BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR
Henry Blake Fuller
CONTENTS
_1. Cope at a College Tea
2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call
3. Cope Is "Entertained"
4. Cope Is Considered
5. Cope Is Considered Further
6. Cope Dines--and Tells About It
7. Cope Under Scrutiny
8. Cope Undertakes an Excursion
9. Cope on the Edge of Things
10. Cope at His House Party
11. Cope Enlivens the Country
12. Cope Amidst Cross-Purposes
13. Cope Dines Again--and Stays After
14. Cope Makes an Evasion
15. Cope Entertains Several Ladies
16. Cope Goes A-Sailing
17. Cope Among Cross-Currents
18. Cope at the Call of Duty
19. Cope Finds Himself Committed
20. Cope Has a Distressful Christmas
21. Cope, Safeguarded, Calls Again
22. Cope Shall Be Rescued
23. Cope Regains His Freedom
24. Cope in Danger Anew
25. Cope in Double Danger
26. Cope as a Go-Between
27. Cope Escapes a Snare
28. Cope Absent From a Wedding
29. Cope Again in the Country
30. Cope as a Hero
31. Cope Gets New Light on His Chum
32. Cope Takes His Degree
33. Cope in a Final View_
AFTERWORD
1
_COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA_
What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with
complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But
twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that
age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary
opportunities, is undeniably--a man; whereas what we require here is
something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male
who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may
even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid
or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence
due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may
seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to
figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and
the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke
their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that,
their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance,
their patience, and even their forgiveness.
I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little
group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the
campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day
more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is
all the better for being just a little ahead.
Of course Cope was not an undergraduate--a species upon which many of
the Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard. "They come,
and they go," said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; "and,
after all, they're more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding."
Besides, the Bigger Town, with all its rich resources and all its
varied opportunities, lay but an hour away. Churchton lived much of its
real life beyond its own limits, and the student who came to be
entertained socially within them was the exception indeed.
No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he
was working along, in a leisurely way, to a degree. He expected to be
an M.A., or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of
later years. But, anyhow, nothing was finer than "writing"--except
lecturing about it.
"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a
small reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held
his hand as long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer
than most women would have felt at liberty to do. And besides speaking
loudly and boldly, she looked loudly and boldly; and she employed a
determined smile which seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I
please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself off--and
much else besides. "Of course I simply _can't_ be half so intrepid as I
seem!" it said. "Everybody about us understands that, and I must ask
your recognition too for an ascertained fact."
"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me
because I haven't been here to _be_ known." He spoke in a ringing,
resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good
will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high
degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with
a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following
his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in
Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another
bout: "I'm after that degree," he concluded.
"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you _have_ been here; you must
have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
began again.
"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust.
Dirt beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."
"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his
long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks,
anyway. And the Hanging Gardens...!" She still clung, looking up his
slopes terrace by terrace.
Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.
"Gracious!" he said, no less resonant than before. "Am I a landscape
garden? Am I a stage-setting? Am I a----?"
Medora Phillips finally dropped his hand. "You're a wicked,
unappreciative boy," she declared. "I don't know whether to ask you to
my house or not. But you may make yourself useful in _this_ house, at
least. Run along over to that corner and see if you can't get me a cup
of tea."
Cope bowed and smiled and stepped toward the tea-table. His head once
turned, the smile took on a wry twist. He was no squire of dames, no
frequenter of afternoon receptions. Why the deuce had he come to this
one? Why had he yielded so readily to the urgings of the professor of
mathematics?--himself urged in turn, perhaps, by a wife for whose
little affair one extra man at the opening of the fall season counted,
and counted hugely. Why must he now expose himself to the boundless
aplomb and momentum of this woman of forty-odd who was finding
amusement in treating him as a "college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had
actually called him: well, perhaps his present position made all this
possible. He was not yet out in the world on his own. In the background
of "down state" was a father with a purse in his pocket and a hand to
open the purse. Though the purse was small and the hand reluctant, he
must partly depend on both for another year. If he were only in
business--if he were only a broker or even a salesman--he should not
find himself treated with such blunt informality and condescension as a
youth. If, within the University itself, he were but a real member of
the faculty, with an assured position and an assured salary, he should
not have to lie open to the unceremonious hectorings of the socially
confident, the "placed."
He regained his smile on the way across the room, and the young
creature behind the samovar, who had had a moment's fear that she must
deal with Severity, found that a beaming Affability--though personally
unticketed in her memory--was, after all, her happier allotment. In her
reaction she took it all as a personal compliment. She could not know,
of course, that it was but a piece of calculated expressiveness, fitted
to a 'particular social function and doubly overdone as the wearer's
own reaction from the sprouting indignation of the moment before. She
hoped that her hair, under his sweeping advance, was blowing across her
forehead as lightly and carelessly as it ought to, and that his taste
in marquise rings might be substantially the same as hers. She faced
the Quite Unknown, and asked it sweetly, "One lump or two?"
