Full morning came, and clean, cold light fell slant-wise on the street with golden sharpness. Everything in the world seemed impossibly good and happy, and all of it, they felt, was theirs. It seemed that everyone in Richmond had a smile for them. It seemed that all the people had been waiting for them through the night, had been preparing for them, were eager to give them the warmest welcome of affectionate hospitality. It seemed not only that they expected Pine Rock’s victory, but that they desired it. All of the girls, it seemed to them, were lovely, and all of them, they felt, looked fondly at them. All of the people of the town, they thought, had opened wide their hearts and homes to them. They saw a banner with their colors, and it seemed to them that the whole town was festooned in welcome to them. The hotels swarmed with them. The negro bellboys grinned and hopped to do their bidding. The clerks who waited smiled on them. They could have everything they wanted. The whole town was theirs. Or so they thought.
The morning passed. At one-thirty they went out to the playing field. And they won the game. As Monk remembered it, it was a dull game. It was not very interesting except for the essential fact that they won it. They had expected too much. As so often happens when so much passion, fervor, hot imagination has gone into the building of a dream, the consummation was a disappointment. They had expected to win by a big score. They were really much the better team, but all their years of failure had placed before them a tremendous psychical impediment. They won the game by a single touchdown. The score was 6 to 0. They even failed to kick goal after touchdown. It was the first time during the course of the entire season that Randy’s toe had failed him.
But it was better that the game ended as it did. It was Jim’s game. There was no doubt of that. It was completely and perfectly his own. Midway in the third quarter he did exactly what he was expected to do. Pacing out to the right, behind the interference, weaving and pawing delicately at the air, he found his opening and shook loose, around the end, for a run of 57 yards to a touchdown. They scored six points, and all of them were Jim’s.
Later, the whole thing attained the clean, spare symmetry of a legend. They forgot all other details of the game entirely. The essential fact, the fact that would remain, the picture that would be most vivid, was that it was Jim’s game. No game that was ever played achieved a more classical and perfect unity for the projection of its great protagonist. It was even better that he scored just that one touchdown, made just that one run. If he had done more, it would have spoiled the unity and intensity of their later image. As it was, it was perfect. Their hero did precisely what they expected him to do. He did it in his own way, by the exercise of his own faultless and incomparable style, and later on that was all they could remember. The game became nothing. All they saw was Jim, pacing and weaving out around right end, his right hand pawing delicately at the air, the ball hollowed in the crook of his long left arm, and then cutting loose on his race-horse gallop.
That was the apex of Jim Randolph’s life, the summit of his fame. Nothing that he could do after that could dim the perfect glory of that shining moment. Nothing could ever equal it. It was a triumph and a tragedy, but at that moment Jim, poor Jim, could only know the triumph of it.
NEXT YEAR THE nation went to war in April. Before the first of May, Jim Randolph had gone to Oglethorpe. He came back to see them once or twice while he was in training. He came back once again when school took up in Autumn, a week or two before he went to France. He was a first lieutenant now. He was the finest-looking man in uniform George Webber ever saw. They took one look at him and they knew the war was won. He went overseas before Thanksgiving; before the New Year he was at the front.
Jim did just what they knew he would do. He was in the fighting around Chateau-Thierry. He was made a Captain after that. He was almost killed in the battle of the Argonne Wood They heard once that he was missing. They heard later that he was dead. They heard finally that he had been seriously wounded and his chances for recovery were slight, and that if he did recover he would never be the same man again. He was in a hospital at Tours for almost a year. Later on, he was in a hospital at Newport News for several months. They did not see him again, in fact, till the Spring of 1920.
He came back then, handsome as ever, magnificent in his Captain’s bars and uniform, walking with a cane, but looking as he always did. Nevertheless he was a very sick man. He had been wounded near the spine. He wore a leather corset. He improved, however; was even able to play a little basketball. The name and fame of him was as great as ever.
And yet, indefinably, they knew that there was something lacking, something had gone by; they had lost something, something priceless, precious, irrecoverable. And when they looked at Jim, their look was somehow touched with sadness and regret. It would have been better for him had he died in France. He had suffered the sad fate of men who live to see themselves become a legend. And now the legend lived. The man was just a ghost to them.