afternoon. Cool and correct, but pleasant. No warmth, no passion. No
special interest in any of my poor girls. I didn't feel that he was
drawing any of them too near the danger-line."
"Mighty gratifying, that. Where does one learn to sing without
provoking danger?"
"In a church choir, of course. He sang last year in the cathedral at
Winnebago."
"Oh, in Wisconsin. And what took us to Winnebago, I wonder?"
"We were teaching in a college there."
"I see."
The talk languished. Basil Randolph had learned most that he wanted to
know, and had learned it without asking too many direct questions. He
began to pick at the fussy fringe on the arm of his chair and to cast
an empty eye on the other fussy things that filled the room. The two
had exhausted long ago all the old subjects, and he did not care to
show an eagerness--still less, a continuing eagerness--for this new
one: much could be picked up by indirection, even by waiting.
Medora felt him as distrait. "Do you want to go up and see Joe for a
little while before you leave us?"
"I believe I will. Not that I've brought anything to read."
"I doubt if he cares to be read to this time--Carolyn gave him the
headlines this forenoon. He's a bit restless; I think he'd rather talk.
If you have nothing more to say to me, perhaps you can find something
to say to him."
"Oh, come! I'm sure we've had a good enough little chat. Aren't you a
bit restless yourself?"
"Well, run along. I've heard his chair rolling about up there for the
last half hour."
5
_COPE IS CONSIDERED FURTHER_
Randolph took the stairs to the second floor, and presently his
footfalls were heard on the bare treads that led from the second to the
third. At the top landing he paused and looked in through the open door
of the picture-gallery.
Over the varnished oak floor of this roomy apartment a middle-aged man
who wore a green shade above his eyes was propelling himself in a
wheeled chair. Thus did Joseph Foster cover the space where the younger
and more fortunate sometimes danced, and thus did he move among works
of art which, even on the brightest days, he could barely see.
He knew the step. "Brought anything?" he asked.
He depended on Randolph for the latest brief doings in current fiction;
and usually in the background--and often long in abeyance--was
something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could
fill the empty hours either through retrospect or anticipation.
"Only myself," replied the other, stepping in. Foster dextrously
manoeuvred his chair toward the entrance and reached out his hand.
"Well, yourself is enough. It's good to have a man about the place once
in a while. Once in a while, I said. It gets tiresome, hearing all
those girls slithering and chattering through the halls." He put his
bony hands back on the rims of his wheels. "Where have you been all
this time?"
"Oh, you know I come when I can." Randolph ran his eye over the walls
of the big empty room. The pictures were all in place--landscapes,
figure-pieces, what not; everything as familiar as the form of words he
had just employed to meet an oft repeated query implying indifference
and neglect.
"How is it outside? I haven't been down on the street for a month."
"Oh, things are bright and pleasant enough." Through the wide window
there appeared, half a mile away, the square twin towers of the
University library, reminiscent of Oxford and Ely. Round them lesser
towers and gables, scholastic in their gray stone, rose above the trees
of the campus. Beyond all these a level line of watery blue ran for
miles and provided an eventless horizon. A bright and pleasant enough
sight indeed, but nothing for Joe Foster.
"Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The
resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and
the sociable.
To the side of this bare place, with its canvases which had become
rather démodé--or at least had long ceased to interest--lay two
bed-chambers: Foster's own, and one adjoining, which was classed as a
spare room. It was sometimes given over to visiting luminaries of
lesser magnitudes. Real celebrities--those of national or international
fame--were entertained in a sumptuous suite on the floor below. Casual
young bachelors, who sometimes happened along, were lodged above and
were expected to adjust themselves, as regarded the bathroom, to the
use and wont of the occupant adjoining.
Foster's own room was a cramped omnium gatherum, cluttered with the
paraphernalia of daily living. It was somewhat disordered and
untidy--the chamber of a man who could never see clearly how things
were, or be completely sure just what he was about.
"There's Pepys up there," he said, pointing to his bookshelf, as he
worked out of his chair and tried to dispose himself comfortably on a
couch. "I hope we're going to get along a little farther with him, some
time."
