laughed. "Sometimes, on lovely days like this, I feel almost as though I
could pole-vault the way you do. It must be glorious to go sailing over
the bar."
"And hear it come clattering down after you?"
They sat on the soft, new grass, and Lillian caught, one after another,
the shy yellow faces peering at her through the long leaves. She looked
so spring-like, so much a part of the fresh, young landscape in its
robes of early February, as she half reclined to reach out for a blossom
larger and yellower than the rest--a pose that she knew was good--that
the Sophomore president put an end to suspense.
"I had expected to lead the cotillion with Miss Martin," he began, "but
she has gone South, so I'm badly left. I'm afraid you are engaged for
it, aren't you?"
Lillian gazed fixedly at the white cupola on a stockfarm building. Her
heart was somewhere deep in hill-grass. She was the most luckless girl
in the whole college! The opportunity of her Sophomore year had come too
late. It was bitter enough for tears.
"I had promised it to Mr. Perkins," she said, irresolutely.
"I was afraid so. Of course, it was awfully late to ask you; but I would
rather go with you than with any of the others, so I ventured."
It was a desperate moment for Lillian.
"I would rather go with you, too," she said, gazing up at him.
"I'm sure I wish you could," he said, with sincerity. She was at her
prettiest that day.
"I will anyway," she declared.
"But Ted----"
"I don't care," she went on, "it was only that he asked me first.
Couldn't I cut it and go with you? He ought to understand that I have a
right to change my mind."
Smith watched the antics of a gopher for a full minute before he
replied. Although Perkins had said nothing to him of his intentions
regarding the dance--the two had few confidences--Cap had held his
theories. Still, he deemed he had a chance. Being a Sophomore, he
believed that he was thoroughly acquainted with the co-educated sex and
all their wiles and guiles; but a feeling of repulsion toward this frank
readiness to throw down another man, one of his own, too, drowned his
sense of self-satisfaction at finding himself preferred.
"Of course, you and Ted must arrange all that," he said, and turned the
conversation.
Cap's lack of confidential relations with Perkins did not stand in the
way of his mentioning the affair to him that night after dinner.
"I thought you ought to know it, Ted," he concluded. "Of course, you
will do as you please about the matter, only I shall not take her."
"You don't think for a moment that _I_ still intend to, do you?" asked
Perkins, fiercely.
"I don't believe I'd blame you exactly if you backed out," said the
complacent Sophomore; "but, of course, it's none of my funeral now; I'm
only sorry I happened to ask her myself, and start the trouble."
"I think I'll walk home with her after rehearsal," said Perkins.
"Well, I shan't say anything about it one way or the other," said Smith,
and he started toward the Gym with a pleasant sense of having galled
somebody a bit.
Meanwhile, Lillian had eaten her dinner with relish. The prospect of
trouble with Perkins did not worry her in the least. Perkins had been
rather a convenience, and to lead the cotillion with Jack Smith was a
delight that entirely divested the other man of all importance. The
rehearsal went through with a dash; Lillian was all animation and
witchery, and the love-scene was perfectly acted, though Ted Perkins sat
glowering in the privileged audience. Cap Smith took his high note with
a tenderness of voice and gesture that moved Connor, the leader (he was
also stage-manager and chief electrician), to call out, "Good boy, Cap,"
and to shake his carefully untrimmed hair in approval.
After rehearsal, the tenor slipped away just as Perkins, with an
artificial smile, approached Lillian.
The Sophomore was in bed when Perkins came into his room.
"What did you do about it?" Cap asked, to start things.
"I simply said I wanted to be excused from taking her to the cotillion."
"What reason did you give?"
"None."
"But you had to give some explanation."
"She didn't ask for any. She guessed it, probably."
"What did she say? Try to smooth it over?"
"No, nothing, except that she was sorry, and that she would have liked
to go with me."
"Humph," sniffed Cap. "I'll bet she was afraid I hadn't said anything to
you about it, and she wouldn't give herself away as long as you didn't
kick up a row. Now I suppose she expects me to take her."
