between padded arms, and given him a cigar. He drew Cope's attention to
the jades and swordguards, to the odd assortment of primitive musical
instruments (which would doubtless, in time, find a place at the Art
Museum in the city), and to his latest acquisition--a volume of Bembo's
"Le Prose." It had reached him but a week before from Venice,--"_in
Venetia, al segno del Pozzo_, MDLVII," said the title-page, in fact. It
was bound in vellum, pierced by bookworms, and was decorated, in quaint
seventeenth-century penmanship, with marginal annotations, and also, on
the fly leaves, with repeated honorifics due to a study of the forms of
address by some young aspirant for favor. Randolph had rather depended
on it to take Cope's interest; but now the little _envoi_ from the
Lagoons seemed lesser in its lustre. Cope indeed took the volume with
docility and looked at its classical title-page and at its quaint
Biblical colophon; but, "Just who _was_ 'Pietro Bembo'?" he asked; and
Randolph realized, with a slight shock, that young instructors teach
only what they themselves lately have learned, and that, in many cases,
they have not learned much.
But in truth neither paid much heed to the tabulated vocables of the
Venetian cardinal--nor to any of the other rarities near by. Basil
Randolph was wondering how he was to take Arthur Lemoyne, and was
asking himself if his trouble in setting up a new ménage was likely to
go for nothing; and Bertram Cope, while he pursued the course of the
bookworm through the parchment covers and the yellowed sheets within,
was wondering in what definite way his host might aid the fortunes of
Arthur Lemoyne and thus make matters a little easier for them both.
"_All' ill.'mo Sig.'r paron ossevnd.'mo.... All' ill.'mo et ecc.'mo
Sig.'r paron... All' ill'mo et R.R.d.'mo Sig.'r, Sig.'r Pio. Francesco
Bembo, Vesco et Conte di Belluno_"--thus ran the faded brown lines on
the flyleaf, in their solicitous currying of favor; but these
reiterated forms of address conveyed no meaning to Cope, and offered no
opening: now, as once before, he let the matter wait.
Randolph thought over Cope's statement of his plans, and his slight
touch of pique did not pass away. Toward the end of the evening, he
spoke of the wreck and the rescue, after all.
"Well," he said, "you are not so completely committed as I feared."
"Committed?"
"By your new household arrangements."
"Well, I shall have back my chum."
Randolph put forward the alternative.
"I was afraid, for a moment, that you might be taking a wife."
"A wife?"
"Yes. Such a rescue often leads straight to matrimony--in the
story-books, anyhow."
Cope laughed, but with a slight disrelish. "We're in actual life still,
I'm glad to think. What I said on one stretch of the shore goes on the
other," he declared. "I don't feel any more inclination to wedded life
than ever, nor any likelihood"--here he spoke with effort, as if
conscious of a possible danger on some remote horizon--"of entering it."
"It _would_ have been sudden, wouldn't it?" commented Randolph, with a
short laugh. "Well," he went on, "one who inclines to hospitality must
work with the material at his disposal. I shall be glad, on some
occasion or other," he proceeded, with a slight trace of formality
creeping into his tone, "to entertain your friend."
"I shall be more than glad," replied Cope, "to have you meet."
18
_COPE AT THE CALL OF DUTY_
Cope took his own time in calling upon the Ashburn Avenue circle; but
he finally made, in person, the inquiries for which those made by
telephone were an inadequate substitute. Yet he waited so long that,
only a few hours before the time he had set, he received a sweet but
somewhat urgent little note from Amy Leffingwell suggesting his early
appearance. He felt obliged to employ the first moments of his call in
explaining that he had been upon the point of coming, anyway, and that
he had set aside the present hour two or three days before for this
particular purpose: an explanation, he acknowledged inwardly, which
held no great advantage for him.
"Why am I spinning such stuff?" he asked himself impatiently.
Amy's note of course minimized her aid to him and magnified his aid to
her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still
stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the
incident. His arm _had_ grasped hers firmly--and she felt it yet. But
when she went on to say--not for the first time, nor for the
second--how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin
against those slapping waves when the shore had seemed so far away, he
wondered whether he had really done so. For a moment or two, possibly;
but surely not as part of a conscious, reasoned scheme to save.
