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 undergraduate 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 sing-song, "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 unpreempted 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 pounded 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 bedroom? 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.