and lunches; he had also free time to make his suggestions operative.
But Cope, though frequently seen in active movement on the campus and
through the town, gave little heed to either of his elderly friends. He
met them both, in High Street, on different occasions, and thanked and
smiled and promised--and kept away. He was doubtless absorbed in his
special work, in the details of the closing year. He may have thought
(as young men have been known to think) that, in accepting their
invitations, he had done enough for them already. He had shown his good
will on several occasions; let that suffice. Or he may have thought (as
young men have been found capable of thinking) not at all: other
concerns, more pressing and more contemporaneous, may have crowded them
out of his mind altogether.
"I wonder if it's sensitiveness?" asked Randolph of Foster. "His chum
didn't go away in the best of good odor...."
"Settle it for yourself," returned Foster brusquely. "And recall that
you have an office--and might have office-hours. Still, if you insist
on asking me----"
"I don't. But you may speak, if you like."
"And if you will consent to be fobbed off with a short-measure
answer----"
"That's right. Don't say all you think."
"Then I would put it somewhere between indifference and ingratitude.
Nearer the latter. We know the young."
"I don't feel that I've done so very much for him," said Randolph,
rather colorlessly.
"You were inclined to."
"H'm, yes. I could have opened up avenues that would have made his year
here a very different thing. Perhaps he didn't realize what I could do.
And perhaps he found me too old."
"Shall you attend the convocation?"
"I go usually. I'll push him off from shore and waft him good-bye."
"Good-bye? Good riddance!"
"You never liked him."
"I never did. If he leaves town without showing up here, no loss."
"Medora expects him here?"
"I think so."
Randolph descended to the lower floor. Mrs. Phillips was alone, seated
behind a tea-service that steamed with expectation.
"Going?" she asked.
"Going. Joe is grouchy and violent today. And he keeps on reminding me
that I have an office."
Medora glanced at the clock. Expectation seemed to be simmering down.
"Stay a few moments if you like. Forget the office a little longer.
I'll make some fresh."
"Not all these preparations for me?"
"Well, they're here. Take advantage."
"You're all alone?"
"Alone. The house is empty."
Medora tried to look as if at the heart of a tremendous vacuum.
"I can't fill it."
"You can fill fifteen minutes."
"Oh, if you're going to confound time and space...!"
He sat down receptively.
Medora rang a bell and harried Helga a little.
She glanced at Randolph. He sat there as if less to fill than to be
filled.
"Say something," she said.
"Are you going to the convocation?"
"No."
He sat silent.
"Does that exhaust the subjects of interest?" she asked.
"Pretty nearly. Doesn't it?"
Medora fell silent in turn,--let the light clatter of the tea things
speak for her.
"Are you going to the convocation?" he presently asked again.
"Such variety!" she mocked.
"Are you?"
She hesitated.
"Yes," she said.
"That's better. Let's go together--as friends."
"Who would imagine us going as enemies?"
"Who, indeed?" Yet if they went together they went as reconciled
competitors,--they went as the result of a truce.
"I should like to see Bertram Cope in cap and gown," he said.
"He has worn them before, he tells me."
"As a----?"
"As a member of the choir, during his undergraduate days."
"I see."
"I never noticed him especially, then," she acknowledged.
"We can notice him now."
Medora made a slight grimace. "Yes, we can notice." He the actor; they
the audience. "A farewell performance."
"A final view."
Convocation day came clear, fair, mild. The professors walked in
colorful solemnity beneath the elms and up the middle aisle of the
chapel, lending both to outdoors and indoors the enlivenment of hoods
red, yellow, purple. The marshals led strings of candidates--long
strings and short--to the platform where the president sat, and the
deans presented in due order their bachelors, masters and doctors. The
rapid handing out of the diplomas brought frequent applause--bits,
spatters, volleys, as the case might be. There was recognition for a
Chinaman, for a negro law-student, for a pair of Filipinos; there was a
marked outburst for a husky young man who was assumed by the uninformed
to have been a star in the university's athletic life; there was a
respectful but emphatic acknowledgment for a determined-looking
middle-aged woman with gray hair, who was led on with four men as a
little string of five; there was a salvo for a thoughtful, dignified
man of thirty-odd, who went up as a group in himself, attended by
marshals before and behind; and there was a slight spatter of applause
for Bertram Cope (one of a small procession of six), yet rather more
for a smiling young man who followed him....
