Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 16

She felt again the ache in the heart which came to her as a child on the bluff-top, when the world seemed spread out before her. When she turned her face upward now it was to think of the awful void s.p.a.ces there, of the mysteries of each flaming planet, and of the helplessness and weakness of the strongest man.

For a year she plunged into astronomy. It had the allurement and the sombre aloofness of unrequited love. It harmonized well with her restless, limitless inner desire.

These sudden pa.s.sions for this or that art were signs of her strength and not her weakness. They sprang out of her swift and ready imagination, which enabled her to take on the personality of the artist, and to feel his joy of power. It was quite normal that she should desire to be successively circus rider, poet and astronomer, and yet, now that her graduation was near, she was as far from a real decision as ever.

"What are you going to do after graduation?" Josie said.

Rose grew grave. "I don't know. Go on studying somewhere."

"I'm going to have a good time!"

"You're always having a good time, you little oriole." Rose had come to patronize Josie in these later days. "I envy you so," she sighed. "The world is so simple for you."

"I don't understand you when you go on like that--you'll come tomorrow and see my new dress, won't you?"

Graduation meant for Josephine the chance to wear a fetching gown, and be looked at by an immense crowd--and one extra man. This was supposed to be a secret, but everybody who cared to give it a thought, knew of it and smiled at her as they would at a child. Josie could be nothing else but a child.

To most of the students graduation day came rus.h.i.+ng with sorrowful speed. It meant pa.s.sing from sunlit lanes of maple and lilac out into the bleak highways of trade and labor. It meant the beginning of struggle with pitilessness in man and nature. As students they were not in the race for subsistence, but as citizens and professional men they were to be compet.i.tors in trades and crafts already overflowing.

Graduation day drew near, and a tremulous ecstasy came into the lives of the outgoing students--a joy made more precious by its certainty of pa.s.sing.

To Rose graduation day came as the sweetest, saddest day of her life. It seemed to close a gate upon something in her history. The smiling, yet mournful, faces of her friends, the wistful eyes of the young men who loved her, the rustle of leaves, the gleam of the water, the dapple of light and shade on the campus, the exaltation of the public moment, all these wondrous things rushed upon her like a flood, and overwhelmed her ambitions and desires, powerful as they were.

At last the books were closed and packed away.

The commencement exercises began with the reception in Science Hall. The night fell slowly, and the fine new building grew alight story after story, and crowds began to stream in. The students led the way, rakish, full of airs, except when piloting their parents about. The fun had been almost furious all day.

There were many of the relatives of the students present, and often they stood out in sharp contrast with the decorations and with the joy of the young people. Beautiful girls might be seen leading bent and wrinkled fathers and mothers, who had sacrificed all for them. Rose wished for her father, and pa.s.sionately desired to do something for him. He had written that he couldn't leave the farm, and so she wandered about with others, like herself, free. Everywhere the young men met her. She never escaped them for a moment, their pursuit was relentless.

The crowd swarmed into each room, where the professors stood beside show-cases, polite and patient, exhibiting machines, specimens, drawings. At another place sherbet was served to the guests, and music could be heard in the lower halls. Everywhere was the lisp of feet, the ripple of talk.

All this was a bore to many of the pupils, for there was the peace-pipe ceremonial preparing on the campus, that they really waited for.

Mysteriously in the deep dusk a huge heap of combustibles had been piled up on the wet gra.s.s, and one by one the two cla.s.ses began to gather.

There was a mutter of voices, a command, then a red flame flashed out, and with it the college yell soared up from a little bunch of dark forms:

"RAH-RAH-RAH-WISCONSIN!"

The stragglers on the walks turned toward the fire, like insects. They came in crawling dark lines like ants, across the wet gra.s.s. They formed a blue-black ma.s.s, lighted on one side by the orange light of the bonfire. The stars overhead grew green and dim in the light of the fire, and the encircling trees of the campus came out like silhouettes of purple-green cardboard.

The cla.s.s rolled out its carpet for the girls and opened its boxes of long clay pipes. It seemed so much more important to Rose now that she stood there in the center as one of the graduating cla.s.s. There was not much talk. They lined up and sang song after song. Then the boys moved about and showed the girls how to light their pipes.

"You want to suck, not blow, on it!" a voice called out, and everybody laughed dutifully. For a few moments all was laughter. The girls tried to a.s.sume the airs of smokers, and puffed their kinnikinnick furiously.

Then as they sang they swung their pipes with rakish air,--"There is a Tavern in our Town" and "The Bull-frog in the Pool," and their voices floated out and up into the wreathing smoke of the fire, as deliciously sweet as though their songs were hymns of praise as they were hymns of youth.

The pipes needed constant relighting. In every silence some girl cried out: "O, my pipe's gone out!" One cried: "Give me a bite!" as if the pipe-stem were taffy.

To Rose the whole ceremony was glorious. It carried her out of herself.

It gave her a glimpse into the world which men keep to themselves, and, besides, she had written the speech handing the pipe down to the custodian of the succeeding cla.s.s, a really admirable ceremony.

Here on this spot the red men warred and loved. Here, with the sheen of lakes about, and the wild gra.s.s under their feet, it was beautiful and appropriate that they should be remembered by these young western sons and daughters of the white man.

The mock antagonism between seniors and juniors seemed to have great meaning when Tom Harris spoke the lofty phrases she had written for him, standing outlined against the soaring fire like a silhouette of velvet, his voice rolling out with lofty suspensive power.

"Here on the spot where our fathers have dwelt for countless suns and moons we ask for peace. We call upon you to bury the hatchet. Forgive and forget; you who have scars forgive, and you who have wrongs forget.

Let all evil spirits be exorcised by the pipe. Here we break the arrow.