"The dickens! How do _I_ know?" he thought. "An extra one on the
saucer, please," he said aloud, with his natural resonance but slightly
hushed. And his blue eyes, clear and rather cold and hard, blazed down,
in turn, on her.
"Why, what a nice, friendly fellow!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, on
receiving her refreshment. "Both kinds of sandwiches," she continued,
peering round her cup. "Were there three?" she asked with sudden
shrewdness.
"There were macaroons," he replied; "and there was some sort of
layer-cake. It was too sticky. These are more sensible."
"Never mind sense. If there is cake, I want it. Tell Amy to put it on a
plate."
"Amy?"
"Yes, Amy. _My_ Amy."
"Your Amy?"
"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."
Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl behind
the samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that her
ring, borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back
with his plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a
"boy" to a "fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot
through a sublimated butler's pantry?
"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked
lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come, we
will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about
yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled
down into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she
told herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but
slender?--even spare, if need be."
As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he,
restored to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed
exuberance,--a man who stood just within the curtained doorway and
flicked a small graying moustache with the point of his forefinger took
in the scene with a studious regard. Every small educational community
has its scholar _manqué_--its haunter of academic shades or its
intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role
in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the
passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young
present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and
who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he
could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows
enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward
their elders; but a few of them--one now and then, at long
intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. On
these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness, comeliness
and _élan_, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one in all the
long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time. And now
he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might in
time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went
for naught; and the young men let him walk under the elms and the
scrub-oaks neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their
fraternities, and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled
away on the quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only
realized how much a friendly hand, extended to them from middle life,
might do for their futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the
youthful egoists, ignoring him still, faced their respective futures,
however uncertain, with much more confidence than he, backed by
whatever assurances and accumulations he enjoyed, could face his own.
"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"
Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the
observer, the _raisonneur_, in this narrative? If so, you err.
What!--you may ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.
It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted
him into this role.
A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been
asked to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given
abundant opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling
subject--himself. Either she now had enough fixed points for securing
the periphery of his circle or else she preferred to leave some portion
of his area (now ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra.
Or perhaps she wished some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her
admiration and confirm her judgment. At all events----
"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."
Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.
"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous.
"You are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She
paused. "Do you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your
first name?"
"Why, is that necessary?"
"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"
"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."
"Never!"
"Bertram. Why not?"
"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and
guessed----!"
"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."
"You hear, Mr. Randolph? You are to meet Mr. Bertram Cope."
Cope, who had risen and had left any embarrassment consequent upon the
short delay to Basil Randolph himself, shot out a hand and summoned a
ready smile. Within his cuff was a hint for the construction of his
fore-arm: it was lean and sinewy, clear-skinned, and with strong power
for emphasis on the other's rather short, well-fleshed fingers. And as
he gripped, he beamed; beamed just as warmly, or just as coldly--at all
events, just as speciously--as he had beamed before: for on a social
occasion one must slightly heighten good will,--all the more so if one
be somewhat unaccustomed and even somewhat reluctant.
Mrs. Phillips caught Cope's glance as it fell in all its glacial
geniality.
"He looks down on us!" she declared.
"How down?" Cope asked.
"Well, you're taller than either of us."
"I don't consider myself tall," he replied. "Five foot nine and a
half," he proceeded ingenuously, "is hardly tall."
"It is we who are short," said Randolph.
"But really, sir," rejoined Cope kindly, "I shouldn't call you short.
What is an inch or two?"
"But how about me?" demanded Mrs. Phillips.
"Why, a woman may be anything--except too tall," responded Cope
candidly.
"But if she wants to be stately?"
"Well, there was Queen Victoria."
"You incorrigible! I hope I'm not so short as that! Sit down, again; we
must be more on a level. And you, Mr. Randolph, may stand and look down
on us both. I'm sure you have been doing so, anyway, for the past ten
minutes!"
"By no means, I assure you," returned Randolph soberly.
Soberly. For the young man had slipped in that "sir." And he had been
so kindly about Randolph's five foot seven and a bit over. And he had
shown himself so damnably tender toward a man fairly advanced within
the shadow of the fifties--a man who, if not an acknowledged outcast
from the joys of life, would soon be lagging superfluous on their rim.
Randolph stood before them, looking, no doubt, a bit vacant and
inexpressive. "Please go and get Amy," Mrs. Phillips said to him. "I
see she's preparing to give way to some one else."