Cope looked somewhat spare, despite his voluminous gown. The trying
lights added little color to his face, and brought his cheek-bones into
undue prominence. But he took his sheepskin with a bow and a gesture
that extinguished several of his companions; and he faced the audience,
on descending from the stage, with a composed effect gained by
experience in the choir. The lustre in the ceiling lit up his yellow
hair and his blue eyes: "He is as charming as ever!" thought Medora
Phillips.
"He's had a hard pull of it," commented Randolph.
"I hope his own people will feed him up this summer," said Medora. Her
emphasis was wayward; "He wouldn't let we do it," she seemed to mean.
"Nor me," she almost made Randolph say.
There was a recessional, and then the crowds of students flooded the
corridors and circulated under the fresh foliage of the campus.
Randolph and Medora Phillips passed out with the rest of the
assemblage. In the midst of one of the avenues of elms they noticed
Cope as the center of a little group: two plain, elderly people (his
parents, doubtless) and--and----
Medora Phillips looked twice. Yes, the other figure was Carolyn Thorpe,
offering congratulations. Carolyn had returned to her post and her work
the day before. "H'm," thought Medora, disposed to be miffed. Still,
Carolyn had, after all, the same right to attend as anyone else.
Medora and Basil Randolph added their congratulations to Carolyn's.
Cope, still in academic garb, performed the necessary introductions.
His air was eager, but cursory; smiling and ready, yet impersonal and
cool; above all, expeditious. If his parents passed on with the
impression that Medora Phillips and Basil Randolph were but casual
acquaintances, worthy of nothing beyond brief formalities, the blame
was his own.
"I'm showing father and mother over the campus," he said, with an open
smile and a wave with his diploma, as he edged away.
The elders docilely took their cue, and moved away with him.
"Well," said Randolph, "there _are_ buildings, of course; and
fountains, and sun-dials, and memorial benches; but..."
"They add nothing to him," pronounced Medora, as she looked back on the
retiring party.
"Did you expect them to?" he asked. "Charm, like guilt, is personal.
Anyhow, there seems to be no brother," he added.
"Well, come, Carolyn," said Medora, to her returned secretary, who was
looking after the party too; "let's start for home. Good afternoon,
Basil."
"What nice, good, pleasant, friendly people they are!" breathed Carolyn.
Randolph had strolled away, and Medora Phillips turned a studious
glance on her companion. Carolyn was conceivably in a state of
mind--keyed up to an all-inclusive appreciation. Did that foreshadow
further verse?--a rustic rhapsody, a provincial pantoum? But Medora
withheld question. Much as she would have enjoyed a well-consolidated
impression of the visitors, she did not intend to secure it by
interrogating Carolyn Thorpe.
33
_COPE IN A FINAL VIEW_
Cope, after a few days, followed his parents back to Freeford. He may
have said good-bye to his landlady and to some of his associates in his
department; but he contrived no set adieux for the friends who had done
so much for him--or had tried to--through the past year. Basil Randolph
and Medora Phillips had their last view of him when, diploma in hand,
he led his parents away, over the campus.
"Oh, well," said Randolph resignedly, "we were less important to him
than we thought. Only a couple of negligible items among many. Entered
in his ledger--if we _were_ entered--and now faded away to a dim,
rusty, illegible scrawl...."
"Stop it, Basil! You make me feel old, antique, antediluvian. I don't
want to. I shan't let myself be pushed back and ignored. I'm going to
give Amy and George a rousing big dinner before long; and when the fall
term opens I shall entertain as never before. And if that young man
from the South turns up here during the summer to see Hortense, I shall
do a lot for them."
Hortense Dunton had long since returned, of course, from the Tennessee
and North Carolina mountains; but she ignored the convocation. One drop
of bitterness, if tasted again--even reminiscently--would have turned
everything to gall. Instead, she found a measure of sweetness in the
letters which followed on her return from that region. They were
addressed in a bold, dashing young hand, and bore the postmark
"Nashville." Hortense was inclined to let them lie conspicuously on the
front-hall table, for half an hour or so, before she took them up.
Little might be absolutely known about her passage with Cope; but there
the letters lay, for her aunt's eye and for Carolyn Thorpe's.
Carolyn prattled a little, not indiscreetly, about her meeting with the
Freeford family on the campus. As Basil Randolph himself had done
months before, she endeavored to construct a general environment for
them and to determine their place in the general social fabric. She
had, however, the advantage of having seen them; she was not called to
make an exiguous evocation from the void. She still held that they were
nice, good, pleasant, friendly people: if they had subordinated
themselves, docilely and automatically, to the prepotent social and
academic figures of the society about them, that in no wise detracted
from the favorable impression they had made on her.
