One Commencement

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Title:     One Commencement
Author: Charles Kellogg Field [More Titles by Field]

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.

"I wonder if the programs got down in time," said Tom, and then he laughed to think of himself, the chairman of the Ball committee, plodding along the splintered dock in a dusty uniform and buff leggings and with the rudiments of a scraggly beard on his face. It was a queer ending.

Down there, the others were floating round, now, to high-priced music from town. In a little note which Pellams had brought him from Her that morning, she had said that she was to wear a small silk flag instead of flowers this time. He would have liked to peep in, as he used to from the gym roof when he was a Freshie, to see if she had really done it.

During these wharf-edge musings, taps had blown, bringing the men on board again. On the way up the plank, he remembered, they passed one of the fellows with his face in his hands, and Tom had to put his arm around the boy and lead him, so that he might be in quarters in time. Neither of them could know that this was to be the one who did not return.

He had his first sight of the hold, after that, and the truth knocked out some of the poetry. Ashley, and K Company in general, were quartered just over the screw; but a man gets used to anything, even to bullets that sing past your ears and clip off little bamboo leaves about two feet from your hair. There were twelve hundred men below decks; when most of the landsmen should be seasick--ugh!

The second night, Tuesday, he had sat with Cap among the coiled ropes on deck. Beyond the shipping, the city of hills twinkled at them, striped with long, sloping lines of dotted light; out of the blackness above, the crown of the Spreckels building made a circlet like a halo over St. Francis and his city; across the bay slid the mysterious, luminous honeycombs of the silent ferry-boats. Far aft, the band was trying to cheer things up with a Sousa march. That very tune was being played, probably, down there where the Quadrangle, softly glowing with the faint edging of lanterns, shimmered in the fairy-land mystery of long palm-studded vistas, a-flutter with white dresses.

"They are saying good-bye to each other, now," said Tom, by way of a feeler.

"Humph!" said Cap. He was flat on his back, looking up at the stars. "It doesn't mean anything. When you're going to pull out across the Pacific for God knows what, then it's different."

"I didn't expect to spend this evening lying on a ship's deck," murmured Tom. He was thinking of what the Promenade Concert usually means to people who have been taught something by co-education. That good-bye, said in the Quadrangle when the music and the thoughtless people have gone and the lanterns blaze up and drop, one after another, and lie smoldering on the moonlit asphalt; those last words with people from whom you have concealed yourself these four years and to whom you can now afford to lay open your heart, as can the happy dead, because your ways after to-night may lie apart,--Tom knew that this good-bye does mean something, in spite of the superior announcement of Sophomore Smith. Only it meant more to a fellow lying thinking about it among the ropes of a transport's deck, with the Spaniards in prospect.

Cap's cigarette shone like a glowworm in the shadow of the stack.

"Our good-bye supper will be sloppy weather, all right;" said he. "Six going out."

"No," answered Tom, "it won't be a drunk to-night, Cap. You haven't been in long enough. I'll bet they don't get through the first case; I'll bet it's a cry. You didn't see '95 go out."

"Well, perhaps," assented the Sophomore. "The fellows are pretty well worked up."

Tom went back to his Freshman days.

"I remember our '95 feed in the Hall. Stanton cried that night, and Gray. I never saw them do it before." Then, more slowly, "It must be tough on a girl."

After which he was not talkative.

There was little enough, this last morning, to suggest Commencement, as he leaned on the damp rail of the ship and dreamed over the last few days. A voice at his elbow said:

"Captain wants you, Sergeant."

Tom started out of his reverie, and the military tilt came into his back. He was not a student bidding the College farewell; he was a sergeant at eighteen a month and lucky to get so much.

The city had awakened when he came to the rail again. There was a tense feeling abroad, a gathering excitement that grew through the morning. All manner of water-craft fussed and fumed and dodged around the transports,--tugs, rowboats, launches and clumsy river steamers strung with flags and black with civilians. One tug that hung close by shone with more color than the others by reason of the women crowding it; Tom could discern the face of his mother looking, looking with yearning eyes that would have called him back. He drew a quick breath of surprise and his hands tightened on the black rigging. There on the tug, standing beside his mother instead of among those who were saying good-bye to the Campus, he saw the Other One.

* * * * *

Soon after three, the screw throbbed, moved, the craft wheeled into lines flanking the huge vessel; the noises of the city awoke:

"For the large birds of prey
They'll carry you away,
And you'll never see your soldiers any more."

The grey town lay back among her hills, shrieking with every manner of mechanical voice her farewell to the troops. Above this uproar rose and fell the weird sobbing of a siren and a cannon from the top of a sky-scraper boomed in at solemn intervals. On the roofs were knots of people flashing white signals of Godspeed; when the wind was right, one could catch, very faintly, the sound of their cheering.

The flotilla drew around the curving water-front and toward the Gate. To the left, the remains of the camp dotted the plain below the Presidio hills; every last man of them was on the bulkhead in front of the fort, waving his brown hat and cheering the lucky devils who went first. The great hill guns bellowed good-bye as the transports slipped through the gleaming strait. Gradually the convoy wheeled 'round again, the bigger vessels keeping up until outside the Heads. Then the first expedition went on alone.

Tom Ashley, Senior and 'Varsity fullback, with his eyes wet in spite of himself, set his face to the west. The round sun hung red above the horizon; a few seconds earlier, it had looked over the Palo Alto hills at the deserted University campus. Beyond the ship, a path of gold lay out toward Manila and its future. Marion, leaning beside him, looked back at the fading line of surf below the Cliff House.

"Well, Tom," he said, a bit huskily, "Commencement Day's over."

"Yes," answered the Sergeant, without turning, "we're up against it, all right!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: On May 25, 1898, Commencement Day at the University, the First California Volunteers sailed for the Philippine Islands. With Company K of that regiment went thirty-five Stanford students, a part of the hundred who volunteered, in various regiments, for the Spanish War.]

[The end]
Charles Kellogg Field's short story: One Commencement

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