"As to that, I _have_ been getting along a little farther;--I've been
to the Library, looking somewhat ahead in the completer edition. I find
that 'Will,' who flung his cloak over his shoulder, 'like a ruffian,'
and got his ears boxed for it, was no mere temporary serving-man, but
lived on with Pepys for years and became the most intimate and trusted
of his friends. And 'Gosnell,' who lasted three days, you remember, as
Mrs. Pepys' maid, turns up a year or two later as an actress at 'the
Duke's house.' And 'Deb,' that other maid whose name we have noted
farther along--well, there's a deal more about her than exactly tends
to edification...."
"Good. I hope we shall have some more of it pretty soon."
"To-day?"
"Not exactly to-day. I've got some other things to think about."
"Such as?"
"Well, I expect you're going to be invited here to dinner pretty soon?"
"So? I've been invited here to dinner before this."
"But another day has come. A new light has risen. I haven't seen it,
but I've heard it. I've heard it sing."
"A light singing? Aren't you getting mixed?"
"Oh, I don't know. There was Viollet-le-Duc and the rose-window of
Notre Dame. They took him there as a child for a choral service, and he
thought it was the rose itself that sang. And there was Petrarch, and
the young Milton--both talking about 'melodious tears'--and something
of the same sort in 'The Blessed Damosel.' And----"
"A psychological catch for which there ought to be a name. Perhaps
there _is_ a name."
"Well, as I say, the light rose, shone, and sang. I didn't see it--I
never see anybody. But his voice came up here quite distinctly. It
seemed good to have a man in the house. Those everlasting girls--I hope
he wasn't bothering to sing for _them_."
"He probably was. How did it go?"
"Very well indeed."
"What kind of voice?"
"Oh, baritone, I suppose you'd call it."
"And he sang sentimental rubbish?"
"Not at all. Really good things."
"With passion?"
"Well, hardly. With cool correctness. An icicle on Diana's temple--that
would be my guess."
"An icicle? No wonder the young ladies don't quite fancy him."
"I understand he took them all in a lump--so far as he took them at
all. Treated them all exactly alike; Hortense was quite scornful when
she brought up my lunch-tray. Of course that's no way for a man to do."
"On the contrary. For certain purposes it might be a very good way."
"'On the contrary,' if you like; since frost may perform the effects of
fire. Medora herself is beginning to see him as a tall, white candle,
burning in some niche or at some shrine. Sir Galahad--or something of
that sort."
Randolph grimaced at this.
"Oh, misery! I hope she hasn't mentioned her impression to _him_!
Imagine whether a man would enjoy being told a thing like that. I hope,
I'm sure, that no 'Belle Dame sans Merci' will get on his tracks!"
"If he goes in too much for 'palely loitering' he may be snatched."
"Poor fellow! They'd better leave him to his studies and his students.
He has his own way to make, I presume, and will need all his energies
to get ahead. For, as some one has said, 'There are no tea-houses on
the road to Parnassus.' Neither do tea-fights boost a man toward the
Porch or Academe."
"He's going in for teas?"
"I won't say that. But it was at a tea that I met him. A trigonometry
tea at little Mrs. Ryder's."
"You've seen him then. You have the advantage of me. What's he like?"
"Oh, he has points in his favor. He has looks; a trim figure, even if
spare; well-squared shoulders; and manners with a breezy, original
tang. The kind of young fellow that people are likely enough to like."
"What kind of manners did he have for you?"
"Well, there you rather get me. He called me 'sir,' with a touch of
deference; yet somehow I felt as if I were standing too close to an
electric fan."
"Yes, even when they indulge a show of deference, they contrive to blow
our gray hairs about our wrinkled temples."
"Don't talk about gray hairs. You have none; and mine are not always
seen at first glance."
"Medora begins to tax me with a few. Don't you see any?"
"Not one. I concentrate on my own. Tush, you're only forty-seven."
