Going to Commencement

IN my mother’s room, where all seven of us were born, stood a certain bureau, with a little drawer in the upper right-hand corner. To us children this drawer was a kind of sanctuary; for therein lay a little red pasteboard box with the printed legend ‘Brown’s Bronchial Troches.'

But Brown’s Bronchial Troches were not what fired the boyish imagination: it was the sacred object, not germane to medicine, reposing in the box. Here lay a red ticket, denoting Life Membership in the Hoosac Valley Fair. No individual and non-transferable privilege, this. It was a family ticket and for life. It raised the great question, recurring every autumn: ‘Are you going to Cattle Show?'

And so, in the last week of September, every year, we hitched up Cobden, or Chevalier (our family horse always bore the name of some noted economist), to the blue-lined carryall, and started eastward for the Cattle Show.

On these occasions, the term ‘ family’ was given its broadest possible interpretation; its content was equivalent to the capacity of the chariot. In addition to the sons of the household, we packed in Billy Cooper, naturally; then Cholly Spooner, and Cholly McCoon, and Monk Raymond, and the Ethiopian Amos Jackson, who looked like a gorilla, having long black arms that reached below his knees. It was always a fine point of casuistry during the rest of the year, whether, as we plunged past the gatekeeper at the Fair Grounds, and flashed our ticket before his eyes, we were really justified in shouting, as we always did, ‘We’re Professor Perry’s boys, and he’s a Life Member!’ My brother Walter has never had, to this day, a doubt, on the subject. ‘We’ meant ‘We Perrys.’ But he is a business man.

There was for us, moreover, another season of excitement to anticipate; and when the snow was off the mountains, and the mud was off the roads, and the new grass had grown tall enough to wave in the wind, and the lilacs had bent down fragrantly over Walden’s spring, and the bats came in the twilight, and fireflies, and the sound of college singing as you tumbled into bed in the dark—every boy in town would put this second question to his pal, or write it shyly on his slate: ‘Are you going to Commencement?’ An engagement to preclude this, no one could have; that was well known; for none of us ever went away in summer time.

Oh, wonderful question! utterly superfluous, yet asked in utmost soberness; not for information, but for utterance, for the glory of the word, for the sheer mystical joy of the thing!

‘Are you going to Commencement?'

For Commencement had a meaning. It meant a brass band all the way from Boston, a band clangorous and martial, in magnificent uniforms with gold braid. There was a boy in my school, a fine boy except for his pride, at whose house the leader of the band boarded all during the three days’ engagement.

It meant that the Governor of the Commonwealth was coming to Williamstown, and the sheriff of the County of Berkshire, with bell-crown and cockade, in buff waistcoat, carrying a staff. It meant wearing your Sunday suit all day Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday; it meant pretty girls from big cities; pretty girls, in stylish dresses, with wonderful parasols — girls who lived in New York.

But they were not going back there till the cool autumn; they were on their way to that wonderful place called ‘the seashore,’ which none of us had ever seen; and they talked about going in bathing, just the way you would speak of going huckleberrying, without blushing a bit! They danced the ‘German,’ whatever that was; and they were laced so tight that you wondered where all the food went to.

It meant, here and there, a grand equipage, spacious victorias, with resplendent coachmen and great, glistening horses in harnesses that creaked and squeaked, and were covered with gold. I know it was gold: a fellow said so. In those days, a lady sitting in her carriage had time to see you coming, and when she bowed to you slowly, with a smile, she dipped her parasol a little, and made a slight forward motion of her thin shoulders. I guess you would call it graciousness or good breeding, or something. Oh, I know, you have no need to tell me; I know well enough it was because she loved my mother.

When the train gets in from New York on Monday, Cyrus W. Field will be here. A boy in my school said to me that Cyrus W. Field was worth a million dollars; and Toad Parsons, from the Whiteoaks, spit some tobacco juice and said, ‘Yes, and then you can add another million to that!’ And we added it.

Everyone was so happy and generous and open! Ah, when the band struck up that wonderful music, and you marched along at the side of the road, it nearly tore out your heart to think how badly Napoleon must have felt on that retreat from Moscow. Anyway, Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest, man in the world.