Amy--who was a blonde girl of twenty or more--came back with him
pleasantly and amiably enough; and her aunt--or whatever she should
turn out to be--was soon able to lay her tongue again to the syllables
of the interesting name of Bertram.
Cope, thus finally introduced, repeated the facial expressions which he
had employed already beside the tea-table. But he added no new one; and
he found fewer words than the occasion prompted, and even required. He
continued talking with Mrs. Phillips, and he threw an occasional remark
toward Randolph; but now that all obstacles were removed from free
converse with the divinity of the samovar he had less to say to her
than before. Presently the elder woman, herself no whit offended, began
to figure the younger one as a bit nonplused.
"Never mind, Amy," she said. "Don't pity him, and don't scorn him. He's
really quite self-possessed and quite chatty. Or"--suddenly to Cope
himself--"have you shown us already your whole box of tricks?"
"That must be it," he returned.
"Well, no matter. Mr. Randolph can be nice to a nice girl."
"Oh, come now,----"
"Well, shall I ask you to my house, after this?"
"No. Don't. Forbid it. Banish me."
"Give one more chance," suggested Randolph sedately.
"Why, what's all this about?" said the questioning glance of Amy. If
there was any offense at all, on anybody's part, it lay in making too
much of too little.
"Take back my plate, somebody," said Mrs. Phillips.
Randolph put out his hand for it.
"This sandwich," said Amy, reaching for an untouched square of wheat
bread and pimento. "I've been so busy with other people...."
"I'll take it myself," declared Mrs. Phillips, reaching out in turn.
"Mr. Randolph, bring her a nibble of something."
"_I_ might----" began Cope.
"You don't deserve the privilege."
"Oh, very well," he returned, lapsing into an easy passivity.
"Never mind, anyway," said Amy, still without cognomen and connections;
"I can starve with perfect convenience. Or I can find a mouthful
somewhere, later."
"Let us starve sitting," said Randolph, "Here are chairs."
The hostess herself came bustling up brightly.
"Has everybody...?"
And she bustled away.
"Yes; everybody--almost," said Mrs. Phillips to her associates, behind
their entertainer's back. "If you're hungry, Amy, it's your own fault.
Sit down."
And there let us leave them--our little group, our cast of characters:
"everybody--almost," save one. Or two. Or three.
2
_COPE MAKES A SUNDAY AFTERNOON CALL_
Medora Phillips was the widow of a picture-dealer, now three years
dead. In his younger days he had been something of a painter, and later
in life as much a collector as a merchandizer. Since his death he had
been translated gradually from the lower region proper to mere
traffickers on toward the loftier plane which harbored the more select
company of art-patrons and art-amateurs. Some of his choicer ventures
were still held together as a "gallery," with a few of his own canvases
included; and his surviving partner felt this collection gave her good
reason for holding up her head among the arts, and the sciences, and
humane letters too.
Mrs. Phillips occupied a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a
mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with
manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau,
the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In
its upper story was the commodious apartment which was known in quiet
times as the picture-gallery and in livelier times as the ball-room. It
was the mistress' ambition to have the lively times as numerous as
possible--to dance with great frequency among the pictures. Six or
eight couples could gyrate here at once. There was young blood under
her roof, and there was young blood to summon from outside; and to set
this blood seething before the eyes of visiting celebrities in the arts
and letters was her dearest wish. She had more than one spare bedroom,
of course; and the Eminent and the Queer were always welcome for a
sojourn of a week or so, whether they came to read papers and deliver
lectures or not. She was quite as well satisfied when they didn't. If
they would but sit upon her wide veranda in spring or autumn, or before
her big open fireplace in winter and "just talk," she would be as
open-eyed and open-eared as you pleased.
"This is much nicer," she would say. Nicer than what, she did not
always make clear.
Yes, the house was nearly three-quarters of a mile to the west of the
campus, but it was twice as far as if it had been north or south.
Trains and trolleys, intent on serving the interests of the great
majority, took their own courses and gave her guests no aid. If the
evening turned cold or blustery or brought a driving rain she would say:
"You can't go out in this. You must stay all night. We have room and to
spare."
If she wanted anybody to stay very much, she would even add: "I can't
think of your walking toward the lake with such a gale in your
face,"--regardless of the fact that the lake wind was the rarest of
them all and that in nine cases out of ten the rain or snow would be
not in people's faces but at their backs.
If she didn't want anybody to stay, she simply ordered out the car and
bundled him off. The delay in the offer of the car sometimes induced a
young man to remain. Tasteful pajamas and the promise of a suitably
early breakfast assured him that he had made no mistake.
