September, 1900.
The first weeks of Freshman year were like a return to the formless
impersonality of little boyhood. Just as Neale had felt himself an
amoeba-like cell among the finished, many-membered adults of his
parents' circle, so he was now again only one more wriggle in the mass
of Freshmen. Nobody could tell him apart from any other Freshman. He
could scarcely tell himself apart from the other Freshmen.
This did not afflict him as it might a more sensitive, self-conscious
boy. Indeed he rather enjoyed the anonymity of his condition, the space
and vacuum about him which it created, where he floated free from any
threat of the handling or pawing-over which was his especial fear when
he entered into relations with other people. There was so much that was
new to him in college life that it was occupation enough to look on
without taking any part. He enjoyed the variety of his experiences, from
the Greek-and-Roman feeling that came with walking up the Library steps,
to the fairy-cave enchantment of floating on the shimmering water of the
electric-lighted, marble-lined swimming pool. And he enjoyed most of all
his aloof spectator's scorn of footless classes like Rhetoric A, or
class-meetings where a few loud-mouthed blow-hards ran the show, while
the real scouts like himself preserved a cautious, sardonic silence. He
discovered the perilous secret, always a temptation to natures like his,
that if you attempt nothing, share in no effort, you are automatically
freed from any blame for the inevitable foolishness and blunders; you
can stand on your safe little hillock and scorn the poor fools who try
to do things and fail. The lone-wolf motive sang seductively in his
seventeen-year-old ears. Nothing in any of his classes, nothing in the
Library or in any of the books in it gave the seventeen-year-old a hint
of any valid, compelling reason for his assuming the heavy, distasteful
burden of responsibility.
Then one day, word was passed around that the Flag Rush would be held
that afternoon; the Flag Rush unanimously deplored by the directing
forces of the University; the Flag Rush, that out-burst of meaningless
brutality so shocking to all the European members of the Faculty,
secretly contemptuous of the prosperous, illiterate, childish country
where they taught.
Neale never dreamed of staying out of the Flag Rush. There was a row on,
and his class needed his muscles and his head. He went to the Gym. at
the appointed hour, where all the Freshmen were assembled. Gathering
confidence at being all together for once, they marched in a body over
to South Field. There they found the Sophs. gathered about a tree, from
a branch of which fluttered a 1903 flag. Juniors took charge of the
affair, coaching and urging on the Freshmen. Still buoyed up by their
mass, by being together, they advanced to the charge. They were
uncertain, and for the most part, amiable big little boys, who really
cared nothing about that flag, who really cared only about doing what
was expected of them. As they advanced, they began to hurry, to rush
forward nervously. Several detached Sophs. dived in at the leaders' feet
and broke up the formation, but there was mass impetus enough to carry
the rush forward. The Freshmen crashed into the defenders of the flag,
pushed them back, circled them round ... at the first physical contact
with the enemy they were no longer big little boys doing what was
expected of them, they were young Berserk fighters, blind and furious
with the delight of battle. A roar went up, a roar from their very
hearts, like the yell which had burst up from their little-boy
game-centers. Except for a few rare and artistic natures, who were
suffering horribly from shock, every one of them was twice what he had
been two minutes before. A Freshman somehow shot up through the crowd,
hoisted on his classmates' shoulders, and laid his hands on the sacred
branch; but defenders spouted up around him, grabbed his legs and
pulled him down. With this, all semblance of organized purpose left the
rush. It broke up into a disorganized melee, rolling and tumbling,
panting and struggling in a hundred separate encounters.
Neale rolled and tumbled, panted and struggled with the rest, far, far
from any cool Olympian detachment. He was one of the biggest and
strongest of the Freshmen and felt his responsibility. He did what he
could. But that was not much. The Freshmen did not know one another, and
had no plan. Sometimes Neale collared his own classmates by mistake;
sometimes a couple of Sophs. tackled him together, ran him back and
dropped him on the grass.
A half-hour later the flag was still in the tree, and the furious
boiling over of insensate young life had cooled to a simmer. The Juniors
called the rush off, the Freshmen began to stream back to the Gym. Neale
was surprised to find one sleeve to his jersey missing and innumerable
rips and tears all over his other garments. He was bruised from head to
foot and spat blood from a cut lip. Calmed, appeased, exhausted, he made
limping for the gate.
