The Courage of the Commonplace

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. Clustered 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 hits it."

"Men of the class 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 class."

A hoarse murmur which a second's growth would have made into a wild shout started in the throats of the massed men behind the class 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 class of —, the newest name on the honor roll of Yale, McLean of the Oriel mine."

It is probably a dizzying thing to be snatched 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 classmates. 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—class-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 class 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 class 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 class. All the time growing madder with restlessness, for who could tell if she might not be leaving town! A remnant of the class 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 scraps 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. Each place is the best. And in some mystical manner all the doubt and unhappiness which had been gone over in labored volumes of thoughts by each alone, melted to nothing, at two or three broken sentences. There seemed to be nothing to say, for everything was said in a wordless, clear mode of understanding, which lovers and saints know. There was little plot to it, yet there was no lack of interest. In fact so light-footed were the swift moments in the rose-scented dark garden that Johnny McLean forgot, as others have forgotten before him, that time was. He forgot that magnificent lot of fellows, his classmates; there was not a circumstance outside of the shadowy garden which he did not whole-heartedly forget. Till a shock brought him to.

The town was alive with bands and cheers and shouts and marching; the distinct noises rose and fell and fused and separated, but kept their distance. When one body of sound, which unnoticed by the lovers had been growing less vague, more compact, broke all at once into loud proximity—men marching, men shouting, men singing. The two, hand tight in hand, started, looked at each other, listened—and then a name came in a dozen sonorous voices, as they used to shout it in college days, across the Berkeley Oval.

"McLean! McLean!" they called.

"Oh, Johnny McLean!" and "Come out there, oh, Johnny McLean!" That was Baby Thomas.

"By Jove, they've trapped me," he said, smiling in the dark and holding the hand tighter as the swinging steps stopped in front of the house of the garden. "Brant must have told."

"They've certainly found you," the girl said. Her arms, lifted slowly, went about his neck swiftly. "You're mine—but you're theirs to-night. I haven't a right to so much of you even. You're theirs. Go." And she held him. But in a second she had pushed him away. "Go," she said. "You're theirs, bless every one of them."

She was standing alone in the dark, sweet garden and there was a roar in the street which meant that he had opened the door and they had seen him. And with that there were shouts of "Put him up"—"Carry him"—"Carry the boy," and laughter and shouting and then again the measured tread of many men retreating down the street, and men's voices singing together. The girl in the dark garden stood laughing, crying, and listened.

"Mother of men!"—

the deep voices sang—

"Mother of men grown strong in giving—Honor to him thy light have led;Rich in the toil of thousands living,Proud of the deeds of thousands dead!We who have felt thy power, and known thee,We in whose lives thy lights avail,High, in our hearts enshrined, enthrone thee,Mother of men, old Yale!"