“Wait a minute,” I said, “there’s the soldier who helped us raise the flag, standing outside the door. Maybe he’ll come in and talk to the girls in place of the Major.” I hurried out and buttonholed the soldier. He declined at first, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I literally pulled him in and chased him up the aisle to the stage.
“But I can’t make a speech,” he said in an agonized whisper, as we reached the steps of the stage, trying to pull back.
“Don’t try to,” I answered cheerfully. “Speeches are horrid bores, anyway. Just tell them exactly what you do in camp; that’s what they’re crazy to hear about.”
Mrs. Lewis didn’t tell the audience that the speaker was one I had kidnapped in a moment of desperation. She introduced him as a friend of the Major’s, who had come to speak in his place. The applause when she introduced him was just as hearty as if he had been the Major himself. The fact that he was a soldier was enough for the girls.
And he brought down the house! He wasn’t an educated man, but he was very witty, and had the gift of telling things so they seemed real. He told little intimate details of camp life from the standpoint of the private as the Major never could have told them. He had us alternately laughing and crying over the little comedies and tragedies of barracks life. He imitated the voices and gestures of his comrades and mimicked the officers until you could see them as plainly as if they stood on the stage. He talked for an hour instead of the half hour the Major was scheduled to speak and when he stopped the air was full of clamorings for more. Private Kittredge had made more of a hit than Major Blanchard could have done.
I never saw a person look so astonished or so pleased as he did at the ovation which followed his speech. He stood there a moment, looking down at the audience with a wistful smile, then he got fiery red and almost ran off the stage.
“I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry the Major’s not coming,” whispered Mrs. Lewis to me under cover of the applause. “The Major’s a very fine speaker, but he wouldn’t have made such a human speech. You certainly have a knack of picking out able people, Miss Brewster! You chose just the right girls for each part in the pageant.”
I didn’t acknowledge this compliment as I should have, because I was wondering why our soldier man had looked that way when we applauded him. He would have slipped out of the side door when he came off the stage, but I stopped him and made him wait for the rest of the program. A national fraternity was holding a convention in town that week and members from all the great colleges were in attendance. As it happened, our Major is a member of that fraternity, and, as a mark of esteem for the Camp Fire Girls, he asked the fraternity glee club to sing for us at the close of our patriotic demonstration.
The singers came frolicking in from some banquet they had been attending, in a very frisky mood, and sang one funny song after another until our sides ached from laughing. I stole a glance now and then at Private Kittredge, beside me, but he never noticed. He was drinking in the antics of those carefree college boys with envious, wistful eyes. At the end of their concert the singers turned and faced the great flag that hung down at the back of the stage and sang an old college song that we had heard sung before, but which had suddenly taken on a new, deep meaning. With their very souls in their voices they sang it:
“Red is for Harvard in that grand old flag,