II.
It was a quiet night outside. The last spring rain was over; the dry, deadening California summer had begun its advance on the land. Already, the green of the hills had faded into a lighter hue, a forerunner of a yellow June and a brown July. The campus was astir with the movement of a Friday night. Shadowy figures, in couples, came and passed down the fairy-land vistas of the Quadrangle; the 'busses deposited the élite of Palo Alto at the door of the Alpha Nus who had said that they would be at home; noises of all kinds, from not unmusical singing to plainly unmusical whoops, exhaled from every pore of the Hall. The piano on the lobby was groaning out a waltz from its few attuned keys and the little space between the big rug and the rail overlooking the dining-room was packed with forms in various conditions of negligée, dancing earnestly and painfully.
Only one room, and that generally the center of disturbance, "sported the oak." Jimmie Mason sat in the knockery, with a book cocked up in front of him, and made a pretense of studying, but his thoughts wandered. Finally he threw his work aside altogether, and looked at the little patches of starlight visible between the branches of the tree outside. It was so plain, the thing he ought to do, in justice to himself, that he had thought the dream of the other thing a fancy that had passed and had been put away with the notions of his prep-days. And yet he had found no peace in his new decision. His plans for next year, his work in class, his new success with certain ventures which after two years of the hardest, closest pinching, had put within his reach the means to gratify a few little whims, to indulge in a few things his poverty had hitherto forbidden him—a few common things the men around him enjoyed, and the lack of which he had ever concealed even from himself—all these were made footless by the ache in the bottom of his soul. And, as he sat and pondered on it, a hard, dull resentment which he had hitherto kept down by sheer will power rose above his other thoughts and claimed admission as a reality. His father had no right to do this thing to him. He was an old man; his chance was past, given up for a few barrels, more or less, of distilled spirits. It was for this that the something inside was asking him to forfeit the chance he had made for himself. The University was his home. His father had done nothing toward this. The laundry agency had provided a living, and the broad democracy of the college had done the rest for him. He was one of the "prominent men" now, a somebody, as he had never been and never could be in the travesty of home that had been his father's giving. Upon his life here rested the possibilities of the future toward which he looked dreamingly sometimes when his notes were written up, and the laundry accounts checked. Assuredly, his father had no claim on this; to admit it would be an injustice to himself, to his ambition, and to his work. And yet this face which had come between him and his book the first night the fight had been on must haunt him always in the hour when his tide was turning.
A thump on the window which opened on the front piazza recalled him from his reverie. A dozen feet were shuffling on the stones outside, and a ruddy face glowed over the sash.
"Go away, Pellams. Got to plug," said Jimmie, hastily resuming his book.
"Relate your predicaments to a constable," said Pellams. "There's going to be a Thirsting Bee at the——"
"Can't go. Got to work on my thesis."
"Relate that to your Uncle Adderclaws. Tumble out, now."
Jimmie only shook his head. There was a conference outside in whispers; then the gang withdrew with suspicious alacrity. Two minutes later, the lock grated with the cautious insertion of a key, and the mob rushed in; Jimmie had forgotten the passkey, for whose possession Pellams had held up the Jap.
"Ah, say, get out of here, you fellows. I'm digging."
"I know it. And you're going to stop. Gentlemen adventurers"—here Pellams mounted a chair—"James Mason, our small but thirsty friend, has sourball. Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what is the universal cure for his affliction?"
"Beer!" The unanimity of the response would have done credit to a Roman mob.
"Quite right ye are, my merry retainers. And will ye, in loving kindness to him, apply that remedy?"
"We will! We will!"
"Well said, me liegemen. Jimmie, move along!" and Pellams fell to strolling around the room and criticizing its collection of stolen signs with the air of one who has discharged his business and stands at ease. The rest threw themselves on the man with sourball and were for tearing off his outer garments and forcing on his sweater, but Lyman by some occult means of his own got the boy aside. One never knew how Frank managed the gang; it was always that way; his methods never obtruded themselves, all one saw was results.
"I wouldn't if I were you," said he; "they won't understand it, and it doesn't do you any good—this sort of thing. Better jolly up."
The Sophomore did not speak; he only shook his head.
"I know what you're holding back for," went on the other; "but going down there isn't the same sort of thing; really, it isn't."
Jimmie started a little, inside, as he realized for the first time the base of his aversion to dragging himself out on the trip. He turned, half-mechanically, and began tugging at his collar. That Phantom should never come between him and one single thing he wanted to do. It might embitter it all, but it could never prevent him from the outward act. He threw his tie over a chair and took off his coat with unnecessary emphasis in the movement. Ten minutes later he was treading the primrose path of dalliance with an arm around "Nosey" Marion.
There was a cool breeze off the bay, bringing the scent of salt water along with the odor of spruce-trees. A voice from the upper regions of the Hall called out to the cavalcade, crawling through the half-darkness along the road:
"He-ea, you! Bring some back for me!"
A dozen windows slammed open at that, and twenty throats took up the noise. Pellams was for answering, but Lyman discreetly checked him.
Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his hat to the cool air.
"This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!"
"Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the muse!"
The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased.
"That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield—just to be original."
"And you'll kill the traffic."
"Chain the poet!"
"If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent."
