Commissions

The thermometer on the porch of Government House said ninety-one degrees at half past one, and the Governor-General went down the steps to the motor in Full Dress.

Full Dress for a Governor-General of the Realm had been settled in 1868 by a committee of the Privy Council that had sat for eleven months, met in January, and been composed, so far as Pershing could tell, entirely of men who would never have to wear it. It was a navy-blue tailcoat of heavy wool, cut high, with a standing collar and gold embroidery of oak leaves at the collar and the cuffs and down the front edges, and nine gilt buttons with the Crown on them, and navy trousers with a gold stripe, and a white waistcoat of corded silk, and a white shirt with a wing collar, and a white tie, and white kid gloves, and a black cocked hat with a white plume, which he carried under his arm, because he would not wear it in a motor, and which had been carried under the arms of a good many Governors-General before him and smelled, faintly, of all of them.

It was a civilian dress. That was the point of it. It had no rank on it and no medals and no sword. He had stood in front of the glass at Government House in New Westminster on the morning of his installation in 1921, in this coat, with his medals in a box on the dressing table behind him where they would stay, and had understood for the first time, looking at himself without them, what he had agreed to. He wore it now when it was required and at no other time. It was required for the commissions.

It was not made for ninety-one degrees.

“You look very fine, Your Excellency,” said Mrs Tull, on the porch, with a fan.

“Thank you, Mrs Tull.”

“You look like a bonfire somebody has dressed up for a wedding,” said Mrs Tull. “Here.” She gave him the fan. “Keep it in the hat. Nobody will see. Wesley carries one in his.”

Pershing looked at the fan. It was black, with a picture of a heron on it. He put it in the cocked hat, under the plume, and got into the motor.

---

Dahlgren Hall was the Academy’s armoury and its drill hall and its ballroom, a vast iron and glass shed on the edge of the Yard with a roof like a railway station, built for six hundred men to wheel and turn in under cover in February, and on the first Saturday of June it held two thousand people, and every one of them had a fan.

They were in the galleries round three sides, in tiers, mothers and fathers and sisters and girls in white and men in straw hats with their jackets off and the people of Annapolis who had come in to watch, and below them on the floor in long white ranks, four hundred and sixty-one of them, stood the class of 1926 in full dress whites, at attention, sweating, with the band of the Academy at one end and the platform at the other, and over all of them, through the glass roof, the sun.

The platform was hung with bunting. On it stood the Superintendent in his whites and his medals, and the Commandant, and the chaplain, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland in a morning coat with a fan in his top hat, and the Premier in a morning coat with nothing in his, and the Governor-General of the Realm, in Full Dress, with a heron in his. In front of them on a long table covered in green baize lay four hundred and sixty-one black tubes of pressed card, each with a red seal and a ribbon, in eleven rows, in alphabetical order.

The band played the anthem. Two thousand people stood and two thousand fans stopped moving. Then they sat and the fans started again, and the sound was like rain on a tin roof, or like a great many birds.

The chaplain prayed. He prayed for the class, and for the Navy, and for the King, and for the Governor-General, and for the Lieutenant-Governor, and at some length for the Realm, and at the end, very briefly, in a voice that dropped a little, for the men of the Academy who had not come home from the war, and the hall was still.

Then the Superintendent read the first name.

“Abramowitz, Daniel.”

There was a movement at the end of the first rank, and a young man came out of it. He was slight and dark and very straight, with spectacles, and he came down the long aisle between the white ranks toward the platform at the regulation pace, looking neither left nor right, his face absolutely set, and as he came, from the gallery on the left, about halfway up, a single voice rose above all the fans, high and loud and entirely without shame.

“That’s my boy!”

Two thousand heads turned.

La Guardia was on his feet in the gallery, in his black suit, with his hat in his hand, waving it. He was standing between a stout woman in black who was weeping into a handkerchief and Voss, who was not, and who was trying, with one hand, to pull him back down by the coat.

“That’s my boy!” La Guardia shouted again. “East Harlem! First in the city! First in the class!” He turned to the gallery behind him with his arms spread wide. “Alphabetical!”

Somebody laughed. Then a great many people laughed. Then somebody at the back of the far gallery began to clap, and somebody else, and then the whole of the left gallery was clapping, and then, which nobody had planned and nobody would afterwards admit to starting, the class of 1926, standing at attention in eleven white ranks on the floor of Dahlgren Hall, began very quietly to stamp, in time, with their right feet, so that the iron floor rang like a drum.

