The Courage of the Commonplace Part 2

On a hot morning such as comes in May, a veteran fly of the year before buzzed about the dim window of the sick-room and banged against the half-closed shutters. Half-conscious of the sound the boy's father read near it, when another sound made his pulse jump.

"Chase him out," came from the bed in a weak, cheerful voice.

"Don't want any more things shut up for a spell."

An hour later the older man stood over the boy. "Do you know your next job, Johnny?" he said. "You've got to get well in three weeks. Your triennial in New Haven is then."

"Holy--mackerel!" exploded the feeble tones. "All right, Henry, I'll do it."

Somewhere in the last days of June, New England is at its loveliest and it is commencement time at Yale. Under the tall elms stretch the shady streets, alive eternally with the ever-new youth of ever-coming hundreds of boys. But at commencement the pleasant, drowsy ways take on an astonishing character; it is as if the little city had gone joyfully mad.

Hordes of men of all ages, in startling clothes, appear in all quarters. Under Phelps Gate-way one meets pirates with long hair, with ear-rings, with red sashes; crossing the campus comes a band of Highlanders, in front of the New Haven House are stray Dutchmen and j.a.panese and Punchinellos and other flotsam not expected in a decorous town; down College Street a group of men in gowns of white swing away through the dappled shadows.

The atmosphere is enchanted; it is full of greetings and reunions and new beginnings and of old friendship; with the every-day clothes the boys of old have shed responsibilities and dignities and are once more irresponsibly the boys of old. From California and Florida, even from China and France, they come swarming into the Puritan place, while in and out through the light-hearted kaleidoscopic crowd hurry slim youngsters in floating black gown and scholar's cap--the text of all this celebration, the graduating cla.s.s. Because of them it is commencement, it is they who step now over the threshold and carry Yale's honor in their young hands into the world. But small attention do they get, the graduating cla.s.s, at commencement. The cla.s.sic note of their grave youthfulness is drowned in the joyful uproar; in the clamor of a thousand greetings one does not listen to these voices which say farewell. From the nucleus of these busy, black-clad young fellows, the folds of their gowns billowing about light, strong figures, the stern lines of the Oxford cap graciously at odds with the fresh modelling of their faces--down from these lads in black, the largest cla.s.s of all, taper the cla.s.ses,--fewer, grayer, as the date is older, till a placard on a tree in the campus tells that the cla.s.s of '51, it may be, has its head-quarters at such a place; a handful of men with white hair are lunching together--and that is a reunion.

In the afternoon of commencement day there is a base-ball game at Yale Field. To that the returning cla.s.ses go in costume, mostly marching out afoot, each with its band of music, through the gay, dusty street, by the side of the gay, dusty street, by the side of the gay, crowded trolley-cars loaded to the last inch of the last step with a holiday crowd, good-natured, sympathetic, full of humor as an American crowd is always. The men march laughing, talking, nodding to friends in the cars, in the motors, in the carriages which fly past them; the bands play; the houses are faced with people come to see the show.

The amphitheatre of Yale Field is packed with more than ten thousand. The seniors are there with their mothers and fathers, their pretty little sisters and their proud little brothers--the flower of the country. One looks about and sees everywhere high-bred faces, strong faces, open-eyed, drinking in this extraordinary scene. For there is nothing just like it elsewhere.

Across the field where hundreds of automobiles and carriages are drawn close--beyond that is a gate-way, and through this, at three o'clock or so, comes pouring a rainbow. A gigantic, light-filled, motion-swept rainbow of men. The first rays of vivid color resolve into a hundred j.a.panese geishas; they come dancing, waving paper umbrellas down Yale Field; on their heels press Dutch kiddie, wooden-shod, in scarlet and white, with wigs of peroxide hair. Then sailors, some of them twirling oars--the famous victorious crew of fifteen years back; with these march a dozen lads from fourteen to eight, the sons of the cla.s.s, sailor-clad too; up from their midst as they reach the centre of the field drifts a flight of blue balloons of all sizes. Then come the men of twenty years ago stately in white gowns and mortar-boards; then the Triennials, with a cla.s.s boy of two years, costumed in miniature and trundled in a go-cart by a nervous father. The Highlanders stalk by to the skirl of bagpipes with their contingent of tall boys, the coming sons of Alma Mater. The thirty-five-year graduates, eighty strong, the men who are handling the nation, wear a unanimous sudden growth of rolling gray beard. Cla.s.s after cla.s.s they come, till over a thousand men have marched out to the music of bands, down Yale Field and past the great circle of the seats, and have settled in brilliant ma.s.ses of color on the "bleachers."