"She was doing all right enough," he muttered in frowning protest.
Neither did he welcome Mrs. Phillips' tendency to make him a hero. She
was as willing as the girl herself to believe that he had kept Amy's
chin above water--not for a moment merely, but through most of the
transit to shore. He sat there uneasily, pressing his thumbs between
his palms and his closed fingers and drawing up his feet crampingly
within their shoes; yet it somewhat eased his tension to find that
Medora Phillips was disposed to put Amy into a subordinate place: Amy
had been but a means to an end--her prime merit consisted in having
given him a chance to function. Any other girl would have done as well.
A slight relief, but a welcome.
Another mitigation: the house, the room, was full of people. The other
young women of the household were present; even the young business-man
who had understood the stove and the pump had looked in: no chance for
an intense, segregated appreciation. There had been another weekend at
the dunes, when this youth had nimbly ranged the forest and the beach
to find wood for the great open fireplace; and he had come, now, at the
end of the season, to make due acknowledgments for privileges enjoyed.
He, for his part, was willing enough to regard Amy as a heroine; but he
considered her as a heroine linked with the wrong man and operative in
the wrong place. He cared nothing in the world for Cope, and disparaged
him as before--when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but
been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram
Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at
the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy,
domestic edge of Churchton--well, wouldn't the affair have been better
set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque
and heroic, instead of slightly silly.
Yes, the room was full. Even Joseph Foster had contrived to get himself
brought down by Peter: further practice for the day when he should make
a still more ambitious flight and dine at Randolph's new table. He sat
in a dark corner of the room and tried to get, as best he might, the
essential hang of the situation: the soft, insidious insistence of Amy;
the momentum and bravado of his sister-in-law; the veiled disparagement
of Cope in which George F. Pearson, seated on a sofa between Carolyn
and Hortense, indulged for their benefit, or for his own relief; above
all, he listened for tones and undertones from Cope himself. He had
never seen Cope before (if indeed it could be said that he really saw
him now), and he had never heard his speaking voice save at a remove of
two floors. Cope had taken his hand vigorously, as that of the only man
(among many women) from whom he had much to expect, and had given him a
dozen words in a loud tone which seemed to correspond with his
pressure. But Cope's voice, in his hearing, had lapsed from resonance
to non-resonance, and from that to tonelessness, and from that to
quietude.... Was the fellow in process of making a long diminuendo--a
possible matter of weeks or of months? As before, when confronted by
what had once seemed a paragon of dash and vigor, he scarcely knew
whether to be exasperated or appeased.
Through this variety of spoken words and unspoken thoughts Hortense sat
silent and watchful. Presently the talk lapsed: with the best will in
the world a small knot of people cannot go on elaborately embroidering
upon a trivial incident forever. There was a shifting of groups, a
change in subjects. Yet Hortense continued to glower and to meditate.
What had the incident really amounted to? What did the man himself
really amount to? She soon found herself at his side, behind the
library-table and its spreading lamp-shade. He was silently handling a
paper-cutter, with his eyes cast down.
"See me!" she said, in a tense, vibratory tone. "Speak to me!"--and she
glowered upon him. "I am no kitten, like Amy. I am no tame tabby, like
Carolyn, sending out written invitations. Throw a few poor words my
way."
Cope dropped the paper-cutter. Her address was like a dash of brine in
the face, and he welcomed it.
"Tell me; did you look absurd--then?" she dashed ahead.
A return to fresh water, after all! "Why," he rejoined reluctantly, "no
man, dressed in all his clothes, looks any the better for being soaked
through."
"And Amy,--she must have looked absolutely ridiculous! That wide,
flapping hat, and all! I had been telling her for weeks that it was out
of style."
"She threw it away," said Cope shortly. "And I suppose her hair looked
as well as a woman's ever does, when she's in the water."
"Well," she observed, "it's one thing to be ridiculous and another to
go on being ridiculous. I hope you don't mean to do that?"
The pronoun "you" has its equivocal aspects. Her expression, while
marked enough, threw no clear light. Cope took the entire onus on
himself.
"Of course no man would choose to be ridiculous--still less to stay so.
Do, please, let me keep on dry land; I'm beginning to feel
water-logged." He shifted his ground. "Why do you try to make it seem
that I don't care to talk with you?"
