thought he had done enough for her, and she thought I had done enough
for them all. And one of the young business-men did enough for that
springy, still-young Mrs. Ryder. Once, indeed, Mrs. Phillips asked me
if I wouldn't like to try a third dance with her (she goes at it with a
good deal of old-time vivacity and vim); but I told her she must know
by this time that I was something of a bungler. 'I wouldn't quite say
that,' she returned, smiling; but we continued to sit there side by
side on a sort of bench built against the wall, and she seemed as well
pleased to have it that way as the other. She did, however, speak about
a little singing. I told her that she must have found me something of a
bungler there, too, and reminded her that I couldn't play the
accompaniments of my best songs at all. Arthur, my dear boy, I depend
on _you_ for that, and you must come down here and do it. No singing,
then. But Mrs. Phillips was not quite satisfied. Wouldn't I recite
something? Heavens! Well, of course I know lots of poems--_c'est mon
metier_. I repeated one. Then other volunteers were called upon--it was
entertaining with a vengeance! The young ladies had to chip in
also--though they, of course, were prepared to. And one of the young
business-men did some clever juggling; and Mrs. Ryder sang a little
French ballade; and Mr. Randolph--poor man!--was suddenly routed out of
his placidity, and responded as well as he could with one or two little
stories, not very pointed and not very well told. But I judge he makes
no great claim to being a _raconteur_--he was merely paying an
unexpected tax as gracefully as he could.
"Well, as I was saying, the man in the wheeled chair came in. Of course
he hadn't been down to dinner--I think I saw a tray for him carried
along the hall. As he was working his way through the door, I suppose I
must have been talking and laughing at my loudest; and that big, bare
room, done in hard wood, made me seem noisier still. He sort of stopped
and twitched, and appeared to shrink back in his chair: I presume my
tones went straight through the poor twisted invalid's head. He must
have fancied me (from the racket I was making) as a sort of
free-and-easy Hercules (which is not quite the case), if not as the
whole football squad rolled into one. Whether he really saw me, then or
thereafter, I don't know; he wore a sort of green shade over his eyes.
Of course I met him in due form. I tried not to give his poor hand too
much of a wring (another of my bad habits); but he took all I gave and
even seemed to hang on for a little more. He sat quietly to one side
for a while, and I tried not to act the bull of Bashan again. Anyhow,
he didn't start a second time. Presently he pulled out rather
unceremoniously: the two young business-men had begun a sort of
burlesque fandango, and their feet were pretty noisy on the bare floor.
He started off after looking toward the piano and then toward me; and
Mrs. Phillips glanced about as if to hint that any display of surprise
or of indulgence would be misplaced. Poor chap!--well, I'm glad he
didn't see me dancing.
"We broke up about eleven, and Mr. Randolph suggested that, as we lived
in the same general direction, we might walk homeward together. Great
heaven! it's eleven--and five after--now! Enough, in all conscience,
for to-night. You shall have the rest to-morrow."
7
_COPE UNDER SCRUTINY_
An evening or two later Cope again corked his red ink and uncorked his
black.
"As I have said, Mr. Randolph and I walked home together. He stopped
for a moment in front of his place. Another large, handsome house. He
told me he had the use of his quarters as long as his landlord's lease
ran, and asked me to come round some time and see how he was fixed.
Then he said suddenly that the evening was fine and the night young and
that he would walk on with me to _my_ quarters, if I didn't mind. Of
course I didn't--he seemed so friendly and pleasant; but I let him
learn for himself that I was far from being lodged in any architectural
monument. Well, we went on for the necessary ten minutes, and he didn't
seem at all put out by the mediocre aspect of the house where I have
put up. He sort of took it all for granted--as if he knew about it
already. In fact, on the way from his place to mine, I no more led him
(as I sense it now) than he led me. He hesitated at no corner or
crossing. 'I am an old Churchtonian,' he said incidentally--as if he
knew everything and everybody. He also mentioned, just as incidentally,
that he had a brother-in-law on our board of trustees. Of course I
promised to go round and see him. I presume that I shall drop in on him
some time or other. Come down here, and you shall have one more house
of call.