Cope's first call was made, not on a tempestuous evening in the winter
time, but on a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of September. The
day was sunny and the streets were full of strollers moving along
decorously beneath the elms, maples and catalpas.
"Drop in some Sunday about five," Medora Phillips had said to him, "and
have tea. The girls will be glad to meet you."
"The girls"? Who were they, and how many? He supposed he could account
for one of them, at least; but the others?
"You find me alone, after all," was her greeting. "The girls are out
walking--with each other, or their beaux, or whatever. Come in here."
She led him into a spacious room cluttered with lambrequins, stringy
portieres, grilles, scroll-work, bric-a-brac....
"The fine weather has been too much for them," she proceeded. "I was
relying on them to entertain you."
"Dear me! Am I to be entertained?"
"Of course you are." Her expression and inflection indicated to him
that he had been caught up in the cogs of a sizable machine, and that
he was to be put through it. Everybody who came was entertained--or
helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of
the establishment.
"Well, can't you entertain me yourself?"
"Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and
isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of
treatment.
"----in the interval," she amended. "They'll be back by sunset. They're
clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them."
She uttered this belief emphatically--so emphatically, in truth, that
it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an
overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should."
"I suppose I have met one of them already."
"You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn."
"What can they all be?" He wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces,
cousins, co-eds, boarders...?"
"Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet."
"Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me
the rest of her name."
"I certainly presented you."
"To 'Amy'."
"Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and
Hortense's name is----"
"Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it
can. Names without people to attach them to...."
"The people will be here presently," Medora Phillips said, rather
shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not
quite the tone usually taken by college boys on their first call. Her
position and her imposing surroundings--yes, her kindliness in noticing
him at all--might surely save her from informalities that almost shaped
into impertinences. Yet, on the other hand, nothing bored one more than
a young man who openly showed himself intimidated. What was there
behind this one? More than she had thought? Well, if so, none the
worse. Time might tell.
"So Miss Leffingwell plays?" He flared out his blue-white smile. "Let
me learn my lesson page by page."
"Yes, she plays," returned Medora Phillips briefly. "Guess what," she
continued presently, half placated.
They were again side by side on a sofa, each with an elbow on its back
and the elbows near together. Nor was Medora Phillips, though plump, at
all the graceless, dumpy little body she sometimes taxed herself with
being.
"What? Oh, piano, I suppose."
"Piano!"
"What's wrong?"
"The piano is common: it's assumed."
"Oh, she performs on something unusual? Xylophone?"
"Be serious."
"Trombone? I've seen wonders done on that in a 'lady orchestra'."
"Don't be grotesque." She drew her dark eyebrows into protest. "What a
sight!--a delicate young girl playing a trombone!"
"Well, then,--a harp. That's sometimes a pleasant sight."
"A harp needs an express wagon. Though of course it is pretty for the
arms."
"Arms? Let me see. The violin?"
"Of course. And that's probably the very first thing you thought of.
Why not have mentioned it?"
"I suppose I've been taught the duty of making conversation."
"The duty? Not the pleasure?"
"That remains to be...." He paused. "So she has arms," he pretended to
muse. "I confess I hadn't quite noticed."
"She passed you a cup of tea, didn't she?"
"Oh, surely. And a sandwich. And another. And a slice of layer cake,
with a fork. And another cup of tea. And a macaroon or two----"
"Am I a glutton?"
"Am I? Some of all that provender was for me, as I recall."
They were still side by side on the sofa. Both were cross--kneed, and
the tip of her russet boot almost grazed that of his Oxford tie. He did
not notice: he was already arranging the first paragraph of a letter to
a friend in Winnebago, Wisconsin. "Dear Arthur: I called,--as I said I
was going to. She is a scrapper. She goes at you hammer and
tongs--pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you..."
Medora Phillips removed her elbow from the back of the sofa, and began
to prod up her cushions. "How about your work?" she asked. "What are
you doing?"
He came back. "Oh, I'm boning. Some things still to make up. I'm
digging in the poetry of Gower--the 'moral Gower'."
"Well, I see no reason why poetry shouldn't be moral. Has he been
publishing anything lately that I ought to see?"
"Not--lately."
"I presume I can look into some of his older things."
"They are all old--five hundred years and more. He was a pal of
Chaucer's."
She gave him an indignant glance. "So that's it? You're laying traps
for me? You don't like me! You don't respect me!"
One of the recalcitrant cushions fell to the floor. They bumped heads
in trying to pick it up.
"Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is
just a necessary old bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about
him--except instructors and their hapless students."
He added one more sentence to his letter to "Arthur": "She pushes you
pretty hard. A little of it goes a good way..."
"Oh, if _that's_ the case..." she said. "How about your thesis?" she
went on swiftly. "What are you going to write about?"
