a larger room than his present, with more furniture and better; a
bookcase instead of a shelf; a closet, and hot and cold water in some
convenient alcove; a second table, with a percolator on it, at which
Arthur, who was a light sleeper and willingly an early riser, might
indulge his knack for coffee-making to the advantage of them both. And
Arthur had the same blessed facility with toast.
Then his thoughts made an excursion toward Randolph. Here was a man who
was in business in the city, and who was related, by marriage, to the
board of trustees. How soon might one feel sufficiently well acquainted
with him to ask his friendly offices in behalf of the new-comer,--the
man who might reasonably be expected the first week in January?
13
_COPE DINES AGAIN--AND STAYS AFTER_
Medora Phillips' social activities ran through several social strata
and her entertainments varied to correspond. Sometimes she contented
herself with mere boy-and-girl affairs, which were thrown together from
material gathered within her own household and from the humbler walks
of undergraduate life. Sometimes she entertained literary celebrities,
and invited the head professors and their wives to meet them. And two
or three times a season she gave real dinners to "society," summoning
to Ashburn avenue, from homes even more architectural than her own, the
banking and wholesale families whose incomes were derived from the
city, but who pillared both the university and the many houses of
worship in Churchton itself. And sometimes, when she passed over the
older generation of these families in favor of the younger, her courses
were more "liberal" than Churchton's earlier standards quite approved.
On such formal occasions her three young ladies were dispensed with.
They were encouraged to go to some sorority gathering or to some
fudge-party. On the occasion now meditated she had another young person
in mind. This was the granddaughter of one of the banking families; the
girl might come along with her father and mother. She was not very
pretty, not very entertaining; however, Mrs. Phillips needed one girl,
and if she were not very attractive, none the worse. The one girl was
for the one young man. The one young man was to be Bertram Cope. Our
fond lady meant to have him and to show him off, sure that her choicest
circle could not but find him as charming as she herself did. Most of
us, at one time or another, have thrust forward our preferences in the
same confident way.
Cope made less of an impression than his patroness had hoped for.
Somehow his lithe youthfulness, his fine hair and teeth and eyes, the
rich resonance of his voice counted for little--except, perhaps, with
the granddaughter. The middle-aged people about him were used to young
college men and indifferent to them. Cope himself felt that he was in a
new environment, and a loftier one. Several of these were important
people, with names familiar through the town and beyond. He employed a
caution that almost became inexpressiveness. He also found Mrs.
Phillips a shade more formal and stately than her wont. She herself, in
her furtive survey of the board, was disappointed to find that he was
not telling. "Perhaps it's that girl," she thought; "she may be even
duller than I supposed." But never mind; all would be made right later.
Some music had been arranged and there would be an accompanist who
would help him do himself full justice.
"They'll enjoy him," she thought confidently.
She had provided an immensity of flowers. There was an excess of light,
both from electric bulbs and from candles. And there was wine.
"I think I can have just one kind, for once," she had said to herself.
"I know several houses where they have two,--Churchton or not,--and at
least one where they sometimes have three. If this simple town thinks I
can put grape-juice and Apollinaris before such people as these...."
Besides, the interesting Cope might interestingly refuse!
As the many courses moved on, Cope smelt the flowers, which were too
many, and some of them too odoriferous; he blinked at the lights and
breathed the heavy thickening air; and he took--interestingly--a few
sips of burgundy,--for he was now in Rome, and no longer a successful
Protestant in some lesser town of the empire. He had had a hard, close
day of it, busy indoors with themes and with general reading; and he
recalled being glad that the dinner had begun with reasonable
promptitude,--for he had bothered with no lunch beyond a glass of milk
and a roll. To-night there had been everything,--even to an unnecessary
entree. He laid down a spoon on his plate, glad that the frozen
pudding--of whatever sort--was disposed of. Too much of everything
after too little. The people opposite were far away; their murmuring
had become a mumbling, and he wished it was all over. The granddaughter
at his elbow was less rewarding than ever, less justificatory of the
effortful small-talk which he had put forth with more and more labor,
and which he could scarcely put forth now at all. What was it he was
meaning to do later? To sing? Absurd! Impossible! His head ached; he
felt faint and dizzy....