Here we tender the sacred pipe. Brothers--sisters, we have spoken!"

The fire burned low. As they sat in circles on the ground and chanted their songs, the sky grew blacker, the trees melted into the darkness, the last wailing cadence floated into silence, and then subdued, tender, they rose and vanished, in pairs and groups, into the darkness like the songs they sang. The cla.s.s of 189-- had entered upon its long, long trail, some to the plains of failure, some to the mountains of victory.

This quaint and suggestive custom received new strength from the oration which Rose contributed. All felt its power and beauty. To the girls the whole ceremony was a rare and delicious piece of audacity. It did them good. It gave them something to look back upon with laughter, into which a sigh and a little catching of the breath might also come.

Something elemental and primitive came to Rose amid all the laughter and song. What was she more than the swart women who had lived here and been wooed of men? Was there not something magnificent in their frank following of the trail of pure pa.s.sion? They loved, and bore children, and ground at the corn mills, and died as the female bison died, and other women came after them to do like unto them, to what end?

Some such questions, vague, ever shadowy, formless, moved Rose, as she lay down to sleep that night. Outside a mandolin tw.a.n.ged--the boys were serenading her, but she had not the wish to see them. She did not go to the window, as the other girls did, deliciously excited, almost hysteric with the daring of being possibly seen in their night-gowns. She kept sombre silence, stirred by profounder emotions than they were capable of.

She thought of William De Lisle but seldom now. In open daylight she was a little ashamed of her idolatry, but on nights like these, when love songs and moonlight fused together, his figure came before her, not so clear a personality now, but as a type of beauty, as a center of dreams, of something wild and free and splendid--something she was to attain to some good day.

She had no thought of attaining him, but some one like unto him. Some one who was grand as her dream of heroes and loyal as her father.

It was characteristic of her that while the lovers singing without made her companions utter hysterical laughter, she was sad and wished to be alone. Their desires were on the surface, s.h.i.+fting, sparkling, seeking kisses. Hers was dark, and deep down, sombre, savage, prophetic. Love with her was a thing not to be uttered. She silenced all jests about it, and all familiarity on the part of her suitors she had put away.

During her first year she had allowed her lover to take her hand, as Carl used to do, because it seemed the usual thing, but after breaking off that entanglement she resolutely set to work to study, and no man had since considered himself her lover. To permit a caress now meant all the world to her. It meant change, undoing of plans, throwing away ambitions. It meant flinging herself to the immemorial sacrifice men demand of women.

There were times when she felt the impulse to do this. She felt it that night as the clear voices of the serenaders came floating in at her window. What did it matter? What could she do in the mighty world? What did the Indian girl, when her lover sang from his canoe among the water lilies in the lake? Why not go to one of these good, clean young men and be a wife? What did it matter--her ambition--her hope? "I will," she said, and a wild rush of blood choked her breathing, "I'll end it all."

But the singing died away, the moonlight vanished out of the room, and the pa.s.sionate longing and tumult of her blood grew slowly quiet, and she slept.

When the sun rose there was no man in her world who could have won her consent to marriage. Her ambitions rose like the sun, buoyant as young eagles, while the singers of the night before were hapless fireflies, tangled in the dewy gra.s.s, their love-light dim, their singing lost.

She was not done with this problem, however.

She saw in one man's eyes something to be answered. She had her answer ready, though she hoped to escape the ordeal. He hovered close about her all the morning. He came by the chapter-house for her, but she had gone to the chapel.

She felt a little guilty toward him. She had attended concerts with him.

She had accepted his company now and again because she liked him and because--well, it was convenient, and by selecting him she escaped the attentions of others. She had seemed to acquiesce in his proprietors.h.i.+p of her, and yet always when alone she had tried to show him that they could only be friends. This he had persistently misunderstood.

She was almost the tallest of her cla.s.smates, she led the march into the chapel for the final ceremonies, a splendid and terrible moment, toward which they had looked for weeks, and for which they had elaborately planned dresses and procedure.

It was all so wistfully beautiful. The cool s.p.a.cious hall filled with hushed people; the vivid green trees looking in at the windows and the soft air burdened with bee songs and the smell of flowers. The June sunlight dappled the lawn with marvels of shade and s.h.i.+ne. The music seemed to wail as they marched, and the rustling stir and murmur of comment helped to unnerve them all even to men.

The speaker looked down upon them with comprehension. He was an eastern man and an old man, also he was a poet. He was just, and he had seen how clean and fine this co-educational school was. The day was beautiful to him as to them, and he comprehended their feelings well. He looked down into their pensive faces, he saw the sorrowful arching of their brows, the sad droop of their lips.

His s.h.a.ggy head drooped forward as he talked to them, till his kind old face, lined with genial wrinkles, seemed to grow beautiful and tender and maternal. He had reared many children of his own, and he now took the young people into his heart. He told them much of his life and trials--how work was in the world for them; play, too--but work, hard work, glorious work! work for humanity as well as for themselves. He conveyed to them something of the spirit of altruism into which the world seemed about to enter on its...o...b..t as it swings through clouds of star-dust.

They cheered him when he ended, and then the president, in brief words, presented their diplomas. Among them now were bitten lips, and tremulous chins and tearful eyes. The doors had closed behind them and they faced the whole world, it seemed. For years they had studied here, in storm and sun, but now they remembered only the sunlight, all fused and blended into one radiant vista.

As they stood for their final benediction a splendid snowy cloud sailed across the sun, and the room darkened mystically. A shudder of exquisite pleasure and pain thrilled Rose, and a little moan pushed from her throat, but the shadow lifted, the organ sounded out a fine brave strain, and the cla.s.s of 189-- was ended. It was now a group of men and women facing the open road.