Rough-Hewn/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
And then it was time to go back to college. Sophomore year was entirely different. What a change from his cat-in-a-strange-garret sensation of a year ago! Now he was blatantly sure of every step in the elaborate and illogical ritual that makes up ndergraduate life. He stood between College Hall and the Library all one happy afternoon, wringing the hands of Sophomores, as uplifted with their status as he. There Griswold the Assistant Manager hailed him and carried him off to the football house on 117th Street. He found the office on the first floor crowded with all the leaders and hangers-on of the football organization.
Andrews shook hands with him and actually remembered his name instead of calling him "Freshman Bean-pole"—it was great to be a Soph.! "Report in the Gym. at three," said Andrews, "you'd better live at the house this season; fix him up with a room, Charley." He turned and went on talking with McClurg, something about officials for the Fordham game.
Bixby reached over and picked up a paper from the welter on his desk, "Top-floor, Crittenden, you'll find a lot of cots in the front room; take any one that's loose."
"I haven't any clothes with me," explained Neale. It had never occurred to him that he would be accepted into the very center of things this way.
"Never mind, bring 'em to-morrow; but you'd better beat it up and stake out your claim to a cot now.…" The telephone rang and Bixby snatched it up, "Columbia football house, yes, this is Bixby speaking. No, that won't do! Those shoes were promised for this afternoon. Yes, yes, you can make it if you send them right away. See here, there are lots of sporting-goods firms who want our trade…"
Neale went upstairs and found a room, with six cots made up. Four of them had suit-cases or books on them to show occupancy. Over by the window he saw Billings, last year's full-back, sitting at a table with a thin, slight upper classman. Neale thought he recognized him,—Grant his name was—one of the college leaders, debating team. Spec. Managing Board, Phi Beta Kappa; that sort of chap. Billings' big body was hunched miserably forward over a book, his forehead wrinkled. As Neale looked at them, Grant reached forward, shut up the book and pulled it towards him.
"No use, Billings. It'd only ball you up to keep on with that math. Not a chance! Don't try the exam. Anyway they can't keep you off the team with only one condition. But, God, how did you manage to flunk Comp. Lit.? Any child of three ought to pass Comp. Lit. But don't you worry! We'll get you through. Have you learned those pieces I gave you?"
Billings straightened up and recited in a stumbling singsong, "As Shelley beautifully says, 'I could lie down like a sick child and weep … and weep … and weep!…'"
"'Away this life of woe,'" prompted Grant. "And it's like a 'tired child.' … No, don't change it! It'll look less as if you were copying a crib if you don't get it quite right. All right for that. Now, let's have the other ones."
At this point, Billings said violently in very forcible language, that poems were all such damn silly rot he couldn't learn them. And Grant, unsurprised and peremptory, answered that it didn't make a damned bit of difference how silly and rotten they were, they could be learned. "You've got brains enough to get a racing-dope sheet by heart, you can memorize poetry too. Now, your time's up. Beat it over to the Library where you can't talk and learn all three pieces! Remember you're to work 'em in, no matter what he asks. And if you have a chance, praise Shelley and knock Matthew Arnold. That's his line."
He turned to Neale, "You're Greenway, aren't you, with two years' conditions in French B?"
"No," said Neale, "I'm Crittenden."
"Oh, are you? Not on my list. You ought to have reported before. I can't do everything at the last minute. No matter, I'll give you till Greenway shows up. He's only a sub-end anyway, and we're lousy with ends. What did you flunk?"
"I didn't flunk anything," Neale admitted, half-ashamed that he might be considered a grind.
Grant jumped up. "What, nothing! And on the football squad, too." He stared hard at Neale as at a strange animal, and conjectured aloud, "Well, you must be a dub, of course. Never knew a Varsity man whose brain-cavity wasn't stuffed with cabbage-leaves."
Neale apparently showed some of the alarm this caused him, for the upper-classman added, "Oh, you'll get your chance just the same. Judging by the number of boobs Alpine and I are coaching, any dub who is eligible will have a smell at the Varsity, at least for the early games, till we can shove the regular Varsity men through their conditions."
"Everybody over to the gym.," roared a voice from the lower hallway.
Neale tossed his derby on one of the unpreëmpted cots and ran downstairs. As he bounded down flight after flight he could hear Grant leaning over the top banister yelling to the Manager to have Greenway found and delivered to him at once.
It was great to breathe the sweaty air of the dressing-room again, to strip and pull on your rough jersey and feel it rubbing the skin of your shoulders, great to hail the men you knew and have them slap you on the back.
