was the job on which Judith spent her Christmas day and the book was practically finished by the time she went to Marlin. I suppose almost everybody has read “The Princess Genevieve.” Some of the critics thought it was better than “Jurgen” but I wouldn’t go that far. It’s too short. I don’t suppose that many people realized that Judith herself had written an autobiographical novel in spite of her scorn for that sort of fiction. The first chapter convinced me. That’s the chapter which tells how the Princess Genevieve rode up the glass hill, slew the two dragons and rescued Prince Ferdinand from the castle of Mildred, the wicked Giantess. And then the story goes on to tell how the Princess rode back to the glass hill a week later carrying Ferdinand across her saddle bow. This time there were four dragons and a giant scorpion at the castle gate, but Genevieve killed them all. And she stormed her way into the secret room where Mildred was hiding. During all the fracas she carried Ferdinand who screamed and fainted. He was still unconscious when the Princess set him down at the feet of Mil dred and said, “I’ve brought your Prince back. I don’t want him any more.”

Perhaps I did hope dimly through the early part of the Summer that Judith herself would come riding down the glass hill with empty saddle. To an almost fantastic degree her fortunes rose as those of Tiny fell. It was only two days after the publication of “The Princess Genevieve” that he threw his arm out in the double header against the Red Sox. After that he could not toss a ball ten feet, and it became necessary to bench him. Probably every specialist in the country looked at Tiny’s arm that summer and they all agreed. By July he knew for certain that his big league days were done.

His downfall marked the dimming of the last ray of hope I had kept alive in my heart. By this time the combination which was arrayed against me was freedom and lust and pity, which is almost unbeatable. In August Tiny told Judith that he had received his unconditional release. Milwaukee in the American Association offered him a job. They thought out there that he might be transformed into a first baseman where his throwing wouldn’t matter much. Tiny would have accepted, but Judith wouldn’t hear of it.

“I can’t do anything else,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Because I’m old,” and she suddenly realized that he actually believed all the sporting page stories about the veteran of thirty-three.

“You can’t go down into the sticks, Tiny,” said Judith. “You’re a big leaguer and you’re just not going to be anything else.”

“But what can I do?”

“I don’t know. Let’s wait.”

And so they waited. Tiny said that he didn’t want to be an old ball player hanging around a big city. Every sporting extra reminded him of what he had been. And so they went down to Jason, Long Island, where Tiny’s father the minister of the First Baptist Church was still preaching. Judith found him a queer, gentle old man. He lived alone in a cottage with a canary. The bird was called Tiny. “He’s wholly dependent on me,” the old man explained. Still the canary earned his way for on Saturday nights old Tyler would sit by the cage and read him the sermon for the next day.

Tiny Tyler’s chance for a job came to him before he had been in Jason a week. The Democrats of the district called on him and offered him a nomination for Congress. “We need young men in politics,” explained the spokesman of the delegation, to Judith’s great delight. And he pointed out that Tiny was very much better known than any man in the whole community. Of course the Republicans usually won the seat, but perhaps it would be different now. Tiny objected that he didn’t know much about politics or anything about making speeches.

“Just give ’em blunt, baseball slang,” said the Democratic chairman.

The first hitch in the campaign occurred right here. Tiny didn’t know any baseball slang, or at any rate very little, and when he tried to write speeches Schopenhauer and proverbs from the Japanese were always creeping in. Judith took over the job. She wrote the plain blunt speeches and gave them the proper virile, slangy touch. Still it was Tiny who won the election, although a curious accident helped him. One week before the end of the campaign old Tyler preached a startling sermon. He had been considering the subject for a long time and he had talked it over with the canary. The inhabitants of Jason and round about were shocked and horrified when the old man said straight out that he didn’t believe in Hell any more. He said that God was a good God and the thing wasn’t possible. If the Bible mentioned Hell the Bible was mistaken and that’s all there was to it.

“I never once in all my life spanked my own son,” he wound up, “and you know him and what a fine man he’s turned out to be and how he made sixty-two home runs in one season.”

The Democratic chairman came to see Tiny less than an hour after. “You’ve got to disown all this stuff your father said,” he insisted.

“Why?” asked Tiny. “I don’t think there is any Hell.”

“Oh yes there is, down on this end of Long Island. Even if there wasn’t you’d have to believe in it. Bryan’s promised to come here and speak at your big rally in Patchogue. Do you suppose he’d help if he knew you were in on this heresy of your father’s?”

“If Bryan believes in Hell let him go there,” said Tiny. And it was Tiny who spoke at Patchogue and not Bryan. He wrote his speech himself. The tariff wasn’t mentioned once. Tiny talked about Hell.

“When I was in the big leagues,” he began, “there were managers who got along by suspending players when they did anything wrong or fining them. And there were others that just talked to you and patted you on the back and said ‘Cut it out.’ And at the end of the season I always noticed that the men who patted the players on the back had their teams up near the top, and the ones that were always punishing people never got any place at all. And I think that God’s got just as much sense as any manager in the big leagues.”

In that Congressional district Hell became the issue of the campaign and Tiny was the first Democrat elected in twenty years. He had a majority of more than three thousand. Judith was proud of him that night. Along came admiration to join pity and lust and freedom.

Tiny never has cut any great figure in Washington, although a leading editorial in “The Morning World” said his speech on immigration was the first sensible word on the subject. That speech sounded to me a good deal like Judith, although of course she’s been pretty busy with her novels. Last Winter she had a baby. She wrote to me and admitted it. “Maybe I told you I never would,” she wrote, “but I thought it would be good for Tiny. There ought to be somebody around the house for him to talk to. And then there’s that home run record. If it’s ever going to be beaten they’ll need somebody like Tiny to do it.”