Rough-Hewn Part 26

McAlpine and Andrews were standing outside the Gym. door. Neale stopped to shake hands with his Captain whom he had not seen before practice.

McAlpine punched him appraisingly in the abdomen.

"Not so bad. Some fat but there's muscle behind it."

Neale made way for Atkins of the '99 team, an alumnus always hanging around the squad every season. He was supposed to be devoting his heart's blood to bond-brokerage, down on Wall Street, but, a wistful exile from the world to which he had given the pa.s.sion of his youth, he always came uptown in the fall to watch football practice. Also, which was of much more importance, he spent his summer vacation looking up available football material, "out in the bushes" as he expressed it. He now stopped in front of the Captain with a grin of pride, and jerking his head towards an approaching player, he inquired, "Well, how about him?"

McAlpine replied with enthusiasm, "Built like a piano, isn't he? Where'd you raise him?"

Neale followed their eyes and saw a squat, swarthy, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linesman rolling past them towards the Gym.

door.

"Where'd I raise him? Stole him from the U. of P. Father's something or other up in the coal-fields--oodles of money. Son was all set up to go to Pennsy, but we got him down here and led him up and down the Great White Way a couple of nights. n.o.body could coax him away now--unless there's a University at Paris."

McAlpine stared after the powerful back and shoulders filling the doorway. "G.o.d, what a brute! Baby hippo walking on his hind legs. What's his breed anyway?"

"Some sort of hunky. I'm not up on their stud book, but I'd say off-hand he's a cross between a Slovak cart-horse and a Ruthenian wild boar--lots of s.p.a.ce in his garret, but you can't hurt him with a pick-ax."

"But, how in merry h.e.l.l, are we going to keep him eligible? What courses did you get him entered for?"

"Oh, a.s.sorted snap courses--English Lit. mostly. And he has a tame tutor that lives with him and does the studying. How'd you suppose he ever got through High School?"

Neale left them talking and stepped into the Gym., admiring enviously the ma.s.sive bone-structure of the new student of English Literature.

There were horribly emotional ups and downs in the Junior football season for Neale, ups and downs that ploughed and harrowed his young soul, planted many seeds in his heart, and left him at the end of the season with so much new knowledge of himself and others to digest, with experiences so rich and varied, dark and brilliant, to look back on, that he needed the entire rest of the year to grow up to them. The other students, those who did not play football, seemed to him like little boys, fooling around with marbles and kites, so little did they know of the black depths of depression and despair, and the hard-won heights of exultation which crammed his own personal life full, and gave him a premature maturity of experience, like that of a boy who has been through a war.

The day after his third game on the Varsity, Father called him on the telephone and asked if he couldn't come home and have dinner with them to celebrate his success--would that be breaking training? Oh, no, Neale answered, not if he got back to the house at nine. So he went home to a specially good dinner, just the kind he remembered as a little boy, when there was company. They talked football mostly: that meant he and Father talked and Mother saw to it that the plates of her two men were filled.

After dinner they went into the library, the library where he had first plunged into the world of books, and there he and Mother sat on the sofa, while Father sat in his own chair, and they visited some more.

Neale found it surprisingly easy to talk to his parents now, almost as easy as if they were strangers. During the last year he had lived away from them except for week-ends and short visits. In that time he had acquired a little perspective; and the new sh.e.l.l to his personality had set hard enough so that he no longer felt an irritable, shame-faced distaste of being looked at by people who had known him as a little boy.

Great Scott! Had he _ever_ been a little boy? The college Junior looked around on the walls, books and furniture that had not changed a hair and remembered with difficulty that he had once been a care-free child in these surroundings.

When he went away, he shook hands with his father, as he always did, and stooped from his great height to kiss his mother as he always did. Why not? It did not occur to him that he might not kiss his mother.

But apparently it had occurred to her, for when she felt on her lips the cool, fresh, boyish, matter-of-fact pressure of his lips, she gave a sob and flung her arms around him, holding him close and crying a little on his shoulder.

Why, dear old Mother! What was the matter with her? Neale put both arms around her and gave her a great hug, as he used to when he came home from West Adams.

It had done him good to see his folks, he thought, as he strode off down the familiar, but not much-loved city street. He thought affectionately about his father and mother for quite a time thereafter, as far as the ferry-house indeed, when the build of a deck-hand reminded him of the new Swede on the team. After that he thought football intensively, a strong color of Junior c.o.c.k-sureness tinging all his thoughts. He was making the team! He wasn't so worse! How green, how incredibly green the thumb-fingered Freshies were who came out to try for the squad. And he had beaten Biffy to it, although Biffy had almost killed himself with trying.