"All over.… On the jump!" The squad clattered out, their cleats scraping and slipping on the marble steps.
Practice that afternoon was what the coaches called light—that is, no bones were broken: they fell on the ball, and it gladdened Neale's heart to see the new men hop into the air and bang down on one hip, just as he used to last season. They tackled the dummy, they went down under punts that sultry September afternoon—all of them, even the line men, time after time, till the sweat soaked even through their elbow-pads. Neale was dog-tired as he hobbled back to the dressing-room and pulled off his dripping jersey. What luxury to slip under the shower, hot first till the dirt was all off, then turn the handle, cool, cool, cooler, cold—to lean forward and feel it patter on your back, lean backward and feel the cold hard drops sting your face and chest. As he lay in Pompeian ease on the rubbing table, Josh went so far as to tell him that his muscles were in pretty fair shape compared to some of them. That was the timber-cruising trip. And how he tore into the roast-beef that night! It was good to be alive—to be a Soph.—to be on the football squad!
Grant's prophecy turned out correct. Four of the regular Varsity men were debarred by the faculty committee and the eligible subs made the most of their opportunity. One of the vacant places was left half-back and Neale, who that summer had grown some flesh and muscle on his lanky limbs and now weighed a hundred and sixty-three stripped, put his whole soul into the quest and nosed out Biffy McFadden for the job. McFadden knew more than Neale (the coach made no secret of Neale's lack of sophistication) but he weighed less and was only a little faster.
So Neale was given, although grudgingly, his chance and took it as though it had been his one chance to save his soul alive. He played against Rutgers, proud, half-scared, yet reassured at lining up by the side of big Tod McAlpine, and was fairly translated when he went over the line (just as easily as if it had been in practice) for one of Columbia's five touchdowns. Against Williams a week later, he played again and did nothing either very good or very bad. Just before the Harvard game. Garland was squeezed through a special examination in Latin and after that Neale had no chance for the Varsity. But he was considered about neck and neck with Biffy as first sub for the back-field, and he and Biffy grew together in a loyal comradeship, as brothers-in-arms.
Like a young tree which suddenly puts out a long new shoot in a new direction, Neale learned a lot of things that autumn, different from anything he had learned before. In the first place, living in the constant unrepressed society of thirty other young men, he acquired a good deal of social ease of a rough-and-tumble sort, learned much profanity, many foul and a few funny stories by the aid of which he was able to piece together the isolated facts he had already picked up about sex, and appear to his brothers a great deal more sophisticated than he was.
He also learned much technical football: to pick openings in a broken field, to jump from a crouching start the instant the ball began to move, to find his stride and be going at top speed in three paces, instinctively to hurdle when the defense was on the ground, to bull over it with churning knees when it was waist high, to lower his head and ram through when it was standing up, and always to kick, crawl, squirm the ball forward even if it was only a half an inch.
He learned a great deal more than that. All that autumn he played football, thought football, dreamed football, lived football. The savage Spartan football code was his code: to do anything, everything for a team-mate, for the team; to fight as hard in midfield with the score hopelessly against him as half a yard from the enemy's goal-line; to endure the agony of being tackled on muscle-bruised thighs, to get up and drive back as hard as ever into the line to the same certain torment; to go to any length to put an opponent out of the game—any length except being caught and having his team penalized by the officials; and no matter to what outbreaks of emotion his exhausted body and over-strained nerves might give way in the dressing-room, to walk out of it with his jaw set, his face impassive and never let an enemy rooter see a tear in his eye. It was by no means the education in the humanities and liberal arts with which the University was supposed to be providing him, but an education of a kind, it certainly was. Above all, at a period when his raw new personality was all one huge void, clamoring for something to fill it, football filled his life full to the brim. There was no vacuum left to be filled either by culture or deviltry.
All through the rest of that in-and-out season he played regularly at left half-back on the scrub, relishing to the full those afternoons when the scrub, with all the best of the decisions, scored on a crippled Varsity; rejoicing even more (for it meant power to the team) when the Varsity struck its gait and poxmded rough-shod over the bleeding and prostrate scrub.
After the season Neale found himself entitled to wear the "Varsity stripe" and monogram. This gave him a certain position in his class. He was somebody. Two fraternities made discreet overtures to him. Neale considered, encouraged Lamma Kappa Pi, which seemed to have more athletic men than the other, was duly pledged and initiated.