"I was thinking of Shakespeare."
"Shakespeare! There you go again! Ridiculing me to my very face!"
"Not at all. There's lots to say about him--or them."
"Oh, you believe in Bacon!"
"Not at all--once more. I should like to take a year and spend it among
the manor-houses of Warwickshire. But I suppose nobody would stake me
to that."
"I don't know what you have in mind; some wild goose chase, probably. I
expect your friends would like it better if you spent your time right
here."
"Probably. I presume I shall end by doing a thesis on the 'color-words'
in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil has no luck."
"Anybody has luck who can form the right circle. Stay where you are. A
circle formed here would do you much more good than a temporary one
four thousand miles away."
Voices were heard in the front yard. "There they come, now," Mrs.
Phillips said. She rose, and one more of the wayward cushions went to
the floor. It lay there unregarded,--a sign that a promising
tête-à-tête was, for the time being, over.
3
_COPE IS "ENTERTAINED"_
Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young
people who were cheerily coming up the walk. Cope, looking at the
fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room
door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent
in Wisconsin:
"Several girls helped entertain me. They came on as thick as spatter.
One played a few things on the violin. Another set up her easel and
painted a picture for us. A third wrote a poem and read it to us. And a
few sophomores hung about in the background. It was all rather too
much. I found myself preferring those hours together in dear old
Winnebago...."
Only one of the sophomores--if the young men were really of that
objectionable tribe--came indoors with the young ladies. The
others--either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy--went away
after a moment or two on the front steps. Perhaps they did not feel
"encouraged." And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope with
the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for
to-day. She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others
superfluous. But--
"Hum!" he thought; "if there's to be a lot of 'entertaining,' the more
there are to be entertained the better it might turn out."
He met Hortense and Carolyn--with due stress laid on their respective
patronymics--and he made an early acquaintance with Amy's violin.
And further on Mrs. Phillips said:
"Now, Amy, before you really stop, do play that last little thing. The
dear child," she said to Cope in a lower tone, "composed it herself and
dedicated it to me."
The last little thing was a kind of "meditation," written very simply
and performed quite seriously and unaffectedly. And it gave, of course,
a good chance for the arms.
"There!" said Mrs. Phillips, at its close. "Isn't it too sweet? And it
inspired Carolyn too. She wrote a poem after hearing it."
"A copy of verses," corrected Carolyn, with a modest catch in her
breath. She was a quiet, sedate girl, with brown eyes and hair. Her
eyes were shy, and her hair was plainly dressed.
"Oh, you're so sweet, so old-fashioned!" protested Mrs. Phillips,
slightly rolling her eyes. "It's a poem,--of course it's a poem. I
leave it to Mr. Cope, if it isn't!"
"Oh, I beg--" began Cope, in trepidation.
"Well, listen, anyway," said Medora.
The poem consisted of some six or seven brief stanzas. Its title was
read, formally, by the writer; and, quite as formally, the dedication
which intervened between title and first stanza,--a dedication to
"Medora Townsend Phillips."
"Of course," said Cope to himself. And as the reading went on, he ran
his eyes over the dusky, darkening walls. He knew what he expected to
find.
Just as he found it the sophomore standing between the big padded chair
and the book-case spatted his hands three times. The poem was over, the
patroness duly celebrated. Cope spatted a little too, but kept his eye
on one of the walls.
"You're looking at my portrait!" declared Mrs. Phillips, as the poetess
sank deeper into the big chair. "Hortense did it."
"Of course she did," said Cope under his breath. He transferred an
obligatory glance from the canvas to the expectant artist. But--
"It's getting almost too dark to see it," said his hostess, and
suddenly pressed a button. This brought into play a row of electric
bulbs near the top edge of the frame and into full prominence the dark
plumpness of the subject. He looked back again from the painter (who
also had black hair and eyes) to her work.
"I am on Parnassus!" Cope declared, in one general sweeping compliment,
as he looked toward the sofa where Medora Phillips sat with the three
girls now grouped behind her. But he made it a boreal Parnassus--one
set in relief by the cold flare and flicker of northern lights.
"Isn't he the dear, comical chap!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, with
unction, glancing upward and backward at the girls. They smiled
discreetly, as if indulging in a silent evaluation of the sincerity of
the compliment. Yet one of them--Hortense--formed her black brows into
a frown, and might have spoken resentfully, save for a look from their
general patroness.
"Meanwhile, how about a drop of tea?" asked Mrs. Phillips suddenly.
"Roddy"--to the sophomore--"if you will help clear that table...."