Somehow, everything seemed open at Commencement time. The doors of the two Museums of Natural History were open all day long. One could go right in. Here were stuffed bears and stuffed birds and a stuffed giraffe, and snakes in great glass jars all drowned in alcohol. ‘Monk’ Raymond, who was older than I, — he was almost twelve, — said we would better be pretty careful in here; that there was a lot of arsenic around; they stuffed the birds with it.

Monk was my best friend. As a friend, he was always steadfast; but as a philosopher, he was sometimes fallible. He was an orphan, brought up by a crotchety old grandfather who carried a crooked stick, and a grandmother who, spiritually, was a cross between a crab-apple and the north wind.

Monk was staring into a humming-bird’s nest. He looked at it a long while, and then remarked, — it seemed for no reason at all, — ‘I heard something funny about Jack Perkins the other day.’

‘What was that, Monk?'

‘His mother kisses him every night when he goes off upstairs to bed.’

‘But, gosh all hemlocks, Monk,—' I began; and then suddenly, looking at him, I saw behind the mask. I saw, and I am proud to recall that I lied like a gentleman, and remarked, ‘Well! that’s the darndest piece of foolishness I ever heard of!'

He also asserted, in a whisper, that the janitor had lifted a snake out of one of those glass jars, and then drunk up the alcohol. That seemed to me quite awful; it seemed incredible that, in the midst of all these wonderful, wonderful things, and with the chance to see them every day, a man could think just about himself, and the delicious pleasure of strong drink.

‘But the worst is wine,’ said Monk. ’Wine is the worst there is. I drank some once. I took just a sip of grandmother’s cherry bounce, and I reeled like anything.’

‘Monk, what do you think is the wickedest thing a fellow can do ? ’

‘Well, murder is pretty wicked,’ reflected Monk, ‘murder and adultery.’

‘Do you mean—do you mean having two wives?’

‘Yes!’ answered he, ‘and never speaking to either of them; never going near them at all; just neglecting them.’

Depression sat upon both of us. But hark! What’s that? It’s the Band! There goes the Band!

And out we scurried as fast as our short legs could carry us.

‘Monk, how would you like to be General Sherman, and sit on a hotel piazza in the evening, and smoke a cigar from Havana, and put up your feet on to the railing, and just think and think and remember?’

‘Fine!’ said Monk; ‘but Hannibal was the greatest of all — if only those Romans had given him a fair show.’

II

From neighboring villages and outlying farms, from Blackinton and Pownal, from Bee Hill and Hemlock Brook, from Whiteoaks and The Hopper and South Part, came the rural population to Commencement.

The men were dressed in their best black suits, and they wore new shoes that squeaked. The advanced industrial age in which we now live has eliminated the squeak from shoe-leather. What a lamentable loss! It gave a personal note; it was a veritable annunciation. The women were always dressed in white, and were either excessively spare or else excessively stout. In any case, they carried fans. There were palm-leaf fans, and fans that shut up with a click; but all were needful, and all were in action, for the weather was sure to be intolerably hot.

Better judges of oratory, keener critics of forensic discourse, could nowhere have been found than in this assemblage at the village church. This was no peasantry; it was only here and there in the building that one could have sighted a rustic. This was a segment of the Yankee race. Sharp intelligence was here, and abounding humor, and a moral integrity, deep-rooted in Calvinism.

Take flight, O Sophomore of the prize contest, take flight into the empyrean, if you will; you will fly alone; you shall not take this people with you. Storm, O Senator from Washington; they will listen and wonder, but inwardly they will laugh you to scorn.

College graduates in very respectable numbers would be found among this farming group; fathers and mothers of college men in greater numbers still. Their daughters were school-teachers, and teachers of Sunday schools; and the whole family read the Springfield Republican. At many a four-corners, among syringa bushes, rested a plain white House of God; and men of brains, men like my father, used to commune there with these people upon the deep things of life. I repeat: this was no peasantry.