As he passed through it, he passed through another and invisible gate,
opening into quite a different path from the solitary, self-satisfied
way of aloofness which he had been following. He did not, as a matter of
fact, pass through the invisible gate. He was shoved through by a
vigorous hand that slapped him on the shoulder. Turning, Neale looked
into the masterful face of the Varsity Coach. "Report for football
practice to-morrow!" was the order. "I'm Andrews!"
The information was unnecessary. Neale would not at this date have
recognized President Low or Dean Van Amringe, but he knew the football
coach. The next twenty hours were beatific. His mind refused to grasp
facts. It wandered off into gorgeous day-dreams. He was on the
Varsity ... no, he was a sub, called in at the last minute ... a long
run! ... better, a recovered fumble ... then down the field, shaking
off one tackler after another.
He would wake up to real life, blushing, swearing at himself for a
condemned fool. And yet a few minutes later, in fancy he was the last
defender between the goal line and a rushing Yale back...!
Not the faintest hint of any of this appeared on the surface. At home he
preserved his normal appetite which was his mother's gauge for his
health and spirits, and although he told them, not unwillingly, about
the Flag Rush, he preserved the sacred secret of his summons from
Andrews, as though it had been his first sentimental rendezvous. The
next day dragged endlessly, filled with the paper-like silhouettes of
talking professors. But three o'clock was finally there, and he was at
the Gym., silent, his face composed, his heart given to sudden swelling
bulges, which made it hard for him to hear what was being said.
They gave him a suit. He trotted with the squad, _with the Squad_ over
to South Field!
"Ever played?" asked the scrub quarter.
"Yes," said Neale. He did not feel obliged to tell how little.
"What position?"
"Half-back," he lied brazenly, having made up his mind that he hadn't
the weight to aspire to the Varsity line.
They ran through signals. Then a scrimmage started but Neale was not in
the line-up. A scrub back had his wind knocked out and didn't get up
quickly enough for the coach. "Put in that Freshman bean-pole. Jump in,
what's your name?"
Neale jumped and floundered for five minutes, then the peppery scrub
quarter consigned him profanely to the side-lines. For two days after
that he moped without a job, although still in a suit, out in the field.
Then he had another trial.
Gradually he made sure of his place as right-half on the scrub--not that
he was any good, as they told him plainly: but because in those days the
whole squad, including hopeless dubs, seldom numbered over thirty men,
and thanks to the work in the mill at West Adams, Neale was physically
fit.
With this place, minor though it was, came the great privilege of
dinner, after practice, at the football house. There he picked up a
little of the theory of the game from the blackboard talks; there after
the Pennsylvania's guards-back had battered through for thirty points,
he heard the coach, white and shaking with emotion, pour out his biting
post-mortem. "You, Jackson," shaking his fore-finger at the left-guard,
"did you shoot your body in low and spill them in their own territory?
No, you STOOD UP!"
Neale's flesh crept, he was almost glad that he had escaped the fearful
responsibility of being on the Varsity. It was terrible, such a weight
on your shoulders. He shrank from it, and with all his being, aspired to
it.
He made no impression on the football world, but his own interior world
was transformed. He was no longer an isolated, formless Freshman, dumped
down into the midst of the most callously laissez-faire of Universities,
he was no more a forgotten molecule with no share in, or responsibility
for the ultimate reaction. He had a shelter for his personality against
the vast, daunting indifference of the universe. He was on the football
squad.
He had feared he might have some trouble in explaining his absence from
the supper-table at home, but that proved unexpectedly easy. The second
evening after he began to play on the scrub, he found Father in the
library at home, reading the sporting sheet of the Evening Telegram.
"Any other Crittendens in college, Neale?" he asked.
"Not that I know about."
"That's you on the football team, then?"
"Only on the scrub, yes, I'm trying. We have dinner together after
practice. You don't mind, do you?"
"Me? Of course not," said Father.
Mother heard all this, apparently had known it before, and did not ask
him to take care of himself and not get hurt. Neale looked over at her
gratefully. Mother was all right.
