The dignity of the impending, classic, stately event; the sorting of gowns, the whispers and queries concerning what world-famous shoulders were to receive the highest degrees: all this sobered the students and stimulated imaginations, days before the actual event transpired. To me it promised to be the opportunity to see, face to face, the men of culture and administrative power whose names were familiar in the far corners of the country: men who not only figured as authors, administrators, lecturers, scientists, travelers, and moral leaders, but, among them, potential Presidents of the nation, honored citizens of public reputation, men whose names were already merged with civic movements, patriotic events, and national political advances. It meant that history, successful ambition, leadership, and moral fibre were to be personified for me in their highest types.
The morning of the inauguration brought with it a great excitement. The Seniors were to wear gowns that morning for the first time. On leaving the house, after breakfast, and taking my position near the Senior Fence, to wait for the formation of the line, a sunburst of silken scarlet gown dazzled my eyes, as a sedate man of sixty, with a white beard, hurried along the path, his head topped by a black velvet bonnet. He was followed by others, in the silken glares of Oxford and Cambridge, and a continual procession of black-draped figures whose multi-colored hoods were like lurid gashes cut in the mourning by a deftly wielded blade.
By nine o’clock the campus was astir with visitors, faculty, alumni, undergraduates, the band and the sight-seers. Ellis marshalled us into a double line, so that to the beholder, in our black gowns and black caps, we resembled a very mournful, if dignified, procession of upright ravens.
Then the band blared forth a martial thunderclap which pulled our feet into time. Slowly, led by the musicians, we filed on our way around the outer edge of the campus, dragging after us the faculty and distinguished visitors whose chief distinction in the procession lay in their inability or unwillingness to keep to the step we fixed. Our two hundred and odd pairs of hands swished against the sides of our flapping gowns in rhythmic evenness. Not even the precision of a Black Watch drill could have been finer rendered than was our Senior march. The heads and bodies swept from side to side like the orderly attack of a straight, long wave beating backwards and forwards against a cliff. Then, at Assembly Hall, our double line divided and we stood with heads uncovered: a lane of honor, while the recipients of honors, the visiting presidents, the faculty and the alumni threaded their way between our lines into the hall.
Deeper and deeper into formalism we plunged: all the traditions of scholarship were called up: all the esthetic possibilities of academic show and etiquette passed in review before us, cap tipping, hood placing, and the summing up of the achievements of a lifetime in two sentences as an honorary degree was bestowed. The trappings and medievalism of scholarship added a new dignity to the college atmosphere. The very air we breathed was musty with the scholar’s tradition.
The only modernness in the event came in the moments of hand-clapping, as addresses, investiture and degrees followed one another. The undergraduate chorus, massed in the rear of the enormous carpeted platform, added to the impressive solemnity of the exercises by its sonorous harmonies. Then came the event of the occasion, and Ellis, knight of valor and skill on the football field, was the central figure in the event. He had been assigned the address representing the undergraduates. He stalked his way to the platform and stood before us, backed by the massed greatness of America’s university world. But he paid no heed to that, as he had not been wont to pay much heed to the thousands of on-lookers who admired his skill in the games. He took fire, and was the first to disturb the quiet soberness of the program by putting vivid gesture and loud, vibrant voice into play. The effect on the visitors and the undergraduates was electrical. Each one bent forward as, in no stately rhetoric or formal phrase, Ellis opened his heart which, at the moment, comprehended the loyalty of all the student body. As he concluded, the students stood in a mass, and after the prolonged applause—the finest applause of the event—our cheer-leader dragged a husky, but thrilling college cheer from our throats, while Ellis modestly found his place in our midst. As we filed out into the light of the noon sun, and could easily discover the towering, broad shoulders of Ellis, our leader, at the head of the line, I thought of the honor he had brought to the college in his four years’ presence in it, and saw in him the union of all that is best in American college life and those qualities which the college aims to invest in every willing student’s life: loyalty to one’s fellows, physical fitness, moral alertness, humility in success, and a respect for the law that governs men and nations.
Chapter XXXIX. The Lost
Parrot. Academic Burlesque. The
Nervousness of the Final Minute.
A Religious Outcropping in a Non-Pious
Heart
SINCE the establishment of my family in the college precincts, I had seen very little, in a social way, of my old friend Sanderson. I determined to pay him a visit one evening, and took with me a glass of grape jelly and some hermit cookies, as a remembrance from my wife.
I found him before a heap of blue papers on which were lead pencil scribbles. A look of anxiety was on his face. When he saw me, however, he smiled his pleasure, went over to the hat rack and put on his fez.
“How are you getting along, Sanderson?” I asked.