These from half-a-dozen voices at once.
"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield—just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back."
"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight."
"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew.
"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"
Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! A bas Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long,
"To drive dull care away!"
And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.
"Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective. Pellams assumed instant control.
"We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening. Get your places. Hands on your bottles! Open—corks! And away we go." The party drank in silence.
"Do you begin to improve, James? There is a trace of a smile in the left-hand corner of the patient's mouth. Ruffle up his hair and give him another while we have him going!"
Someone started a song, and they had another drink to punctuate the pause between verses. A ruddier shade was creeping towards the roots of Pellams' hair; Lyman, who smiled but seldom, was grinning across the table at a Sophomore trying to flip cracker crumbs into his mouth.
"This is a tryout," said Pellams. "The first man that balks at his beer will drink raspberry chasers for a month. Hey! look at 'Nosey' Marion trying to shirk!"
Sure enough, Marion, who tried to keep up a reputation for capacity with a naturally slim endowment, was slyly pouring his last potion into an empty beer-case behind him. They fell upon the offender forthwith, whipped him into the ranks again, and resumed their seats, laughing and panting.
"And now that our erring brother is punished and forgiven—that's as good a phrase as I ever saw—punished and forgiven—stick that in the Sequoia, Pegasus"—Pellams rambled on, "we've got to have the motif. I move from the chair that the guest of the evening gives us 'My Old Kentucky Home!' Punish your glass and tune up, Jimmie!"
The cry went on until Jimmie had to respond. He began with the intention of singing it quite carelessly, because there was much in his soul that night that he dared not show before them all; but Jimmie had the gift of song in his heart as in his voice, and he threw himself into the music before the first stanza was half done. Only once before had he sung the song as he did to-night; it was at last Commencement, when he sang it for the Seniors going out on their adventures, and when he was done they had all been still and quiet like men who have seen ghosts—as perhaps they had, that night, the phantoms of men and times haunting certain low, arched buildings they were to see no more.
"Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!"
Jimmie's tender baritone floated up from the table wistfully sweet, and shaken a little with feeling, for the trouble of the week just past was sweeping into it. Lyman, listening, knew of what place the boy was singing, and mentally noted that he had better be thoughtful of the youngster during the rest of the term.
The fellows were quiet for a moment after they had droned out the chorus, each one putting his own meaning into that sweet old song of farewell, and then, to break the charm, a small voice with a Spanish roll in it, piped "Tamales!" at the crack in the door.
"Hey!—Lupe!—make him sing!"
They raided the stock first, and rendered happy with the jingle of silver the quaint little remnant of the race who named their valley for the blessed Santa Clara. Then, when he had counted it and put it safely away with the officious assistance of Pellams Rex, they set him on the table in his blue overalls and over-sized hat and made him sing for them in his pathetic treble, "La Paloma," and for encore, "Two Leetle Girl een Bloo." Pellams removed him after that, claiming that Langdon was about to tell the story of his life, which could not be published in the Sequoia.
Jimmie Mason had sat there all this time, taking it in and drinking with the others, but there was never a cloud on his brain nor a waver in his movements. The rest of them wandered from the motif; each was composing a fugue of his own, according to the mould of his nature. Scraps of their conversation floated in on him between songs—"Got him just below the knees—now!"—"and the difference between me and a tank is in the inferior receptivity—ain't that a peach?—of the receptacle"—"Now, the fallacy of the original proposition, as Herbert Spencer hath it, lies in the expression of the component particulars"—this was Langdon—"that proves that if I had a board Pellams would be summarily chastised"—"Put it down and order up another, here's good drink going stale"—"Whoa, Pegasus, old hoss, that's my tamale you have designs on"—"and cut his name there"—"sing it down! This is to break training for the third time"—"What's the matter with ——ty-eight?"—All this came in on him, as he watched them grow from geniality to hilarity and then on toward enthusiasm. They had forgotten him; only now and then someone shied a cracker at his head and told him to "jolly up."
Another drink, and the patriotic stage was upon them. The King ordered a glass, standing, to the Team, and one with a foot on the table to the Captain, and one with both feet on the table and glasses to the ceiling to the Victory next fall. Someone started the yell; it went round the table. Then they joined in on "Here's to Stanford College," with a verse for every class and its yell at the end, and before they were done there were three howling factions, each trying to cry the others down.
Frank Lyman, he of the steady head, who was quiet or hilarious as he willed, but was never beyond the point where he willed to be, sat watching good-humoredly from his corner, and noted that Jimmie Mason's voice had risen the loudest, and that he, too, had forgotten the motif.
Pellams had wandered into the outer room "to bust the proprietor's blamed old nickel-machine and get even," leaving the disturbance to subside of its own weight. Coming back suddenly to the door, he cried: "Hey, I've got 'em! The raw material and the finished product! Let's have a temperance lecture from Lyman."
It was a queer group at the door. The half-gone Pellams, with his face flushed and his hair dishevelled, in one of his hands little Lupe, hanging to an empty pail and between laughter and tears; the other hand tight on the collar of as dirty, as unkempt, and as drunken an old loafer as ever hung over a Mayfield bar. Pellams swung the ruin in.
"Now, tell us how you got that fine, large tee!" said the tormentor. "Orate to us, General Jackson!"