Then from across the field rise men's voices singing. They sing the college songs which their fathers sang, which their sons and great-grandsons will sing. The rhythm rolls forward steadily in all those deep voices:

"Nor time nor change can aught avail," the words come,

"To break the friendships formed at Yale."

There is many a breath caught in the crowded mult.i.tude to hear the men sing that.

Then the game--and Yale wins. The cla.s.ses pour on the field in a stormy sea of color, and dance quadrilles, and form long lines hand in hand which sway and cross and play fantastically in a dizzying, tremendous jubilation which fills all of Yale Field.

The people standing up to go cannot go, but stay and watch them, these thousand children of many ages, this marvellous show of light-heartedness and loyalty. Till at last the costumes drift together in platoons and disappear slowly; and the crowd thins and the last and most stirring act of the commencement-day drama is at hand.

It has come to be an inst.i.tution that after the game the old graduates should go, cla.s.s by cla.s.s, to the house of the president of Yale, to renew allegiance. It has come to be an inst.i.tution that he, standing on the steps of his house, should make a short speech to each cla.s.s. The rainbow of men, sweeping gloriously down the city streets with their bands, dissolves into a whirlwind at the sight of that well-known, slight, dignified figure on the doorstep of the modest house--this is a thing which one who has seen it does not forget; the three-minute speeches, each apt to its audience, each pointed with a dart straight to the heart of cla.s.s pride and sentiment, these are a marvel. Few men living could come out of a such a test creditably; only this master of men and of boys could do it as he does. For each cla.s.s goes away confident that the president at least shares its conviction that it is the best cla.s.s ever graduated. Life might well be worth living, it would seem, to a man who should hear every year hundreds of men's voices thundering his name as these men behind the cla.s.s banners.

Six weeks after the disaster of the Oriel mine it was commencement day in New Haven and Johnny McLean, his broken arm in a sling, a square of adhesive plaster on his forehead, was back for his Triennial. He was mightily astonished at the greeting he got.

Cla.s.smates came up to him and shook his hand and said half a sentence and stopped, with an arm around his shoulder; people treated him in a remarkable way, as if he had done something unheard of.

It gratified him, after a fashion, yet it more than half annoyed him. He mentioned over and over again in protest that he had done nothing which "every one of you fellows wouldn't have done just the same," but they laughed at that and stood staring in a most embarra.s.sing way.

"Gosh, Johnny McLean," Tim Erwin remarked finally, "wake up and hear the birdies sing. Do you mean to tell me you don't know you're the hero of the whole blamed nation?"

And Johnny McLean turned scarlet and replied that he didn't think it so particularly funny to guy a man who had attended strictly to his business, and walked off. While Erwin and the others regarded him astounded.

"Well, if that isn't too much!" gasped Tim. "He actually doesn't know!"

"He's likely to find out before we get through," Neddy Haines, of Denver, jerked out nasally and they laughed as if at a secret known together.

So Johnny pursued his way through the two or three days before commencement, absorbed in meeting friends, embarra.s.sed at times by their manner, but taking obstinately the modest place in the cla.s.s which he had filled in college. It did not enter his mind that anything he had done could alter his standing with the "fellows." Moreover, he did not spend time considering that.

So he was one of two hundred Buster Browns who marched to Yale Field in white Russian blouses with shiny blue belts, in sailor hats with blue ribbons, and when the Triennials rushed tempestuously down Trumbull Street in the tracks of the gray-beards of thirty-five years before, Johnny found himself carried forward so that he stood close to the iron fence which guards the little yard from the street. There is always an afternoon tea at the president's house after the game, to let people see the cla.s.ses make their call on the head of the University. The house was full of people; the yard was filled with gay dresses and men gathered to see the parade.

On the high stone steps under the arch of the doorway stood the president and close by him the white, light figure of a little girl, her black hair tied with a big blue bow. Cl.u.s.tered in the shadow behind them were other figures. Johnny McLean saw the little maid and then his gaze was riveted on the president.

It surely was good to see him again; this man who knew how to make them all swear by him.

"What will he have to say to us," Johnny wondered. "Something that will please the whole bunch, I'll bet. He always. .h.i.ts it."

"Men of the cla.s.s of -," the president began, in his deep, characteristic intonations, "I know that there is only one name you want to hear me speak; only one thought in all the minds of your cla.s.s."

A hoa.r.s.e murmur which a second's growth would have made into a wild shout started in the throats of the ma.s.sed men behind the cla.s.s banner. The president held up his hand.

"Wait a minute. We want that cheer; we'll have it; but I've got a word first. A great speaker who talked to you boys in your college course said a thing that came to my mind to-day.

