“I thought I had no friends,” Ellsworth spoke a moment later. “I thought you fellows were kind-hearted, but would draw the line at taking any trouble.”
“Johnny,” said the other, “I want you to cut out that. It’s poor. It’s cheap. Don’t be a conceited ass and think you’re the only man with decent feelings. The cockles of your heart warm up when the class is concerned, don’t they? You’d go a long way for one of us, wouldn’t you? All right, then; why shouldn’t we be as decent as you? We are; we’re pretty fond of each other, and you’re one of us. Moreover, you ungrateful chump, you’re a special one, for that voice of yours gets us where nothing else can. Nobody gives a hang, except to regret it for you, if you’ve pulled off success or not. That’s your damned self-consciousness, don’t you know. And look here, Johnny, it’s nothing new to say, but the world is full of friends if you’ll hold out your hand and take ’em. Most people are kindly; they’re only hesitating for fear you’ll snub them, just the way you’re hesitating. It’s such a foolish waste of energy to be always on guard against a lot of well-meaning good souls. When we get back to New Haven to-night just look at the fellows with new glasses—try rose color. See a friend in each one of them; he’s there all right.”
“I’ll do anything you say, Jim,” said Johnny Ellsworth. “I believe in one man now for good. I didn’t know a fellow could have as good a friend as—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Jimmy Pendleton.
There is a celebration at Yale the night before commencement day which turns the campus into a stage-setting of an unearthly play. The scenery is an orgy of light and shadow; the music is a whirlpool of bands and voices of men. The townspeople are barred, but around Phelps’s archway they gather by hundreds to watch the classes march through. For all over New Haven that night are class dinners, and from the dinners, which are early, the classes in costume march in procession and, carrying torches, pass into the campus. By nine or ten o’clock alumni are congregated there from all over the world, of all ages, from the lads who graduated three years back to gray-haired men who went out from college forty-five or fifty or even more years ago.
Around the edge of the campus are small tents, each forming a casual headquarters for a class, over a keg of beer. The bands play by turns or all together. The men sing as they march; the place is sulphurous with the reek of torches. In orange blurs against the thick air torches flame out, a dozen torches, a hundred, spotty, dancing on the smoke-filled atmosphere. The atmosphere is pinkish; the windows of the buildings about flash red reflections. The quiet elms stand above this turmoil and rustle in the June night breeze.
“Welcome back, boys of mine,” they seem to say. “You are mad with play to-night, but so were your grandfathers sometimes; so will be your grandsons. Come back to me always and play, always safe, always boys, under my branches.”
And the pink smoke and the flaring red brightness lift to the branches, and the light shines on the under side of the leaves, and, against the absolute blackness of the night above, the million leaves of the campus elms have the look of carvings in the roof of a limitless cathedral.
The runaways had just missed at Stamford an up-bound train and had waited a long time for the next. When they finally landed at New Haven it was eight-thirty in the evening. They had dined en route, and Pendleton was in the blue blouse and cap which he had forgotten to change in his rush after the escaping Ellsworth. They stopped at headquarters to leave Ellsworth’s bag and to let him get into the class costume. Then, through the delirium of the town, the staid old New England town gone mad with color and uproar of two thousand “boys” of all ages, they hurried to College Street. In the tunnel of Phelps’s archway Jim Donnelly, Yale policeman, friend of every Yale boy for uncounted years, opposed his authority to trespassers, let pass the rightful lords of the campus. He honored the late-comers, as they forced their way through the crowd, with a short nod.