“We all thought he would have a brilliant career. But perhaps he is more or less forgotten now. He came out of college and was married, and his father died and left him a mother and two sisters and an inheritance of debts. That cut him off from the professional schools and he went West, and I have found out that he went into a business where there was no chance in the world of advancement. But it had to be done because that offered a way of bearing the burdens and obligations that were on him. It was just like him. It was an unselfish thing to do. Perhaps working to pay off his father’s debts was quixotic, but it amounts to being well inside the limits of honor. It certainly needs no apologies. Then he had to take care of a wife and three others besides. His health became very bad — he used to work sixteen hours a day sometimes, and when he was forty years old he found himself very much out of order. Then he came back East. Part of his burdens had been removed, but it was too late to start life as he might have started it once. He had burned out in the service like a faithful, honest, well-made candle. His light had been dim, but it had also been steady. I suppose he is alive, although I don’t know. But all of us who knew him best are sure that wherever he is he is still putting up a good fight, and though he hasn’t got the cheers and the limelight, he’s pulling mighty well! I know it!”
The room was very still as Crane paused. He had spoken slowly and with a boyish simplicity that commanded the eyes of all the men about the tables.
“I found out about him at this late day because I felt I had been a fool to let his friendship slip away from me simply because he had gone West, and the others who knew him as I knew him felt the same. We’ve tried to locate him, but we lost the scent after we found he had come back from Iowa. It was disappointing — because we had planned to go back to-night, Drowson and Lapham and Riggs and myself and this other man, and sit under the tree in the yard where twenty-five years ago we’d promised to reach success, before we came back to attend this dinner. I feel sure that this missing man — this lost member of the class, I might say, for I can’t find any one who knows where he is — ought to be there. We think he comes as near success as any one of us.”
Crane stopped for a moment, and, leaning over, brushed a little pile of cigar ashes off the table-cloth. Clews, now hot with an unnamable emotion, now cold with excitement, sat gazing with motionless staring eyes across the length of the room toward Crane. The latter was red with the embarrassment of a subject which he knew was too big for him; Clews was very white.
The speaker raised his head once more and looked about at the eyes that were upon him. “I think you all understand,” he said, appealingly. “We learned years ago at the University that faithful duty really counted, and not the dollars and the shouts alone—and having a name in encyclopaedias. The kind of success we are looking for isn’t always gilt-edged; the band isn’t always playing for it to march by! When I looked up this man I found a good, clean, honest story—a story of devotion and loyalty, and the kind of courage that held out when nobody was looking on or waving hats! I think we all ought to be glad he is a ‘Seventy-six’ man, and that we are not so narrow or ignorant as to count him a lost cause and a failure. I want you to drink a toast to him with me — gentlemen, to the man who does his job in a shadow!” Crane’s voice had dropped to a whisper. The whole class came to its feet together!
Clews realized that this toast was to him. Had his head been cool he would have arisen with the rest, unmarked and unknown — it was the old custom of remaining seated when so honored that betrayed him. It left him a second behind the rest, and the speaker’s big blue eyes were upon him at once, growing wider and wider in an opening bloom of recognition, and staring and staring like a man who sees into another world. Crane lowered his glass and some of the yellow liquid trickled down on the table-cloth. “Good God!” he exclaimed, and his suppressed voice penetrated to every corner of the room.
Clews stumbled back into his chair. Sitting there, with the others upon their feet, he became the central figure. For a single second there was complete silence, and then “Seventy-six” raised its voice in a great generous roar, increasing, billowing up, surging into Clews’s ears. He looked up with wet cheeks and smiled like a pleased boy. This was his class, cheering — and for him!
Much later in the night, at an hour when only a few stray lights were burning in the dormitories, some undergraduates who had stayed over for Commencement and were returning to their rooms after an evening in town, saw five men, old enough to be their fathers, quarrelling in the moonlight in the middle of the yard.
“It was this tree,” said one. “I know it.”
“I tell you you are wrong. We know what we are talking about,” came two other voices.
“I’ve been out here every year,” asserted a third. “It’s absurd to suppose I’ve forgotten!”
The undergraduates, who had stopped at a doorway, grinned significantly. ”Scandal in gray hairs,” said one.
Still later in the night, Clews returned to his wife and daughter, who had been sitting up anxiously, watching the hands of the clock walk into the morning. Governor William Drowson was with him, wearing a Panama hat which was no longer a decorous covering for the head, and blinking good-naturedly at the light.
“Alice,” said Carter Clews, “this is Billy. I roomed with him when I was a Freshman. He’s going to spend the night with me.”
