Tommy Wormsey was a meek little boy with an ugly face, mostly covered
with court-plaster, and he would rather fall on a football than eat.
When he came trotting out upon the field, the college along the side
lines always smiled at the way he tipped his head to one side with his
eyes on the ground, as though he was ashamed of himself and of his funny
little bumpy body, stuck into a torn suit and stockings which weren't
mates and had holes in them. When he skimmed over the ground and dived
through the air and brought down a two-hundred-and-something-pound
guard, with his knotty little arms barely reaching about the big
thighs, it looked very absurd, and when he jumped up again, yelling
"3--9--64" in his shrill earnest voice, and ran sniffling back to his
place, with his sorrowful face seeming to say, "I know I oughtn't to
have let him slide so far, but please don't scold me this time," the
crowd laughed uproariously, which hurt his feelings.
But he paid very little attention to anything except the scrub
captain's orders and the admonitions of the coachers, to whom he said,
"Yes, sir," and "I'll try it that way, sir." He was afraid of them,
and looked down at his torn stockings when they spoke to him. Those of
the crowd along the ropes who knew everything, as well as the other
spectators who only knew a few things, said that Freshman Wormsey had
more sand and football instinct than any man on the field. But they
did not know what a coward he was at heart.
More than once when a 'varsity guard had broken through and jumped on
him, and the scrub halves had fallen on him from the other direction
to keep him from being shoved back, and the other 'varsity guard and
the centre, who were not light, had thrown themselves upon these, and
one of the ends had swung round and jumped on the top of the pile on
general principles, Wormsey, at the bottom, said "ouch!" under his
breath, if he had any. He weighed 137 pounds stripped.
At night, after the trick practice with checkers at the Athletic Club,
he always hurried back to his room, and stacked the pillows and sofa
cushions up in the corner of the room, with the black one in the
centre, and taking his place on one knee in the opposite corner,
socked the ball into the pile. Every time he missed the black one in
the centre he called himself names.
Sometimes when he did this he became excited, and sprang forward and
knocked down chairs and tables and things. But he paid no attention to
that. He only bit his nails and fell to passing again, and kept it up
sometimes until eleven o'clock, which was a whole hour later than he
had any business to be out of bed.
But there were days when it became tiresome, this constant pound,
pound, pound, fall down, get up and pound again, and once in a while
there came dark times when he felt that it all didn't pay, which was
very unpatriotic thinking; and the next day, when the crowd yelled,
"Well tackled, Wormsey!" he wondered how he could have been such a
mucker as to think it. But it was rather hard work for a
seventeen-year-old boy whose bones weren't knit to play two
thirty-minute halves every day as hard as they were doing now, and
then practise place kicks and catching punts afterward, besides
keeping hold of all the signals and systems and stuff that were
drummed into his little head every evening, along with the rest of the
second eleven, in the room across the hall from the one where the
'varsity were learning their systems and signals and tricks.
It's all well enough for them. They have their 'varsity sweaters with
the big P on them, and have their pictures printed in the papers, and
are pointed out and praised and petted and fondled and fussed over
like blue-ribboned hunters at the horse show; but for the poor,
faithful, unappreciated scrub it's a different story. There's none of
the glory, and all work and grind and strain at the top notch of
capacity. And nothing at the end of it but thanks and the
consciousness of doing one's duty by the college. So about this time,
when they were approaching that critical stage in training which is
like getting one's second wind in a cross-country run, he used to have
some terrible times with himself. If anyone knew what muckerishly
cowardly thoughts he had, he was afraid they'd fire him from college.
He was ashamed of himself, but he couldn't help it. He was getting
sick of training, sick of getting up at seven o'clock in the morning
and hurrying down to breakfast while the alarm clocks were going off
in East and West colleges, and the frost was still on the grass. Every
day, as soon as the morning recitations were over, no matter what kind
of weather, he must jump into the 'bus at the corner of Dickinson
Hall, drive down to the grounds, undress and dress again, and hobble
out upon the field, and get his poor little body bumped and pounded
and kicked and trampled on, and the rest of his personality yelled at
by the captain, and scolded by the coachers, who stand alongside in
nicely creased trousers, with canes in their hands, and call out,
"Line up more quickly, scrub," which is hard to do when one's lungs
are breathless, especially when one is a quarter-back, and needs a
certain amount of wind to scream out the signals in a loud enough tone
to keep from being sworn at. And that's the way they make football
stuff.
To-day he let Hartshorn drag him five yards and missed one tackle
outright, and he was discouraged. After the line-up, while they were
practising him at catching punts, he seemed to have such bad luck
holding the ball; and once, in trying for a wild one when he had run
over by the cinder track, grunting and straining, and had put up his
little arms, only to feel the ball bounce off his chest, he gnashed
his teeth so loud and said "Oh, dear!" in such a plaintive whimper,
like a child waking from a bad dream, that two pipe-smoking seniors,
who were trooping out in the rear of the crowd, smiled audibly and
said something about him. He could not hear what it was. He only
heard them laugh, and it nearly broke his heart. But all that he could
do was to call them things under his breath, and run sniffling back to
his place again.
The trouble with the boy was he had worked so hard and worried so much
that he was over-trained, and so, naturally, there was not much ginger
left in him. And the reason the keen-eyed trainer did not see this and
lay him off for a few days was that Wormsey thought it his duty to
make up in nerve what he lacked in ginger; and he was too bashful to
tell anyone how difficult it was to make himself play hard, and how
that he no longer felt springy when he jumped out of bed in the
morning, and that he slept all the afternoon after practice, instead
of studying, as all football men should.