The football season slid along, the Varsity improving every week. Neale
glowed with caste-loyalty as Saturday after Saturday he watched the
prowess of his big brothers. Every day he felt himself stretching up,
broadening out, nearer to their stature, though nobody else gave him a
thought. Life was full of big and generous and absorbing matter.
Then came Thanksgiving Day, the climax ... and oh, after that, what a
vacuum! Nothing in life but classes! Holy smoke! It was fierce! What did
the fellows do who hadn't had anything but classes! How could they stand
it? But of course, it wasn't such a come-down for them.
Going home as Neale did every afternoon, he had none of the scanty,
ill-organized college social life. Sliding into college as he had, with
no introduction from the right kind of Prep. school, and with a
noticeably colorless personality, he was not thought of as a possibility
for any fraternity. Time hung heavy on his hands. Lectures took up but
three hours a day, on the busiest days. To fill in the rest of the time
there was the swimming pool, the Gymnasium and the Library. He swam,
practised the overhand racing stroke, dived; in the Gym. he fooled
awkwardly on the parallel bars and side-horse; he tossed medicine balls
with any pick-up acquaintance; what he really enjoyed was the line of
traveling rings which hung in front of the visitors' gallery--but one
day he heard an upper classman refer to these as "Freshmen's Delight,"
and thereafter he avoided them.
The Library, the first one to which he had had access, wasn't so bad.
Neale went there first to look up a reference for Comp. Lit. A. Of
course you ran the risk of being thought a grind if you spent too much
time there, but you could kill the hours very pleasantly with the bound
volumes of the magazines in the shelves about the general reading-room.
Neale and most of his friends wasted an unconscionable number of hours
on those magazines: but little by little the library habit began to form
itself, by slow, infinitesimal accretions. He found it a good place to
study, wrote English A. themes there, finally even got into the way of
running through the card catalogue, and drawing books with titles that
sounded good.
Christmas came. Father, recognizing manhood achieved, gave him a box of
a hundred Milo cigarettes. Mother--poor, dear, ignorant Mother!--gave
him a white sweater decorated with a light blue C! Even more than by
smoking Father's cigarettes, Neale proved that he had begun to outgrow
the cruel egotism of adolescence, by kissing Mother and thanking her,
without telling her that almost any fool finally gets his diploma, but
only the chosen few--and these as Juniors or Seniors--win the right to
adorn themselves with the proud insignia of their Varsity letter.
After Christmas came the mid-year exams. Neale went into them
confidently enough--and to his astonishment emerged with passing marks,
but with no great credit. D in German was the worst, and he'd studied
German since he was a little boy! Greek, English and Latin marked him as
mediocre with a C. Comparative Literature alone rated him B--and every
one knew that Comp. Lit. was a snap course. Neale had never thought of
himself as a grind, but he had been used to high marks at school, and
the low grades nettled him. He began to see that there was more to this
college work than he had understood. The studies themselves were not
unlike those of high school; indeed they were easier than the science
and mathematics that had been hammered into him at Hadley. But the point
of view was different, and that had fooled him. There was a "take it or
leave it" attitude about everything at college; the professors did not,
as at Hadley, hold their jobs only because they were able to drive the
bright, the dull, the scatter-brained, the sluggish, all through passing
grades for the next year's work. No, these college professors and
instructors gave themselves no such trouble. They set out their wares.
If the students helped themselves, so much the better: if they didn't,
so much the worse--for the students. Neale mis-called the professors for
lazy time-servers: but he wasn't going to let them put it over on him
that way another time. He would read everything they suggested and more!
They would be astonished by the brilliance of his finals. But just then
baseball practice started in the cage and Neale forgot all about his
vendetta against the professors.
At baseball he expected to shine. This he had really played before
coming to college. April saw the Freshman baseball squad practising on
South Field. It was a terrible jolt to Neale to find himself in the
discard. His vacant-lot, light-of-nature game had not compared favorably
with the play of graduates of well-coached Prep. schools. He was thrown
back on the Library. Perhaps it was just as well, he told himself with
sour-grape philosophy. After all he was there, among other things, to
get an education.