Part 27 (1/2)

Day after day the Wall Street bond-broker wrestled with Neale's latent acuteness and forced it into action. With shame, with praise, with reproach and enthusiasm, he drew out of Neale more than Neale had dreamed could be there. If one--even one--of the teachers of English or Greek or chemistry or economics had taught Neale as this semi-illiterate, wealthy young barbarian taught him...! If Neale had given even a tenth as much attention to any of his courses...!

Neale clambered up over himself, raging with hope; up over his first realization that there was infinitely more to this problem than he had ever supposed; over his next, that he did not know even the rudiments of the game he had thought he knew so well; over his occasional glimmers of understanding, why he failed sometimes and succeeded at other times; over an increasing percentage of successes, and finally stood, a little giddy with the new height, on the peak towards which Atkins had urged him, where he waited clear-headed, strong, confident, behind the tackle, hoping the next play would come his way.

The play did come his way. The Varsity tried out against the scrub its new delayed pa.s.s from close formation. To the left it worked very well.

But when they tried it to the right, Neale dropped Rogers for a loss, three times in succession. The look on Atkins' face was glory.

The next afternoon Neale was back on the Varsity and Biffy on the scrub.

There was a pang in his beat.i.tude, a painful moment of generous distress when Biffy came up to congratulate him. The two hard-faced, frowsy-headed, gum-chewing young savages gripped each other's hands in an inexpressive silence; and each saw deep into the other's big heart as he was rarely, in all his life thereafter, to look into any other human being's inner chamber.

Biffy carried it off splendidly, Neale thought, but he couldn't fool a man who had just been there himself. He felt sorry for Biffy. He remembered to be sorry for Biffy till the whistle blew for the Annapolis game.

CHAPTER XXVII

After the Thanksgiving game, a great peace, a lying-fallow time, a period of unconscious adjustment and a.s.similation of all that ma.s.s of experience.

Neale moved back to the Frat. house, rooming with Harry Gregg, a cla.s.smate of his and a fine fellow, thought Neale, even though not athletic. He and Gregg had chanced to take much the same courses and were in the same cla.s.s-rooms in several subjects. After a preliminary stagger or two, like a man coming indoors after living in the open, who cannot walk across the room without tripping over the furniture, Neale's mind settled down to his studies. He found them rather more interesting than he had expected. A course in general European history especially held him, and he gave much more time to the outside reading prescribed than he would have confessed to any member of his Frat. except Gregg, who took it as a matter of course. He encountered some personalities there who held him and about whom he often thought, big figures who dwarfed the life around him when they stood up beside his study table.

Cromwell was one and Garibaldi another. But they were not all soldiers.

Wise old scouts like Sully, Oxenstierna and Plombal who did the real work and let the cloth-of-gold opera-tenor kings and potentates prance around in the lime-light, they took Neale's fancy too. They were the boys for him! He used to sit back and laugh to himself to think how much more they must have enjoyed the real exercise of their own strength than the silly sovereigns could have enjoyed their silly lime-light. As for Henry IV and _his_ lady-loves, he reminded Neale so forcibly of Mike and his lady-loves that he could never take that white-plumed monarch seriously. Henry of Navarre made him laugh at Mike and Mike made him laugh at Henry of Navarre, and over both those hilarities Neale drew the decent veil of his calm, pipe-smoking stolidity.

One day browsing around in the Library, he saw the t.i.tle of one of the books Miss Austin had spoken of the summer before, one of the books Neale had pretended to know and had never heard of. He drew it out (it was ”Richard Feveral”), and read it, entranced, until early the next morning. After that he looked up, one by one, all the books she had mentioned, and read them, some with delight, some with blank incomprehensiveness, some with scorn.

He killed a lot of time discussing things in general with Gregg, reading Gregg's books. He fell especially hard for a worn volume of Poems and Ballads. For six weeks he was convinced that Swinburne had said the last word, a blighting word, on ethical values. Then one day he noticed that his favorite credo, ”From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free” could be sung to the tune of the well-known, extremely coa.r.s.e and very unpoetical song called, ”Some die of drinking whiskey, some die of drinking beer,” and it occurred to him suddenly that when you thought about it, both expressed the same philosophy. It was disgusting! It wasn't argument--but just the same it somehow put a crimp in Swinburne!