"We will leave you gentlemen to your cigars," he heard a distant voice
saying; and he was conscious for an instant that his hostess was
looking down the table at him with a face of startled concern....
"Don't try to lead him out," a deep voice said. "Lay him on the floor."
He felt himself lowered; some small rug was doubled and redoubled and
placed under his head; a large, firm hand was laid to his wrist; and
something--a napkin dipped in a glass of water and then folded?--was
put to his forehead.
"His pulse will come up in a minute," he heard the same deep voice say.
"If he had taken a step he would have fainted altogether."
"My poor, dear boy! Whatever in the world...!" Thus Medora Phillips.
"Better not be moved for a little," was the next pronouncement.
Cope lay there inert, but reasonably conscious of what was going on.
His eyes gave him no aid, but his ears were open. He heard the alarmed
voice of Medora Phillips directing the disconcerted maids, and the
rustle and flutter of the garments of other daughters of Eve, who had
found him interesting at last. They remarked appreciatively on his
pallor; and one of them said, next day, before forgetting him
altogether, that, with his handsome profile (she mentioned especially
his nose and chin) and with his colorlessness, he looked for a moment
like an ancient cameo.
He knew, now, that he was not going to faint, and that he was in better
case than he seemed. In the circumstances he found nothing more
original to say than: "I shall be all right in no time; just a touch of
dizziness...." He was glad his dress-coat could stand inspection, and
hoped nobody would notice that his shoes had been half-soled....
After a little while he was led away to a couch in the library. The
deep-voiced doctor was on one side of him and Medora Phillips on the
other. Soon he was left alone to recuperate in the dark,--alone, save
for one or two brief, fluttery appearances by Mrs. Phillips herself,
who allowed the coffee to be passed without any supervision on her own
part.
On the second of these visitations he found voice to say:
"I'm so sorry for this--and so ashamed. I can't think how it could have
happened."
He _was_ ashamed, of course. He had broken up an entertainment pretty
completely! Servants running about for him when they had enough to do
for the company at large! All the smooth conventions of dinner-giving
violently brushed the wrong way! He had fallen by the roadside, a young
fellow who had rather prided himself on his health and vigor. Pitiful!
He was glad to lie in the dark with his eyes shut tight, tight.
If he had been fifteen or twenty years older he might have taken it all
rather more lightly. Basil Randolph, now----But Randolph had not been
invited, though his sister and her husband were of the company. Yet had
it been Randolph, he would have smiled a wan smile and tried for a mild
joke, conscious that he had made an original and picturesque
contribution to the affair,--had broken the bland banality of routined
dinner-giving and had provided woman with a mighty fine chance to
"minister" and fuss: a thing she rather enjoyed doing, especially if a
hapless, helpless man had been delivered into her hands as a subject.
But there was no such consolation for poor abashed Cope. He had
disclosed himself, for some reason or other, a weakling; and he had
weakened at a conspicuously wrong time and in a conspicuously mistaken
place. He had hoped, over the cigars and coffee, to lay the foundation
of an acquaintance with the brother-in-law who was a trustee,--to set
up an identity in this influential person's mind as a possible help to
the future of Arthur Lemoyne. But the man now in the dining-room, or
the drawing-room, or wherever, might as well be in the next state.
There came a slight patter of rain on the bay-window near his head. He
began to wonder how he was to get home.
Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, among the ladies, Mrs. Phillips was
anxiously asking: "Was the room too warm? Could the wine have been too
much for him?" And out in the dining-room itself, one man said, "Heaven
knows just how they live;" and another, "Or what they eat, or don't
eat;" and a third, "Or just how hard these young beginners are driven."
"Ought he to go out to-night, Doctor?" asked Mrs. Phillips in a
whisper, appearing in the dining-room door.
"He might better stay if he can," replied the authority, who happened
to be at the nearer end of the table.