There were further attractions, however, beyond the things of the mind and the spirit. If you began to be wearied by the graduation oratory; and the programme seemed to extend on and on, away to the bottom of the third page; and the intermissions for music by the band appeared too few; and ‘The Soul of Matthew Arnold’ began to get a little blurred in your mind; and you grew indifferent to ‘Bismarck and the Unification of Germany’; and you yourself began to feel the contagion of ‘The Unrest of the Age’; and it grew hotter all the time; and the Doctors of Divinity on the platform began to loosen, just a little, their snowy white cravats; and His Excellency the Governor of the Commonwealth had become suspiciously still — you could steal out of church, with a serious expression, and visit the merry-goround.

For Stephen Bacon, proprietor of the Hopper farm, those rich broad acres of meadow and upland overhung by Bald Mountain, used to descend upon the town at Commencement time, with his mighty swings and his merrygo-round. These he installed in open spaces near the College; and what with booths and the rest, the neighborhood would take on the aspect of a county fair. In years far later, when one sat at Bacon’s supper-table, after a happy day of trout fishing, he would observe to his guest and to his hired men, ‘Anyone can succeed at farming who uses good energy and good calculation.’ We knew his grandfather had proved this on the very same homestead; his father had proved it in his time; and he himself had proved it.

But nature’s harvest out of those generous fields was not his only harvesttime. Commencement and Commencement crowds also brought to him their goodly returns. Yes! it was ‘good calculation.’ One cannot forget the patient blue eye and the measured drawl of this sage son of Ceres, who dwelt beneath the shadows of Greylock.

And here at the merry-go-round would be Abe the Bunter, the very blackest of all Blacks. His life had come in with the century, and in boyhood he had escaped from slavery in York State. He had married an Amazon named Elsa, of Indian blood mingled with that of a Hessian soldier in the army of Burgoyne.

Abe was afraid of her, but so was everyone else; for when she strode down the street, silent and sinister, she was as formidable as a regiment of the Old Prussian Guard. They occupied a cabin in the Whiteoaks, by the side of Broad Brook; but if, as preachers tell us, the French have no word for home, neither had Abe the Bunter.

Abe, in his prime, was a most powerful Negro, and he performed, not with hands or feet, but with his head, Herculean labors. It happened in this wise. He had a cranium as resistant as armor plate. More than this, at the summit of his forehead was a large protuberant mound, the size of a hen’s egg.

This African Pan would use his head as a battering-ram, and no dormitory door could sustain the shock. Thus, for the inconsiderable sum of half a dollar, a group of busy undergraduates in a college study could be induced to satisfy their intellectual curiosity and their destructive instincts at the same time. It was magnificent, and, if not war, it bore a close resemblance to it.

This eccentricity of cranium became Abe the Bunter’s chief financial resource; it was literally his capital. And when age came on, and caution, and when prowess was relaxed, he still throve; for in the interest of science he hypothecated his skull. To no less than a half-dozen different, students he had sold his cranium for cash, delivery to be made when the Lord should call him.

Yet the last time I saw him, he was in the poor-house. As I handed him the package of tobacco I had brought for him, he sagely observed, ‘It has always been worth a great deal to me to be a nigger.’

Epictetus! Epictetus! can you equal that?

I sometimes suspect that Abe the Bunter may be destined to greater fame than any of the gifted sons of Williams or of Williamstown. It may be that ages hence, when the Hoosac shall have overrun its banks, Macaulay’s traveler from New Zealand, with an anthropologist in his company, may unearth the skull of the gallant Abe.

‘Here was a Nordic,’ the anthropologist will affirm; ‘a direct ancestor of the blue-eyed, blond-haired Nordic race.’ And the Williamstown Man, Homo Bunterius, will take a place in the ringing halls of Science, even as the Neanderthal Man, the Rhodesian Man, and the Man of Piltdown.

