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 titles 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 passing 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" attitude 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 passing 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 shine. 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
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 associates 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, cocking a shrewd old eye in reflection, must have again come to some exploitable value. Three men were to go up unobtrusively, 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 compasses 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 hardship 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.