"Of course he can," she returned. Of course there was a room for him.
When the party finally reassembled in the drawing-room Cope had
disappeared. Mrs. Phillips could now enlarge on his attractiveness as a
singer, and could safely assure them--what she herself believed--that
they had lost a really charming experience. "If you could only have
heard him that Sunday!" she concluded.
Cope had said, of course, "I can get home perfectly well," and, "It's a
shame for me to be putting you out this way," and so on and on,--the
things you yourself would have said in the circumstances; but he said
them with no particular spirit, and was glad, as he walked uncertainly
up stairs, that he had not far to go.
Mrs. Phillips indeed "had a room for him." She had rooms a-plenty.
There was the chintz chamber on the third floor, where the Irish poet
(who seemed not to expect very much for himself) had been put; and
there was the larger, handsomer chamber on the second floor, where the
Hindoo philosopher (who had loomed up big and important through a vague
Oriental atmosphere) had been installed in state. It was a Louis Quinze
room, and the bed had a kind of silken canopy and a great deal too much
in the way of bolsters and lace coverings. It was thought that the
Hindoo, judging from the report of the maid next morning, had been
moved by some ascetic impulse to sleep not in the bed but on the floor
beside it. This was the room now destined for Cope; surely one flight
of stairs was enough. But there must be no further practice of
asceticism,--least of all by a man who was really ill; so Mrs.
Phillips, snatching a moment from her guests, herself saw the maid
remove the lace pillow-shams and coverlet, and turn down the sheets,
and set the thermos-bottle on the stand beside the reading lamp....
"Don't get up a moment earlier than you feel like doing," she said, at
the door. "Breakfast----"
"To-morrow is one of my busy days," replied Cope wanly. "Goldsmith,
Sheridan...."
"Well, we have other wage-workers in the house, you know. At
seven-thirty, then, if you must."
"Seven-thirty, if you please. Thank you."
By the time Mrs. Phillips had returned to her guests, the first of the
limousines was standing before the house; its wet top shone under an
electric globe. Her own car, meanwhile, obdurately reposed in its
garage. Presently a second limousine joined the first, and a third the
second; and in another quarter of an hour her guests were well on their
way to dispersal. She bade them all goodnight in the best of good humor.
"You've never before had quite such an evening as this, I'm sure!" she
said, with great gaiety.
"Isn't it wonderful how she took it all!" said one lady to another, on
the back seat of her car. "Anything like that would have thrown me off
completely."
The other lady laughed amusedly. She often found our Medora "great fun."
Meanwhile, Cope, up stairs, was sinking deeper and deeper into his big,
wide, overupholstered bed. And as his body sank, his spirit sank with
it. He felt poor, unimportant, ill at ease. In especial, he felt
greatly subordinated; he wished that he might have capitulated to a
man. Then the mystery of handsome houses and of handsome furnishings
came to harass him. Such things were everywhere: how were they got, how
were they kept? Should he himself ever----? But no; nothing ahead for
years, even in the most favorable of circumstances, save an assistant
professorship, with its inconceivably modest emoluments....
And Medora Phillips, in the stir of getting her guests out of the
house, had her first vision of him as sinking off to sleep. Somehow or
other his fine, straight yellow hair retained its backward sweep with
no impairment by reason of turnings and tossings; his clear profile
continued to keep itself disengaged from any depression in the pillows;
his slender hands were laid in quiet symmetry over the wide edge of the
down-turned coverlet. A decorous, unperturbed young old-master ... Van
Eyck ... Carpaccio....
Cope came down to breakfast a little pale, a little shamefaced; but he
felt pretty well revived and he made up in excess of speech and action
what he essentially lacked in spirit. Mrs. Phillips descended as early
as the three girls,--earlier, in fact, than Hortense, who entered
informally through the butler's pantry and apparently in full
possession of last night's facts. Carolyn inquired civilly after his
condition; Amy Leffingwell, with her blue eyes intent upon him,
expressed concern and sympathy; Hortense, with her lips closely shut in
a satirical smile, said nothing at all: a possible exhibition of
self-control which gave her aunt some measure of solicitude. It was not
always well when she talked, and it was not always well when she kept
silent. Mrs. Phillips pressed the toast upon him and recommended the
grape-fruit. He took both with satisfaction, and a second cup of
coffee. With that he felt he could easily walk to his class-room; and
the walk itself, in the fresh morning air, would brace him further for
his hours of routine with his students.