But why that group of gleeful listeners surrounding the person with the wheelbarrow? They are gulping down the oratory of the redoubtable Bill Pratt. For this is Bill himself — Bill, with his sawbuck and his saw; Bill, who took no holidays, but was himself a holiday; Bill, who was the joy of college boys throughout more than sixty years; Bill, who claimed membership in my grandfather’s class, in my father’s class, and in my class. A sturdy, muscular man, and grave, he can neither read nor write. He is wearing several pairs of trousers and half a dozen shirts; and his sleeves are rolled up at the elbow. Winter and summer, this is his garb. He is not only clothed, but clothed upon. His diet, never varied, consists of crackers and cheese and hard cider. To feed his body, he saws wood; but to satisfy his soul, he makes orations. To the layman they are sound and fury, signifying nothing; but to the poet, the artist, the mystic, they are joy and bliss ineffable.

Years ago, when I was a small boy, my mother used to go on pilgrimage with me, one day in spring, one day in autumn, to buy me clothes against the coming season.

Not Damascus, hardly Athens, certainly not Rome, has stirred my pulses as did, in those great days, the Main Street of North Adams. For on a corner of this street stood a wonderful store; and behind the counter, a wonderful man, whose voice was very quiet and whose manners seemed the gentlest in the world.

When the garments had been chosen, these long-awaited words would fall from the lips of Henry Savage: ‘We should like to present to the young man, either a necktie, or a pair of suspenders.’

The Valley of Decision!

I would walk to the front door and look out upon the tumultuous roaring life of the World of Men. I have found no more vital question. Here lay the whole problem of Art and Morality.

Dear Reader, have I taken too long to tell you that the oratory of Bill Pratt was of the necktie, rather than of the suspender order? It was for ornament, rather than for moral uplift.

Art thou an impressionist? Listen; this was taken down in shorthand: —

‘Gentlemen of the noble conjugation! Sanctified embodiments of the dust of earth! I greet you with the testiments of munification, huminity, proserpy, and destruction.

‘By the efforts of my shad-glooms of death, by the fables of conjuity and the vance of dormant worship, I select myself. I elevate myself on prospersity and tain and parmenity and generosity, to the gable-end of Christianity. Arise! the Tain of Progress! Hear us, Sakes of Life and Glooms of Death. On the fancy verge of Egotism, may the whale gates of parmenity transform my elevation, and concess my headways of bluce in the ornaments of munition and the tain of gollidge.

‘Transform my own sanctity in the ballads of life, and, purified by the rich views of the dust of earth, strike the Shakespeares of the gable-end. Proserpize the glooms of the infinesimal destruction. Fountain of Headways and Charge of the Glooms of earth! By the verb defections of parmenity, mangenism, resurrection, and redemption, Hail to the Dust of Earth! Spit of the halfways, ornaments of publicity, vance of worship and tain of progress, concess myself with all-spice and ranggang to the gable-end of the cartridge-box, to the inguinity of the brainless hymoniky, the concessive tweed-shell, and the Shakespearean spit-fire. Oh! for the whale gates of Sanctity, the testiments of gollidge and glooms. May the shoulder-blades of Time and the inguinity of Purification consume us!

‘Sakes of Life and Fountain of all Headways, transform us by the ornaments of testimonial pardonation to the Shad-Glooms of Eternity! ’

This, of course, in the realm of Thought is pure mysticism; and in the realm of Sense, what Music, what Music it was!

And what shall I more say? For time would fail me to tell of Sugar Billy; of Aaron Blue, that Merlin of the Whiteoaks, who peddled the gleaming sea-sand; of Sabriny Beebe; of Mandy Crum; of Josh Maynard, who looked like Lord Palmerston dug up from a barnyard; of old Doctor Porter, the suave Ethiopian who could set your bones if that was your desire; and of that strange apparition, Lon Leet of Moon Hollow.

At this June season, our house would be filled with guests; the more crowded it was, the happier was my mother, the smile upon whose lips in every season no poet could describe. Her graciousness and unfeigned delight in welcoming back some lonely missionary from India or South Africa, home on furlough, put heart into many a good man or woman, half-dazed by America after years of foreign residence. Ranged about our dinner-table sat college classmates of my father, the men of ’52.

I wonder how clearly I can recall Henry Hazeltine?

