Princeton Stories

by Jesse Lynch Williams

Sometimes when he did this he became excited, and sprang forward and knocked down chairs and tables and things. But he paid no attention to that. He only bit his nails and fell to passing again, and kept it up sometimes until eleven o'clock, which was a whole hour later than he had any business to be out of bed.

But there were days when it became tiresome, this constant pound, pound, pound, fall down, get up and pound again, and once in a while there came dark times when he felt that it all didn't pay, which was very unpatriotic thinking; and the next day, when the crowd yelled, "Well tackled, Wormsey!" he wondered how he could have been such a mucker as to think it. But it was rather hard work for a seventeen-year-old boy whose bones weren't knit to play two thirty-minute halves every day as hard as they were doing now, and then practise place kicks and catching punts afterward, besides keeping hold of all the signals and systems and stuff that were drummed into his little head every evening, along with the rest of the second eleven, in the room across the hall from the one where the 'varsity were learning their systems and signals and tricks.

It's all well enough for them. They have their 'varsity sweaters with the big P on them, and have their pictures printed in the papers, and are pointed out and praised and petted and fondled and fussed over like blue-ribboned hunters at the horse show; but for the poor, faithful, unappreciated scrub it's a different story. There's none of the glory, and all work and grind and strain at the top notch of capacity. And nothing at the end of it but thanks and the consciousness of doing one's duty by the college. So about this time, when they were approaching that critical stage in training which is like getting one's second wind in a cross-country run, he used to have some terrible times with himself. If anyone knew what muckerishly cowardly thoughts he had, he was afraid they'd fire him from college.

He was ashamed of himself, but he couldn't help it. He was getting sick of training, sick of getting up at seven o'clock in the morning and hurrying down to breakfast while the alarm clocks were going off in East and West colleges, and the frost was still on the grass. Every day, as soon as the morning recitations were over, no matter what kind of weather, he must jump into the 'bus at the corner of Dickinson Hall, drive down to the grounds, undress and dress again, and hobble out upon the field, and get his poor little body bumped and pounded and kicked and trampled on, and the rest of his personality yelled at by the captain, and scolded by the coachers, who stand alongside in nicely creased trousers, with canes in their hands, and call out, "Line up more quickly, scrub," which is hard to do when one's lungs are breathless, especially when one is a quarter-back, and needs a certain amount of wind to scream out the signals in a loud enough tone to keep from being sworn at. And that's the way they make football stuff.

To-day he let Hartshorn drag him five yards and missed one tackle outright, and he was discouraged. After the line-up, while they were practising him at catching punts, he seemed to have such bad luck holding the ball; and once, in trying for a wild one when he had run over by the cinder track, grunting and straining, and had put up his little arms, only to feel the ball bounce off his chest, he gnashed his teeth so loud and said "Oh, dear!" in such a plaintive whimper, like a child waking from a bad dream, that two pipe-smoking seniors, who were trooping out in the rear of the crowd, smiled audibly and said something about him. He could not hear what it was. He only heard them laugh, and it nearly broke his heart. But all that he could do was to call them things under his breath, and run sniffling back to his place again.

The trouble with the boy was he had worked so hard and worried so much that he was over-trained, and so, naturally, there was not much ginger left in him. And the reason the keen-eyed trainer did not see this and lay him off for a few days was that Wormsey thought it his duty to make up in nerve what he lacked in ginger; and he was too bashful to tell anyone how difficult it was to make himself play hard, and how that he no longer felt springy when he jumped out of bed in the morning, and that he slept all the afternoon after practice, instead of studying, as all football men should.

He went into the field-house the next day, unbuttoning his coat and hating football. He hated the ill-smelling dressing-room. He was sick of training, sick of rare beef and Bass's ale and bandages and rub-downs, and the captain's admonitions and the coacher's scoldings. He thought he would give anything not to be obliged to play that day. He was sore all over, and his ear would be torn open again, and he didn't like having the blood trickle down his neck; it felt so sticky.

It was a hot, lazy, Indian-summer day; and his muscles felt exhausted. He felt as much like exerting them as one feels like studying in spring term directly after dinner, when the seniors are singing on the steps. As he came hobbling out of the field-house he laced his little jacket, and made up his mind that after the practice he would tell the captain that he could not spare the time from his studies to play football, patriotism or no patriotism. This was not necessary, because he was tumbled over in the opening play, and remained upon the ground even after the captain cried "Line up quickly," with his ugly little face doubled up in a knot.

"There goes another back," said the scrub captain, pettishly, snapping his fingers. "Rice, you play quarter; and Richardson, you come play half in Rice's place."

Another sub and William, the negro rubber, picked Wormsey up, the doctor following behind, and turning back to see the play, which had already begun again, for he wanted to see how the new system was working.