"He stopped for a moment in front of my diggings, taking my hand to say
goodnight and taking his own time in dropping it. Enough is enough.
'You have the small change needed for paying your way through society,'
he said, with a sort of smile. 'I must cultivate a few little arts
myself,' he went on; 'they seem necessary in some houses. But I'm glad,
after all, that I didn't remember to-night that a tribute was likely to
be levied; it would have taken away my appetite and have made the whole
evening a misery in advance. As things went, I had, on the whole, a
pleasant time. Only, I understood that you sang; and I was rather
hoping to hear you.' 'I do best with my regular accompanist,' I
returned--meaning you, of course. I hope you don't mind being degraded
to that level. 'And your regular accompanist is not--not----?' 'Is
miles away,' I replied. 'A hundred and fifty of them,' I might have
added, if I had chosen to be specific. Now, if he had wanted to hear
me, why hadn't he asked? He would have needed only to second Mrs.
Phillips herself; and there he was, just on the other side of me. In
consequence of his reticence I was driven--or drove myself--to blank
verse. And that other man, the one in the chair; he may have had his
expectations too. Arthur, Arthur, try to grasp the situation! You must
come down here, and you must bring your hands with you. Tell the bishop
and the precentor that you are needed elsewhere. They will let you off.
Of course I know that a village choir needs every tenor it can get--and
keep; but come. If they insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring
your hands and your reading eye. Don't let me go along making my new
circle think I'm an utter dub. Tell your father plainly that he can
never in the world make a wholesale-hardware-man out of you. Force him
to listen to reason. What is one year spent in finding out just what
you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like the devil; nobody does my
things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your old anthems and your
old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt from this hole at
a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a real bed
instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two
wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own
breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you
found out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you
would be bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack
up and appear."
The delay in the posting of this appeal soon brought from Winnebago a
letter outside the usual course of correspondence. It was on a fresh
sheet and under a new date-line that Cope continued. After a page of
generalities and of attention to particular points in the letter from
Wisconsin, Cope took up his own line of thought.
"I had meant, of course, to look in on him within a few days,--no great
hurry about it. But on Sunday evening he wrote and asked if he might
not call round on me instead. My name is not in the telephone-book;
neither, as I found out, was his. So I used up a sheet of paper, an
envelope, and a stamp--just such as I am now using on you--to tell him
that he might indeed. I put in the 'indeed' for cordiality, hoping he
wouldn't think I had slighted _his_ invitation. On Monday evening he
came round--I must have reached him by the late afternoon delivery.
Need I say that he had to take this poor place as he found it? But
there was no sign of the once-over--no tendency to inventory or
appraise. He sat down beside me on the couch just as if he had no
notion that it was a bed (and a rather rocky one, at that), and talked
about my row of books, and about music and plays, and about his own
collection of curios--all in a quiet, contained way, yet intent on me
if not on my outfit. Well, it's pleasant to be considered for what you
are rather than for what you have (or for what few poor sticks your
landlady may have); and I rather liked his being here. Certainly he was
a change from my students, who sometimes seem to exclude better timber.
"Needless to say, he repeated his invitation, and last evening I
shunted Middle English (in which I have a lot to catch up) and walked
round to him. Very adequately and handsomely lodged. Really good
bachelor quarters (I hadn't known for certain whether he was married or
not). A stockbroker of a sort, I hear,--but not enough to hurt, I
should guess. He has a library and a sitting-room. Like me, he sleeps
three-quarters, but he doesn't have to sit on his bed in the daytime.
And he has a bathrobe of just the sort I shall have, when I can afford
it. He has got together a lot of knick-knacks and curios, but takes
them lightly.
"'Sorry I've only one big arm-chair,' he said, handing me his
cigarette-case and settling me down in comfort; 'but I entertain very
seldom. I should like to be hospitable,' he went on; '--I really think
it's in me; but that's pretty much out of the question here. I have no
chef, no dining-room of my own, no ball-room, certainly.... Perhaps,
before very long, I shall have to make a change.'
