Part 26 (1/2)

McAlpine and Andrews were standing outside the Gym. door. Neale stopped to shake hands with his Captain whom he had not seen before practice.

McAlpine punched him appraisingly in the abdomen.

”Not so bad. Some fat but there's muscle behind it.”

Neale made way for Atkins of the '99 team, an alumnus always hanging around the squad every season. He was supposed to be devoting his heart's blood to bond-brokerage, down on Wall Street, but, a wistful exile from the world to which he had given the pa.s.sion of his youth, he always came uptown in the fall to watch football practice. Also, which was of much more importance, he spent his summer vacation looking up available football material, ”out in the bushes” as he expressed it. He now stopped in front of the Captain with a grin of pride, and jerking his head towards an approaching player, he inquired, ”Well, how about him?”

McAlpine replied with enthusiasm, ”Built like a piano, isn't he? Where'd you raise him?”

Neale followed their eyes and saw a squat, swarthy, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linesman rolling past them towards the Gym.

door.

”Where'd I raise him? Stole him from the U. of P. Father's something or other up in the coal-fields--oodles of money. Son was all set up to go to Pennsy, but we got him down here and led him up and down the Great White Way a couple of nights. n.o.body could coax him away now--unless there's a University at Paris.”

McAlpine stared after the powerful back and shoulders filling the doorway. ”G.o.d, what a brute! Baby hippo walking on his hind legs. What's his breed anyway?”

”Some sort of hunky. I'm not up on their stud book, but I'd say off-hand he's a cross between a Slovak cart-horse and a Ruthenian wild boar--lots of s.p.a.ce in his garret, but you can't hurt him with a pick-ax.”

”But, how in merry h.e.l.l, are we going to keep him eligible? What courses did you get him entered for?”

”Oh, a.s.sorted snap courses--English Lit. mostly. And he has a tame tutor that lives with him and does the studying. How'd you suppose he ever got through High School?”

Neale left them talking and stepped into the Gym., admiring enviously the ma.s.sive bone-structure of the new student of English Literature.

There were horribly emotional ups and downs in the Junior football season for Neale, ups and downs that ploughed and harrowed his young soul, planted many seeds in his heart, and left him at the end of the season with so much new knowledge of himself and others to digest, with experiences so rich and varied, dark and brilliant, to look back on, that he needed the entire rest of the year to grow up to them. The other students, those who did not play football, seemed to him like little boys, fooling around with marbles and kites, so little did they know of the black depths of depression and despair, and the hard-won heights of exultation which crammed his own personal life full, and gave him a premature maturity of experience, like that of a boy who has been through a war.

The day after his third game on the Varsity, Father called him on the telephone and asked if he couldn't come home and have dinner with them to celebrate his success--would that be breaking training? Oh, no, Neale answered, not if he got back to the house at nine. So he went home to a specially good dinner, just the kind he remembered as a little boy, when there was company. They talked football mostly: that meant he and Father talked and Mother saw to it that the plates of her two men were filled.

After dinner they went into the library, the library where he had first plunged into the world of books, and there he and Mother sat on the sofa, while Father sat in his own chair, and they visited some more.

Neale found it surprisingly easy to talk to his parents now, almost as easy as if they were strangers. During the last year he had lived away from them except for week-ends and short visits. In that time he had acquired a little perspective; and the new sh.e.l.l to his personality had set hard enough so that he no longer felt an irritable, shame-faced distaste of being looked at by people who had known him as a little boy.

Great Scott! Had he _ever_ been a little boy? The college Junior looked around on the walls, books and furniture that had not changed a hair and remembered with difficulty that he had once been a care-free child in these surroundings.

When he went away, he shook hands with his father, as he always did, and stooped from his great height to kiss his mother as he always did. Why not? It did not occur to him that he might not kiss his mother.

But apparently it had occurred to her, for when she felt on her lips the cool, fresh, boyish, matter-of-fact pressure of his lips, she gave a sob and flung her arms around him, holding him close and crying a little on his shoulder.

Why, dear old Mother! What was the matter with her? Neale put both arms around her and gave her a great hug, as he used to when he came home from West Adams.

It had done him good to see his folks, he thought, as he strode off down the familiar, but not much-loved city street. He thought affectionately about his father and mother for quite a time thereafter, as far as the ferry-house indeed, when the build of a deck-hand reminded him of the new Swede on the team. After that he thought football intensively, a strong color of Junior c.o.c.k-sureness tinging all his thoughts. He was making the team! He wasn't so worse! How green, how incredibly green the thumb-fingered Fres.h.i.+es were who came out to try for the squad. And he had beaten Biffy to it, although Biffy had almost killed himself with trying.

The weak opponents of the preliminary season were easily swamped.

McAlpine, Rogers, Neale, with one of the tackles back, the big Swede, Gus La.r.s.en, or Atkins' coal miner (whose name, Vaclav Blahoslav, stumped the squad till it was shortened to ”Mike”) tore over Rutgers, Fordham, Hamilton and the other small fry. True, the battering-ram machine broke tragically down before Princeton's even stronger attack, but none of the blame for that attached to Neale. He was kept out of that game by a wrenched ankle, and Biffy's rotten luck let him into the line-up for the first defeat of the season. Neale really had luck on his side, he thought with some complacency. By next Sat.u.r.day his ankle was all right again and he trotted out on Franklin Field supremely confident, trotted out to fall straight into the black depths of the bottomless pit.

For after that swelling supreme self-confidence came a queer slowness of mind. He found it hard to keep his thoughts on his work as they ran through signals. His eyes kept straying to the rioting, flag-waving grand-stands. The whistle blew, the kick-off came straight to Neale. For the first time since Freshman year he felt a sinking dread that he might fumble. The ball hit him on the chest and bounded off. Tod McAlpine fell on it and the rus.h.i.+ng game began.

For the first half it was anybody's game. Either team when it got the ball could gain but could not score. Something was the matter with Neale. He wasn't all there. He knew he was playing mechanically, but couldn't seem to summon the energy to do better.