"What a regular nuisance I've made of myself!" he said, on leaving the
house.
"Oh, haven't you, just!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips joyously. "Your name
as an entertainer will be all over town! I'm sure you gave some of
those poky people a real touch of novelty!"
Amy Leffingwell was in the front hall at the same time, with her
music-roll. They were going the same way, to substantially the same
place, to meet about the same hour in the day's schedule. They went
along the street together.
The morning air was brisk and cool after last night's shower. Like the
trees under which they passed, it gave the first decided intimation of
autumn. They set off at a lively pace toward the college towers and the
lake.
Cope was soon sailing along with his head high, his trim square
shoulders much in action, and his feet throwing themselves spiritedly
here and there. Amy, who was not very tall, kept up as well as she
could.
"This isn't too fast for you...?" she asked presently.
"No; but it may be a little too fast for you. Excuse me; I've never
learned to keep pace with a woman. But as for myself, I never felt
better in my life. Every yard toward the good old lake"--the wind was
coming down from the north in a great sweep--"makes me feel finer."
He slowed up appreciably.
"Oh, not for me!" she said in deprecation. "I like a brisk morning walk
as well as anybody. Did you sing at all?" she asked.
"Not a note. They put the soft pedal on me. They 'muted' me," he
amended, in deference to her own branch of the profession.
"We came in by the side door about half past nine. It was a dull
meeting. I listened for you. Somebody was playing."
Cope gave a sly smile.
"It must have been the poor disappointed woman who was to have
accompanied me. She had had a list of three or four of my things--to
run them over in her own album, I suppose. Think just how disappointed
she must have been to find that she had the whole field to herself!"
"Oh, musicians--even we poor, despised professionals--are not all like
that. If it had been arranged for me to accompany you with an
obbligato, I shouldn't have been pleased if opportunity had failed me."
"Your contribution would have been more important than hers. And your
substitution for my failure would have given added interest."
The talk, having reached the zone of arid compliment, tended to
languish. They had now reached Learning's side of the trolley-tracks,
and rills in the great morning flood of the scholastic life were
beginning to gather about them and to unite in a rolling stream which
flowed toward the campus.
Two or three streets on, the pair separated, she to her work, he to
his. For him the walk had been a nothing in particular--he would a
little have preferred taking it alone. For her it had been--despite the
low level of expressiveness reached on either side--a privilege which
had been curtailed much too soon.
Meanwhile, back in the house, Hortense was detailing the events of the
previous evening to Joe Foster; the general access of activity on the
morning after had made it desirable that she help with his breakfast.
She went at it with a will.
"Why," she said, as Foster sat at his coffee, boiled egg and toast, "he
keeled over like a baby."
"Hum!" said Foster darkly. It was as if a shaping ideal had dissipated.
Or as if a trace of weakness in one seemingly so young and strong was
not altogether unacceptable as a source of consolation.
However, Cope, at half past four that afternoon, was on the faculty
tennis-courts, with a racquet in his hand. But one set was enough. "I
seem to be a day ahead of my schedule," he said, pulling out and
strolling along homeward.
14
_COPE MAKES AN EVASION_
Two or three days later, Randolph put a book of essays in his pocket
and went round to spend an hour with Joseph Foster. Foster sat in his
wheeled chair in his own room. He was knitting. The past year or two
had brought knitting-needles into countenance for men, and he saw no
reason why he should not put a few hanks of yarn into shape useful for
himself. He might not have full command of his limbs nor of his eyes,
but he did have full command of his fingers. He had begun to knit socks
for his own use; and even a muffler, in the hope that on some occasion,
during the coming months, he might get outside.