By Saturday noon the Reverend Henry Hazeltine would climb down out of the stage-coach. He was father’s oldest and dearest friend, and they were members of the same fraternity. Though a gentle, pulmonary soul, he was one of our hardy perennials for the Commencement season. His voice was very thin, but so was everything else about him, save his ancient carpet-bag, which always bulged with spotless linen. He wore low shoes, and white socks, and white cravat, and a whitelinen duster for traveling; but his Panama hat had been browned by the glare of many Stockbridge summers. His upper lip, perhaps the longest and most solemn in modern history, was clean-shaven; the rest of his face was covered by a dark red beard. And he had brown eyes of the greatest, depth and beauty.

Father claimed that in a ‘Logic’ examination at the end of their Junior year, Henry had beaten him by one point. But the Reverend Henry declared that he had been beaten by father. In a friendship lasting for half a century, this was their only point of disagreement.

Just one other portrait — this of father’s fellow townsman and intimate friend, ‘Jimmie’ Paul. Always at table with us on these high occasions, he must have seemed a puzzle to many of the ‘Gown.’ Everybody called him ‘Jimmie.’ To old and young, to even the smallest child in town, he was Jimmie Paul. This, too, not by reason of affection for him, but by reason of a veiled contempt. For Jimmie Paul was ‘queer.’ There was no society for the prevention of cruelty by children, and Jimmie was fair game for the silliest and for the most stupid. He was an old bachelor and a hermit. Perhaps no man ever lived among the Berkshire Hills who was so sensitive to natural beauty, and who felt so passionate a love for little children. His voice he sent forth in a rhapsody or chant, and as he talked, be blinked his eyes. As I recall him, he resembled the portraits of Thoreau, and he was about one hundred times more interesting.

Some Friday in June, about the time of the wild azalea, he would appear at the schoolhouse and announce that on the following day he would conduct a picnic on East Mountain. At the head of his troop of boys and girls, all carrying their luncheon packages, with here and there a teacher, he would lead us through the woods, pointing out sudden beauties hid from the foundation of the world. He was a poet, worshiping at the Temple’s inner shrine.

There at the table also would be college presidents, and teachers from the Middle West or the Pacific States. Stalwarts these, who had gone out from our Vale of Beauty to become pioneers of education on the treeless plains of Nebraska and on the California coast. Stirred by father’s stimulating interest, each had his tale to tell of small beginnings, of valor, and success.

There was one magic key never touched at these formal occasions — a note reserved for the intimacy of the family circle, when the Commencement Season should be over. This was my mother’s astounding mimicry. The Lord had permitted mother to be lefthanded; the manifest purpose, this: that, while pouring tea with her left hand, she might be free to gesture with her right.

Nothing rested my father like a demonstration of this kind, though it was a gift wholly left out of his own composition. The roaring waves of laughter from him and the six children always disconcerted the Puritan soul of my mother. To the end of her days she would blush with confusion.

Impersonation, with her, was a wholly interior thing; it needed only a wave of the hand, the raising of an eyebrow, a twitch of her mobile lips, and she achieved perfectly, in a fraction of a second, what a blunderer would take five minutes to do, and fail in doing. O ye holy, who sat in amplitude of white waistcoat on the Commencement Stage — you never knew! Just a moment’s quick posture, a trick of the voice, and the bland gods of the platform became deflated for us forever!

Our chief social lions were the adventurers of the Cross — that gifted family from Syria; that immensely tall athletic man, who carried on his forehead the great scar, from the scimitar of a Kurdish bandit in the mountains of Armenia; that vigorous missionary from Southern India, who took me for companion on a lonely walk one day in the high pastures, and remarked, as he lighted his cigar before vaulting the rail fence, ‘I would as soon expect to convert the devil in hell as to convert a Hindu of the Brahman caste.’ How entertaining, after a day or two, they all became! What stories they told! And how they dreaded the thought of being parted, by the width of the world, from their growing children.

Yes! these were our social lions, and how unfashionable they were! Looking back at the various types, they seem the most unworldly group of people ever drawn beneath a single roof; and, within somewhat narrow limits, the best-educated lot.

But this present world they knew better than most, for they were workers in it. They had been bred to its enlightenment, and dedicated to its healing.