The Courage of the Commonplace

On the urgent insistence of every one he made a speech. He got to his six-feet-two slowly, and his hands went into his trousers pockets as usual. "Holy mackerel," he began—"I don't call it decent to knock the wind out of a man and then hold him up for remarks. They all said in college that I talked the darnedest hash in the class, anyway. But you will have it, will you? I haven't got anything to say, so's you'd notice it, except that I'll be blamed if I see how this is true. Of course I'm keen for it—Keen! I should say I was! And what makes me keenest, I believe, is that I know it's satisfactory to Henry McLean." He turned his bright face to his father. "Any little plugging I've done seems like thirty cents compared to that. You're all peaches to take such an interest, and I thank you a lot. Me, the superintendent of the Oriel mine! Holy mackerel!" gasped Johnny, and sat down.

The proportion of fighting in the battle of life outweighs the "beer and skittles"; as does the interest. Johnny McLean found interest in masses, in the drab-and-dun village on the prairie. He found pleasure, too, and as far as he could reach he tried to share it; buoyancy and generosity were born in him; strenuousness he had painfully acquired, and like most converts was a fanatic about it. He was splendidly fit; he was the best and last output of the best institution in the country; he went at his work

like a joyful locomotive. Yet more goes to explain what he was and what he did. He developed a faculty for leading men. The cold bath of failure, the fire of success had tempered the young steel of him to an excellent quality; bright and sharp, it cut cobwebs in the Oriel mine where cobwebs had been thickening for months. The boy, normal enough, quite unphenomenal, was growing strong by virtue of his one strong quality: he did what he resolved to do. For such a character to make a vital decision rightly is a career. On the night of the Tap Day which had so shaken him, he had struck the key-note. He had resolved to use his life as if it were a tool in his hand to do work, and he had so used it. The habit of bigness, once caught, possesses one as quickly as the habit of drink; Johnny McLean was as unhampered by the net of smallnesses which tangle most of us as a hermit; the freedom gave him a power which was fast making a marked man of him.

There was dissatisfaction among the miners; a strike was probable; the popularity of the new superintendent warded it off from month to month, which counted unto him for righteousness in the mind of the president, of which Johnny himself was unaware. Yet the cobwebs grew; there was an element not reached by, resentful of, the atmosphere of Johnny's friendliness—"Terence O'Hara's gang." By the old road of music he had found his way to the hearts of many. There were good voices among the thousand odd workmen, and Johnny McLean could not well live without music. He heard Dennis Mulligan's lovely baritone and Jack Dennison's rolling bass, as they sang at work in the dim tunnels of the coal-mine, and it seemed quite simple to him that they and he and others should meet when work hours were over and do some singing. Soon it was a club—then a big club; it kept men out of saloons, which Johnny was glad of, but had not planned. A small kindliness seems often to be watered and fertilized by magic. Johnny's music-club grew to be a spell to quiet wild beasts. Yet Terence O'Hara and his gang had a strong hold; there was storm in the air and the distant thunder was heard almost continually.

Johnny, as he swung up the main street of the flat little town, the brick school-house and the two churches at one end, many saloons en route, and the gray rock dump and the chimneys and shaft-towers of the mine at the other, carried a ribbon of brightness through the sordid place. Women came to the doors to smile at the handsome young gentleman who took his hat off as if they were ladies; children ran by his side, and he knocked their caps over their eyes and talked nonsense to them, and swung on whistling. But at night, alone in his room, he was serious. How to keep the men patient; how to use his influence with them; how to advise the president—for young as he was he had to do this because of the hold he had gained on the situation; what concessions were wise—the young face fell into grave lines as he sat, hands deep in his pockets as usual, and considered these questions. Already the sculptor Life was chiselling away the easy curves with the tool of responsibility.

He thought of other things sometimes as he sat before the wood fire in his old Morris chair. His college desk was in the corner by the window, and around it hung photographs ordered much as they had been in New Haven. The portrait of his father on the desk, the painting of his mother, and above them, among the boys' faces, the group of boys and girls of whom she was one, the girl whom he had not forgotten. He had not seen her since that Tap Day. She had written him soon after—an invitation for a week-end at her mother's camp in the woods. But he would not go. He sat in the big chair staring at the fire, this small room in the West, and thought about it. No, he could not have gone to her house party—how could he? He had thought, poor lunatic, that there was an unspoken word between them; that she was different to him from what she was to the others. Then she had failed him at the moment of need. He would not be taken back half-way, with the crowd. He could not. So he had civilly ignored the hand which had held out several times, in several ways. Hurt and proud, yet without conceit, he believed that she kept him at a distance, and would not risk coming too near, and so stayed altogether away. It happens at times that a big, attractive, self-possessed man is secretly as shy, as fanciful, as the shyest girl—if he cares. Once and again indeed the idea flashed into the mind of Johnny McLean—that perhaps she had been so sorry that she did not dare look at him. But he flung that aside with a savage half-thought.