"He asked me about Freeford, and I didn't realize until I was on my way
back that he had assumed my home town just as he had assumed my
lodging. Well, all right; I never resent a friendly interest. He sat in
a less-easy chair and blew his smoke-rings and wondered if I had been a
small-town boy. 'I'm one, too,' he said; '--at least Churchton, forty
years--at least Churchton, thirty years ago, was not all it is to-day.
It has always had its own special tone, of course; but in my young--in
my younger days it was just a large country village. Fewer of us went
into town to make money, or to spend it.'...
"And then he asked me to go into town, one evening soon, and help him
spend some. He suggested it rather shyly; _à tâtons_, I will
say--though French is not my business. He offered a dinner at a
restaurant, and the theatre afterwards. Did I accept? Indeed I did.
Think, Arthur! after all the movies and restaurants round the elms and
the fountain (tho' you don't know them yet)! I will say, too, that his
cigarettes were rather better than my own....
"I suppose he is fully fifty; but he has his young days, I can see.
Certainly his age doesn't obtrude,--doesn't bother me at all, though he
sometimes seems conscious of it himself. He wears eye-glasses part of
the time,--for dignity, I presume. He had them on when I came in, but
they disappeared almost at once, and I saw them no more.
"He asked me about my degree,--though I didn't remember having spoken
of it. I couldn't but mention 'Shakespeare'--as the word goes; and you
know that when I mention him, it always makes the other man mention
Bacon. He did mention Bacon, and smiled. 'I've studied the cipher,' he
said. 'All you need to make it go is a pair of texts--a long one and a
short one--and two fonts of type, or their equivalent in penmanship.
Two colors of ink, for example. You can put anything into anything. See
here.' He reached up to a shelf and brought down a thin brown square
note-book. 'Here's the alphabet,' he said; 'and here'--opening a little
beyond--'is my use of it: one of my earliest exercises. I have put the
first stanza of "Annabel Lee" into the second chapter of "Tom Jones."'
He ignored the absent eye-glasses and picked out the red letters from
the black with perfect ease. 'Simplest thing in the world,' he went on;
'anybody can do it. All it needs is time and patience and care. And if
you happen to be waggishly or fraudulently inclined you can give
yourself considerable entertainment--and can entertain or puzzle other
people later. You don't really believe that "Bacon wrote Shakespeare"?'
"Of course I don't, Arthur,--as you very well know. I picked out the
first line of 'Annabel Lee' by arranging the necessary groupings among
the odd mixture of black and red letters he exhibited, and told him I
didn't believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare--nor that Shakespeare did
either. 'Who did, then?' he naturally asked. I told him that I would
grant, at the start and for a few seasons, a group of young noblemen
and young gentlemen; but that some one of them (supposing there to have
been more than that one) soon distanced all the rest and presently
became the edifice before which the manager from Stratford was only the
facade. He--this 'someone'--was a noble and a man of wide reach both in
his natural endowments and in his acquired culture. But he couldn't dip
openly into the London cesspool; he had his own quality to safeguard
against the contamination of a new and none too highly-regarded trade.
'I don't care for your shillings,' he said to Shaxper, 'nor for the
printed plays afterward; but I do value your front and your footing and
the services they can render me on my way to self-expression.' He was
an earl, or something such, with a country-seat in Warwick, or on the
borders of Gloucestershire; 'and if I only had a year and the money to
make a journey among the manor-houses of mid-England,' I said, 'and to
dig for a while in their muniment-rooms....' Well, you get the idea,
all right enough.
"He came across and sat on the arm of the big easy-chair. 'If you went
over there and discovered all that, the English scholars would never
forgive you.' As of course they wouldn't: look at the recent Shaxper
discoveries by Americans in London! 'And wouldn't that be a rather
sensational thesis,' he went on, 'from a staid candidate for an M.A.,
or a Ph.D., or a Litt.D., or whatever it is you're after?' It would, of
a verity; and why shouldn't it be? 'Don't go over there,' he ended with
a smile, as he dropped his hand on my shoulder; 'your friends would
rather have you here.' 'Never fear!' I returned; 'I can't possibly
manage it. I shall just do something on "The Disjunctive Conjunctions
in 'Paradise Lost,'" and let it go at that!'