As Randolph entered, Foster looked up from under his green shade with
an expression of perplexity. "Have I dropped a stitch here or not?" he
asked. "I wish you knew something about knitting; I don't like to call
Medora or one of the girls away up here to straighten me out. Look;
what do you think?"
"They count all right," said Randolph; and he sat down on the couch
opposite. "I've brought a book."
"I hope it's poetry!" said Foster, with a fierce promptness. "I hope
it's about Adonis, or Thammuz, whose mishap 'in Lebanon' set all the
Syrian females a-going. I could stand a lot more of that,--or perhaps I
couldn't!"
"Why, Joe, what's gone wrong?"
"I suppose you know that your young friend got up a great to-do for us
the other evening?"
"Yes; I've heard something about it." He looked at Foster's drawn face,
and heard with surprise the rasping note in his voice. "Was it as bad
as that?"
Foster drew his shade down farther over his eyes and clashed his
needles together.
"I remember how, when I was in Florence, we went out to a religious
festival one evening at some small hill-town near by. This was twenty
years ago, when I _could_ travel. There was a kind of grotto in the
church, under the high altar; and in the grotto was a full-sized figure
of a dead man, carved and painted--and covered with wounds; and round
that figure half the women and girls of the town were collected,
stroking, kissing ... Adonis all over again!"
"Oh, come, Joe; don't get morbid."
Foster lifted one shoulder.
"Well, the young fellow began by roaring through the house like a bull
of Bashan, and he ended by toppling over like a little wobbly calf."
He spoke like a man who had imagined a full measure of physical powers
and had envied them ... had been exasperated by the exuberant
presentation of them... had felt a series of contradictory emotions
when they had seemed to fail....
"It was only a moment of dizziness," said Randolph. "I imagine he was
fairly himself next day."
"Well, I've heard too much about it. Medora came up here and----"
"Need we go into that?"
"There were plenty more to help," Foster went on doggedly. "One dear
creature, who was old enough to be more cautious, spilt water down the
whole front of her dress----"
"I expect," said Randolph, "that the poor chap has been overworked; or
careless about his meals; or worried in his classes--for he may not be
fully settled in his new place; or some emotional strain may have set
itself up----"
"I vote for the emotional strain," said Foster bluntly.
"A guess in the dark," commented Randolph, and paused. He himself knew
little enough of Cope as a complex. He had met him but a few times, and
could not associate him with his unknown background. He knew next to
nothing of Cope's family, his connections, his intimates, his early
associations and experiences. Nor had he greatly bestirred himself to
learn. He had done little more than go to a library in the city and
turn over the leaves of the Freeford directory. This publication, like
most of those dealing with the smaller cities, gave separately the
names of all the members of a family; and repetitions of the same
address helped toward the arrangement of these individuals (disposed
alphabetically) into family groups. Freeford had no great number of
Copes, and several of them lived at 1636 Cedar Street. "Elm, Pine,
Locust, Cedar," had thought Randolph; "the regular set." And, "One of
the good streets," he surmised, "but rather far out. Cedar!" he
repeated, and thought of Lebanon and the Miltonic Adonis. Of these
various Copes, "Cope, David L., bookpr," might be the father,--unless
"Cope, Leverett C., mgr" were the right man. If the former, he was
employed by the Martin & Graves Furniture Company, and the Martins were
probably important people who lived far out--and handsomely, one might
guess--on a Prospect Avenue.... Then there was "Cope, Miss Rosalys M.,
schooltchr," same address as "David": she was likely his daughter.
"H'm!" Randolph had thought, "these pickings are scanty,--enough
anatomical reconstruction for to-day...." And now he was thinking, as
he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I
might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I
trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour
doesn't spread indefinitely. And then--men's brothers...."
"Well," asked Foster sharply, "are you mooning? Medora sat in the same
place yesterday, and she talked for awhile too and then fell into a
moonstruck silence. What's it all about?"
Randolph came out of his reverie. "Oh, I was just hoping the poor boy
was back on his pins all right again."