"What rot! It's probable that I was important enough for that, isn't it? You fool!" And about then he was likely to get up with a spring and attack a new book on pillar and shaft versus the block system of mining coal.

The busy days went on, and the work grew more absorbing, the atmosphere more charged with an electricity which foretold tempest. The president knew that the personality of the young superintendent almost alone held the electricity in solution that for months he and his little musical club and his large popularity had kept off the strike. Till at last a day came in early May.

We sit at the ends of the earth and sew on buttons and play cards while fate wipes from existence the thing dearest to us. Johnny's father that afternoon mounted his new saddle-horse and rode through the afternoon lights and shadows of spring. The girl, who had not forgotten, either, went to a luncheon and the theatre after. And it was not till next morning that Brant, her brother, called to her, as she went upstairs after breakfast, in a voice which brought her running back. He had a paper in his hand, and he held it to her.

"What is it, Brant? Something bad?"

"Yes," he said, breathing fast. "Awful. It's going to make you feel badly, for you liked him—poor old Johnny McLean."

"Johnny McLean?" she repeated. Brant went on.

"Yesterday—a mine accident. He went down after the entombed men. Not a chance." Brant's mouth worked. "He died—like a hero—you know." The girl stared.

"Died? Is Johnny McLean dead?"

She did fall down, or cry out, but then Brant knew. Swiftly he came up and put his big, brotherly arm around her.

"Wait, my dear," he said. "There's a ray of hope. Not really hope, you know—it was certain death he went to—but yet they haven't found—they don't know, absolutely, that he's dead."

Five minutes later the girl was locked in her room with the paper. His name was in large letters in the head-lines. She read the account over many times, with painstaking effort to understand that this meant Johnny McLean. That he was down there now, while she breathed pure air. Many times she read it, dazed. Suddenly she flashed to the window and threw it open and beat on the stone sill and dragged her hands across it. Then in a turn she felt this to be worse than useless and dropped on her knees and found out what prayer is. She read the paper again, then, and faced things.

It was the oft-repeated, incredible story of men so accustomed to danger that they throw away their lives in sheer carelessness. A fire down in the third level, five hundred feet underground; delay in putting it out; shifting of responsibility of one to another, mistakes and stupidity; then the sudden discovering that they were all but cut off; the panic and the crowding for the shaft, and scenes of terror and selfishness and heroism down in the darkness and smothering smoke.

The newspaper story told how McLean, the young superintendent, had come running down the street, bare-headed, with his light, great pace of an athlete. How, just as he got there, the cage of six men, which had gone to the third level, had been drawn up after vague, wild signalling, filled with six corpses. How, when the crowd had seen that he meant to go down, a storm of appeal had broken that he should not throw his life away; how the very women whose husbands and sons were below had clung to him. Then the paper told of how he had turned at the mouth of the shaft—the girl could see him standing there tall and broad, with the light on his boyish blond head. He had snatched a paper from his pocket and waved it at arm's-length so that everyone could see. The map of the mine. Gallery 57, on the second level, where the men now below had been working, was close to gallery 9, entered from the other shaft a quarter of a mile away. The two galleries did not communicate, but only six feet of earth divided them. The men might chop through to 9 and reach the other shaft and be saved. But the men did not know it. He explained shortly that he must get to them and tell them. He would go to the second level and with an oxygen helmet would reach possible air before he was caught. Quickly, with an unhesitating decision, he talked, and his buoyancy put courage in to the stricken crowd. With that a woman's voice lifted.

"Don't go—don't ye go, darlin'," it screamed. "'Tis no frinds down there. 'Tis Terence O'Hara and his gang—'tis the strike-makers. Don't be throwin' away your sweet young life for thim."

The boy laughed. "That's all right. Terence has a right to his chance." He went on rapidly. "I want five volunteers—quick. A one-man chance isn't enough to take help. Quick—five."