"Or fifty-seven, or sixty-seven, or seventy-seven...." Foster adjusted
his green shade and attempted an easier disposition of his twisted
limbs on the couch. "Well, forty-seven, as you suggest,--as you insist.
How old is this young fellow?"
"Twenty-four or twenty-five."
"Well, they can make us seem either younger or older. That rests with
ourselves. It's all in how we take them, I expect."
"Better take them so as to make ourselves younger."
"Then the other question."
"How they take us?"
"Yes. We're lucky, in this day and generation, if they take us at all."
"You may be right," assented Randolph ruefully. "Yet there are gleams
of hope. The more thoughtful among them have a kind of condescending
pity to bestow----"
"And the thoughtless?"
"They can find uses for us. One of the faculty was telling me how he
tried to give two or three of his juniors an outing at his cottage over
in Michigan. Everything he gave they took for granted. And if anything
was lacking they took--exceptions. Monopolized the boats; ignored the
dinner-hour.... Sometimes I think that even the thoughtless are
thoughtful in their own way and use us, if we happen to have lands and
substance, purely as practical conveniences. I've been almost glad to
think that I possess none myself."
"Don't stay here and talk like that. This is one of my blue days."
"I wish I had brought a novelette. Sure you don't want to hear a little
more about the Countess of Castlemaine and the rascalities of the Navy
Office?"
"No; some other time, when I feel a bit more robust. It isn't every day
that the mind can digest such a period with comfort."
"Are we two old fogies beginning to wear on each other?"
"I hope not. But when you go down, stop for Medora a minute and see if
she hasn't got something to say."
Medora--when he finally got down stairs--had.
She laid some knitting on the drawing-room table and came out into the
hall.
"No reading this afternoon, I judge. What I heard, or seemed to hear,
was a broken flow of talk."
"No reading. Restless."
"So I was afraid. I'd rather have one good steady voice purring along
for him, and then I know he's all right. Carolyn has been too busy
lately. What seems to have unsettled him?"
"Oh, I don't know. Young life, possibly."
"Well, I've asked and asked the girls not to be quite so gay and
chattery in the upper halls."
"You can't keep girls quiet."
"I don't want to--not everywhere and at all times."
"I have an idea that a given number of girls make more noise in a house
than the same number of young fellows. I know that they do in
boarding-houses and rooming-houses, and I believe it's so as between
sororities and fraternities. Put a noise-gauge in the main hall of the
Alpha-Alpha house and another in the main hall of the Beta-Beta house,
and the girls would run the score above the boys every time. If ever I
build a sorority house, it will be for the Delta-Iota-Nus, and a statue
of the great goddess DIN herself shall stand just within the entrance."
"You discourage me. I was going to give a dinner."
"Go ahead. A few remarks from me won't stop the course of your
hospitality. Neither would a few orations. Neither would a few
deliberative bodies assembled for a month of sessions, with every
member talking from nine till six."
"You think I indulge in too many?"
"Too many what? Festivals? Puns?"
Medora paused, a bit puzzled.
"Puns? Why, I never, never----Oh, I see!"
"Too many dinners? No. Who could?"
"This one was to be a young people's dinner. I was going to invite you."
"Thanks. Thanks. Thanks."
"Still, if you think my girls are noisy...."
"I was speaking of girls in numbers."
"Well, Bertram Cope didn't find them so."
"Why not?"
"Why not, indeed? They collected in a silent little group behind my
sofa...."
"Puzzled? Awed?"
"Fudge! Well, save Thursday."
"Is he coming?"
"I trust so."
"Then they do need a constabulary to keep them quiet?"
"Oh, hush!"
"How many are you expecting to have? You know I don't enjoy large
parties."
"Could you stand ten?"
"I think so."
"Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the
door.
Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a
feeling that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that
the company would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively
so--aside from the hostess and himself. And even she often had her
young days and her young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet
clamor, understood and prepared for, might be met with composure.
6
_COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_
Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the
red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that
Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in
the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology--unless,
indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to
distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material
that made chronology a matter of consequence at all.
"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of
sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer
derived from Beaumont and Fletcher."