"That's where she was keen, all right; she never breathed a word about
you; only made me feel like two-bits in a fog for having turned her
down."
"If I had been you I would have roasted her right there, fired the whole
string at her."
This was the point for which the jilted man had come into Cap's room.
"No," said he, "you said you wouldn't take her either, and I thought
that would punish her better than having any scene with me. She'll know
I have had my innings."
This took Smith where he lived, but he put on a cheerful front,
perforce:
"Well, I'll crawl gracefully out of it, to-morrow," said he. "I suppose
she'll be hopping when she thinks it over."
Perkins went up to his room satisfied.
When Cap Smith caught Miss Arnold at the post-office, he began to find
that it was easier to plan a graceful crawling out than to execute the
movement.
"I shall have to take back what I said yesterday about the cotillion,"
he began, cleverly, guiding her toward Roble, "because, you see, it
wouldn't be just square to Ted, would it? He might feel hurt, and I
wouldn't have that. We must have six dances, though, anyway."
This, assuredly, would show her. Unfortunately, Lillian was either dull
or desperate.
"But he released me last night."
"Did he?" said Jack. He had started all wrong.
"Yes, we settled it all very well; he didn't seem to care in the least,
he is so good-natured." She looked as serene as the sky above her,
although she was beginning to have biting suspicions. "So it's all
right."
Cap Smith's feet had become tangled in crawling; he kicked out
recklessly.
"No, it's not all right. I don't believe in a girl's treating a fellow
like that, and I won't be a party to it."
"Why did you ask me, then?" she challenged. "To tempt me because you
happened to be president and a girl loves to lead?"
"I'm not so mean as that. How could I know Perkins had asked you. He
hadn't told me."
"I suppose you told him about it?"
"Yes, I thought that I ought to."
"After telling me that I might arrange it. It was my business."
"I knew how you would do it, and I wasn't willing that Ted should be cut
that way."
"What a lovely friendship!" said Lillian. She was much vexed.
Smith did not reply at once. The beauty of his friendship with Perkins
did not strike him very heavily at the moment.
"At any rate, under the circumstances I don't feel that I can take you
to the cotillion."
"Don't flatter your--" Lillian was too angry to speak without crying, so
she went into the Hall abruptly.
With the approach of Washington's Birthday, the rage of Miss Arnold
grew. Inasmuch as everyone took it for granted that she was going with
Perkins, it was not likely that she would be asked again, instead, late
beginners, running cards for themselves and other people, asked her for
dances, and rather than admit her predicament she let them fill her
card.
The afternoon of the cotillion she went to bed and was ill for a day;
then she appeared at the final rehearsal with a smiling face and a soul
full of wrath. She had very little to say to Smith, but otherwise she
showed no resentment, and her acting was as good as ever. One wiser than
Cap Smith would have augured ill from her fair seeming, a less confident
man would have been on his guard; but he had forgotten all that he had
ever read about the fury of women scorned, and he went to his doom
unconscious.
The Gym had never held a bigger audience, and the opera, as usual, was
proving itself the greatest success in the annals of Stanford
theatricals; the show was so inoffensively proper, Connor declared with
a sigh, that it was disgusting. No hitch or jar marred the perfect
running of the performance, and the conductor, directing the
scene-shifting between acts, stopped now and then to shake hands with
himself. The borrowed scenery almost fitted; there was no wait of more
than half an hour; very few of the chorus got out of tune; the costumes
had been expunged by a board of lady managers and declared officially to
have no _Said Pasha_ tendencies; the leading ladies were actually
keeping their tempers; things moved on as smoothly as though the Fates
were deadening suspicion in order to make the coming catastrophe the
more overwhelming.
The third act drew on. The low comedian had just finished joshing back
and forth with the bleachers, whose chorus work had equalled, in some
respects, that on the stage. A soft light began to illumine the painted
heavens, and a three-hundred-candle-power Luna, the pride and joy of
Connor's heart, rose in wavering majesty. The house was quiet now,
listening to Smith's solo to Lillian in the moonlit garden. The music
swept softly on to the close of the song. As Jack took a deep breath for
his tender love-note, the note that was to make men sigh and women
quiver, Lillian leaned closer to him, as if drawn by the caressing
sweetness in his voice, and one round, white arm stole about his neck in
the prettiest gesture imaginable. No one knew that with the other hand
she had quickly drawn out the big black pin that held the flowers on her
breast. One wicked jab, and the precious high note broke in a wild
"ouch" of pain.