The youth hastened to get into action. Cope went on with his letter to
"Arthur":
"It was an afternoon in Lesbos--with Sappho and her band of
appreciative maidens. Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some
pamphlets and paper-cutters off the center-table, and we all plunged
into the ocean of Oolong--the best thing we do on this island...."
He was lingering in a smiling abstractedness on his fancy, when--
"Bertram Cope!" a voice suddenly said, "do you do nothing--nothing?"
He suddenly came to. Perhaps he had really deserved his hostess'
rebuke. He had not offered to help with the tea-service; he had
proferred no appropriate remark, of an individual nature, to any of the
three _ancillae_....
"I mean," proceeded Mrs. Phillips, "can you do nothing whatever to
entertain?"
Cope gained another stage on the way to self-consciousness and
self-control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic curse of this
household.
"I sing," he said, with naïf suddenness and simplicity.
"Then, sing--do. There's the open piano. Can you play your own
accompaniments?"
"Some of the simpler ones."
"Some of the simpler ones! Do you hear that, girls? He is quite
prepared to wipe us all out. Shall we let him?"
"That's unfair," Cope protested. "Is it my fault if composers _will_
write hard accompaniments to easy airs?"
"Will you sing before your tea, or after it?"
"I'm ready to sing this instant,--during it, or before it."
"Very well."
The room was now in dusk, save for the bulbs which made the portrait
shine forth like a wayside shrine. Roddy, the possible sophomore,
helped a maid find places for the cups and saucers; and the three
girls, still formed in a careful group about the sofa, silently waited.
"Of course you realize that this is not such a very large room," said
Mrs. Phillips.
"Meaning....?"
"Well, your speaking voice _is_ resonant, you know."
"Meaning, then, that I am not to raise the roof nor jar the china. I'll
try not to."
Nor did he. He sang with care rather than with volume, with discretion
rather than with abandon. The "simple accompaniments" went off with but
a slight hitch or two, yet the "resonant voice" was somehow, somewhere
lost. Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it
seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some
teacher's none too competent hands, or--what was quite as serious--as
if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete
expression of the singer's nature. Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein--all these
were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically;
and there was a silence. Hortense broke it.
"Parnassus, yes. And finally comes Apollo." She reached over and
murmured to Mrs. Phillips: "None too skillful on the lyre, and none too
strong in the lungs...."
Medora spoke up loudly and promptly.
"Do you know, I think I've heard you sing before."
"Possibly," Cope said, turning his back on the keyboard. "I sang in the
University choir for a year or two."
"In gown and mortar-board? 'Come, Holy Spirit,' and all that?"
"Yes; I sang solos now and then."
"Of course," she said. "I remember now. But I never saw you before
without your mortar-board. That changes the forehead. Yes, you're
yourself," she went on, adding to her previous pleasure the further
pleasure of recognition. "You've earned your tea," she added.
"Hortense," she said over her shoulder to the dark girl behind the
sofa, "will you--? No; I'll pour, myself."
She slid into her place at table and got things to going. There was an
interval which Cope might have employed in praising the artistic
aptitudes of this variously gifted household, but he found no
appropriate word to say,--or at least uttered none. And none of the
three girls made any further comment on his own performance.
Mrs. Phillips accompanied him, on his way out, as far as the hall. She
looked up at him questioningly.
"You don't like my poor girls," she said. "You don't find them clever;
you don't find them interesting."
"On the contrary," he rejoined, "I have spent a delightful hour." Must
he go on and confess that he had developed no particular dexterity in
dealing with the younger members of the opposite sex?
"No, you don't care for them one bit," she insisted. She tried to look
rebuking, reproachful; yet some shade of expression conveyed to him a
hint that her protest was by no means sincere: if he really didn't, it
was no loss--it was even a possible gain.
"It's you who don't care for me," he returned. "I'm _vieux jeu_."
"Nonsense," she rejoined. "If you have a slight past, that only makes
you the more atmospheric. Be sure you come again soon, and put in a
little more work on the foreground."
Cope, on his way eastward, in the early evening, passed near the
trolley tracks, the Greek lunch-counter, without a thought; he was
continuing his letter to "Dear Arthur":
"I think," he wrote, with his mind's finger, "that you might as well
come down. I miss you--even more than I thought I should. The term is
young, and you can enter for Spanish, or Psychology, or something.
There's nothing for you up there. The bishop can spare you. Your father
will be reasonable. We can easily arrange some suitable quarters..."
And we await a reply from "Dear Arthur"--the fifth and last of our
little group. But no; there are two or three others--as you have just
seen.
4
_COPE IS CONSIDERED_
A few days after the mathematical tea, Basil Randolph was taking a
sedate walk among the exotic elms and the indigenous oaks of the
campus; he was on his way to the office of the University registrar. He
felt interested in Bertram Cope and meant to consult the authorities.