The weak opponents of the preliminary season were easily swamped.

McAlpine, Rogers, Neale, with one of the tackles back, the big Swede, Gus La.r.s.en, or Atkins' coal miner (whose name, Vaclav Blahoslav, stumped the squad till it was shortened to "Mike") tore over Rutgers, Fordham, Hamilton and the other small fry. True, the battering-ram machine broke tragically down before Princeton's even stronger attack, but none of the blame for that attached to Neale. He was kept out of that game by a wrenched ankle, and Biffy's rotten luck let him into the line-up for the first defeat of the season. Neale really had luck on his side, he thought with some complacency. By next Sat.u.r.day his ankle was all right again and he trotted out on Franklin Field supremely confident, trotted out to fall straight into the black depths of the bottomless pit.

For after that swelling supreme self-confidence came a queer slowness of mind. He found it hard to keep his thoughts on his work as they ran through signals. His eyes kept straying to the rioting, flag-waving grand-stands. The whistle blew, the kick-off came straight to Neale. For the first time since Freshman year he felt a sinking dread that he might fumble. The ball hit him on the chest and bounded off. Tod McAlpine fell on it and the rushing game began.

For the first half it was anybody's game. Either team when it got the ball could gain but could not score. Something was the matter with Neale. He wasn't all there. He knew he was playing mechanically, but couldn't seem to summon the energy to do better.

He sat listless, almost sullen while Andrews harangued the team between the halves. He was hardened by this time to the Neapolitan frenzy of emphasis which marked exhortations to play your best football or die.

He'd do his best, he told himself, looking down at his feet. n.o.body could do any more.

The second half began with an exchange of punts. Playing behind the cyclopean Mike, Neale hadn't much work to do on the defensive, but once Mike was boxed out on a straight buck, Neale shot his body in to plug the hole and turning, caught a bony knee in the back, right over the kidneys. As he lay on the ground gasping for breath, he could see that he hadn't even stopped the play. It had gone over him for two yards. Oh, h.e.l.l! What was the use? How his back ached! The Penn. quarter seemed to know he was feeling wobbly. All the plays were coming at him and Mike, and most of them got by. Where _was_ the ball? Sometimes it came straight through and the next minute on the same formation swung outside--and Neale uselessly buried under the interference. He'd have to stop it somehow--soon. He glanced back out of the corner of his eye, and saw the goal posts less than five yards behind. The Penn. formation was on his side again. Mike charged like a buffalo. Neale rushed in behind him, but blindly. Then all at once he picked out the man with the ball--too late. His sideways drive for a tackle missed and as he fell, his arms empty, he saw the red-and-blue jersey go over the line.

He got up shaken, feeling very sick of himself, not meeting anybody's eye. While Penn. was kicking the goal, Neale saw Biffy come bounding out from the side-lines, "I'm to take Crittenden's place," he reported.

It was like a blow in the face. And he had earned it. Neale walked to the bench, took a blanket, looking carefully away from the sub who held it out to him, wrapped himself up, forced his face into its usual expression of impa.s.sivity and watched the game. It was not much to watch: Columbia badly up in the air, Pennsy getting stronger every minute.

He dreaded the post-mortem at the football house, and took as deserved Andrews' verdict. "Crittenden, you were a total loss. I knew you weren't much of a defensive back, but I didn't suppose a whale like you would let a skinny little runt of a Penn. sub ride you back five yards and dump you on your tail."

Day after day went by, with Neale in exile, playing once more on the scrub. The night before the Brown game, when the line-up was announced, he got together a show of good-will as he shook hands with Biffy and wished him luck. But he lay awake in the dark that night, heartbroken, sternly motionless and rigid on his cot, his great hands clenched hard.

It was his virgin sorrow, the first real suffering he had ever known.

The first real sorrow of most lives is usually tempered to the softness of immature hearts by the self-preserving instinct to lay the blame on something or somebody else, by merciful self-pity. But for Neale there was no Fate, nor chance, nor enemy, nor fickleness of woman on whom to lay the blame. There was no one to blame but himself, and before his time, he felt the pure rigor of this knowledge cut deep like a clean steel blade. It cut out a part of his boyishness forever. It was the first scar of the initiation into manhood. Neale stood up to it like a man, although so young a man. "No squealing!" he commanded himself savagely.

