Stanford Stories Part 23

They raided the stock first, and rendered happy with the jingle of silver the quaint little remnant of the race who named their valley for the blessed Santa Clara. Then, when he had counted it and put it safely away with the officious a.s.sistance of Pellams Rex, they set him on the table in his blue overalls and over-sized hat and made him sing for them in his pathetic treble, "La Paloma," and for encore, "Two Leetle Girl een Bloo." Pellams removed him after that, claiming that Langdon was about to tell the story of his life, which could not be published in the Sequoia.

Jimmie Mason had sat there all this time, taking it in and drinking with the others, but there was never a cloud on his brain nor a waver in his movements. The rest of them wandered from the motif; each was composing a fugue of his own, according to the mould of his nature. Sc.r.a.ps of their conversation floated in on him between songs--"Got him just below the knees--now!"--"and the difference between me and a tank is in the inferior receptivity--ain't that a peach?--of the receptacle"--"Now, the fallacy of the original proposition, as Herbert Spencer hath it, lies in the expression of the component particulars"--this was Langdon--"that proves that if I had a board Pellams would be summarily chastised"--"Put it down and order up another, here's good drink going stale"--"Whoa, Pegasus, old hoss, that's my tamale you have designs on"--"and cut his name there"--"sing it down! This is to break training for the third time"--"What's the matter with ----ty-eight?"--All this came in on him, as he watched them grow from geniality to hilarity and then on toward enthusiasm. They had forgotten him; only now and then someone s.h.i.+ed a cracker at his head and told him to "jolly up."

Another drink, and the patriotic stage was upon them. The King ordered a gla.s.s, standing, to the Team, and one with a foot on the table to the Captain, and one with both feet on the table and gla.s.ses to the ceiling to the Victory next fall. Someone started the yell; it went round the table. Then they joined in on "Here's to Stanford College," with a verse for every cla.s.s and its yell at the end, and before they were done there were three howling factions, each trying to cry the others down.

Frank Lyman, he of the steady head, who was quiet or hilarious as he willed, but was never beyond the point where he willed to be, sat watching good-humoredly from his corner, and noted that Jimmie Mason's voice had risen the loudest, and that he, too, had forgotten the motif.

Pellams had wandered into the outer room "to bust the proprietor's blamed old nickel-machine and get even," leaving the disturbance to subside of its own weight. Coming back suddenly to the door, he cried: "Hey, I've got 'em! The raw material and the finished product! Let's have a temperance lecture from Lyman."

It was a queer group at the door. The half-gone Pellams, with his face flushed and his hair dishevelled, in one of his hands little Lupe, hanging to an empty pail and between laughter and tears; the other hand tight on the collar of as dirty, as unkempt, and as drunken an old loafer as ever hung over a Mayfield bar. Pellams swung the ruin in.

"Now, tell us how you got that fine, large tee!" said the tormentor.

"Orate to us, General Jackson!"

The old man braced himself, with drunken dignity, against the door.

"You young fellows c'n make fools o' yourselves," he said, "but you can't make fool o' me."

"That's all right, pardner--Nature saved us the trouble in your case,"

said Pellams, the thoughtless.

The clear head in the room--Lyman's always--took it all in; Frank made a step to come between the Junior and his victim. Then he turned, half-unconsciously, toward Mason. Jimmie was standing with his hands on the table, looking straight before him, and in that look Frank read the certainty that the case was out of his control. For the Face was rising before Jimmie Mason once more; it had twisted itself in with the relaxed, foolish features before him, until he saw his father there, a mock and a shame. It was not his father, of course--he pa.s.sed his hand before his eyes as though to clear them--but suppose that somewhere else a crowd had his father--and he not there to----

The Angel of Pity, or the Universal Conscience, or whatever it is that you and I have learned from our books and our teachers to put as our symbol of the belief in the higher things, wrote upon his records that night that a prayer had gone up, for the first time, from the dingy back room of the Hotel Mayfield.

Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the amateur conductor had one of his inspirations.

"Hey, a trio! The event of the evening! General Hardsh.e.l.l Jackson, Senor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the platform, Senor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in a corner. Then he gestured wildly toward the door.

"Hey, Jimmie, come back here," he called; "don't let him out, boys!"

Jimmie had reached the door when Lyman caught his sleeve.

"Where are you going?"

"Home."

"You mean the Hall?"

Jimmie pulled free of the Senior's hand.

"No!" he said. "Home."

A SONG CYCLE AND A PUNCTURE.

A Song Cycle and a Puncture.

"And I learned about women from 'er!"

KIPLING.

Six Madonnas, from their places on the Chapel walls, gazed at the spectacle of a student with long hair and energetic manner drilling a chorus of young men and women from behind the preacher's desk. There was no visible sign of agitation on the part of the six Madonnas, though an operatic rehearsal in Chapel might be considered reason enough. To be sure, one of them, with her feet upon a crescent moon, kept her eyes fixed religiously on the ceiling, but this had become a habit. The Madonnas were not surprised.

