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From this man I had come uptown to a branch of the Y. M. C. A., where after an hour of hand-ball and a plunge in the swimming tank I had gone to a room downstairs, to which ambitious youngsters came for free advice from an expert who told them how to get on in life. His room was a confessional.
He was a Hamburg-American captain, lately sailing between Buenos Aires and Hamburg, and before that on an Atlas Line boat between the Caribbean and New York. He talked English and seemed more than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the old Chelsea Hotel, just across the street from the Y. M. C. A. gymnasium in which I had played hand-ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street.
The language of the stable and the kennel is rich in traces of Norman influence; and in backgammon, as played by orthodox players, we have a suggestive memorial of those Norman nobles, of whom Fortescue, in the 'De Laudibus' observes: "Neither had they delyght to hunt, and to exercise other sportes and pastimes, as dyce-play and the hand-ball, but in their own proper tongue."
As we drove up to the camp, smoke was rising lazily into the warm summer air from a dozen fires in different parts of the grounds; company cooks were putting the knives, forks, and dishes that they had just washed into improvised cup-boards made by nailing boxes and tomato-crates against the trees; officers in fatigue-uniform were sitting in camp-chairs, here and there, reading the latest New York papers; and thousands of soldiers, both inside and outside the sentry-lines, were standing in groups discussing the naval fight off Manila, lounging and smoking on the ground in the shade of the army wagons, playing hand-ball to pass away the time, or swarming around a big board shanty, just outside the lines, which called itself "NOAH'S ARK" and announced in big letters its readiness to dispense cooling drinks to all comers at a reasonable price.
Even Ippegoo, with all his natural defects of mind and body, was by no means contemptible as a player, in those games, especially, which required agility and powers of endurance. First they had a game of hand-ball. It was very simple. The players, who were not selected, but entered the lists at their own pleasure, divided themselves into two parties, which stood a little apart from each other.
Quoiting tournaments were got up, football matches arranged, games at rounders and hand-ball every conceivable game was indulged in, with sometimes a few coppers as prizes but more often a few ounces of tobacco or tea or a packet of sugar. Dances in the evenings were started at the corner of the row to the strains of a melodeon, and were carried on to the early hours of the morning.
Then an ordinary hand-ball was tossed into the air by Okiok, who led one of the parties. Simek, the mighty hunter, led the other. These men, although approaching middle age, were still at the height of their strength and activity, and therefore fitting leaders of the younger men in this as well as the more serious affairs of life.
I lie a-bed to the fourth hour; after that I take a ramble, or having read or written what may amuse me in my privacy, I am anointed with oil, but not with such as the nasty Nacca, when he robs the lamps. But when the sun, become more violent, has reminded me to go to bathe, I avoid the Campus Martius and the game of hand-ball.
He loved football, track, he won three gold medals broad-jumping, canoeing, swimming, billiards, he won a loving cup at that, tennis, ice-skating, hand-ball; and yes, ye of finer calibre, quiver if you will he loved a prize-fight and played a mighty good game of poker, as well as bridge though in the ten and a half years that we were married I cannot remember that he played poker once or bridge more than five times.
There were bowling-alleys, billiard and lounging-rooms, hand-ball, tennis and racket-courts, a completely equipped gymnasium, a shooting-gallery, and a swimming-pool with Turkish and Russian baths. In this casino alone there were rooms for forty guests.
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