Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University

by Charles K. Field; Will Irwin

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.