That was the year they really marched on Richmond. It is hard to tell about it now. It is hard to convey to anyone the passion, the exultant hope, of that invasion. They do not have it now. They fill great towns at night before the game. They go to night clubs and to bars. They dance, they get drunk, they carouse. They take their girls to games, they wear fur coats, they wear expensive clothing, they are drunk by game time. They do not really see the game, and they do not care. They hope that their machine runs better than the other machine, scores more points, wins a victory. They hope their own hired men come out ahead, but they really do not care. They don’t know what it is to care. They have become too smart, too wise, too knowing, too assured, to care. They are not youthful and backwoodsy and na?ve enough to care. They are too slick to care. It’s hard to feel a passion just from looking at machinery. It’s hard to get excited at the efforts of the hired men.
It was not that way that year. They cared a lot—so much, in fact, they could feel it in their throats, taste it in their mouths, hear it thudding in the pulses of their blood. They cared so much that they could starve and save for it, hoard their allowances, shave their expenses to the bone, do without the suit of clothes to replace the threadbare one they owned. They were poor boys, most of them. The average expenditure among them was not more than $500 a year, and two-thirds of them worked to earn the greater part of that. Most of them had come from the country, from the little country towns up in the mountains, in the Piedmont, down in the pine lands of the coast. A lot of them were hayseeds, off the farm. And the rest of them had come from little towns. There weren’t any big towns. They didn’t have a city in the state.
They were, in point of fact, the student body of an old, impoverished, backwoods college. And they had the finest life. It was the finest place with all its old provincialism, the bare austerity of its whitewashed dormitory rooms, its unfurnished spareness, its old brick and its campus well, its world remotion in the Piedmont uplands of an ancient state. It beat any other place “all hollow.” It beat Harvard, it beat Princeton, it beat Yale. It was a better life than Cambridge or than Oxford had to offer. It was a spare life, a hard life, an impoverished kind of life, in many ways a narrow and provincial kind of life, but it was a wonderfully true and good life, too.
It was a life that always kept them true and constant to the living sources of reality, a life that did not shelter them or cloister them, that did not make snobs of them, that did not veil the stern and homely visage of the world with some romantic softening of luxury and retreat. They all knew where they had come from. They all knew where their money came from, too, because their money came so hard. They knew all about, not only their own lives, but about the lives of whole state. It is true they did not know much about any other life, but they knew that through and through. They knew what was going on around them. They knew the life of the whole village. They knew every woman, man, and child. They knew the histories and characters of each. They knew their traits, their faults, their meannesses and virtues; they were full of knowledge, humor, and observation. It was a good life. It was a spare one, and perhaps it was a narrow one, but they had what they had, they knew what they knew.
And they knew that they were going to win that year. They saved up for it. They would have made that trip to Richmond if they had had to march there. It was not hard for Monk. He got to go by the exercise of a very simple economic choice. He had the choice of getting a new overcoat or of going to Richmond, and like any sensible boy he took Richmond.
I said that he had the choice of Richmond or of a new overcoat. It would be more accurate to say he had the choice of Richmond or an overcoat. He didn’t have an overcoat. The only one that he had ever had had grown green with age, had parted at the seams a year before he came to college. But he had money for a new one now, and he was going to spend that money for the trip to Richmond.
Somehow Jim Randolph heard about it—or perhaps he just guessed it or inferred it. The team was going up two nights before the game. The rest of them were coming up next day. They had a bonfire and a rousing rally just before the team went off, and after it was over Jim took Monk in his room and handed him his own sweater.
“Put this on,” he said.
Monk put it on.
Jim stood there in the old, bare dormitory room, his strong hands arched and poised upon his hips, and watched him while he did it.
“Now put on your coat,” he said.
Monk put his coat on over it.
Jim looked at him a moment, then burst out in a laugh.
“God almighty!” he cried. “You’re a bird!”