"He got up to reach for the ash-receiver. 'They tell me,' he said,
'that a degree isn't much in itself--just an _étape_ on the journey to
a better professional standing.' 'Yes,' said I, '--and to better
professional rewards. It means so many more hundreds of dollars a year
in pay.' But you know all about that, too.
"I'm glad your dramatic club is getting forward so well with the
rehearsals for its first drive of the season; glad too that, this time
at least, they have given you a good part. Tell me all about it before
the big stars in town begin to dim your people in my eyes--and in your
own; and don't let them cast you for the next performance in January.
You will be here by then.
"Yours,
"B.L.C."
8
_COPE UNDERTAKES AN EXCURSION_
Two or three days later, Randolph met Medora Phillips in front of the
bank. This was a neat and solemn little edifice opposite the elms and
the fountain; it was neighbored by dry-goods stores, the offices of
renting agencies, and the restaurants where the unfraternized
undergraduates took their daily chances. Through its door passed
tradesmen's clerks with deposits, and young housewives with babies in
perambulators, and students with their small financial problems, and
members of the faculty about to cash large or small checks. Mrs.
Phillips had come across from the dry-goods store to pick up her
monthly sheaf of vouchers,--it was the third of October.
"Don't you want to come in for a minute?" she asked Randolph. "Then you
can walk on with me to the stationer's. Carolyn tells me that our last
batch of invitations reduced us to nothing. How did _your_ dinner go?"
Randolph followed her into the cool marble interior. "Oh, in town, you
mean? Quite well, I think. I'm sure my young man took a good honest
appetite with him!"
"I know. We don't do half enough for these poor boys."
"Yes, he rose to the food. But not to the drinks. I took him, after
all, to my club. I innocently suggested cocktails; but, no. He
declined--in a deft but straightforward way. Country principles.
Small-town morals. He made me feel like a--well, like a corrupter of
youth."
"You didn't mind, though,--of course you didn't. You liked it. Wasn't
it noble! Wasn't it charming! So glad that _we_ had nothing but
Apollinaris and birch beer! Still, it would have been a pleasure to
hear him refuse."
The receiving-teller gave her her vouchers. She put them in her handbag
and somehow got round a perambulator, and the two went out on the
street.
"And how did your 'show' go?" she continued. "That's about as much as
we can call the drama in these days."
"That, possibly, didn't go quite so well. I took him to a 'comedy,'--as
they nowadays call their mixture of farce and funniment. 'Comedy'!--I
wish Meredith could have seen it! Well, he laughed a little, here and
there,--obligingly, I might say. But there was no 'chew' in the thing
for him,--nothing to fill his intellectual maw. He's a serious
youngster, after all,--exuberant as he seems. I felt him appraising me
as a gay old irresponsible...."
"'Old'--you are not to use that word. Come, don't say that he--that he
venerated you!"
"Oh, not at all. During the six hours we were together--train, club,
theatre, and train again--he never once called me 'sir'; he never once
employed our clumsy, repellent Anglo-Saxon mode of address, 'mister';
in fact, he never employed any mode of address at all. He got round it
quite cleverly,--on system, as I soon began to perceive; and not for a
moment did he forget that the system was in operation. He used,
straight through, a sort of generalized manner--I might have been
anywhere between twenty and sixty-five."
They were now in front of the stationer's show-window, and there were
few people in the quiet thoroughfare to jostle them.
Medora smiled.
"How clever; how charming!" she said. "Leaving you altogether free to
pick your own age. I hope you didn't go beyond thirty-five. You must
have been quite charming in your early thirties."
"That's kind of you, I'm sure; but I don't believe that I was ever
'charming' at _any_ age. I think you've used that word once too often.
I was a quiet, studious lad, with nice notions, but possibly something
of a prig. I was less 'charming' than correct. The young ladies had the
greatest confidence in me,--not one of them was ever 'afraid'."
"Why, how horrid! How utterly unsatisfactory! Nor their mothers?"
"No. And I'm still single, as you're advised. And I'm not sure that the
young gentlemen cared much more for me. If I had had a little more
'gimp' and _verve_, I might have equalled the particular young
gentleman of whom we have been discoursing. But...."
His obviously artificial style of speech concealed, as she guessed,
some real feeling.