Abramowitz did not turn his head. He came up the steps of the platform and halted in front of the Governor-General and saluted, and his hand, at his cap, was shaking.

Pershing took the first black tube from the table and held it out.

“Mr Abramowitz,” he said, under the noise. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your Member is very proud of you.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Do not be sorry,” said Pershing. “He is entitled,” and shook the young man’s hand, and gave him the tube, and Abramowitz took it and stepped back and saluted again and turned and went down the steps, and the gallery on the left went on clapping until he had reached his place in the rank, and then stopped, all at once, and La Guardia sat down.

“Ackerman, Robert.”

---

It took two hours and forty minutes.

Pershing had known it would take a long time and had not, until he was standing in it, understood what a long time would be. Four hundred and sixty-one young men came up the steps of the platform one after another in the heat and saluted and were given a black tube and a handshake and a word, and went down again. The Superintendent read the names in a voice that grew steadily hoarser. The band played softly between the letters of the alphabet. The fans in the galleries never stopped. The sun moved across the glass roof and the light on the floor moved with it, a great white square of it, sliding very slowly from the left gallery toward the right, and where it lay the white uniforms of the class blazed so that Pershing could hardly look at them.

He did not look at the fan in his hat. He did not take off his gloves. He stood at the table in nine pounds of navy wool and gold and shook four hundred and sixty-one hands, and by the letter M the white kid of his right glove was grey, and by the letter S it was wet through, and he was aware, as he had been aware on a great many hot afternoons in a great many places, of the sweat running steadily down the middle of his back under his shirt and his waistcoat and his coat in a single unbroken line, like a plumb line, and of the absolute necessity of not showing it.

He said something to each of them. He did not say the same thing twice, because he had a horror of saying the same thing twice; and he found, somewhere around the letter D, that he did not have to try, because they were not the same men twice.

And he found, somewhere around the letter G, that they were saying something to him.

It began with a man named Gallagher, who was large and fair and from Boston by his voice, and who, as he took his tube and shook the Governor-General’s hand, said very quietly, without moving his lips, in the manner of a man who has had four years’ training in speaking in the ranks: “Corner of Prince George, sir.”

Pershing looked at him.

Gallagher saluted and turned and went down the steps with a face like a wall.

The next man said nothing. The man after him said nothing. The man after that, a short dark man named Gonzales, from Texas, said as he took his tube, in the same way: “Ticked, sir. On the map. Prince George.”

“Thank you, Mr Gonzales.”

“Sir.”

After that it came every few men, all down the alphabet, from the H’s to the end. It did not come from all of them. It came from perhaps one man in five. It came in a dozen different accents, Boston and Texas and Ohio and Georgia and Oregon and somewhere in the Dakotas, and it came always in the same way, without a movement of the lips, at the moment of the handshake, so that the Superintendent at Pershing’s elbow, reading the names, heard none of it, and the Lieutenant-Governor and the Premier behind him heard none of it, and the two thousand people in the galleries heard none of it, and only the Governor-General heard, four hundred and sixty-one times, the class of 1926 telling him what it thought.

Within sight, sir.

The class is ready, sir.

Tonight, sir.

Twenty-two oysters, sir. We heard.

God bless you, sir. For the referee.

Abramowitz, sir. He’s a good egg.

Don’t let them stop it, sir.

He did not answer any of them. He said, to each, what he would have said anyway: congratulations; well done; I am glad to see you here; your mother will be proud; the Navy is fortunate. He kept his face exactly as it had been at the letter A. But somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, around the letter M, with his glove going grey and the sweat running down his back and the great white square of sunlight sliding across the floor, he understood that the whole of the Yard was on La Guardia’s side, every one of them, the class and the galleries and the band and very likely the chaplain, and that they all knew it, and that they all assumed, because he had stood on the step at midnight in his dressing gown and ruled on their map for them, that the referee knew it too.

He did not know what he thought about that. He did not, at that moment, permit himself to know.

“Ruark, Edward.”

The red-haired midshipman came up the steps. His ears were scarlet. He saluted, and took his tube, and shook the Governor-General’s hand, and Pershing saw his lips not move.

“Sir. The ball, sir. Twenty past ten. We’ve worked out the relay.”

“Mr Ruark,” said Pershing, very quietly, “the referee is not a party.”

“No, sir,” said Ruark. “That’s why we’re telling you, sir. So you’ll know where to stand.”

