The Freshman (Holman)/Chapter 11
If Harold had an impulse to dance for joy at Trask's unexpected good news, his battered body soon made him acquainted with the impossibility of such unconventional behavior. He ached in a hundred places. Already his bruises were stiffening so that he could hardly walk. But walk he must. For, following the informal procedure of his old Sanford High School football days, Harold had donned his togs in his room and walked to Tate Field. This to the snickering delectation of the gentlemanly loafers on University Street.
He stood on the sidewalk outside the gate of the football field and wondered miserably how he was going to summon up the strength to traverse the six or seven blocks to Clark Street His spirits were high, but his flesh was very, very low. In this emergency a taxicab rattled to the curb. The deus ex machina behind the steering wheel was a white man as tattered as his vehicle. This equipage now came to an asthmatic stop in front of Harold.
"Taxi, boss?" inquired the chauffeur. "Sure looks like you need one, boss."
Harold hesitated. The taxi might be expensive. He ought to walk to save money. But he simply couldn't. He felt incapable of traveling a block. He laboriously pulled himself into the tonneau of the machine and said, "Fifteen Clark Street."
Immediately the taxi man seemed called upon to give a demonstration to prove that his taxicab wasn't as dead as it looked. He bounced down University Street at an amazing speed. At the corner of Clark he turned so sharply that Harold was flung off the seat and, every hurt spot on his body screaming for mercy, down to the floor of the machine. The Freshman made a half-hearted attempt or two to rise from his undignified position during the last hundred yards of his journey. But it was no use. When the driver, having stopped the car with sickening suddenness, leaped from the seat and opened the rear door, he discovered his passenger huddled helplessly on the floor. The chauffeur sniffed. For an instant he suspected something anti-Volsteadian. Then he concluded otherwise.
Harold finally pulled himself together and, assisted by the chauffeur, reached the sidewalk. He reached into his sweater for his wallet and paid off the taxi man, who drove away.
As the Freshman stood for a moment girding up his strength to mount the Sayre porch, a fat hand suddenly struck him a resounding blow in the back.
"Hello, Speedy, how's the boy!" came the loud voice of Sheldon's friend, Garrity, who was escorting a Clark Street girl to her home.
Harold's headguard, which he had been holding in his hand, fell to the sidewalk. He tried to do his Lester Laurel jig to greet Garrity, but he could hardly manage it. The Sophomore passed on down the street curious and grinning.
"Speedy" bent to the task of picking up his headguard from the sidewalk. In the front yard next door Mr. Hodge, the Tate butcher, was engaged in propping up his flowers with sticks. He bent a stick over his knee to make it the same length as the others. A sharp crack sounded in the crisp autumn air. Harold suddenly turned pale and clutched at his bent back. For an instant he thought it had broken! Then he straightened, realizing the absurdity of his fears.
Out on University Street the Tate General Hospital ambulance went clanging by at a furious pace. Harold threw up his hand as if to hail it! But, disregarding him, it went rushing on. Harold turned wearily toward the Sayre front porch.
He made the steps up to the porch all right. He opened the front door and toiled up the first flight of steps. The second flight loomed like Mount Everest. But he set to work on it, dragging his feet wearily one after the other. So, finally, he attained the very last step. And there he had to stop and rest before negotiating the remaining twenty feet of hallway to his room. He sat there leaning against the wall, smiling. Chester Trask had personally told him to report for football at two o'clock the next afternoon!
And there Peggy, coming home from work, found him.
It was a very flushed and excited Peggy that mounted the steps. She was going to tell Harold Lamb something for his own good, disillusion him!
For that very afternoon, not ten minutes previous, Dan Sheldon had brought an excruciatingly funny news to the group of college loafers loitering around her counter in the Hotel Tate.
"I've got a new one on 'Speedy,'" Dan offered jocosely. "He thinks he made the football team, and he's only the water boy."
Some member of the squad, disregarding Trask's orders, had communicated this choice morsel to Dan.
The laughter resulting from Dan's sally made Peggy, behind the counter, boil. Finally she could stand it no longer. She rushed out and confronted Dan.
"Harold Lamb has more spunk in his little finger than you have in your whole conceited make-up!" she cried.
Then, so upset was she that she sought the hotel manager and announced that she was quitting for the day. She would hurry home, find Harold and tell him what had happened. Tell him the truth and let him fight it out.
