“Then I’ll take the gold one,” decided Sam, in a subdued voice. When the exchange was effected, he held out his hand to his old rival, who seemed to him at that moment more unreachable than ever, and blurted out, “If there are many fellows like you in Hillbury, I wish I had gone there!”
So it happened that Sam Archer really did have a gold medal to show Miss Margaret when he met her again at the train, and with it a little tale to tell of schoolboy honesty and generosity.[1]
[1] If this incident of the medal sounds like the invention of an unpractical moralist, the author pleads innocent to the charge. It is a fairly accurate account of an actual occurrence at a recent Exeter-Andover contest.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE YALE CUP
With the passing of the Hillbury meet, Archer’s career as a school athlete was at an end. He played tennis and scrub ball, but this was play, not work. His training now was for quite another kind of contest—the final wrestling match with the college examinations. He shared as a helpless onlooker in the disaster of the annual ball game, when Noyes’s nine after a hard fight took the Seatonians into camp. The football men were the only victors of the year, since even in tennis honors were divided. Sam smiled to himself somewhat grimly as he considered how fortune had cooperated with Mulcahy in his ambitions for the Yale Cup. Against the background of defeated teams, the football men bulked large as athletes.
Mrs. Archer came up to be present at the festivities of graduation week. With Mrs. Sedgwick and Margaret, she started early for the chapel exercises with which the school year formally closed. As they crossed the yard, the seniors were forming in a long, uneven double line that extended from the steps of the main school building across the lawn toward the outer fence. Late risers were scurrying from the dormitories, struggling, on the run, to work their arms into the sleeves of their gowns and at the same time to keep their mortar-boards safely balanced on their heads. The marshals were zealously and more or less effectually ordering the jeering battalion. Sam, looking like a giant in the ample gown that covered his bony length, raised his cap over a face glowing with satisfaction as the three visitors passed the head of the line, hurrying to reach their places before the procession took the right of way. “He’s a dear boy,” thought the mother with pride, “if he is not a genius. He does the best he can.”
They were given seats on the side aisle, well to the front; the middle section was reserved for the class. Before the platform stood a heavy table. On it were the score of prizes to be assigned, piles of books, impressive envelopes containing the money awarded, and in the midst, towering in cold stateliness above two minor brethren, the shining form of the Yale Cup. Solemn faces of benefactors and famous graduates looked down disapprovingly from the walls; there had been no such lavish display of prizes in the simple old days when they were members of the school, reciting Latin and Greek by candlelight to austere, dignified gentlemen who revered Cicero as the model for all language and ignored French and German as the lingo of dancing-masters and fiddlers. Flanking the platform and facing the audience, ran a long line of chairs—“for the faculty,” whispered Mrs. Sedgwick, who had been present on such occasions before.
Presently the tramp of feet was heard, and the seniors filed in for their last chapel service. They stood, when they reached their places, waiting for the dignitaries, who were not slow to appear. The principal entered with the president of the board of trustees, two clergymen from abroad, others of the trustees who were in town, and a venerable alumnus or two to whom the school would do honor. These took places on the platform, in the alcove behind the reading desk. After them came the faculty, a motley line, in which staid elderly men, of the wisdom which is born of long intercourse with boys, touched shoulders with youths fresh from the university—in whom self-confidence and zeal must still do duty for ripe experience and sound judgment. When all were placed, the visiting clergymen conducted the simple devotional exercises, the hymns rolling with resonant vigor from two hundred masculine throats. Then the president of the board of trustees, encumbered by many typewritten sheets, came forward beside the desk for the formal business of the day.
He began by addressing certain neatly worded compliments to the graduating class. In this task, which was in the line of his daily work as an advocate before important courts, he acquitted himself with dignity and impressiveness. When, however, he came to the reading of the list of those entitled to diplomas, his experience in public speaking availed him little. He waded on, undaunted, through fourscore names, pronounceable and unpronounceable, drawn from all races and all lands. As each name was read or attempted, its claimant rose in response, until every wearer of a gown was on his feet. Then the diplomas were passed out in bunches to chosen delegates, who delivered them to their proper owners.