The old man braced himself, with drunken dignity, against the door.
"You young fellows c'n make fools o' yourselves," he said, "but you can't make fool o' me."
"That's all right, pardner—Nature saved us the trouble in your case," said Pellams, the thoughtless.
The clear head in the room—Lyman's always—took it all in; Frank made a step to come between the Junior and his victim. Then he turned, half-unconsciously, toward Mason. Jimmie was standing with his hands on the table, looking straight before him, and in that look Frank read the certainty that the case was out of his control. For the Face was rising before Jimmie Mason once more; it had twisted itself in with the relaxed, foolish features before him, until he saw his father there, a mock and a shame. It was not his father, of course—he passed his hand before his eyes as though to clear them—but suppose that somewhere else a crowd had his father—and he not there to——
The Angel of Pity, or the Universal Conscience, or whatever it is that you and I have learned from our books and our teachers to put as our symbol of the belief in the higher things, wrote upon his records that night that a prayer had gone up, for the first time, from the dingy back room of the Hotel Mayfield.
Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the amateur conductor had one of his inspirations.
"Hey, a trio! The event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson, Señor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Señor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he gestured wildly toward the door.
"Hey, Jimmie, come back here," he called; "don't let him out, boys!"
Jimmie had reached the door when Lyman caught his sleeve.
"Where are you going?"
"Home."
"You mean the Hall?"
Jimmie pulled free of the Senior's hand.
"No!" he said. "Home."
A SONG CYCLE AND A PUNCTURE.
A Song Cycle and a Puncture.
"And I learned about women from 'er!"
Kipling.
Six Madonnas, from their places on the Chapel walls, gazed at the spectacle of a student with long hair and energetic manner drilling a chorus of young men and women from behind the preacher's desk. There was no visible sign of agitation on the part of the six Madonnas, though an operatic rehearsal in Chapel might be considered reason enough. To be sure, one of them, with her feet upon a crescent moon, kept her eyes fixed religiously on the ceiling, but this had become a habit. The Madonnas were not surprised.
The early years of the University, when there was no assembly hall and the temporary chapel was used for everything that did not demand the superior accommodations of the men's gymnasium, had prepared them for anything. They had looked calmly down upon student farces and Wednesday evening prayer meetings, professional impersonations and baccalaureate sermons. Once, there had been a German farce under the protection of the Germanic Language department, by a company from town, a boisterous play with a gigantic comedienne in a short skirt. Beside this performance, Lillian Arnold's singing a love duet with Jack Smith was nothing very shocking.
Connor, the man who was getting up the opera for the benefit of the Junior Annual, waved his baton gracefully and looked pleased. The rehearsal had gone well that afternoon, and now Cap Smith was singing with creditable expression the love song in the last act. The experience of Connor told him that this song would make even the bleachers at the back of the gymnasium keep a respectful silence, which was saying a good deal. Smith had a very pretty tenor, redeeming its lack of volume by a sympathetic quality that was decidedly pleasant. In a song like this, his voice came out well. There was a high note at the end to be taken pianissimo with something else that signified "as though you meant it." Smith could make it sound so, at any rate. One girl at the back of the chorus always said, "Ah," under her breath when the song was ended at rehearsal.
Lillian Arnold, who played opposite Smith in the opera, did not conceal from herself the pleasure she took in the part. Long before rehearsals began, she had spent her smiles upon Connor with a view to that very rôle. Miss Arnold was a young person who knew the things she wanted; one of them was Smith. 'Varsity end, champion pole-vaulter, Glee Club tenor and Sophomore president, which means principally leading the cotillion, he was well worth a girl's trouble. There was the more glory in the winning of this capital prize because he was not very enthusiastic about Roble. There was somebody up in town who took a great deal of his blue fraternity-paper. Lillian Arnold knew about the girl in town, so she accepted gracefully what the gods gave and was outwardly content.
The gift of the gods was Ted Perkins, whose vest was decorated like Cap's and who had no entanglements. When the approach of the Sophomore cotillion set Roble agog with a pleasant but hardly strong-minded excitement, he "asked her." Peace of mind comes naturally after such an invitation is given and accepted; on rare occasions this does not last.
The first thing that occurred to ruffle Miss Arnold's complacency was a chance remark dropped one noon by Perkins as they were strolling home obliquely from the Quad.
"Cap isn't going to lead with Miss Martin, after all," said he.
"Indeed!" exclaimed Lillian. For some remote feminine reason the announcement was interesting.
"Her family has gone South suddenly, a death or something. Cap is all broken up about it. He was going to show her off in style that night."
"I wonder whom he will ask, now," she said, as though it didn't matter the least bit in the world.
Down somewhere in a girl's heart lies the gambler's instinct. Lillian would have thrown away then and there the certainty of Ned Perkins' timely invitation for the torturing suspense, the alluring chance, that attended the Sophomore president's second choice. Perkins, in his simple masculine dullness, never guessed this.
"I don't believe he knows yet; he wouldn't tell over at the house if he did. Another plum for unengaged Roble."