And now came a change in his manner of living. The chapter needed roomers to help pay the rent for the Frat. house. Couldn't Brother Crittenden move into a top-floor bed-room? Neale broached the subject to his father and mother, pointing out how much more time he would have for study if he lived near the University. They surprised him by treating the matter with unexpected solemnity and delaying decision for several days; but in the end they gave their consent.
It did not occur to Neale as he slung his clothes into a trunk that he was saying good-by to his home-life; and if it occurred to his mother, silently helping him pack, she kept her thoughts to herself. An event that seemed of much more importance to Neale was a move that Father made on his own initiative. After a long homily on responsibility and learning the value of money, he proposed to grant Neale an allowance of fifty dollars a month to be paid on the first of the month in advance. Out of this Neale was to buy food, shelter and incidentals. Father was to go on paying college fees.
So Brother Crittenden installed himself in the top-floor hall bedroom, and according to fraternity practice, decorated it with pennants, foils and masks (although he did not fence), and sword bayonets, because they looked impressive and were cheap at Bannerman's. To make a real college room, he knew by comparing it with others, it should have a dozen girls' photographs, but Neale knew no girl well enough to beg photographs from her. He excused this lack by telling himself that he had no use for women, he was at college for the stern man's business of making the football team. Nothing that might interfere with the pink of physical condition or the singleness of mental resolution should have a place in his life.
And indeed for the six weeks which separated the end of the season from mid-year examinations, he stuck to a monastic schedule. The mandate had gone forth that football men must somehow manage to pass a majority of their subjects, and Neale's fraternity brothers never tried to coax him away from the table where he sat wrestling with Cicero's Letters or the Carolingian Empire, not even to play poker, or go night-hawking around little Coney Island.
But after mid-years it was different. Nobody could possibly start worrying about the finals for three months yet. The basket-ball season began and with it the informal Gym. dances after each game. "Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero" was in the air, not only in Latin classes. Neale went to the first games in the cap and sweater he wore about the campus, and when the dance began, sneaked out, dodging behind pillars to avoid compromising those of his chapter, resplendent in evening clothes with girl partners more resplendent still. But such seclusion was not to last. Other fellows, the "fussers" of his chapter were caught with extra girls on their hands, sisters or cousins, or ex-girls, and Neale in spite of his avowed principle of dancing only when he couldn't run away fast enough to escape, was hauled in to be the necessary extra man for the more or less anonymous out-of-town girl to be provided for.
Logically enough, other advances followed. Finding that they had landed not only a promising athlete in Brother Crittenden, but a passable social member, the rest of the chapter hastened to count him in. He learned to play poker; to drink more beer than he wanted; to keep a pipe going without burning his mouth; he learned where to go for chop suey; to sniff at a cigar, and look wise before he bought it; to pretend to like his cocktails dry, although as a matter of fact, he did not like them at all; he learned to rattle off a line of bright, slangy compliments at college dances or Frat. teas, and to take a flashier line with chippies at the dance halls; he added to his store of oaths and smutty stories … the chapter thought well of him and he thought even better of himself.
By the time spring came Neale felt happily sure that he was seeing life without making a fool of himself, which was, according to his latest philosophy (borrowed from Horace) the right thing to do. He would be nineteen in a few months now, time to attain a calm, mature, unsurprised acceptance of the world. No half-baked enthusiasms about anything. Except football, of course. That was far above all philosophies of life. In the spring of his Sophomore year Neale was consuming pipefuls of tobacco and meditating on what he called his "past life," censuring or approving his actions by the newly acquired yard-stick of the "golden mean." What a youthful idiot he had been about Don Roberts! That was so long ago that he could smile cynically at both his enthusiasm and his disillusion, each equally far from balance. Balance. Poise. That was the right dope for a man of the world.
And yet, spring was in the air, and it was hard, even for the ripe maturity of nineteen to be perfectly balanced. Neale had no girl at hand, and was betrayed into working off the excitement of spring days by writing an English theme on the tulips in Union Square. So much early May, both of style and personality seeped into this, that the jaded, discouraged young professor of English felt his heart leap up with incredulous hope and pleasure. To encourage the writer he read parts of it aloud to the class, while Neale's very soul scorched with shame. One of his non-athletic classmates, a brilliant, precocious, foreign-born fellow, with literary aspirations, came up to him afterwards and congratulated him enviously on his success. It was a terrible experience all around. Neale vowed furiously to himself that never again would he let any real feeling slip into a college theme.