Some of the stouter lads of fifty gasped a bit then, while the judge tinkled an interlude on the keys. Then the doctor spoke, out of a cloud of cigarette smoke which banked his chair; lounging, with his legs crossed, and his keen face thrown back, and his eyes—the luminous blue eyes which could hold, it seemed, every worth-while human expression—with those extraordinary eyes on the ceiling, he spoke out of the smoke:
“There’s one song, you fellows, which I like to think hits off our class. The words aren’t much—pretty poor,” he reflected, half aloud, “but they seem to—do. ‘Amici.’ I’d like to hear Johnny Ellsworth sing ‘Amici.’”
Instantly Ellsworth was pelted. “‘Amici’—sing ‘Amici,’” they threw at him.
The beautiful voice, with its haunting under-quality, floated out over the company of middle-aged men.
The judge struck a chord; the crowded room was still. Then the beautiful voice, with its haunting under-quality, which caught at the secret softnesses in souls, floated out over the company of middle-aged men, and behold they were boys again. Very quietly they listened. The famous doctor’s eyes were still on the ceiling; the cabinet minister stared hard at the window; the bishop’s big gray head was bent, and his look introspective; most of them gazed at Ellsworth singing. Then the chorus came, and with a stir as if a breeze had touched all across a field of corn, the whole room blew softly, deeply, into the music.
Amici usque ad aras,
and the rest.
So they sang it, gathered back to their old altars, the men who had been friends for thirty years.
When the judge’s fingers lifted from the last note there was a silence which said things none of them there could have said in words. It spoke, as a silence will sometimes, of memories and faith and loyalty. It told, as each man looked at the faces about him, carved with the tools of Time, the sculptor, the silence told of sorrow and joy, of lives each with its full measure of fighting and of pathos, but each lived by the line of straight honor, without which one does not comfortably face Alma Mater. An every-day group of American men. A country is not going to ruin at once which shows by the hundred such sons.