The bleachers laughed uproariously.
ONE COMMENCEMENT.
One Commencement.[A]
"Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave;
Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame;
Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave."
BRET HARTE.
There is one Wednesday morning, the last in May, when the sun, peeping
over the observatory dome on Mount Hamilton and flooding the wide valley
of Santa Clara, wakes unfeelingly a reluctant set of mortals to the
realization that this is the last of their mornings.
The girl in Roble who has lived four happy, independent years where the
winds of freedom blow, and who is going back this afternoon to the
household duties and narrow sympathies of a not over-interesting home,
leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar
view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its
reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm
light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum
with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of
the Cloth of Gold.
The Encina student who has slaved his uneasy way, with no resources save
his willingness to do anything that may help him from one semester to
the next, springs exultantly from his alcove, for to-day he has finished
the struggle, and there is a good job waiting for him.
Over in the fraternity house, the man who has sung his grasshopper songs
in careless disregard of changing seasons, and who has found some
impossible examinations barring his primrose path, blinks painfully at
the merciless sun of Commencement Day, laughing at him above the roofs
of siren Mayfield, and holds his foolish head in his hands; for last
night, while the other Seniors, full of honors and regrets, were trying
to choke down a little of the good-bye supper after the Promenade, he
went a bit too far in celebrating his mixed emotions of grief at
flunking and joy at coming back again.
Upon all alike--upon him who has watched for it, dreading it through
four enchanted years, as upon him who has forgotten until the list of
candidates for graduation glared at him from the registrar's
bulletin-board with a vacancy in that section where his name ought to
be; upon him who has hoped for this as a commencement in very truth of
things great and new, as upon him who cares not--shines this early
sunlight of the last Wednesday in May.
There is never a cloud in the sky this morning; the meadow lark sings
more joyously than on any other day; the campus is more radiantly
beautiful, because some hundred and fifty people are looking at it
through tears for the last time.
* * * * *
On his own Commencement Day, Tom Ashley lay sleeping, hidden away from
the splendor of the morning, two-score miles from the smiling campus.
The man lying next him in the upper tier but one rolled over and shook
him by the shoulder:
"Wake up, Tom; it's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?"
The Senior struggled back from sleep; a dream influence lingered with
him, a vision of a cloistered enclosure, a dream in which all his
senses, now assailed by the sights and smells and sounds of a
troop-ship, drew in again the familiar things; he beheld the red tiles
a-shimmer above the yellow stone; the aromatic scent of budding
eucalyptus was in his nostrils, the sound of the young laughter of women
in his ears. He sat up, gazing uncertainly at the dark, crowded space,
the narrow stairway, the great iron racks covered with gray-blanketed
shapes; then he crawled into his uniform and out on the ship's deck. The
early dawn had set the towers of the city glittering; already the low
wharf-sheds along the water-front were astir with life. Back of the town
the twin peaks, named by the early Franciscans for a woman's breasts,
rose veiled with a filmy scarf of fog. Everywhere below them spangled
flags in myriads flapped from the tops of the city and among the crowded
shipping.
Ashley leaned over the rail of the _Peking_ and watched the yellow tide
slide by with its burden of debris. Not far away in the stream lay the
other two transports, unattended; it was too early for the fussy craft
that curtseyed about them during the day. At three o'clock that
afternoon these vessels were to sail for the distant Philippines,
bearing arms against the ancient country of the Spanish Fathers--the
pioneers who had shown the Saxon the way to this golden coast and had
made vine and rose flourish for him on the barren sandhills, that he
might now strip from the land of their forefathers the last possession
of a dying empire. By the strange turnings of history, from the very
city of their patron saint the New World was sending forth its first
hostile expedition against the Old, and the great community that had
grown from their nestling mission of Dolores would shriek Godspeed to
these enemies of Old Spain.