Perkins would have been less at ease over the condition of engaged Roble could he have looked into the little east music-room where Lillian played accompaniments, and Cap Smith, leaning over a wicker chair, went through the music of his part. These cozy rehearsals in the quiet afternoons had resulted in Smith's asking himself, during a cut home through the Quad, why he had never noticed Lillian Arnold in particular. Connor, the director, had a keener eye, evidently. She was pretty, dashing and real good fun. Perkins was entitled to respect for his selection. Lillian was "all right;" this is a masculine term which may mean anything from mild approval to the rapture of "just one girl." The mild interpretation, of course, is to be put upon Smith's use of the term, even after he had been to Roble two evenings. Their talk was about the opera, nothing further, and when he had taken his high note with just the proper emotional slur, they both laughed. To be honest, there had been one chat on the moonlit steps of the Museum, but all of this went down on the blue fraternity-paper among other confidences.
One afternoon, in the middle of a Spring-time walk, Smith gave utterance to a decision concerning which he had already written, dutifully, to an interested party in the South. They had passed the willow-fringed bank of Lagunita, the red boathouse, the double avenue of young pines, and, crossing into the back road, strolled down to the low gate opposite the Farm; this they climbed and came into a little hollow where knowing people find yellow violets. He had just given her a frank compliment.
"You are the best fence-taker I ever saw for a girl."
"That's one practical result of an hour's credit in gym-work," she laughed. "Sometimes, on lovely days like this, I feel almost as though I could pole-vault the way you do. It must be glorious to go sailing over the bar."
"And hear it come clattering down after you?"
They sat on the soft, new grass, and Lillian caught, one after another, the shy yellow faces peering at her through the long leaves. She looked so spring-like, so much a part of the fresh, young landscape in its robes of early February, as she half reclined to reach out for a blossom larger and yellower than the rest—a pose that she knew was good—that the Sophomore president put an end to suspense.
"I had expected to lead the cotillion with Miss Martin," he began, "but she has gone South, so I'm badly left. I'm afraid you are engaged for it, aren't you?"
Lillian gazed fixedly at the white cupola on a stockfarm building. Her heart was somewhere deep in hill-grass. She was the most luckless girl in the whole college! The opportunity of her Sophomore year had come too late. It was bitter enough for tears.
"I had promised it to Mr. Perkins," she said, irresolutely.
"I was afraid so. Of course, it was awfully late to ask you; but I would rather go with you than with any of the others, so I ventured."
It was a desperate moment for Lillian.
"I would rather go with you, too," she said, gazing up at him.
"I'm sure I wish you could," he said, with sincerity. She was at her prettiest that day.
"I will anyway," she declared.
"But Ted——"
"I don't care," she went on, "it was only that he asked me first. Couldn't I cut it and go with you? He ought to understand that I have a right to change my mind."
Smith watched the antics of a gopher for a full minute before he replied. Although Perkins had said nothing to him of his intentions regarding the dance—the two had few confidences—Cap had held his theories. Still, he deemed he had a chance. Being a Sophomore, he believed that he was thoroughly acquainted with the co-educated sex and all their wiles and guiles; but a feeling of repulsion toward this frank readiness to throw down another man, one of his own, too, drowned his sense of self-satisfaction at finding himself preferred.
"Of course, you and Ted must arrange all that," he said, and turned the conversation.
Cap's lack of confidential relations with Perkins did not stand in the way of his mentioning the affair to him that night after dinner.
"I thought you ought to know it, Ted," he concluded. "Of course, you will do as you please about the matter, only I shall not take her."
"You don't think for a moment that I still intend to, do you?" asked Perkins, fiercely.
"I don't believe I'd blame you exactly if you backed out," said the complacent Sophomore; "but, of course, it's none of my funeral now; I'm only sorry I happened to ask her myself, and start the trouble."
"I think I'll walk home with her after rehearsal," said Perkins.
"Well, I shan't say anything about it one way or the other," said Smith, and he started toward the Gym with a pleasant sense of having galled somebody a bit.
Meanwhile, Lillian had eaten her dinner with relish. The prospect of trouble with Perkins did not worry her in the least. Perkins had been rather a convenience, and to lead the cotillion with Jack Smith was a delight that entirely divested the other man of all importance. The rehearsal went through with a dash; Lillian was all animation and witchery, and the love-scene was perfectly acted, though Ted Perkins sat glowering in the privileged audience. Cap Smith took his high note with a tenderness of voice and gesture that moved Connor, the leader (he was also stage-manager and chief electrician), to call out, "Good boy, Cap," and to shake his carefully untrimmed hair in approval.
After rehearsal, the tenor slipped away just as Perkins, with an artificial smile, approached Lillian.
The Sophomore was in bed when Perkins came into his room.
"What did you do about it?" Cap asked, to start things.
"I simply said I wanted to be excused from taking her to the cotillion."
"What reason did you give?"
"None."
"But you had to give some explanation."
"She didn't ask for any. She guessed it, probably."
"What did she say? Try to smooth it over?"
"No, nothing, except that she was sorry, and that she would have liked to go with me."
"Humph," sniffed Cap. "I'll bet she was afraid I hadn't said anything to you about it, and she wouldn't give herself away as long as you didn't kick up a row. Now I suppose she expects me to take her."
"That's where she was keen, all right; she never breathed a word about you; only made me feel like two-bits in a fog for having turned her down."