---

Voss came up on to the platform at the letter T.

He came up the side steps, not the front ones, where the midshipmen were coming, and he came very quietly, in his grey suit with his grey bag over his shoulder, and stood just behind the table at Pershing’s elbow, between the Superintendent and the Commandant, with an expression of respectful and complete determination.

“Your Excellency,” he said, under the next name. “Forgive me.”

“Mr Voss.”

“I have reason to believe, Your Excellency,” said Voss, very low, “that one or more of these tubes may have been tampered with.”

Pershing gave the next midshipman his tube and shook his hand. “Tampered with?”

“Your Excellency, a pressed card tube of that diameter,” Voss nodded at the table, “holds approximately six fluid ounces. I have measured one. There are four hundred and sixty-one of them. If one in ten were filled, that would be approximately two and a quarter gallons, Your Excellency. Within sight of a great many places.” He paused. “I have reason to believe that the class may be involved.”

“What reason?”

“They are all whispering, Your Excellency.”

Pershing gave the next midshipman his tube and shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, Mr Tolliver,” and Tolliver said, without moving his lips, “Hang on, sir,” and went down the steps.

“Mr Voss,” said Pershing, “these are the King’s commissions.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“They are signed by the King. They are sealed with the seal of the Realm. They were printed in New Westminster and they came down on the train with me yesterday in a locked box, in the custody of my private secretary, who has not let them out of his sight since, and who is standing,” he did not look, “at the end of the platform, watching you.”

Voss looked. Bramwell was standing at the end of the platform in a dark morning coat, with his hands behind his back, watching him.

“I see, Your Excellency.”

“If you wish to open one,” said Pershing, “you may open one. You will have to ask the officer whose commission it is. In front of his mother.”

Voss looked out at the floor of Dahlgren Hall, at the eleven white ranks and the four hundred and fifty men who had been commissioned standing in them, each with a black tube under his arm, and at the galleries, and the two thousand fans.

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Your Excellency,” he said.

“No,” said Pershing. “I don’t think it will.”

Voss went down the side steps, and Pershing gave the next midshipman his tube.

---

He gave the address at a quarter to five.

He gave it standing at the front of the platform without notes, with the cocked hat under his arm and the heron in it, and it was short, because he had promised the Superintendent it would be short and because there was no man in that hall, himself included, who could have stood a long one.

He spoke about service. He had spoken about service at every commissioning for five years, and he said again what he always said, that service was not obedience, though it required obedience; that a commission was not a reward for four years at the Academy but a debt, contracted on the day it was signed, and owed for the rest of a man’s life to the people who paid for it; that the Navy was not the King’s and not the Parliament’s and not its own, but the Realm’s, which was to say everyone’s, the dockers’ and the cannery hands’ and the oystermen’s as much as the Admiral’s, and that an officer who forgot it would be reminded, and should be.

And then he said something he had not said before. He did not know he was going to say it until it was being said.

“You will give orders,” he said. “Most of them will be obeyed. Some will not. When an order is not obeyed, you will be tempted to think that the fault is in the man. Sometimes it will be. But I will tell you something I learned late. An order that cannot be obeyed does more harm than no order at all. It does not merely fail. It teaches every man who hears it that orders are things that fail, and he carries that lesson to the next one, and the next, and he is right to. Give orders that can be kept. And when you find you have given one that cannot, have the courage to say so, out loud, and withdraw it. That is not weakness. It is the only thing that keeps the others standing.”

He stopped. He had not meant to say any of it. The hall was absolutely silent, two thousand people and four hundred and sixty-one officers and the band, and even the fans had stopped.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are commissioned. God keep you,” and stepped back.

The class of 1926 threw its caps into the air.

They went up all at once, four hundred and sixty-one white caps, into the great white square of sunlight under the glass roof of Dahlgren Hall, and hung there for a moment, turning, and came down again like snow on everybody, and the band struck up, and the galleries stood, and in the gallery on the left a short man in a black suit was on his feet again, shouting something that nobody could hear and everybody understood.

Pershing stood at the front of the platform with his hat under his arm and his glove wet through and did not move.

Behind him, Tull, who had been sitting in the heat with his fan for three hours in perfect happiness, leaned forward and said, warmly, delightedly, with no idea at all, “Wonderful, Your Excellency. Wonderful. Orders that can be kept. Exactly so. That is exactly what I always say about Maryland.”

And Ritchie, beside him, put his top hat over his face and his shoulders shook.