Rough-Hewn Part 24

The event of that summer, the only one that counted for him, was a long, timber-cruising trip which he took, as chain-boy and camp-helper, up into the mountains of southern Vermont. Grandfather's whole life had been spent in handling timber in one way and another and all his old friends and a.s.sociates were in that world. Every one had the greatest respect for old Mr. Crittenden's "timber-sense" even now when he was so old that he could do no more cruising, engage in no more active speculation. Sitting around on the lumber-piles at the mill, or on the porch of the Crittenden house, Grandfather somehow had a finger in many a timber deal. People came to consult him, and to get him to go halves on buys bigger than they had capital for. From the time he had been a little boy, Neale had been the unconsidered witness of innumerable such interviews, and had laughed inwardly with considerable family pride to see how completely Grandfather in his baggy old country clothes held his own and better against the smartly-dressed younger men who came to talk business with him.

The summer after Neale's Freshman year, the proposition was a big buy of wild land from which Grandfather himself had skimmed the cream thirty years ago and sold for nothing afterwards, but which old Mr. Crittenden opined, c.o.c.king a shrewd old eye in reflection, must have again come to some exploitable value. Three men were to go up un.o.btrusively, and timber-cruise through it, back and forth, zig-zag, till they could make a fair report on what was there. The plans were being made, one evening, out on the porch where they all sat in the long, clear summer twilight.

Grandfather had not seemed to notice Neale's half-wistful interest in the talk of camp outfits and compa.s.ses and packs, but suddenly, looking down to where the boy stretched his long, gaunt body on the porch-floor, he said, "What say, Neale? How'd you like to go along? You could carry chain when they had to run a line, and I guess you're smart enough to keep a fire going and help make camp, ain't you?"

That had been a great month; full of discomfort and hards.h.i.+p and fatigue and deep, deep satisfaction. Neale was the only boy with three men, hardened, wiry woodsmen, who had spent their lives in forests, not at all in the loafing irregular manner of sportsmen, with occasional spurts of nervous effort, and with long periods, in unfavorable weather, of idling around a camp-fire. Neale's three companions had always worked in the woods as regularly as his father worked in his office. Rain and heat and cold and insect-plagues were nothing to them. The main business of every day was work: and camp-life was organized sketchily (without much regard for comfort), not to interfere with work. Neale found that his gymnasium-practice, athletic-sports, college-life had left him as soft as dough beside these lean, iron-like men. He doggedly sweated himself into a hardness that made it possible for him to keep pace with them. At first when they turned in under their blankets at night as soon as dark came, Neale had been too exhausted to sleep and had lain awake aching, every one of his big bones bruised by the roughness of the hastily-made balsam-bough bed. But inside a week, he was able, as his companions did, to stretch out with one long, deep breath, and to know nothing more till morning came, and the light woke him to roll over and open his eyes to the unimaginable freshness of dawn, filtering through the thick-leaved branches over his head. He drew in a chest-full of the sweet, new air, a heart-full of immaculate beauty, and fell heavily asleep again, till half-an-hour later one of his companions kicked him awake to take his share of getting breakfast and packing up for the day's tramp.

The three timber-cruisers talked very little of anything, most of their prodigious capacity for effort going into their work, and they never talked at all of the beauty which was the background of their lives; but they occasionally paid a silent, offish tribute to that beauty by going a little out of their way to some "look-out" evidently, from their talk, familiar to them since boyhood. This was generally the top of a cliff or rocky slide, where there were no trees to obscure the view. Arrived there, they never did anything but sit and swing their feet over emptiness, pitch stones into the void below them, and quarrel with each other about the identification of different peaks and hollows in the vast wooded expanse of mountains before them. But they were always more than usually silent after such a glimpse of the s.p.a.ciousness of the world and, for one, Neale found a greatness in his heart to match the greatness which had filled his eyes.

Once as they sat thus on a crag, throwing stones and smoking, the head timber-cruiser, old Martin h.o.a.rdman, remarked to Neale, of whom they usually took little notice, "See that high range ... and then that other beyond it, the one with the three-peaked mountain in the middle?"

Neale nodded.

"Wa'l, you'd never guess it, but there's a valley down in between them two, with a sight of folks in it, and farms and everything."

Another man said, "Why, old man Crittenden's got a brother lives there.

Ain't that the Ashley valley? He runs an old-fas.h.i.+oned water-power mill there."

Martin observed, "Yep, I've drawed many a load of logs to the old man's mill."

Neale remembered the sharp-spoken old man who had visited Grandfather's mill one day when he was a little boy. He had said then, he would go up to Ashley some day and make Uncle Burton a visit. Well, if he were a crow or a hawk, he could do it now, in about half an hour. He sat dreaming, his eyes fixed on the two hazy blue lines of mountains which stood up so high and so close to each other that they entirely hid the valley between. It must be a quiet, sheltered spot, that valley.

"Time to be movin' on," said old Martin, getting to his feet, and striding off into the woods, with his strong, unelastic, never-tiring gait.

At the end of five weeks they were plodding back up the road to the Crittenden house, Neale not to be distinguished from the other men. The road seemed hard and narrow and foolish to them, the house and barn like toys, the world about them on so small a scale that their widened eyes could scarcely distinguish one thing from another. Neale had the distinct impression, when he stepped into the kitchen that if he stood up straight, he would put his head through the ceiling. And what a comical, trifling thing a chair was! He felt afraid to let his whole weight come down on it and expected it to go to pieces in his hand, it felt so flimsy.

But his bed was good--oh, very good. He slept till noon the next day and was wakened by Grandfather coming up to see what the matter was. He scrambled up, half-awake, rubbing his eyes and staring, his pyjamas open upon his broad chest, his long arms bare. Grandfather stood looking at him for a moment before he went back downstairs. He did not say a word except, "You're going to eat breakfast and dinner together, I guess,"

but Neale knew that Grandfather was very well pleased with what he saw.

Grandfather was a pretty good old scout, anyhow, he thought, as he washed gingerly in the white earthen-ware basin, which seemed appallingly breakable to him.

CHAPTER XXIV

And then it was time to go back to college. Soph.o.m.ore 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 Soph.o.m.ores, as uplifted with their status as he. There Griswold the a.s.sistant 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 cla.s.sman. 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, G.o.d, how _did_ you manage to flunk Comp.

Lit.? Any child of three ought to pa.s.s 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 d.a.m.n silly rot he couldn't learn them. And Grant, unsurprised and peremptory, answered that it didn't make a d.a.m.ned 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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-cla.s.sman added, "Oh, you'll get your chance just the same. Judging by the number of b.o.o.bs 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 rea.s.sured 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 comrades.h.i.+p, 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 s.e.x, 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 impa.s.sive 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, relis.h.i.+ng 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 ent.i.tled to wear the "Varsity stripe" and monogram. This gave him a certain position in his cla.s.s. 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.