The early years of the University, when there was no a.s.sembly hall and the temporary chapel was used for everything that did not demand the superior accommodations of the men's gymnasium, had prepared them for anything. They had looked calmly down upon student farces and Wednesday evening prayer meetings, professional impersonations and baccalaureate sermons. Once, there had been a German farce under the protection of the Germanic Language department, by a company from town, a boisterous play with a gigantic comedienne in a short skirt. Beside this performance, Lillian Arnold's singing a love duet with Jack Smith was nothing very shocking.

Connor, the man who was getting up the opera for the benefit of the Junior Annual, waved his baton gracefully and looked pleased. The rehearsal had gone well that afternoon, and now Cap Smith was singing with creditable expression the love song in the last act. The experience of Connor told him that this song would make even the bleachers at the back of the gymnasium keep a respectful silence, which was saying a good deal. Smith had a very pretty tenor, redeeming its lack of volume by a sympathetic quality that was decidedly pleasant. In a song like this, his voice came out well. There was a high note at the end to be taken pianissimo with something else that signified "as though you meant it."

Smith could make it sound so, at any rate. One girl at the back of the chorus always said, "Ah," under her breath when the song was ended at rehearsal.

Lillian Arnold, who played opposite Smith in the opera, did not conceal from herself the pleasure she took in the part. Long before rehearsals began, she had spent her smiles upon Connor with a view to that very role. Miss Arnold was a young person who knew the things she wanted; one of them was Smith. 'Varsity end, champion pole-vaulter, Glee Club tenor and Soph.o.m.ore president, which means princ.i.p.ally leading the cotillion, he was well worth a girl's trouble. There was the more glory in the winning of this capital prize because he was not very enthusiastic about Roble. There was somebody up in town who took a great deal of his blue fraternity-paper. Lillian Arnold knew about the girl in town, so she accepted gracefully what the G.o.ds gave and was outwardly content.

The gift of the G.o.ds was Ted Perkins, whose vest was decorated like Cap's and who had no entanglements. When the approach of the Soph.o.m.ore cotillion set Roble agog with a pleasant but hardly strong-minded excitement, he "asked her." Peace of mind comes naturally after such an invitation is given and accepted; on rare occasions this does not last.

The first thing that occurred to ruffle Miss Arnold's complacency was a chance remark dropped one noon by Perkins as they were strolling home obliquely from the Quad.

"Cap isn't going to lead with Miss Martin, after all," said he.

"Indeed!" exclaimed Lillian. For some remote feminine reason the announcement was interesting.

"Her family has gone South suddenly, a death or something. Cap is all broken up about it. He was going to show her off in style that night."

"I wonder whom he will ask, now," she said, as though it didn't matter the least bit in the world.

Down somewhere in a girl's heart lies the gambler's instinct. Lillian would have thrown away then and there the certainty of Ned Perkins'

timely invitation for the torturing suspense, the alluring chance, that attended the Soph.o.m.ore president's second choice. Perkins, in his simple masculine dullness, never guessed this.

"I don't believe he knows yet; he wouldn't tell over at the house if he did. Another plum for unengaged Roble."

Perkins would have been less at ease over the condition of engaged Roble could he have looked into the little east music-room where Lillian played accompaniments, and Cap Smith, leaning over a wicker chair, went through the music of his part. These cozy rehearsals in the quiet afternoons had resulted in Smith's asking himself, during a cut home through the Quad, why he had never noticed Lillian Arnold in particular.

Connor, the director, had a keener eye, evidently. She was pretty, das.h.i.+ng and real good fun. Perkins was ent.i.tled to respect for his selection. Lillian was "all right;" this is a masculine term which may mean anything from mild approval to the rapture of "just one girl." The mild interpretation, of course, is to be put upon Smith's use of the term, even after he had been to Roble two evenings. Their talk was about the opera, nothing further, and when he had taken his high note with just the proper emotional slur, they both laughed. To be honest, there had been one chat on the moonlit steps of the Museum, but all of this went down on the blue fraternity-paper among other confidences.

One afternoon, in the middle of a Spring-time walk, Smith gave utterance to a decision concerning which he had already written, dutifully, to an interested party in the South. They had pa.s.sed the willow-fringed bank of Lagunita, the red boathouse, the double avenue of young pines, and, crossing into the back road, strolled down to the low gate opposite the Farm; this they climbed and came into a little hollow where knowing people find yellow violets. He had just given her a frank compliment.

"You are the best fence-taker I ever saw for a girl."

"That's one practical result of an hour's credit in gym-work," she 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 gra.s.s, 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 Soph.o.m.ore 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?"