The next day he sat all through the game on the edge of the subs' bench, his big muscles quivering with readiness to respond to an order to jump into the game, his heart sick, sick within him because the order did not come. n.o.body so much as looked his way. There he sat, a big, useless lump.

"What's the matter with me?" he cried out behind his Iroquois mask of insensibility, "I've got the strength. I've got the speed. _Am I a quitter?_" The sweat stood out on him at the idea, and at first, helpless before the dramatic quality of young imagination, he felt that must be the answer. Yes, he was a quitter. As well die, and be done with it.

Then the nucleus of what was to become Neale hardened itself against this easy, inverted sentimentalism, and small as the nucleus was, it set itself to consider the matter in judicial, objective judgment. Neale went over his football for the last week as though it had been that of another player. "I did quit in the Penn. game. But other fellows have had a slump and pulled out of it. And since then, by G.o.d, I've played myself out in every practice. I've given all there was to give and then some!"

He held up his head at this. And yet, if he wasn't a quitter, what _was_ the matter with him? "Biffy isn't any world-beater. Yet he must be better than I am, or Andrews wouldn't give him my place. _Andrews is square._" He said that with the accent of the mystic who affirms that G.o.d is good; and it was very much the same sort of corner-stone in the house he was building to live in.

Along in the second half, Atkins (the grad. who had discovered Mike), stopped his caged-tiger prowl up and down the side lines and dropped into an empty s.p.a.ce beside Neale. "Look at that!" he cried suddenly, "Did you see that?"

Neale had noticed nothing in particular--just a general tangle of brown and blue jerseys. "I don't think they gained," he said.

"Great Scott, no! Haven't you any eyes? They lost about half-a-yard. The Brown left-half tripped over Mike's legs, but if he'd been a foot further out, he'd be going yet. McFadden was suckered."

Neale took his eyes for a moment from the field to look around wonderingly at Atkins. He had never thought of him before except with pity as an old exile, who couldn't play any more. Could he really see all that in a play, see just what every man had done? Atkins went on now, stiffening with his concentration like a pointer dog. "There it goes again--see, he's charging right on top of Mike. Just luck if he gets the man--missed him! It was Tod who stopped the play. Next time they hit the left side of our line, watch the way Rogers handles it."

Atkins bit savagely on a mouthful of gum, "There!" He dug his finger nails into Neale's wrist. Neale could see Rogers rock a second, undecided, on tip-toe; side-step an interferer; and then shoot his body like a projectile into the play. "Spilled 'em for a yard-and-a-half loss: that's the stuff!"

He looked around sharply at Neale. "If _you_ could use your head like that, you'd be worth something to the team."

Neale stared at him, his young face candid with the astonishment of feeling a brand-new idea inserting itself into his mind. Maybe _that_ was what was the matter with his game.

He reached up, as he would have said, to the upper story, and turned back to watch the game with new eyes, eyes sharpened by intelligence. He concentrated on the back-field defense and began for the first time to understand the inwardness of it. He couldn't attain Atkins' hawk-like vision of the play and what every man in the back field had done; but he made out a great deal more than he ever had before.

Next Monday at practice Atkins came and stood behind Neale (the bond-selling business never seemed to exist for Atkins during football season). To Neale, as he played on the scrub, Atkins poured out his acc.u.mulated tactical lore, the wisdom that choked and strangled him because he was no longer allowed to put it into action. Seizing on Neale, whom he did not know personally at all, he forced his way into Neale's attention and held it fiercely on the business of playing football intelligently.

"Have a look! Have a look! Secondary defense finds the play before it stirs out of its tracks! No, you shouldn't have tried a tackle that time," he yanked Neale to his feet, "they were too bunched. I made just that break in the Princeton game in '99 and I've never forgiven myself.

If you'd spilled the interference, your end would have got the runner.

Watch the ball! don't run in till you _know_ where it is--and then _go to it_! Sometimes you can tell by the back's eyes, give themselves away by looking where they're going to go, but an old hand will cross you on purpose. The knees are safer, mostly they lean a little just before the ball goes back. Got to use old head! Bill Morley himself couldn't stop a play if he didn't know where it was. Ah! _that's_ the stuff! That was just right--not too soon or too late--and see how easy it was!"