That is to say, he intended to consult the written and printed data
provided by the authorities,--not to make verbal inquiries of any of
the college officials themselves. He was, after all, sufficiently in
the academic tradition to prefer the consultation of records as against
the employment of _viva voce_ methods; and he saw no reason why his new
interest should be widely communicated to other individuals. There was
an annual register; there was an album of loose sheets kept up by the
members of the faculty; and there was a card-catalogue, he remembered,
in half a dozen little drawers. All this ought to remove any necessity
of putting questions by word of mouth.
The young clerk behind the broad counter annoyed him by no offer of
aid, but left him to browse for himself. First, the printed register.
This was crowded with professors--full, head, associate, assistant;
there were even two or three professors emeritus. And each department
had its tale of instructors. But no mention of a Bertram Cope. Of
course not; this volume, it occurred to him presently, represented the
state of things during the previous scholastic year.
Next the card-catalogue. But this dealt with the students
only--undergraduate, graduate, special. No Cope there.
Remained the loose-leaf faculty-index, in which the members of the
professorial body told something about themselves in a great variety of
handwriting: among other things, their full names and addresses, and
their natures in so far as penmanship might reveal it. Ca; Ce; Cof;
Collard, Th. J., who was an instructor in French and lived on Rosemary
Place; Copperthwaite, Julian M.; Cotton ... No Cope. He looked again,
and further. No slightest alphabetical misplacement.
"You are not finding what you want?" asked the clerk at last. The
search was delaying other inquirers.
"Bertram Cope," said Randolph. "Instructor, I think."
"He has been slow. But his page will be in place by tomorrow. If you
want his address...."
"Yes?"
"--I think I can give it to you." The youth retired behind a screen.
"There," he said, returning with a bit of pencilling on a scrap of
paper.
Randolph thanked him, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket. A
mere bit of ordinary clerkly writing; no character, no allure. Well,
the actual chirography of the absentee would be made manifest before
long. What was it like? Should he himself ever have a specimen of it in
a letter or a note?
That evening, with his after-dinner cigarette, he strolled casually
through Granville Avenue, the short street indicated by the address. It
was a loosely-built neighborhood of frame dwellings, with yards and a
moderate provision of trees and shrubs--a neighborhood of people who
owned their houses but did not spend much money on them. Number 48 was
a good deal like the others. "Decent enough, but commonplace," Randolph
pronounced. "Yet what could I have been expecting?" he added; and his
whimsical smile told him not to let himself become absurd.
There were lighted windows in the front and at the side. Which of these
was Cope's, and what was the boy doing? Was he deep in black-letter, or
was he selecting a necktie preliminary to some evening diversion
outside? Or had he put out his light--several windows were dark--and
already taken the train into town for some concert or theatre?
"Well," said Randolph to himself, with a last puff at his cigarette,
"they're not likely to move out and leave him up in the air. I hope,"
he went on, "that he has more than a bedroom merely. But we know on
what an incredibly small scale some of them live."
He threw away his cigarette and strolled on to his own quarters. These
were but ten minutes away. In his neighborhood, too, people owned their
homes and were unlikely to hurry you out on a month's notice. You could
be sure of being able to stay on; and Randolph, in fact, had stayed on,
with a suitable family, for three or four years.
He had a good part of one floor: a bedroom, a sitting room, with a
liberal provision of bookshelves, and a kind of large closet which he
had made into a "cabinet." There are all sorts of cabinets, but this
was a cabinet for his "collection." His collection was not without some
measure of local fame; if not strictly valuable, it was at least
comprehensive. After all, he collected to please himself. He was a
collector in Churchton and a stockbroker in the city itself. The
satirical said that he was the most important collector in "the
street," and the most important stockbroker in the suburbs. He was a
member of a somewhat large firm, and not the most active one. His
interest had been handed down, in a manner, from his father; and the
less he participated the better his partners liked it. He had no one
but himself, and a sister on the far side of the city, miles and miles
away. His principal concern was to please himself, to indulge his
nature and tastes, and to get, in a quiet way, "a good deal out of
life." But nobody ever spoke of him as rich. His collection represented
his own preferences, perseverance and individual predilections. Least
of all had it been brought together to be "realized on" after his death.
"I may be something of a fool, in my own meek fashion," he
acknowledged, "but I'm no such fool as that."
He had a few jades and lacquers--among the latter, the ordinary
inkwells and sword-guards; a few snuff-boxes; some puppets in costume
from Mexico and Italy; a few begrimed vellum-bound books in foreign
languages (which he could not always read); and now and then a friend
who was "breaking up" would give him a bit of Capo di Monte or an
absurd enigmatic musical instrument from the East Indies. And he had a
small department of Americana, dating from the days of the Civil War.
