CHAPTER XXVII
The next morning Hugh's mother and father arrived in the automobile. He was to drive them back to Merrytown the day after commencement. At last he stood in the doorway of the Nu Delta house and welcomed his father, but he had forgotten all about that youthful dream. He was merely aware that he was enormously glad to see the "folks" and that his father seemed to be withering into an old man.
As the under-classmen departed, the alumni began to arrive. The "five year" classes dressed in extraordinary outfits—Indians, Turks, and men in prison garb roamed the campus. There were youngsters just a year out of college, still looking like undergraduates, still full of college talk. The alumni ranged all the way from these one-year men to the fifty-year men, twelve old men who had come back to Sanford fifty years after their graduation, and two of them had come all the way across the continent. There had been only fifty men originally in that class; and twelve of them were back.
What brought them back? Hugh wondered. He thought he knew, but he couldn't have given a reason. He watched those old men wandering slowly around the campus, one of them with his grandson who was graduating this year, and he was awed by their age and their devotion to their alma mater. Yes, Henley had been right. Sanford was far from perfect, far from it—a child could see that—but there was something in the college that gripped one's heart. What faults that old college had; but how one loved her!
Thousands of Japanese lanterns had been strung around the campus; an electric fountain sparkled and splashed its many-colored waters; a band seemed to be playing every hour of the day and night from the band-stand in front of the Union. It was a gay scene, and everybody seemed superbly happy except, possibly, the seniors. They pretended to be happy, but all of them were a little sad, a little frightened. College had been very beautiful—and the "world outside," what was it? What did it have in store for them?
There were mothers and fathers there to see their sons receive their degrees, there were the wives and children of the alumni, there were sisters and fianées of the seniors. Nearly two thousand people; and at least half of the alumni drunk most of the time. Very drunk, many of them, and very foolish, but nobody minded. Somehow every one seemed to realize that in a few brief days they were trying to recapture a youthful thrill that had gone forever. Some of the drunken ones seemed very silly, some of them seemed almost offensive; all of them were pathetic.
They had come back to Sanford where they had once been so young and exuberant, so tireless in pleasure, so in love with living; and they were trying to pour all that youthful zest into themselves again out of a bottle bought from a bootlegger. Were they having a good time? Who knows? Probably not. A bald-headed man does not particularly enjoy looking at a picture taken in his hirsute youth; and yet there is a certain whimsical pleasure in the memories the picture brings.
For three days there was much gaiety, much singing of class songs, constant parading, dances, speech-making, class circuses, and endless shaking of hands and exchanging of reminiscences. The seniors moved through all the excitement quietly, keeping close to their relatives and friends. Graduation wasn't so thrilling as they had expected it to be; it was more sad. The alumni seemed to be having a good time; they were ridiculously boyish: only the seniors were grave, strangely and unnaturally dignified.
Most of the alumni left the night before the graduation exercises. The parents and fiancées remained. They stood in the middle of the campus and watched the seniors, clad in caps and gowns, line up before the Union at the orders of the class marshal.