He went into the field-house the next day, unbuttoning his coat and
hating football. He hated the ill-smelling dressing-room. He was sick
of training, sick of rare beef and Bass's ale and bandages and
rub-downs, and the captain's admonitions and the coacher's scoldings.
He thought he would give anything not to be obliged to play that day.
He was sore all over, and his ear would be torn open again, and he
didn't like having the blood trickle down his neck; it felt so
sticky.
It was a hot, lazy, Indian-summer day; and his muscles felt exhausted.
He felt as much like exerting them as one feels like studying in
spring term directly after dinner, when the seniors are singing on the
steps. As he came hobbling out of the field-house he laced his little
jacket, and made up his mind that after the practice he would tell the
captain that he could not spare the time from his studies to play
football, patriotism or no patriotism. This was not necessary, because
he was tumbled over in the opening play, and remained upon the ground
even after the captain cried "Line up quickly," with his ugly little
face doubled up in a knot.
"There goes another back," said the scrub captain, pettishly, snapping
his fingers. "Rice, you play quarter; and Richardson, you come play
half in Rice's place."
Another sub and William, the negro rubber, picked Wormsey up, the
doctor following behind, and turning back to see the play, which had
already begun again, for he wanted to see how the new system was
working.
As they approached the field-house he saw the two fellows who had
laughed at him the day before standing apart down at the end of the
field. One of them was tapping his pipe against the heel of his shoe,
and saying, "I didn't know that that little devil could be hurt. He
always--" But just then the 'varsity full-back made a long "twister"
punt, and he interrupted himself with an exclamation about that. It
sounded like a reproach to Wormsey, and he began to feel that he had
somehow gotten hurt with malice aforethought. And this made him so
ashamed that when they reached the field-house the trainer, sponging
his face, said, encouragingly: "That's all right, me boy. Don't feel
badly. You'll be out again in a couple of weeks. I've been meaning to
lay you off for a while, anyway. I'll tell you for why; you're a
little stale, Tommy, a little stale."
Every day now Wormsey trudged down to the field on crutches--they had
to be sawed off at the bottom first--and watched the practice from a
pile of blankets on the side-lines. It was a fine thing, he told
himself, to watch the others do all the work while he sat still with
four 'varsity sweaters tied about his neck. This was a great snap; he
was still on the scrub, was at the training table, and would have his
picture taken, would go to the Thanksgiving game free, and yet did not
have to get pounded and pummelled.
He was made a good deal of now. The coachers patted him on the back
and said "My boy" to him. He had a lot of sympathetic adulation from
admiring classmates. Upper-classmen whom he had never seen before, but
who somehow knew him, came up and said, "How's the leg, Tommy?" At
which he hung his head and sniffled, and said, "Getting along pretty
well, thank you," and then grinned, because he didn't know whether
they were guying him or not.
In a few days he could walk with a cane, and he put on his football
clothes because they were more comfortable. He limped after the teams
up and down the field, and squatted down to see how the 'varsity made
their openings, and he learned how to tell, by the expression of his
legs, on which side the quarter was going to pass the ball, which
nobody else in the world could tell. Also, by carelessly daily
sauntering into the cage during the preliminary practising, with a
guileless smile on his face, he found out the 'varsity signals, which
he had no business to find out.
Sometimes he became very much excited during the scrimmages, and once,
when Dandridge, the wriggly 'varsity half-back, kept on squirming and
gaining after he had been twice downed, Wormsey screamed, as he hopped
up and down on one foot, "Oh, grab--grab him! _Please_ grab him! Oh!
oh!" so loud that all the field heard it and laughed at him. Then he
realized what a fool he had made of himself and kicked himself with
his good leg, and limped slowly up the field to study the next play.
But conceited as it was, he really thought that he would have stopped
that runner if he had been there. He imagined just how it would feel
to have once more the thrill of a clean tackle, sailing through the
air, and locking his arms tight, and squeezing hard, and both rolling
over and over, while the crowd yelled in the distance. And he thought
it would be fine to get out there again, and run his hands through his
hair, and call out the signals, and plunge the ball home into the
back's stomach, and then pitch forward, and push and strain and sweat
and fall down and get up again. He had a firm healthy skin now, and
had gone up to the tremendous weight of 138½, which was vulgar
obesity.
One windy sunny day when Wormsey was limping friskily up and down the
field with his hair blowing about, Stump, the 'varsity quarter,
instead of springing up to his place after one of the tandem plays, as
he should have done, lay still on the ground, while the college held
its breath.
"It's Stump! it's Stump!" they whispered to one another with scared
faces. Then they no longer held their breaths. They moaned, and
stamped their heels into the frosty ground, and gazed out sadly toward
the dear, frowzy head of the man who was being carried to the
field-house.
"It's only a wrench," said the doctor. "He'll be out in a few days."
The captain's mouth grew a little more stern, but he only snapped his
fingers, and said: "Bristol! No, he's laid off too. Wait a moment,
doctor," he called out. "Is Wormsey well enough to play?"
"Wormsey?" said Tommy to himself in little gasps. "Why, I'm Wormsey.
What! play with the 'varsity!"