"Miscellaneous enough," pronounced Medora Phillips, on once viewing his
cabinet, "but not altogether"--she proceeded charitably--"utter
rubbish."
And it was felt by others too that, in the lack of any wide
opportunity, he had done rather well. Churchton itself was no nest of
antiquities; in 1840 it had consisted merely of a log tavern on the
Green Bay road, and the first white child born within its limits had
died but recently. Nor was the Big Town just across the "Indian
Boundary" much older. It had "antique shops," true; but one's best
chances were got through mousing among the small scattered troups of
foreigners (variegated they were) who had lately been coming in
pell-mell, bringing their household knick-knacks with them. There was a
Ghetto, there was a Little Italy, there were bits of Bulgaria, Bohemia,
Armenia, if one had tired of dubious Louis Quinze and Empire. In an
atmosphere of general newness a thing did not need to be very old to be
an antique.
The least old of all things in Randolph's world were the students who
flooded Churchton. There were two or three thousand of them, and
hundreds of new ones came with every September. Sometimes he felt
prompted to "collect" them, as contrasts to his older curios. They were
fully as interesting, in their way, as brasswork and leatherwork, those
products of peasant natures and peasant hands. But these youths ran
past one's eye, ran through one's fingers. They were not static, not
even stable. They were restless birds of passage who fidgeted through
their years, and even through the days of which the years were made:
intent on their own affairs and their own companions; thankless for
small favors and kind attentions--even unconscious of them; soaking up
goodwill and friendly offices in a fashion too damnably
taken-for-granted ... You gave them an evening among your books, with
discreet things to drink, to smoke, to play at, or you offered them a
good dinner at some good hotel; and you never saw them after ... They
said "Yes, sir," or "Yep;" but whether they pained you by being too
respectful or rasped you by being too rowdyish, it all came to the
same: they had little use for you; they readily forgot and quickly
dropped you.
"I wonder whether instructors are a shade better," queried Basil
Randolph. "Or when do sense and gratitude and savoir-faire begin?"
A few days later he had returned to the loose-leaf faculty. Cope's page
was now in place, with full particulars in his own hand: his interest
was "English Literature," it appeared. "H'm! nothing very special in
that," commented Randolph. But Cope's penmanship attracted him. It was
open and easy: "He never gave _his_ instructor any trouble in reading
his themes." Yet the hand was rather boyish. Was it formed or unformed?
"I am no expert," confessed Randolph. He put Cope's writing on a middle
ground and let it go at that.
He recalled the lighted windows and wondered near which one of them the
same hand filled note-books and corrected students' papers.
"Rather a dreary routine, I imagine, for a young fellow of his age.
Still, he may like it, possibly."
He thought of his own early studies and of his own early
self-sufficiencies. He felt disposed to find his earlier self in this
young man--or at least an inclination to look for himself there.
The next afternoon he walked over to Medora Phillips. Medora's upper
floor gave asylum to a half-brother of her husband's--an invalid who
seldom saw the outside world and who depended for solace and
entertainment on neighbors of his own age and interests. Randolph
expected to contribute, during the week, about so many hours of talk or
of reading. But he would have a few words with Medora before going up
to Joe.
Medora, among her grilles and lambrequins, was only too willing to talk
about young Cope.
"A charming fellow--in a way," she said judicially. "Frank, but a
little too self-assured and self-centered. Exuberant, but possibly a
bit cold. Yet--charming."
"Oh," thought Randolph, "one of the cool boys, and one of the
self-sufficing. Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good
capacity for self-control and self-direction. Not at all an
uninteresting type," he summed it up. "An ebullient Puritan?" he asked
aloud.
"That's it," she declared, "--according to my sense of it."
"Yet hardly a New Englander, I suppose?"
"Not directly, anyhow. From down state--from Freeford, I think he said.
I judge that there's quite a family of them."
"Quite a family of them," he repeated inwardly. A drawback indeed. Why
could an interesting young organism so seldom be detached from its
milieu and enjoyed in isolation? Prosy parents; tiresome, detrimental
brothers ... He wondered if she had any idea what they were all like.
It might be just as well, however, not to know.
"And, judging from the family name, and from their taste at
christenings, I should say there might be some slant toward England
itself. A nomenclature not without distinction. 'Bertram'; rather nice,
eh? And there is a sister who teaches in one of the schools, I
understand; and her name is Rosalind, or Rosalys. Think of that! I
gather that the father is in some business," she concluded.
"Well, well," thought Randolph; "more than one touch of gentility, of
fine feeling." If the father was in "some business," most likely it was
some one else's business.