Even now, coming upon him sprawled at the head of the stairs, tired and manhandled, Peggy was so full of her recent resolution that she started, "Harold, I've something to tell you—"
But he interrupted her. He turned enraptured eyes to hers and murmured ecstatically, "I made the team!"
Her face fell. She shrugged her pretty shoulders helplessly. She couldn't tell him now. It would be too cruel.
She concealed her real feelings and said simply, "I—I congratulate you."
She took notice of his weakened condition and asked anxiously, "What's the matter, Harold? Are you ill?"
He tried to assure her blithely. "Ill? No, I'm not ill. I've just been out for football, that's all. And I made good, Peggy. Chester Trask himself ordered me to report at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. He said I'd made the team. Isn't that wonderful?"
"Great," she agreed. But then, all concern, "Your face is cut and your right eye is black. And your sweater is torn. What have they been doing to you? Oh, that awful Cavendish man. He's a terror, they say."
"Don't say anything about Coach Cavendish, Peggy. He's a peach. A little strenuous maybe, but he gets results. We varsity fellows swear by him."
Peggy looked at him and tried to smile. He was such an innocent, such a good-hearted, sincere baby. She put an arm around his shoulders. "You can't sit here, Harold," she gently chided him. "You'll have to get up. I'll help you."
"Oh, I can get up all right," he protested. "I was just resting here for a minute and thinking. I'm all right."
But he accepted the aid of her arm. Perhaps it didn't really assist very much, but it felt fine. Thus he progressed down the hall to his room.
Peggy opened the door for him. She stood on the threshold a minute and ordered him maternally, "Now you take a good hot bath, Harold. And hurry over to Commons and get your dinner, or you'll be too late."
He promised. And he ventured, "And later—Peggy. You're not working to-night, are you? Can't I come down after I come back from Commons and talk to you—about football? I don't have to study. I've got my work done for to-morrow."
"Well," she hesitated demurely, "I'll be in the living room at eight. If you would like to talk—"
And she disappeared.
Harold entered his room, nearly all in but very happy. Over to the wall he limped to the place where the "Tattler" photograph of himself hung under that of Chester Trask. Harold pulled out the thumb-tack holding his picture. For a second he looked at his own smiling photograph. Then he tacked it firmly in a new place—beside the picture of Captain Trask!
And so in "Speedy's" fancy, Chet Trask was tottering on his throne.
After a bath and a refreshing meal at Commons, Harold returned to find that Peggy had kept her promise. She was at the piano in the Sayre living room.
Never had he had such an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with pretty Peggy and he made full use of his chances. He told her all about Sanford, his Uncle Peter, his parents and Professor Harlow Gaines. She was a very good listener. And then he started on football.
"You must come down and see me practice, Peggy," he told her earnestly. "I guess the practice is open to the public, except the two weeks before the Union State game. Then it's secret. Not even Dean Pennypacker can get in. Will you come?"
"Oh, I used to go to football practice every other afternoon or so last Fall," she replied rather airily. His unintentionally patronizing manner, she decided, needed reproof. "I knew lots of boys on the team. This year I work every afternoon but Wednesdays, so I don't know whether I can make it or not."
"Come next Wednesday, will you, Peggy?" he asked eagerly. The shot about "lots of boys" had found its mark. He was quite humble. "Maybe I'll get a chance to introduce you to Chester Trask."
She laughed. "I met Chester four years ago when he was a Freshman like you. I went to the Fall Frolic with him his Sophomore year."
"Oh," said Harold, abashed. And in a smaller voice, "He's a fine fellow, isn't he?"
"One of the best," she answered promptly. "Compared with him, a man like Dan Sheldon is—well, I won't say it."
"Dan's all right too," Harold defended. "He's democratic."
"So is the thug that hits you over the head and takes the money out of your pocket," said Peggy sharply. "Only the thug's more frank in his methods."
But she would not discourse further on the subject of Sheldon. She did, however, promise to drop in at football practice the following Wednesday afternoon. Though, truth to tell, she did not look forward eagerly to the occasion. A glance at Harold's freakish-looking uniform had indicated that his previous experience with the game must have been of an elementary character. She would not enjoy the spectacle of Harold in the rôle of water boy, she knew.
At nine o'clock she suggested tactfully that he had better retire to his room.