"Because you don't. Haven't I noticed it?"
"I haven't. It seems to me that I----"
"Of course you haven't. Does that make it any better?"
"I'm sure the last thing in the world I should want to do would be
to----"
"I know. Would be to show partiality. To fail in treating all alike.
Even that small programme isn't much--nor likely to please any girl;
but you have failed to carry it out, small as it is. Here in this
house, there on the dunes, what have I been--and where? Put into any
obscure corner, lost in the woods, left off somewhere on the edge of
things...."
Cope stared and tried to stem her protests. She was of the blood,--her
aunt's own niece. But whereas Medora Phillips sometimes "scrapped," as
he called it, merely to promote social diversion and to keep the
conversational ball a-rolling, this young person, a more vigorous
organism, and with decided, even exaggerated ideas as to her dues...
Well, the room was still full, and he was glad enough of it.
"I don't know whether I like you or not," she went on, in a low, rapid
tone; "and I don't suppose you very much like me; but I won't go on
being ignored....
"Ignored? Why," stammered Cope, "my sense of obligation to this
house----"
She shrugged scornfully. His sense of obligation had been made none too
apparent. Certainly it had not been brought into line with her deserts
and demands.
Cope took up the paper-cutter again and looked out across the room. Amy
Leffingwell, questioningly, was looking across at him. He could change
feet--if that made the general discomfort of his position any less. He
did so.
Amy was standing near the piano and held a sheet or two of new music in
her hands. And Medora Phillips, with a word of general explication and
direction, made the girl's intention clear. Amy had a new song for
baritone, with a violin obbligato and the usual piano accompaniment,
and Cope was to sing it. 'Twas an extremely simple thing, quite within
his compass; and Carolyn, who could read easy music at sight ("It's
awfully easy," declared Amy), would play the piano part; and Amy
herself would perform the obbligato (with no statement as to whether it
was simple or not).
Carolyn approached the task and the piano in the passive spirit of
accommodation. Cope came forward with reluctance: this was not an
evening when he felt like singing; besides, he preferred to choose his
own songs. Also, he would have preferred to warm up on something
familiar. Amy took her instrument from its case with a suppressed sense
of ecstasy; and it is the ecstatic who generally sets the pace.
The thing went none too well. Amy was the only one who had seen the
music before, and she was the only one who particularly wanted to make
music now. However, the immediate need was not that the song should go
well, but that it should go: that it should go on, that it should go on
and on, repetitiously, until it should come (or even not come) to go
better. She slid her bow across the strings with tasteful passion. She
enjoyed still more than her own tones the tones of Cope's voice,--tones
which, whether in happy unison with hers or not, were, after all,
seldom misplaced, whatever they may have lacked in heartiness and
confidence. It was a short piece, and on the third time it went rather
well.
"How perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, at the right moment.
Cope smiled deprecatingly. "It might be made to go very nicely," he
said.
"It _has_ gone very nicely," insisted Amy; "it did, this last time."
She waved her bow with some vivacity. She had heaved the whole of her
young self into the work; she had been buoyed up by Cope's tones,
which, with repetition, had gathered assurance if not expressiveness;
and she based her estimate of the general effect on the impression
which her own inner nature had experienced. And her impression was
heightened when Pearson, forging forward, and ignoring both Cope and
Carolyn, thanked her richly and emphatically for her part--a part
which, to him, seemed the whole.
Hortense, who had kept her place behind the large lampshade, twisted
her interlocked fingers and said no word. Foster, who had disposed
himself on an inconspicuous couch, kept his own counsel. After all,
_omne ignotum_: Cope's singing had sounded better from upstairs. At
close range a ringing assertiveness had somehow failed.
Cope had come with no desire to extend his stay beyond the limits of an
evening call. He declined to sing on his own account, and soon rose as
if to make his general adieux.
"You won't give us one of your own songs, then?" asked Medora Phillips,
in a disappointed tone. "And at my dinner----"
No, she could not quite say that, at her dinner, Cope, whatever he had
failed to do, had contributed no measure of entertainment for her
guests.
"Give us a recitation, then," persisted Medora; "or tell us a story. Or
make up"--here she indulged herself in an airily imperious flight--"a
story of your own on the spot."