"If I had been you I would have roasted her right there, fired the whole string at her."
This was the point for which the jilted man had come into Cap's room.
"No," said he, "you said you wouldn't take her either, and I thought that would punish her better than having any scene with me. She'll know I have had my innings."
This took Smith where he lived, but he put on a cheerful front, perforce:
"Well, I'll crawl gracefully out of it, to-morrow," said he. "I suppose she'll be hopping when she thinks it over."
Perkins went up to his room satisfied.
When Cap Smith caught Miss Arnold at the post-office, he began to find that it was easier to plan a graceful crawling out than to execute the movement.
"I shall have to take back what I said yesterday about the cotillion," he began, cleverly, guiding her toward Roble, "because, you see, it wouldn't be just square to Ted, would it? He might feel hurt, and I wouldn't have that. We must have six dances, though, anyway."
This, assuredly, would show her. Unfortunately, Lillian was either dull or desperate.
"But he released me last night."
"Did he?" said Jack. He had started all wrong.
"Yes, we settled it all very well; he didn't seem to care in the least, he is so good-natured." She looked as serene as the sky above her, although she was beginning to have biting suspicions. "So it's all right."
Cap Smith's feet had become tangled in crawling; he kicked out recklessly.
"No, it's not all right. I don't believe in a girl's treating a fellow like that, and I won't be a party to it."
"Why did you ask me, then?" she challenged. "To tempt me because you happened to be president and a girl loves to lead?"
"I'm not so mean as that. How could I know Perkins had asked you. He hadn't told me."
"I suppose you told him about it?"
"Yes, I thought that I ought to."
"After telling me that I might arrange it. It was my business."
"I knew how you would do it, and I wasn't willing that Ted should be cut that way."
"What a lovely friendship!" said Lillian. She was much vexed.
Smith did not reply at once. The beauty of his friendship with Perkins did not strike him very heavily at the moment.
"At any rate, under the circumstances I don't feel that I can take you to the cotillion."
"Don't flatter your—" Lillian was too angry to speak without crying, so she went into the Hall abruptly.
With the approach of Washington's Birthday, the rage of Miss Arnold grew. Inasmuch as everyone took it for granted that she was going with Perkins, it was not likely that she would be asked again, instead, late beginners, running cards for themselves and other people, asked her for dances, and rather than admit her predicament she let them fill her card.
The afternoon of the cotillion she went to bed and was ill for a day; then she appeared at the final rehearsal with a smiling face and a soul full of wrath. She had very little to say to Smith, but otherwise she showed no resentment, and her acting was as good as ever. One wiser than Cap Smith would have augured ill from her fair seeming, a less confident man would have been on his guard; but he had forgotten all that he had ever read about the fury of women scorned, and he went to his doom unconscious.
The Gym had never held a bigger audience, and the opera, as usual, was proving itself the greatest success in the annals of Stanford theatricals; the show was so inoffensively proper, Connor declared with a sigh, that it was disgusting. No hitch or jar marred the perfect running of the performance, and the conductor, directing the scene-shifting between acts, stopped now and then to shake hands with himself. The borrowed scenery almost fitted; there was no wait of more than half an hour; very few of the chorus got out of tune; the costumes had been expunged by a board of lady managers and declared officially to have no Said Pasha tendencies; the leading ladies were actually keeping their tempers; things moved on as smoothly as though the Fates were deadening suspicion in order to make the coming catastrophe the more overwhelming.
The third act drew on. The low comedian had just finished joshing back and forth with the bleachers, whose chorus work had equalled, in some respects, that on the stage. A soft light began to illumine the painted heavens, and a three-hundred-candle-power Luna, the pride and joy of Connor's heart, rose in wavering majesty. The house was quiet now, listening to Smith's solo to Lillian in the moonlit garden. The music swept softly on to the close of the song. As Jack took a deep breath for his tender love-note, the note that was to make men sigh and women quiver, Lillian leaned closer to him, as if drawn by the caressing sweetness in his voice, and one round, white arm stole about his neck in the prettiest gesture imaginable. No one knew that with the other hand she had quickly drawn out the big black pin that held the flowers on her breast. One wicked jab, and the precious high note broke in a wild "ouch" of pain.
The bleachers laughed uproariously.
ONE COMMENCEMENT.
One Commencement.[A]
"Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave;
Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame;
Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave."
Bret Harte.
There is one Wednesday morning, the last in May, when the sun, peeping over the observatory dome on Mount Hamilton and flooding the wide valley of Santa Clara, wakes unfeelingly a reluctant set of mortals to the realization that this is the last of their mornings.
The girl in Roble who has lived four happy, independent years where the winds of freedom blow, and who is going back this afternoon to the household duties and narrow sympathies of a not over-interesting home, leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The Encina student who has slaved his uneasy way, with no resources save his willingness to do anything that may help him from one semester to the next, springs exultantly from his alcove, for to-day he has finished the struggle, and there is a good job waiting for him.
Over in the fraternity house, the man who has sung his grasshopper songs in careless disregard of changing seasons, and who has found some impossible examinations barring his primrose path, blinks painfully at the merciless sun of Commencement Day, laughing at him above the roofs of siren Mayfield, and holds his foolish head in his hands; for last night, while the other Seniors, full of honors and regrets, were trying to choke down a little of the good-bye supper after the Promenade, he went a bit too far in celebrating his mixed emotions of grief at flunking and joy at coming back again.