"You'll have to study harder if you expect to play on the football team," she told him. "They cut you off the squad if you fall down in your work, you know."
"I'll study," he promised her. "Only I wish you wouldn't make me go."
She was firm, however, and he arose to depart. As he started to mount the stairs, she called up to him, "And, Harold—wear your street clothes to the football field to-morrow."
"But I've got my old Sanford uniform," he objected. "I—"
"You're not in Sanford any more," she replied impatiently. "Forget Sanford for a while. This is Tate. In Tate the football players dress at the field house. Remember that." And she skipped back into the living room before he could offer any more objections. Some day, she grimly told herself, she would have to take this dear innocent and really tell him some things.
Against his better judgment, Harold followed Peggy's advice and walked into Tate Field at quarter to two the next afternoon in his street clothes. He stood near the gate alone for ten minutes. Then the illustrious huskies of the Tate squad began to arrive. They had had their orders from Captain Trask about "Speedy" Lamb. They maintained grave faces and nodded to him as to an equal. After a time he summoned up his nerve and followed one of them into the field house. He found the players in various states of nudity, abandoning mufti for the football uniforms they pulled out of their lockers. He was watching them, wondering what his next move would be, when Chester Trask arrived.
"Hello, Lamb," the captain greeted him soberly. "Waiting for a uniform? Mulligan—hey, Mulligan!" And when Mike Cavendish's man-of-all-work waddled up, "Outfit Lamb here with one of those uniforms from last Thursday, will you?"
Mulligan shuffled away obediently. It had rained the previous Thursday and the varsity had practiced for four hours in the downpour and a sea of mud. Mulligan had been since then trying to dry out the uniforms. The players on the squad had experienced no inconvenience, being equipped with an extra suit apiece and the promise of a complete new outfit on the eve of the Union State game.
In a couple of minutes Mulligan came scuffing back with sweater, pants, socks and shoes. With a thrill Harold recognized the flaming red colors of Tate with the thin white stripes. The red was very much faded, to be sure, and it had run badly into the white. But still he was about to don the sacred colors of Tate. He was about to do or die for Good Old Tate on the gridiron. His gyrations before the mirror back in Sanford might not have been in vain after all.
The sweater and socks were musty and still damp. The trousers were stiff as a board in spots. The shoes were out of shape, caked with mud and unyielding as steel. Mulligan dumped the motley array of paraphernalia at the Freshman's feet and clanged open a
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"When I blow that whistle, give me the ball!"
locker for him. Harold divested himself briskly of his clothes and slipped on the messy gridiron attire, succeeding after a tough struggle in pinching his feet into the stiff shoes. The rest were already out on the field clustered around the brawny figure of Mike Cavendish as Harold emerged from the field house and sped to join them. The reclaimed uniform was too small for him.
Cavendish, paying no attention to his new; Freshman recruit, set the squad to practicing on the tackling dummy, newly repaired by Mulligan.
"One tackle apiece," boomed Cavendish. "And, if you guys want to keep your jobs, make it a good one!"
The players formed in a long single line. Harold, without invitation, fell in at the end. One after the other, they ran, flung themselves at the woolen effigy of a football player hanging by its pulley, and brought it to earth. Cavendish observed them grimly. The tackling was much improved, though the coach's hard-boiled face did not admit it. When the last man ahead of Harold had made a perfect tackle, Cavendish walked over to Mulligan, who was standing by the dummy, and muttered something to him.
It was as the result of Mulligan's prompt obedience to the coach's order that Harold encountered catastrophe. For Harold, impatient of an invitation, had decided to have a go at the tackling dummy. He set himself, launched out into as fast a sprint as his tight borrowed shoes would permit, hurled himself at the dangling dummy and hit—empty space and then the ground with a resounding whack. For Hughie Mulligan, with his back to Harold, had chosen that instant to pull the dummy up to the top of its crossbar preparatory to stowing it away for the day.
Harold gasped for a moment, the wind temporarily knocked out of him, striving to gather just what had gone wrong. He looked up from the sprawling posture into the glowering, unshaven face of Mike Cavendish. Mike snorted with disgust, but he didn't say a word. Instead the coach walked over to Chester Trask.