'The courage of the commonplace,' he said, 'is greater than the courage of the crisis.'"

Again that throaty, threatening growl, and again the president's hand went up--the boys were hard to hold.

"I see a man among you whose life has added a line to that saying, who has shown to the world that it is the courage of the commonplace which trains for the courage of the crisis. And that's all I've got to say, for the nation is saying the rest-except three times three for the glory of the cla.s.s of -, the newest name on the honor roll of Yale, McLean of the Oriel mine."

It is probably a dizzying thing to be s.n.a.t.c.hed into the seventh heaven. Johnny McLean standing, scarlet, stunned, his eyes glued on the iron fence between him and the president, knew nothing except a whirling of his brain and an earnest prayer that he might not make a fool of himself. With that, even as the thunder of voices began, he felt himself lifted, swung to men's shoulders, carried forward. And there he sat in his foolish Buster Brown costume, with his broken arm in its sling, with the white patch on his forehead, above his roaring cla.s.smates. There he sat perspiring and ashamed, and faced the head of the University, who, it must be said, appeared not to miss the humor of the situation, for he laughed consumedly. And still they cheered and still his name rang again and again. Johnny, hot and squirming under the merry presidential eye, wondered if they were going to cheer all night. And suddenly everything--cla.s.s-mates, president, roaring voices--died away. There was just one thing on earth.

In the doorway, in the group behind the president, a girl stood with her head against the wall and cried as if her heart would break. Cried frankly, openly, mopping away tears with a whole-hearted pocket-handkerchief, and cried more to mop away.

As if there were no afternoon tea, no mob of Yale men in the streets, no world full of people who might, if they pleased, see those tears and understand. The girl. Herself. Crying. In a flash, by the light of the happiness that was overwhelming, he found this other happiness. He understood. The mad idea which had come back and back to him out there in the West, which he had put down firmly, the idea that she had cared too much and not too little on that Tap Day four years ago--that idea was true. She did care. She cared still.

He knew it without a doubt. He sat on the men's shoulders in his ridiculous clothes, and the heavens opened. Then the tumult and the shouting died and they let the hero down, and to the rapid succession of strong emotions came as a relief another emotion--enthusiasm.

They were cheering the president, on the point of bursting themselves into fragments to do it, it seemed. There were two hundred men behind the cla.s.s banner, and each one was converting what was convertible of his being into noise. Johnny McLean turned to with a will and thundered into the volume of tone which sounded over and over the two short syllables of a name which to a Yale man's idea fits a cheer better than most.

The president stood quiet, under the heaped-up honors of a brilliant career, smiling and steady under that delirious music of his own name rising, winged with men's hearts, to the skies.

Then the band was playing again and they were marching off down the street together, this wonderful cla.s.s that knew how to turn earth into heaven for a fellow who hadn't done much of a stunt anyhow, this grand, glorious, big-hearted lot of chaps who would have done much more in his place, every soul of them--so Johnny McLean's thoughts leaped in time with his steps as they marched away.

And once or twice a terror seized him--for he was weak yet from his illness--that he was going to make "a fool of himself."

He remembered how the girl had cried; he thought of the way the boys had loaded him with honor and affection; he heard the president's voice speaking those impossible words about him-- about him--and he would have given a large sum of money at one or two junctures to bolt and get behind a locked door alone where he might cry as the girl had. But the unsentimental hilarity all around saved him and brought him through without a stain on his behavior. Only he could not bolt--he could not get a moment to himself for love or money.

It was for love he wanted it. He must find her--he could not wait now.

But he had to wait. He had to go into the country to dinner with them all and be lionized and made speeches at, and made fun of, and treated as the darling child and the pride and joy and--what was harder to bear--as the hero and the great man of the cla.s.s. All the time growing madder with restlessness, for who could tell if she might not be leaving town! A remnant of the cla.s.s ahead crossed them-- and there was Brant, her brother. Diplomacy was not for Johnny McLean--he was much too anxious.

"Brant, look here," and he drew him into a comparative corner.

"Where is she?" Brant did not pretend not to understand, but he grinned.

"At the Andersons', of course."

"Now?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Fellows," said Johnny McLean, "I'm sorry, but I've got to sneak.

I'm going back to town."

Sentences and sc.r.a.ps of sentences came flying at him from all over.

"Hold him down"--"Chain him up"--"Going--tommy-rot--can't go!"

"You'll be game for the roundup at eleven--you've got to be."

"Our darling boy--he's got to be," and more language.

"All right for eleven," Johnny agreed. "I'll be at head-quarters then--but I'm going now," and he went.

He found her in a garden, which is the best place to make love.