Part 23 (2/2)

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 Sat.u.r.day after Sat.u.r.day he watched the prowess of his big brothers. Every day he felt himself stretching up, broadening out, nearer to their stature, though n.o.body 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 cla.s.ses! Holy smoke! It was fierce! What did the fellows do who hadn't had anything but cla.s.ses! 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 cla.s.sman 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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sing 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” att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+ne. 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.

CHAPTER XXIII

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