"Listen, Cap," he exploded to Chester in low, tense tones. "Get this right at the start! I kidded myself into giving this crazy Freshman, Lamb, leg room around this field. Now he's started goin' nutty again. Just threw himself at my feet and tried to knock me down! That guy may have the spirit, but he sure lacks the brains. Now, we may need some comedy relief around here, but I'm not goin' to have that nut gettin' under people's legs and gummin' the works. No, sir! It'll just be a question whether he gets killed by himself or whether I kill him. I warn you, Cap. One more bat out of this Lamb lad and out he goes on his head. Either that or out I go—see?"
Trask laid a soothing arm on the coach's broad shoulder. "Calm down, Mike," he cajoled. "Don't worry about the kid. I'll take care of him. He won't annoy you."
The coach went away unconvinced and muttering. Trask saw Harold, who had just pulled himself to his feet.
"You want to do all you can for Tate, don't you, Freshman?" Trask asked him gravely.
"You bet!"
"Well, get this then: Don't do a thing out here on the football field till you get orders from me. Don't move. Go over there and sit on the bench now till I call you."
Harold went. He sat on the bench from half past two until six o'clock. Neither Trask nor Coach Cavendish had once looked his way. Other players sat on the bench, were called out to the scrimmage, pulled off sweaters and put them on again, returned to the bench panting to rest, doused mouths, faces and necks in the water bucket beside Harold's resting place. Once or twice he handed them the huge sponge when, eyes filled with water, they groped for it without success. But that was the extent of his labors for Good Old Tate that afternoon.
The same sitting program was repeated every day the rest of that week. Harold began to grow uneasy, to smart under his inactivity. He had a suspicion that perhaps Chester Trask had forgotten the existence of Candidate Lamb. He wanted to trot out to the captain, tug at the great man's sweater and announce that he was ready for some real work. But orders were orders. Trask had looked so serious when he admonished Harold not to move a muscle unless he was told to. Harold was afraid to disobey.
As Monday afternoon of the week following began to be striped with the shadows of approaching dusk and still Harold's sole duty had consisted in resting on the bench and handing the sponge to exhausted warriors, he started to worry seriously about Wednesday. He did not want Peggy Sayre to sit in the grandstand and watch him hold down a sector of a hard wood bench all afternoon. He had been guilty of some pretty tall talk with Peggy as to his football activities. He would have to make good. But what was to be done about it?
It rained torrents on Tuesday. The deluge was so intense that Coach Cavendish reluctantly sent the assembled squad back to the locker room, calling off practice for the day. He did so with considerable profane denunciation of the elements, for the Carver game was scheduled for Saturday and the team was slow in rounding into shape.
Wednesday, however, dawned clear as a bell. Peggy had said that she could not leave the cigar counter at the Tate until four o'clock but would come directly to the field. Yes, she would wait for Harold after practice and he could walk as far as the Commons with her. Harold put on his crusted uniform and, still without altered instructions from anybody or as much as a glance from Trask, uneasily took his place on the bench. He sat there for two hours, glancing ever and again at the grandstand. He almost hoped that Peggy had been detained, that she wouldn't appear.
Out on the field, Chester Trask, temporarily released from the scrimmage, was standing beside Coach Cavendish watching the first varsity eleven striving to rush the ball twenty yards through the scrub to a touchdown. His eye swept over the field and he suddenly became aware of Harold Lamb sitting disconsolately on the bench on the opposite side of the gridiron. Actually Trask for an instant wondered who the huddled bench-warmer was. He had completely forgotten about "Speedy." Then he remembered. He felt a guilty pang. Why, he had let that kid sit there for nearly a week now.
At that moment Crawford, the varsity quarterback, faked a pass to Houghton, the right halfback, indulged in some rapid, typical Cavendish prestidigitation with the ball, foxed the opposing forwards and dashed around the end with the spheroid himself to a touchdown.
Cavendish and Trask followed the players to the goal line.
"O. K., Crawford," said Cavendish, which was as near as he ever came to complimenting anybody. "That's all the scrimmaging for to-day. Low, Blythe, Woolsey and Trask, practice drop kicking here. Start at ten yards and gradually work backwards. Candidates for center pass the balls to the kickers. The rest of you work on the tackling dummy. Get me? All right. Snap into it then!"
But Trask did not go directly to his dropkicking. He hurried across the field to Harold, who looked up with a terrible eagerness as the captain approached.