"Oh, if you insist on disparaging yourself...!"
"I was quite as coolly correct as I apprehend him to be; and if I could
only have contrived to compass the charming, as well, who knows
what----?"
"You don't like my word. Is there a better, a more suitable?"
"No. You have the _mot juste_."
He threw a finger through the wide pane of glass. "Is that the sort of
thing you are after? Those boxes of pale gray are rather good."
"I never buy from the show-window. Come in, and help me choose."
"I love to shop," he said, in a mock ecstasy. "With others," he added.
"I like to follow money in--and to contribute taste and experience."
Over the stationer's counter she said:
"Save Sunday. We are going out to the sand-hills."
"Thank you. Very well. Most glad to."
"And you are to bring him."
"Him?"
"Bertram Cope."
"Why, I've given him six hours within two or three days. And now you're
asking me to give him sixteen."
"Sixteen--or more. But you're not giving them to him. You're giving
them to all of us. You're giving them to me. The day is likely to be
fine and settled, and I'd recommend your catching the 8:30 train. I
shall have my full load in the car. And more, if I have to take along
Helga. Try to reach us by one, or a quarter past."
Mrs. Phillips had lately taken on a house among the sand dunes beyond
the state line. This singular region had recently acquired so wide a
reputation for utter neglect and desolation that--despite its distance
from town, whether in miles or in hours--no one could quite afford to
ignore it. Picnics, pageants, encampments and excursions all united in
proclaiming its remoteness, its silence, its vacuity. Along the rim of
ragged slopes which put a term to the hundreds of miles of water that
spread from the north, people tramped, bathed, canoed, motored and
week-ended. Within a few seasons Duneland had acquired as great a
reputation for "prahlerische Dunkelheit"--for ostentatious
obscurity--as ever was enjoyed even by Schiller's Wallenstein. "Lovers
of Nature" and "Friends of the Landscape" moved through its distant and
inaccessible purlieus in squads and cohorts. Everybody had to spend
there at least one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts
whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who
insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two
super-fanatics--ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the
sand-diggers--who clung to that weird and changing region the whole
year through.
Medora Phillips' house was several miles beyond the worst of the
hurly-burly. There were no tents in sight, even in August. Nor was the
honk of the motor-horn heard even during the most tumultuous Sundays.
The spot was harder to reach than most others along the twenty miles of
nicked and ragged brim which helped enclose the wide blue area of the
Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little
tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly
in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch
thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our
nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated
old farmhouse and had made it into what her friends and habitues liked
to call a bungalow. The house had been put up--in the rustic spirit
which ignores all considerations of landscape and outlook--behind a
well-treed dune which allowed but the merest glimpse of the lake;
however, a walk of six or eight minutes led down to the beach, and in
the late afternoon the sun came with grand effect across the gilded
water and through the tall pine-trunks which bordered the zig-zag path.
Medora had added a sleeping porch, a dining-porch and a lean-to for the
car; and she entertained there through the summer lavishly, even if
intermittently and casually.
"No place in the world like it!" she would declare enthusiastically to
the yet inexperienced and therefore the still unconverted. "The spring
arrives weeks ahead of our spring in town, and the fall lingers on for
weeks after. Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole
country meet in one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and
the flowers!" Then she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in
April, and the vast sheets of pale blue lupines in early June, and the
yellow, sunlike blossoms of the prickly-pear in July, and the red
glories of painter's-brush and bittersweet and sumach in September. "No
wonder," she would say, "that they have to distribute handbills on the
excursion-trains asking people to leave the flowers alone!"
"How shocking!" Cope had cried, with his resonant laugh, when this
phase of the situation was brought to his attention. "Are the
automobile people any better?"
Randolph had told him of some of the other drawbacks involved in the
excursion. "It's a long way to go, even when you pass up the trolley
and make a single big bolt by train. And it leads through an industrial
region that is mighty unprepossessing--little beauty until almost the
end. And even when you get there, it may all seem a slight and simple
affair for the time and trouble taken--unless you really like Nature.
And lastly," he said, with a sidelong glance at Cope, "you may find
yourself, as the day wears on, getting a little too much of my company."