Nothing of this was in Ashley's mind as he watched the water lapping at
the beach-side of the transports. He kept saying over in his mind the
words of his bunk-mate, "It's Commencement Day! Don't you want your
degree?"
In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Tom, looking at his coarse
blue uniform, smiled as he thought on his plans for Graduation Week.
Those feet, now clad in new government gunboats, were to have waltzed
but two nights before in shining patent-leather at the head of the
Senior Ball. Only yesterday he should have been galloping around the
bases in fantastic costume at the Senior-Faculty game. Monday afternoon,
when he should have been before the Chapel site with Her, listening to
the glories of the Class as told over its freshly-mortared plate, he was
tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of
roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city
going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and
counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a
thousand others on the troopship _City of Peking_, a sergeant at
eighteen a month and lucky to get so much, with a chain of superiors
ordering his comings and goings.
All this because of the destruction of an American battleship in the
harbor of Havana.
The notes of a bugle-call drifted across the water from the nearest
transport, and Tom's mind went back to the time when the unfamiliar
sound was first heard on the Stanford campus. It seemed like a very old
memory, although it was but three weeks past. He remembered how, when
the recruiting sergeant came down from the city, the after-dinner crowd
used to sit on the Hall steps watching him drill the men in the
moonlight. After drill, they would loaf in his Hall room, talking it
over, and when the civilians had drifted off to bed or to the inglorious
studies of a routine now ended for Tom, he would sit with "Nosey" Marion
and blow smoke. Neither spoke much, only a word now and then, but they
were thinking of the same thing.
The days passed; the college used to drop out between recitations to
watch them drilling on the football field; the uniforms arrived, and
then the orders. There was a baseball rally that night, but when the
enlisted men came into the Hall and word was passed that they were going
on the morrow, the occasion was all theirs. Marion, who had been twice
on the debating team, stood up, looking slimmer than ever in his plain
blue, and spoke for them. He said only simple things; it was not like
his speech of a year before, when his impassioned arguments turned
defeat into victory at the Inter-Collegiate; but the crowd listened with
their eyes on the floor and applauded with their hands only when he had
done, because they couldn't trust their voices. They sang the terrible
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" after that; Langdon led it. "Peg" could
hardly carry a tune with that awful voice of his, but he sang the verses
so that the chills ran down your back and you had to join in the chorus,
"Our God is marching on."
Next day they themselves were marching on, forty of them, with hardly a
thought of what they were leaving behind, their minds fixed on the
distant Isles of Philip. Tom had never expected to leave the campus in
that spirit. He loved it all, from the quiet slopes by Frenchman's Lake
to that lofty redwood treetop, first rampart of the smiling city to the
eager Freshman, last long-watched glimpse of the land of his memories to
the reluctant Senior.
He had always felt that it would be a tug to say good-bye, yet he, too,
his mind over-seas, had gone away to town with hardly a thought. He had
time to reflect in that dreary fortnight at the Presidio when the
unseasonable rains drenched his tent, and the wretched routine of beans
and coffee hurt the romance of enlistment.
The life had its compensating features. Every city girl he had ever met
in College or town society came out to camp and asked for him at K
Street--K Street with its saucy cardinal flag waving above the first
tent to the left. Most of them brought candy; a vary few, with
super-feminine understanding, made it beer; one, she was a genius, sent
over on a drizzling evening a piping-hot steak. Then, too, he had three
white angles on his sleeve and "Sergeant Ashley" sounded well. Cap Smith
was not even a corporal; the emphasis with which Cap mentioned the fact
showed anything but college spirit.