A trifling request, truly. But----
"Heavens!" said Cope. "I am not an author--still less an
_improvvisatore_."
"I am sure you could be," returned Medora fondly. "Just try."
Cope sat down again and began to run his eye uncomfortably about the
room, as if dredging the air for an idea. Behind one corner of a mirror
was a large bunch of drying leaves. They had been brought in from the
sand dunes as a decorative souvenir of the autumn, and had kept their
place through mere inertia: an oak bough, once crimson and russet; a
convoluted length of bittersweet, to which a few split berries still
clung; and a branch of sassafras, with its intriguing variety of
leaves--a branch selected, in fact, because it gave, within narrow
compass, the plant's entire scope and repertoire as to foliage.
Cope caught at the sassafras as a falling balloonist catches at his
parachute.
"Well," he said, still reluctant and fumbling, "perhaps I can devise a
legend: the Legend, let us say, of the Sassafras Bush."
"Good!" cried Medora heartily.
Pearson, whispering to Amy Leffingwell, gave little heed to Cope and
his strained endeavor to please Mrs. Phillips. Foster, quite passive,
listened with curiosity for what might come.
"Or perhaps you would prefer folk-lore," Cope went on. "Why the
Sassafras has Three Kinds of Leaves, or something like that."
"Better yet!" exclaimed Medora. "Listen, everybody. Why the Sassafras
has Three Kinds of Leaves."
Pearson stopped his buzzings, and Cope began. "The Wood-nymphs," he
said slowly, "were a nice enough lot of girls, but they labored under
one great disadvantage: they had no thumbs."
Hortense pricked up her ears. Did he mean to be personal? If so, he
should find that one of the nymphs had a whole hand as surely as he
himself had a cheek.
Cope paused. "Of course you've got to postulate _something_," he
submitted apologetically.
"Of course," Medora agreed.
"So when they bought their gloves, or mittens, or whatever their
handgear might be called, they usually patronized the hickory or the
beech or some other tree with leaves that were----"
"Ovate!" cried Medora delightedly.
"Ovate, yes; or whatever just the right word may be. But a good many of
them traded at the Sign of the Sassafras, where they found leaves that
were similar, but rather more delicate."
"I believe he's going to do it," thought Foster.
"Yet the nymphs knew that they lacked thumbs and kept on wanting them.
So, during the long, dull winter, they put their minds to it, and
finally thumbs came."
"Will-power!" said Medora.
"And early in April they went to the Sassafras and said: 'We have
thumbs! We have thumbs! So we need a different sort of mitten.'
"The Sassafras was only half awake. 'Thumbs?' he repeated. 'How many?'
"'Two!' cried the nymphs. 'Two!'
"A passing breeze roused the Sassafras. He became at least
three-quarters awake."
"I doubt it," muttered Hortense.
"'That's interesting,' he said. 'I aim to supply all new needs. Come
back in a month or so, and meanwhile I'll see what I can do for you.'
"In May the nymphs returned with their thumbs and asked, 'How about our
new mittens?'"
The story was really under way now, and Cope went on with more
confidence and with greater animation.
"'Look and see,' said the Sassafras.
"They looked and saw. Among its simple ordinary leaves were several
with two lobes--one on each side. 'Will these do?'
"'Do?' said the nymphs. 'We said we had two thumbs, but we meant one on
each hand, stupid. Do? We should say not!'
"The Sassafras was mortified. 'Well,' he said, 'that's all I can manage
this season. I'm sorry not to have understood you young ladies and your
needs. Come back again next spring.'
"It was a long time to wait, but they waited. Next May----"
Amy, now unworried by George Pearson, began to get the thread of the
thing. Foster was sure the thread would run through. Hortense was still
alert for ulterior meanings. Poor Cope, however, had no ambition to
spin a double thread,--a single one was all he was equal to.
"Next May the nymphs, after nursing their thumbs for a year----"
Hortense frowned.
"----came back again; and there, among the plain leaves and the
double-lobed leaves, were several fresh bright, smooth ones with a
single lobe well to one side,--the very thing for mittens. And------"
"Yes, he has done it," Foster acknowledged.
"And that," ended Cope rather stridently, as he rose to go on the flood
of a sudden yet unexpected success, "is Why the Sassafras----"
"Why the Sassafras has Three Kinds of Leaves!" cried Medora in triumph.