Upon all alike—upon him who has watched for it, dreading it through four enchanted years, as upon him who has forgotten until the list of candidates for graduation glared at him from the registrar's bulletin-board with a vacancy in that section where his name ought to be; upon him who has hoped for this as a commencement in very truth of things great and new, as upon him who cares not—shines this early sunlight of the last Wednesday in May.
There is never a cloud in the sky this morning; the meadow lark sings more joyously than on any other day; the campus is more radiantly beautiful, because some hundred and fifty people are looking at it through tears for the last time.
On his own Commencement Day, Tom Ashley lay sleeping, hidden away from the splendor of the morning, two-score miles from the smiling campus.
The man lying next him in the upper tier but one rolled over and shook him by the shoulder:
"Wake up, Tom; it's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?"
The Senior struggled back from sleep; a dream influence lingered with him, a vision of a cloistered enclosure, a dream in which all his senses, now assailed by the sights and smells and sounds of a troop-ship, drew in again the familiar things; he beheld the red tiles a-shimmer above the yellow stone; the aromatic scent of budding eucalyptus was in his nostrils, the sound of the young laughter of women in his ears. He sat up, gazing uncertainly at the dark, crowded space, the narrow stairway, the great iron racks covered with gray-blanketed shapes; then he crawled into his uniform and out on the ship's deck. The early dawn had set the towers of the city glittering; already the low wharf-sheds along the water-front were astir with life. Back of the town the twin peaks, named by the early Franciscans for a woman's breasts, rose veiled with a filmy scarf of fog. Everywhere below them spangled flags in myriads flapped from the tops of the city and among the crowded shipping.
Ashley leaned over the rail of the Peking and watched the yellow tide slide by with its burden of dèbris. Not far away in the stream lay the other two transports, unattended; it was too early for the fussy craft that curtseyed about them during the day. At three o'clock that afternoon these vessels were to sail for the distant Philippines, bearing arms against the ancient country of the Spanish Fathers—the pioneers who had shown the Saxon the way to this golden coast and had made vine and rose flourish for him on the barren sandhills, that he might now strip from the land of their forefathers the last possession of a dying empire. By the strange turnings of history, from the very city of their patron saint the New World was sending forth its first hostile expedition against the Old, and the great community that had grown from their nestling mission of Dolores would shriek Godspeed to these enemies of Old Spain.
Nothing of this was in Ashley's mind as he watched the water lapping at the beach-side of the transports. He kept saying over in his mind the words of his bunk-mate, "It's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?"
In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Tom, looking at his coarse blue uniform, smiled as he thought on his plans for Graduation Week. Those feet, now clad in new government gunboats, were to have waltzed but two nights before in shining patent-leather at the head of the Senior Ball. Only yesterday he should have been galloping around the bases in fantastic costume at the Senior-Faculty game. Monday afternoon, when he should have been before the Chapel site with Her, listening to the glories of the Class as told over its freshly-mortared plate, he was tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a thousand others on the troopship City of Peking, a sergeant at eighteen a month and lucky to get so much, with a chain of superiors ordering his comings and goings.
All this because of the destruction of an American battleship in the harbor of Havana.
The notes of a bugle-call drifted across the water from the nearest transport, and Tom's mind went back to the time when the unfamiliar sound was first heard on the Stanford campus. It seemed like a very old memory, although it was but three weeks past. He remembered how, when the recruiting sergeant came down from the city, the after-dinner crowd used to sit on the Hall steps watching him drill the men in the moonlight. After drill, they would loaf in his Hall room, talking it over, and when the civilians had drifted off to bed or to the inglorious studies of a routine now ended for Tom, he would sit with "Nosey" Marion and blow smoke. Neither spoke much, only a word now and then, but they were thinking of the same thing.
The days passed; the college used to drop out between recitations to watch them drilling on the football field; the uniforms arrived, and then the orders. There was a baseball rally that night, but when the enlisted men came into the Hall and word was passed that they were going on the morrow, the occasion was all theirs. Marion, who had been twice on the debating team, stood up, looking slimmer than ever in his plain blue, and spoke for them. He said only simple things; it was not like his speech of a year before, when his impassioned arguments turned defeat into victory at the Inter-Collegiate; but the crowd listened with their eyes on the floor and applauded with their hands only when he had done, because they couldn't trust their voices. They sang the terrible "Battle Hymn of the Republic" after that; Langdon led it. "Peg" could hardly carry a tune with that awful voice of his, but he sang the verses so that the chills ran down your back and you had to join in the chorus, "Our God is marching on."
Next day they themselves were marching on, forty of them, with hardly a thought of what they were leaving behind, their minds fixed on the distant Isles of Philip. Tom had never expected to leave the campus in that spirit. He loved it all, from the quiet slopes by Frenchman's Lake to that lofty redwood treetop, first rampart of the smiling city to the eager Freshman, last long-watched glimpse of the land of his memories to the reluctant Senior.