"Come over and help receive these drop kicks," ordered Chester. Harold trotted after him, a great gladness in his heart. He did not stop to realize that he was setting out upon the most menial of tasks, a job comparable with that of a caddy in a golf match. He only knew that Peggy, if she arrived now, would not see him warming the bench. He stationed himself back of the goal posts with four other Freshmen candidates. He celebrated his arrival by bumping into one of the other receivers, who was all set to handle the first ball, a beautiful spiral from the foot of Trask, and causing the poor chap to miss the catch. For this he was bawled out severely. But, in no wise disheartened, he bent to his labors with a will. He chased every ball kicked, though he now had grasped that he mustn't interfere with the other receivers. He went up into the grandstand after two or three wild kicks. He missed two catches. Then he snuggled a hard one to his chest, and rejoiced. He felt like giving three cheers as, casting a glance over toward the grandstand, he discovered that Peggy had selected that most propitious of all moments to sink into a seat in the third tier.
The rest of the afternoon was a complete success. After catching drop kicks for half an hour, Trask, now determined to make up for Harold's idleness by keeping him busy at any cost, set him to retrieving balls for the punters. The captain even stood by for a time and then offered a criticism of Harold's awkward manner of catching a football. The Freshman absorbed these golden words of wisdom as if they had come from Mt. Sinai.
When the practice was called off for the day, he trotted proudly into the field house with the other players, head erect. He even ventured to join in their shouts and banter in the locker room and under the showers. He was one of them. His eyes were shining with something more than the water from the showers when he met Peggy outside the field and walked down University Street with her.
"Did you enjoy the practice?" he asked innocently, hoping secretly that she would make some comment upon his own fine showing.
"Very much," she replied. "The material looks very good. I guess Tate will have a good team this year. Billie Blythe and 'Cardinal' Woolsey and Chester Trask certainly made some fine drop kicks. I don't believe they come any better than those three."
"Some of their kicks were pretty hard to catch," he suggested.
"I know," she commented dryly. "They couldn't blame you for missing a couple. I don't see how you catch those spirals at all. They go so high and come down so fast."
"Just a matter of knack," he announced expertly.
Peggy sighed. He was incorrigible. She knew that there wasn't a shred of egotism in his whole body. He was so innocently eager to impress her, to win her approval.
She decided to humor him. "I thought you did very nicely, Harold," she fibbed. "You've got the proper spirit. If you'll just listen to all that rough Cavendish man and Chester Trask tell you, you'll get along."
"You bet I will," he maintained staunchly. "And I'll listen to them, never fear. Chester Trask is a personal friend of mine, you know."
He turned as he heard himself hailed in a feminine voice from an automobile parked at the curb near the Hotel Tate.
"Hello, Mr. Lamb," shrilled the thin soprano of Grace Beach. And then, somewhat less cordially, "Good afternoon, Peggy."
Harold, who had not seen Grace since the boresome party after the movies and felt a little guilty over it, greeted her with overcordiality. Peggy, on the other hand, was rather cool. She knew the spinstery Miss Beach very well.
The other occupants of the car joined half-heartedly in Grace's salutations. On the front seat of Joe Bartlett's shiny automobile sat the simpering Grace beside Joe. In the tonneau lounged Grace's cousin Delphine and Leonard Trask. The latter two seemed rather absorbed in each other and hardly looked up to acknowledge Harold's presence. The blonde hair of Delphine was a little tousled. She was giggling at the low-voiced remarks of Leonard. The quartet had been spending the early October afternoon riding in the country.
When Harold and Peggy had passed on, the Freshman remarked to his companion, "I didn't know you were acquainted with Grace Beach, Peggy."
She replied pertly, "Oh, everybody in Tate knows Grace."
"You don't like her then?"
"I never talk about other girls, Harold. This town is still too small to gossip in safety. Grace is all right. She just doesn't strike my fancy, that's all."
"Yes, she's all right—I guess," said Harold uncertainly. "I wonder what Chester Trask's kid brother sees in that Delphine though. She's an awful 'dumb dora.'"
Peggy smiled. Harold was picking up the Tate slang fast. She asked, for a reason Harold at the time did not fathom, "The Trasks have a lot of money, haven't they? Chester and Leonard are the sons of Trask, the big steel man, aren't they?"
"Yes," Harold replied. "But what—"
"Well, the Beaches and this Delphine haven't a dime," said Peggy shortly. And in a few minutes bid him good-by at the entrance to the Freshman Commons.