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 scraping 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 reassured 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 comradeship, 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 sex, 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 impassive 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, relishing 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 entitled to wear the "Varsity stripe" and monogram. This gave him a certain position in his class. 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.