He had always felt that it would be a tug to say good-bye, yet he, too, his mind over-seas, had gone away to town with hardly a thought. He had time to reflect in that dreary fortnight at the Presidio when the unseasonable rains drenched his tent, and the wretched routine of beans and coffee hurt the romance of enlistment.
The life had its compensating features. Every city girl he had ever met in College or town society came out to camp and asked for him at K Street—K Street with its saucy cardinal flag waving above the first tent to the left. Most of them brought candy; a vary few, with super-feminine understanding, made it beer; one, she was a genius, sent over on a drizzling evening a piping-hot steak. Then, too, he had three white angles on his sleeve and "Sergeant Ashley" sounded well. Cap Smith was not even a corporal; the emphasis with which Cap mentioned the fact showed anything but college spirit.
These things made it easier not to think about the campus and what the rest of the fellows were doing, but the old life came drifting in after all. Sometimes, after the long, hard morning drill on the green slope beyond the car-track, between drill and the welcome mess-call, Marion would come into the Sergeant's tent and they would sit apart to talk about the Faculty game or the Senior ball and the dances they had expected to put on their cards. Each Saturday some of the boys came up and brought the campus news. One time, all enlisted Stanford tumbled out of their tents, every last one of them, to welcome a big, slow-moving, slow-speaking man, who plays first-base at the Commencement Game. A corporal who had never been to college and who had a newspaper idea of students, asked if that was the football captain whom they were crowding around and almost trying to hug, and Marion answered no; that he was a bigger man than even the head coach. The boys held their visitor until the officer of the day ordered civilians out of camp, and, when the unfeeling guard drove him out, they gave the yell in good old style. The colonel sent his orderly to find what was the matter, for it was a high offence against martial law, and when the messenger reported that it was those Stanford kids in K, yelling for their President, his superior said that he guessed it was all right; this was the first California regiment, and the old man was a part of the state. This was before the final dispatches came, before the men learned that they were going on the first expedition.
Monday morning and marching orders. On this, the morning of Wednesday, as he looked across the water and watched the city growing brighter, he thrilled again with the remembrance of that feeling, that purely physical tingling of the nerves, which came over him at the barracks when he lifted his gun to start. The load on his back was snug and light as he stood there in marching rig; how much heavier and harder it was to grow before he should stand on American soil again, he could not know. Then, the shuffling of many feet and the flutter of a flag outside the stone gates, so strangely like the gates which stand at the entrance of the Land of his Memories—and his Commencement week had begun.
Class Day, from that time, on, lay in his memory a mass of unassimilated matter to be thought out in the long weeks of idleness on the Peking's blistering deck. The crowd, huge, wild, packed from building to curb, the merry, merry flags waving them on, the little kaleidoscopic flashes of expressions which he caught, when he stopped to look at them, on the grim faces to right and left,—all these impressions and many more were jumbled in his brain. He remembered the excitement and sympathy mingled in the countenances of the people. One or two little things were caught along with the larger recollections—a woman's face that looked like Hers and almost made him forget for the moment that She was then doubtless listening to the Class history; a baby holding a flag in its little hand, and staring with awed, uncomprehending eyes at the sober-faced soldiers tramping on and on; a man mounted on a truck crying above the cheering, "Give 'em hell for us!" A remembrance that stood out above the others was that of someone calling a good-bye to the Major, of the choke in the officer's voice as he answered. He was an older man, and his expression of feeling nearly upset Tom. He trudged on, file-closer for the front rank and six-feet-one of target, and wondered if he had been a fool after all. It was well enough for those people yelling acclaim from street and housetop; but they were going back home, or down to the University, and he—to the troopship, and the high seas, and after that no telling. The strap of his knapsack hurt him. They said that Manila was a furnace. He wished that the women would stop loading them with flowers; he wished that Pellams and the other fellows wouldn't keep running out to march beside him; didn't they know how hard he was trying to hold it back? And what did this going amount to, anyway? If he had staid out, there would have been only one gap in the company. Then, in a rest, Pellams got to his side with a bottle of ice-cold Pilsener and Tom pointed its base to the sky and gained courage.
There was a falling apart to his right, and he felt rather than saw that his mother had slipped through the crowd and taken his hand in her slim, white one, was marching beside him over the cruel cobble-stones; Pellams, too, closed up on the other side, for the officers were not trying to keep the alignment as they drew near the end. These three went on together, she trying to be brave now that the last had come, Pellams clumping along over the rough pavement and joking in ecstatic disregard of the discomfort of his fat body. It was over at last, the mounted police were pushing back the crowd; it was to be all alone now. The Stanford men gave their yell together, the volunteer held his mother close for a moment. Then,—"Company, attention!"—the dock faded into mist, so that he stumbled on the gangway.
Not until that night, when a group of them paced along the wharf, had anyone spoken of Class Day. Cap Smith had started it.
"They are going to the Ball now," said he.
"I wonder if Lyman came out ahead on the Show," said Marion, his eye on the dollar, even at that solemn moment.
"I wonder if the programs got down in time," said Tom, and then he laughed to think of himself, the chairman of the Ball committee, plodding along the splintered dock in a dusty uniform and buff leggings and with the rudiments of a scraggly beard on his face. It was a queer ending.