These things made it easier not to think about the campus and what the
rest of the fellows were doing, but the old life came drifting in after
all. Sometimes, after the long, hard morning drill on the green slope
beyond the car-track, between drill and the welcome mess-call, Marion
would come into the Sergeant's tent and they would sit apart to talk
about the Faculty game or the Senior ball and the dances they had
expected to put on their cards. Each Saturday some of the boys came up
and brought the campus news. One time, all enlisted Stanford tumbled
out of their tents, every last one of them, to welcome a big,
slow-moving, slow-speaking man, who plays first-base at the Commencement
Game. A corporal who had never been to college and who had a newspaper
idea of students, asked if that was the football captain whom they were
crowding around and almost trying to hug, and Marion answered no; that
he was a bigger man than even the head coach. The boys held their
visitor until the officer of the day ordered civilians out of camp, and,
when the unfeeling guard drove him out, they gave the yell in good old
style. The colonel sent his orderly to find what was the matter, for it
was a high offence against martial law, and when the messenger reported
that it was those Stanford kids in K, yelling for their President, his
superior said that he guessed it was all right; this was the first
California regiment, and the old man was a part of the state. This was
before the final dispatches came, before the men learned that they were
going on the first expedition.
Monday morning and marching orders. On this, the morning of Wednesday,
as he looked across the water and watched the city growing brighter, he
thrilled again with the remembrance of that feeling, that purely
physical tingling of the nerves, which came over him at the barracks
when he lifted his gun to start. The load on his back was snug and
light as he stood there in marching rig; how much heavier and harder it
was to grow before he should stand on American soil again, he could not
know. Then, the shuffling of many feet and the flutter of a flag outside
the stone gates, so strangely like the gates which stand at the entrance
of the Land of his Memories--and his Commencement week had begun.
Class Day, from that time, on, lay in his memory a mass of unassimilated
matter to be thought out in the long weeks of idleness on the _Peking's_
blistering deck. The crowd, huge, wild, packed from building to curb,
the merry, merry flags waving them on, the little kaleidoscopic flashes
of expressions which he caught, when he stopped to look at them, on the
grim faces to right and left,--all these impressions and many more were
jumbled in his brain. He remembered the excitement and sympathy mingled
in the countenances of the people. One or two little things were caught
along with the larger recollections--a woman's face that looked like
Hers and almost made him forget for the moment that She was then
doubtless listening to the Class history; a baby holding a flag in its
little hand, and staring with awed, uncomprehending eyes at the
sober-faced soldiers tramping on and on; a man mounted on a truck crying
above the cheering, "Give 'em hell for us!" A remembrance that stood
out above the others was that of someone calling a good-bye to the
Major, of the choke in the officer's voice as he answered. He was an
older man, and his expression of feeling nearly upset Tom. He trudged
on, file-closer for the front rank and six-feet-one of target, and
wondered if he had been a fool after all. It was well enough for those
people yelling acclaim from street and housetop; but they were going
back home, or down to the University, and he--to the troopship, and the
high seas, and after that no telling. The strap of his knapsack hurt
him. They said that Manila was a furnace. He wished that the women would
stop loading them with flowers; he wished that Pellams and the other
fellows wouldn't keep running out to march beside him; didn't they know
how hard he was trying to hold it back? And what did this going amount
to, anyway? If he had staid out, there would have been only one gap in
the company. Then, in a rest, Pellams got to his side with a bottle of
ice-cold Pilsener and Tom pointed its base to the sky and gained
courage.
There was a falling apart to his right, and he felt rather than saw that
his mother had slipped through the crowd and taken his hand in her slim,
white one, was marching beside him over the cruel cobble-stones;
Pellams, too, closed up on the other side, for the officers were not
trying to keep the alignment as they drew near the end. These three went
on together, she trying to be brave now that the last had come, Pellams
clumping along over the rough pavement and joking in ecstatic disregard
of the discomfort of his fat body. It was over at last, the mounted
police were pushing back the crowd; it was to be all alone now. The
Stanford men gave their yell together, the volunteer held his mother
close for a moment. Then,--"Company, attention!"--the dock faded into
mist, so that he stumbled on the gangway.
Not until that night, when a group of them paced along the wharf, had
anyone spoken of Class Day. Cap Smith had started it.
"They are going to the Ball now," said he.
"I wonder if Lyman came out ahead on the Show," said Marion, his eye on
the dollar, even at that solemn moment.