Mittens for midsummer made no difficulty.
Cope gave Carolyn careful thanks for her support at the piano, and did
not see that she felt he too could be a poet if he only would. He went
out of his way to shake hands with Hortense, and did not realize how
nearly a new quarrel had opened. He stepped over to do the like with
Amy; but she went out with him into the hall,--the only one of the
party who did,--and even accompanied him to the front door.
"Thank you so much," she said, looking up into his face smilingly and
holding his hand with a long, clinging touch. "It went beautifully; and
there are others that will go even better."
"Others?" He thought, for an instant, that she was thanking him for his
Legend and was even threatening to regard him as a flowing fount of
invention; but he soon realized that her mind was fixed exclusively on
their duet--if such it was to be called.
"The deuce!" he thought. "Enough is enough."
Despite his success with the Sassafras, he went home discomforted and
even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The
girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck
ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One
consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a
second squall from the same quarter would not be altogether amiss.
And had there not been one further fleeting source of reassurance? Had
he not, on leaving, caught through the open door of the drawing room an
elevation of Medora Phillips' eyebrows which seemed to say fondly,
indulgently, yet a bit ironically, "Oh, you foolish girl!"? Yet if a
girl is foolish, and is going to persist in her folly, a lightly lifted
pair of eyebrows will not always stay her course. Her gathering
momentum is hardly to be checked by such slender means.
19
_COPE FINDS HIMSELF COMMITTED_
Amy Leffingwell, having written once, found it easier to write again.
And having strolled along the edge of the bluff with Cope on that
fateful Sunday, she found it natural to intercept him on other parts of
the campus (where their paths might easily cross), or to stroll with
him, after casual encounters carefully planned, through sheets of
fallen leaves under the wide avenues of elms just outside. Her third
note almost summoned him to a rendezvous. It annoyed him; but he might
have been more than annoyed had he known of her writing, rather simply,
to a rather simple mother in Fort Lodge, Iowa, about her hopes and her
expectations. Her mother had, of course, heard in detail of the rescue;
and afterward had heard in still greater detail, as the roseate
lime-light of idealization had come to focus more exactly on the scene.
She had had also an unaffected appreciation--or several--of Cope's
personal graces and accomplishments. She had heard, lastly, of Cope's
song to her daughter's obbligato: a duet _in vacuo_, since Carolyn had
been suppressed and the surrounding company had been banished to a
remote circumference. What wonder that she began to see her daughter
and Bertram Cope in an admirable isolation and to intimate that she
hoped, very soon, for definite news?
Well, not a few of us have met an Amy Leffingwell: some plump-faced,
pink-cheeked child, with a delicate little concave nose not at all
"strong," and a fine little chin none too vigorously moulded, and a
pair of timid candid blue eyes shadowed by a wisp or so of fluffy
hair--and have not always taken her for what she was. She "wouldn't
hurt a kitten," we say; and we assume that her "striking out a line for
herself" is the last thing she would try to do. Yet such an
unimpressive and disarming façade may mask large chambers of
stubbornness and tenacity.
Amy knew how long and hard she had thought of Cope, and she asked for
some evidence that he had been thinking long and hard of her. She
desired a "response." But, in fact, he had been thinking of her only
when he must. He thought of her whenever he saw himself caught in that
flapping sail, and he thought of her whenever he recalled that she had
taken it on herself to select his songs. But he did not want her to
make out-and-out demands on his time and attention. Still less did he
want her to talk about "happiness." This had come to be her favorite
topic, and she discoursed on it profusely: he was almost ungracious
enough to say that she did so glibly. "Happiness"--that conventional
bliss toward which she was turning her mind as they strolled together
on these late November afternoons--was for him a long way ahead. How
furnish a house, how clothe and feed a wife?--at least until his thesis
should be written and a place, with a real salary, found in the
academic world. How, even, buy an engagement ring--that costly
superfluity? How even contrive to pay for all the small gifts and
attentions which an engagement involved? Yet why ask himself such
questions? For he was conscious of a fundamental repugnance to any such
scheme of life and was acutely aware that--for awhile, at least, and
perhaps for always--he wanted to live in quite a different mode.