Down there, the others were floating round, now, to high-priced music from town. In a little note which Pellams had brought him from Her that morning, she had said that she was to wear a small silk flag instead of flowers this time. He would have liked to peep in, as he used to from the gym roof when he was a Freshie, to see if she had really done it.
During these wharf-edge musings, taps had blown, bringing the men on board again. On the way up the plank, he remembered, they passed one of the fellows with his face in his hands, and Tom had to put his arm around the boy and lead him, so that he might be in quarters in time. Neither of them could know that this was to be the one who did not return.
He had his first sight of the hold, after that, and the truth knocked out some of the poetry. Ashley, and K Company in general, were quartered just over the screw; but a man gets used to anything, even to bullets that sing past your ears and clip off little bamboo leaves about two feet from your hair. There were twelve hundred men below decks; when most of the landsmen should be seasick—ugh!
The second night, Tuesday, he had sat with Cap among the coiled ropes on deck. Beyond the shipping, the city of hills twinkled at them, striped with long, sloping lines of dotted light; out of the blackness above, the crown of the Spreckels building made a circlet like a halo over St. Francis and his city; across the bay slid the mysterious, luminous honeycombs of the silent ferry-boats. Far aft, the band was trying to cheer things up with a Sousa march. That very tune was being played, probably, down there where the Quadrangle, softly glowing with the faint edging of lanterns, shimmered in the fairy-land mystery of long palm-studded vistas, a-flutter with white dresses.
"They are saying good-bye to each other, now," said Tom, by way of a feeler.
"Humph!" said Cap. He was flat on his back, looking up at the stars. "It doesn't mean anything. When you're going to pull out across the Pacific for God knows what, then it's different."
"I didn't expect to spend this evening lying on a ship's deck," murmured Tom. He was thinking of what the Promenade Concert usually means to people who have been taught something by co-education. That good-bye, said in the Quadrangle when the music and the thoughtless people have gone and the lanterns blaze up and drop, one after another, and lie smoldering on the moonlit asphalt; those last words with people from whom you have concealed yourself these four years and to whom you can now afford to lay open your heart, as can the happy dead, because your ways after to-night may lie apart,—Tom knew that this good-bye does mean something, in spite of the superior announcement of Sophomore Smith. Only it meant more to a fellow lying thinking about it among the ropes of a transport's deck, with the Spaniards in prospect.
Cap's cigarette shone like a glowworm in the shadow of the stack.
"Our good-bye supper will be sloppy weather, all right;" said he. "Six going out."
"No," answered Tom, "it won't be a drunk to-night, Cap. You haven't been in long enough. I'll bet they don't get through the first case; I'll bet it's a cry. You didn't see '95 go out."
"Well, perhaps," assented the Sophomore. "The fellows are pretty well worked up."
Tom went back to his Freshman days.
"I remember our '95 feed in the Hall. Stanton cried that night, and Gray. I never saw them do it before." Then, more slowly, "It must be tough on a girl."
After which he was not talkative.
There was little enough, this last morning, to suggest Commencement, as he leaned on the damp rail of the ship and dreamed over the last few days. A voice at his elbow said:
"Captain wants you, Sergeant."
Tom started out of his reverie, and the military tilt came into his back. He was not a student bidding the College farewell; he was a sergeant at eighteen a month and lucky to get so much.
The city had awakened when he came to the rail again. There was a tense feeling abroad, a gathering excitement that grew through the morning. All manner of water-craft fussed and fumed and dodged around the transports,—tugs, rowboats, launches and clumsy river steamers strung with flags and black with civilians. One tug that hung close by shone with more color than the others by reason of the women crowding it; Tom could discern the face of his mother looking, looking with yearning eyes that would have called him back. He drew a quick breath of surprise and his hands tightened on the black rigging. There on the tug, standing beside his mother instead of among those who were saying good-bye to the Campus, he saw the Other One.
Soon after three, the screw throbbed, moved, the craft wheeled into lines flanking the huge vessel; the noises of the city awoke:
"For the large birds of prey
They'll carry you away,
And you'll never see your soldiers any more."
The grey town lay back among her hills, shrieking with every manner of mechanical voice her farewell to the troops. Above this uproar rose and fell the weird sobbing of a siren and a cannon from the top of a sky-scraper boomed in at solemn intervals. On the roofs were knots of people flashing white signals of Godspeed; when the wind was right, one could catch, very faintly, the sound of their cheering.
The flotilla drew around the curving water-front and toward the Gate. To the left, the remains of the camp dotted the plain below the Presidio hills; every last man of them was on the bulkhead in front of the fort, waving his brown hat and cheering the lucky devils who went first. The great hill guns bellowed good-bye as the transports slipped through the gleaming strait. Gradually the convoy wheeled 'round again, the bigger vessels keeping up until outside the Heads. Then the first expedition went on alone.
Tom Ashley, Senior and 'Varsity fullback, with his eyes wet in spite of himself, set his face to the west. The round sun hung red above the horizon; a few seconds earlier, it had looked over the Palo Alto hills at the deserted University campus. Beyond the ship, a path of gold lay out toward Manila and its future. Marion, leaning beside him, looked back at the fading line of surf below the Cliff House.
"Well, Tom," he said, a bit huskily, "Commencement Day's over."
"Yes," answered the Sergeant, without turning, "we're up against it, all right!"