He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame
lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and
meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two
stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead,
with some dozen of the more indispensable aids to our tongue's
literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered
with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots
that antedated his own pen. He threw up this covering as it fell over
the front edge of the table, pulled out a drawer, laid a sheet of paper
in the bettered light, and uncorked a black-ink bottle.
"Dear Arthur," he began.
He looked across to the other chair, with its broken spindles and
obfuscated varnish. With things as he wanted them, his correspondent
would be sitting there and letter-writing would be unnecessary.
"Dear Arthur," he repeated aloud, and set himself to a general sketch
of the new land and the "lay" of it.
"Three-quarters of them are of course girls," he presently found
himself writing, "which is the common proportion almost everywhere, I
presume, except in engineering and dentistry. However, there are four
or five men. I've been pretty careful, and they still treat me with
respect. I'm afraid my course is regarded as a 'snap.' Everybody, it
seems, can grasp English literature (and produce it). And almost
anybody, I begin to fear, can teach it. Judging, that is, from the pay.
I'm afraid the good folks at Freeford will find themselves pinched for
another year still."
He glanced across toward the pile of corrected themes. He felt that not
everybody was "called," as a matter of course, to write English, and he
stubbornly nourished the belief that toiling over others' imperfections
was more of a job than boards of trustees always realized.
"Of course," he presently resumed, "things are rather changed from what
they were before. I find more in the way of social opportunities and
greater interest shown by the middle-aged. It is no disadvantage to
cultivate people who have their own homes; the lunch-rooms round the
fountain-square are numerous enough, but not so good as they might be.
And I don't know but that an instructor may lose caste by eating among
a miscellany of undergraduates. Anyhow, it's no plan to pursue for
long."
He sat for a moment, lost in thought over recent social experiences.
"One very good house has lately been opened to me," he continued. "I
dined there last Thursday evening. It's really quite a mansion--a great
many large rooms: picture-gallery, ballroom, and all that; and the
dinner itself was very handsomely done. You know my theory,--a theory
rather forced upon me, in truth, by circumstances,--that the best way
to enjoy a good meal is to have had a string of poor ones. Well, since
coming back, and with no permanent arrangements made, I have had plenty
of chance for getting into position to appreciate the really
first-class. There was a color-scheme in pale pink--ribbons of that
color, pink icing on the cakes, and so on. The same thing could be
done, and done charmingly, in light green--with pistache ice-cream. Of
course the candle-shades were pink too."
His eye wandered toward a small triangular closet, made off from the
room by a flimsy and faded calico-print curtain.
"I had my dress-suit cleaned and pressed, but the lapels of the coat
came out rather shiny, and I thought it better to hire one for the
occasion. There was no trouble about a fit--I have standardized
shoulders, as you know.
"Of course I miss you all the time, and I assuredly missed you just
here. If it is really true, as you write, that you are holding your
summer gains and weigh twelve pounds more than you did at the end of
June, and if you are thinking of getting a new suit, please bear in
mind that my own won't last much longer. I have the chance, now, to go
out a good deal and to meet influential, worth-while people. In the
circumstances I ask you not to bant. One rather spare man in a pair of
men is enough.
"My hostess, a Mrs. Phillips, I met at a tea during my first week. This
tea was given by a lady in the mathematical department, and she and her
husband were at the dinner. They are people in the early or middle
thirties, I judge, and were probably put in as a connecting link
between the two sections of the party. Mrs. Phillips herself is a rich
widow of forty-odd--forty-five or six, possibly,--though I am not the
very best judge in such matters: no need to tell you that, on such a
point, my eye and my general sense are none too acute. The only other
middle-aged (or elderly) person present was a Mr. Randolph, who is
perhaps fifty, or a little beyond, yet who appears to have his younger
moments. There were some girls, and there were two young men in
business in the city--neighbors and not connected with the University
at all. 'For which relief,' etc.,--since it _is_ a bit benumbing to
move in academic circles exclusively;--I should hate to feel that a
really professorial manner was stealing over me. Well, everybody was
lively and gay, except at first Ryder (he's the math. man); but even he
limbered up finally. Mrs. Phillips herself has a great deal of action
and vivacity--seemed hardly more than thirty. Well, I could be pretty
gay too with a lot of money behind me; and I think that, for another
year or so, I can contrive to be gay without it. But after that....