And twenty men pushed to the boy to follow him into hell. Swiftly he picked five; they put on the heavy oxygen helmets; there was a deep silence as the six stepped into the cage and McLean rang the bell that signaled the engineer to let them down. That was all. They were the last rescuers to go down, and the cage had been drawn up empty. That was all, the newspaper said. The girl read it. All! And his father racing across the continent, to stand with the shawled women at the head of the shaft. And she, in the far-off city, going though the motions of living.

The papers told of the crowds gathering, of the Red Cross, of the experts come to consider the situation, of the line of patient women, with shawls over their heads, waiting always, there at the first gray light, there when night fell; the girl, gasping at her window, would have given years of her life to have stood with those women. The second day she read that they had closed the mouth of the shaft; it was considered that the one chance for life below lay in smothering the flames. When the girl read that, a madness came on her. The shawled women felt that same madness; if the inspectors and the company officials had insisted they could not have kept the mine closed long—the people would have opened it by force; it was felt unendurable to seal their men below; the shaft was unsealed in twenty-four hours. But the smoke came out, and then the watchers realized that a wall of flame was worse than a wall of planks and sand, and the shaft was closed again.

For days there was no news; then the first fruitless descent; then men went down and brought up heavy shapes rolled in canvas and bore them to the women; and "each morning the Red Cross president, lifting the curtain of the car where he slept, would see at first light the still rows of those muffled figures waiting in the hopeless daybreak." Not yet had the body of the young superintendent been found; yet one might not hope because of that. But when one afternoon the head-lines of the papers blazed with a huge "Rescued," she could not read it, and she knew that she had hoped.

It was true. Eighteen men had been brought up alive, and Johnny McLean was one. Johnny McLean carried out senseless, with an arm broken, with a gash in his forehead done by a falling beam as he crawled to hail the rescuers—but Johnny McLean alive. He was very ill, yet the girl had not a minute's doubt that he would get well.

And while he lay unconscious, the papers of the country rang with the story of what he had done, and his father sitting by his bed read it, through unashamed tears, but Johnny took no interest. Breathing satisfied him pretty well for a while. There is no need to tell over what the papers told—how he had taken the leadership of the demoralized band; how when he found them cut off from the escape which he had planned he had set them to work building a barrier across a passage where the air was fresher; how behind this barrier they had lived for six days, by the faith and courage of Johnny McLean. How he had kept them busy playing games, telling stories; had taught them music and put heart into them to sing glees, down in their tomb; how he had stood guard over the pitiful supply of water which dripped from

the rock walls, and found ways of saving every drop and made each man take his turn; how when Tom Steele went mad and tried to break out of the barrier on the fifth day, it was McLean who fought him and kept him from the act which would have let in the black damp to kill all of them; how it was the fall in the slippery darkness of that struggle which had broken his arm. The eighteen told the story, but by bit, as the men grew strong enough to talk, and the record rounded out, of life and reason saved by a boy who had risen out of the gray of commonplace into the red light of heroism. The men who came out of that burial spoke afterward of McLean as of an inspired being.

At all events the strike question was settled in that week below, and Johnny McLean held the ringleaders now in the hollow of his hand. Terence O'Hara opened his eyes and delivered a dictum two hours after he was carried home. "Tell thim byes," he growled in weak jerks, "that if any wan of thim says shtrike till that McLean child drops the hat, they'll fight—O'Hara."

Day after day, while the country was in an uproar of enthusiasm, Johnny lay unconscious, breathing, and doing no more. And large engineering affairs were allowed to go and rack and ruin while Henry McLean watched his son.

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 Japanese 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 class. 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 class, at commencement. The classic 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 class of all, taper the classes,—fewer, grayer, as the date is older, till a placard on a tree in the campus tells that the class 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 classes 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 Japanese 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 class, 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 class 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. Class after class 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 masses 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 multitude to hear the men sing that.

Then the game—and Yale wins. The classes 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 institution that after the game the old graduates should go, class by class, to the house of the president of Yale, to renew allegiance. It has come to be an institution that he, standing on the steps of his house, should make a short speech to each class. 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 class 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 class goes away confident that the president at least shares its conviction that it is the best class 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 class 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. Classmates 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 embarrassing 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, embarrassed at times by their manner, but taking obstinately the modest place in the class 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 classes 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.