He went back to his history and economics. But you couldn't stew over your books all day long; he drifted more or less with Billy Peters'

innocuous, evening-dress, dancing-fussing set.

Outwardly he pa.s.sed as a good fellow, a pa.s.sable mixer though rather silent. Inwardly he had given up his pose of Horatian calm. It didn't work--not for him. He found himself very much alone and friendless. The other men on the football squad--well, they had been his blood-brothers during the season, but after the season they were mostly illiterate young rakes without a single mental spark even when they were drunk. As for Pete Hilliard's crowd and their small-town, back-alley ways of amusing themselves--h.e.l.l! Neale felt for them the amused scorn of the native-born great-city dweller for the uneasy provincial who thinks he can hide his provincialism best by a.s.suming a boisterous nastiness.

For the first time Neale began to wonder about himself, to wonder what sort of a human being he was anyway, that he didn't seem to fit in really, with any crowd. There was always so much of himself left over, shut out from companions.h.i.+p, left in the dark, alone and silent, while with a little corner of himself he danced and talked to girls, and drank and played poker, and talked to Gregg; for there was an immense lot of which he never spoke even to Gregg. For instance they never talked about girls, and Neale was thinking a good deal about girls. When he read love-poems his breath came and went fast, he felt tingling all over. He longed to put out his hand and open the door into the wonders and marvels that lay beyond it. He drew back from the fear of failure, of making a fool of himself at an unfamiliar game. But he never feared that there was nothing beyond the door.

At dances, sometimes he stood aloof, trying to look Byronic to save himself from looking wistful, sometimes he danced steadily, always with a calm exterior, beneath which weltered a confused ma.s.s of bewildered uncertainties and longings that rose choking to his very throat: and yet not a word of it could he ever get out.

What was it he was missing? Moody, out of humor with the bright, warm May suns.h.i.+ne, he put the question to himself as he sauntered aimlessly down the Library steps. Why, he was missing everything that made life worth while! Was he always to live alone with most of him hidden and silent? Would he never find his crowd, or at least one other person, to meet whom he could go forth, all of him, light and free, without the ball and chain of his endless reticences? Other fellows seemed to find something satisfying in life. Why not he? Was it his fault, or life's, that he walked in inner blackness? He was framing a sweeping indictment of life as he pa.s.sed the gate to South Field.

Somebody ran out and grabbed him by the neck, a tall Senior. ”King's Crown playing the Deutscher Verein,” he explained. ”Speed up and get in, Crit. Get your coat off. Never mind your togs. You've got to catch next inning. Purdy can't hold the ball if I put a hop on it, and the Dutchies are swatting my slow curve. There you go, that's the third out. Get busy. Give me one finger for a fast one; two for an out; and the closed fist for the drop.”

The pessimistic philosopher, exiled to eternal solitude, shed coat and collar, put on mask and mitt. A ball, a strike, a high foul. As he sprinted behind the back-stop to get under it, Neale sloughed off the parched skin of introspection. From that time on, he forgot everything but the game. He rattled off encouragement to the pitcher, ”Keep workin', old man _that_-a-boy, make him hit it! Got him swinging wild!”

He improvised wild flights of kidding to get the goat of one batter after another.

After the game when he and his pitcher were shaking hands and grinning at each other, he became aware of Berkley and Berkley's girl. What was her name? He'd met her at the Junior Ball--oh, yes, Miss Wentworth. They stopped to congratulate him. Neale was conscious, wretchedly, unphilosophically conscious of a very dirty face, a more than dirty s.h.i.+rt--and torn trousers. But Miss Wentworth didn't seem to notice.

Perhaps she was a good sport. It was conceivable that a girl might be.

She made a sensible comment on the double play which had saved the game in the eighth. Why, she was intelligent as well as good-looking. Neale fell into step, forgetting his disheveled looks, and walked along to the drug-store at 120th Street, where they all had sodas.

He met her again that spring, in the waiting-room of the 125th Street station, of all prosaic places! He had stopped in for a time-table to see about getting up to West Adams and she was evidently waiting for a train. He touched his cap. She smiled. He stopped to pa.s.s the time of day, ”Vacation's almost here,” he said.

”What are you going to do with it?” she inquired.