"I wish you had been there instead of Ryder. If you are really going to
be twenty-seven in November--as I figure it--you might yourself have
served as a connecting link between youth and age. No, no; I take it
back; I didn't mean it. I wouldn't have you seem older for anything,
and you know it.
"There were three girls. They all live in the house itself, forming a
little court: Mrs. P. seems to need young life and young attentions. So
not one of them had to be taken home--there's usually _that_ to do, you
know. Not that it would have mattered much, as the distances would have
been short and the night was clear starlight. But they could all stay
where they were, and I walked home in quite different company."
Cope threw back his Oriental table-cover once more and drew out a few
additional sheets of paper.
"One of them is an artist. She paints portraits, and possibly other
things. Oh, I was going to say there is an art-gallery at the top of
the house. Her husband--I mean Mrs. Phillips'--was a painter and
collector himself; and after dinner we went up there, and a curious man
came in, propelling a wheeled chair--a sort of death's-head at the
feast.... But don't let me get too far away from the matter in hand.
She is dark and a bit tonguey--the artist-girl; and I believe she would
be sarcastic and witty if she weren't held down pretty well. I think
she's a niece: the relationship leaves her free, as I suppose she
feels, to express herself. If you like the type you may have it; but
wit in a woman, or even humor, always makes me uncomfortable. The
feminine idea of either is a little different from ours.
"Another girl is a musician. She plays the violin--quite tolerably.
Yes, yes, I recall your views about violin-playing: it's either good or
bad--nothing between. I'll say this, then: she played some simple and
unpretentious things and did them very deftly. Simple, unpretentious:
oddest thing in the world, for she is a recent graduate of our school
of music and began this fall as an instructor. Wouldn't you have
expected to find her demanding a chance to perform a sonata at the
least, or pining miserably for a concerto with full orchestra? Well,
this young lady I put down as a plain boarder--you can't maintain a big
house on memories and a collection of paintings. She's a nice child,
and I dare say makes as good a boarder as any nice child could.
"The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a
secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary
is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the
engagement-book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the
minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite
the mistress of self-respecting adulation. _She_ would know the
difference between Herrick and Cowper!"...
Cope pulled out his watch. Then he resumed.
"It's half past ten, but I think I'll run on for a few moments longer.
If I don't finish, I can wind up to-morrow.--Mr. Randolph sat opposite
me. He looked at me a lot and gave attention to whatever I
said--whether said to him, or to my neighbors right and left, or to the
whole table. I didn't feel him especially clever, but easy and
pleasant--and friendly. Also a little shy--even after we had gone up to
the ball-room. I'm afraid that made me more talkative than ever; you
know how shyness in another man makes me all the more confident and
rackety. Be sure that voice of mine rang out! But not in song. There
was a piano up stairs, of course, and that led to a little dancing.
Different people took turns in playing. I danced--once--with each of
the three girls, and twice with my hostess; then I let Ryder and the
two young business-men do the rest. Randolph danced once with Mrs.
Phillips, and that ended it for him. My own dancing, as you know, is
nothing to brag of: I think the young ladies were quite satisfied with
the little I did. I'm sure _I_ was. You also know my views on round
dances. Why dancing should be done exclusively by couples arranged
strictly on the basis of contrasted sexes...! I think of the good old
days of the Renaissance in Italy, when women, if they wanted to dance,
just got up and danced--alone, or, if they didn't want to dance alone,
danced together. I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a
straightforward outlet for superfluous physical energy. Also, peasants
in a ring--about a Maypole or something. Also, I very much like square
dances and reels. There were enough that night for a quadrille, with
somebody for the piano and even somebody to 'call off,'--but whoever
sees a quadrille in these days? However, I mustn't burn any more gas on
this topic.