"Just the right parents for Bertram," she said fondly, to herself. She
made, almost unconsciously, the allowance that is still generally made,
among Americans, for the difference between two generations: the elder,
of course, continues to provide a staid, sober, and somewhat primitive
background for the brilliancy of the younger. Her own people, if they
appeared in Churchton, might seem a bit simple and provincial too.
Hortense took Carolyn's slight and fond observations with a silent
scorn. When she spoke at all, she was likely to say something about
"family"; and it was gathered that the dashing correspondent at
Nashville was conspicuously "well-connected." Also, that he belonged to
the stirring New South and had put money in his purse. Hortense's
contempt for the semi-rustic and impecunious Cope became boundless.
About the middle of July a letter lay on the front-hall table for
Carolyn. It was from Cope.
"Only think!" said Carolyn to herself, in a small private ecstasy
within her locked bedchamber; "he wrote on his own account and of his
own accord. Not a line from me; not a suggestion!"
The letter was an affair of two small pages. "Yours very sincerely,
Bertram L. Cope" simply told "My dear Miss Thorpe" that he had been
spending three or four days in Winnebago, Wisconsin, and that he had
now returned home for a month of further study, having obtained a post
in an important university in the East, at a satisfactory stipend. A
supplementary line conveyed regards to Mrs. Phillips. And that was all.
Was it a handful of husks, or was it a banquet? Carolyn took it for the
latter and lived on it for days. Little it mattered what or how much he
had written: he had written, and of his own accord--as Carolyn made a
point of from the first. There is an algebraic formula expressive of
the truth that "1" is an infinitely greater number of times than "0."
And a single small taper is infinitely greater in point of light and
cheer than none at all. Carolyn's little world underwent illumination,
and she with it. She promptly soared to a shining infinity.
Medora Phillips could not overlook Carolyn's general glow, nor the
sense of elevation she conveyed. Things became clearer still when
Carolyn passed on the scanty message which Cope had added at the end.
"Best regards to Mrs. Phillips"--there it was, so far as it went. And
Medora felt, along with Carolyn, that a slight mention was an immensity
of times greater than no mention at all. "Very kind, very thoughtful of
him, I'm sure," she said without irony.
Carolyn let her read the letter for herself. It was a brief, cool,
succinct thing, and not at all unsuited for general circulation. "Best
regards to Mrs. Phillips. Yours very sincerely, Bertram L. Cope," she
read again; then, like Carolyn, she retired for meditation.
Well, from its dozen or fifteen lines several things might fairly be
inferred. "Three or four days in Winnebago"--a scanty pattern for a
visit. Had three or four been enough? Had Lemoyne been found glum and
unpleasant? Had those months of close companionship brought about a
mutually diminished interest? Not a word as to Lemoyne's accompanying
him to Freeford, or joining him there later. On the contrary, a strong
implication that there would be sufficient to occupy him without the
company of Lemoyne or anybody else: evidences of an eye set solely on
the new opportunity in the East.
"Well, if he is going to get along without him," said Medora to
herself, "it will be all the better for him. He was never any advantage
to him," she added, with an informal and irresponsible use of her
pronouns. But she knew what she meant and had no auditor to satisfy.
When, however, she touched on the matter with Basil Randolph she showed
more exactitude. Randolph had lingered late upstairs with Foster, and
he had been intercepted, on his way out, with an invitation to remain
to dinner. "Very well," he said. "Sing-Lo is not invariably inspired on
Monday evening. I shall be glad to stay."
He felt, in fact, the need of a little soothing. Foster had been taking
a farewell shot at Cope and had been rough and vindictive. He had heard
something of the antics of "Annabella's" partner and had magnified
characteristically the seriousness of the offense. "What hope for
him"--meaning Cope--"so long as he goes on liking and admiring that
fellow?"
"Well," returned Randolph, in an effortless platitude, "liking is the
great mystery--whether you take its coming or its going."
"The sooner this one goes, the better," snapped Foster. "Have you heard
from that fellow at all?" he inquired.
"'That fellow'? What fellow--this time?"
"The other one, of course. Cope."
"No."
Foster wiped out Cope with one question.
"Likely to 'cultivate' some other young chap, next year?"
Randolph had a moment of sober thoughtfulness.
"No."
"Good! Get back into harness; have 'hours' and all the rest of it. Best
thing in the world for you. The young care so much for us--the devil
they do!"
Foster gave a savage, dragging clutch at his shade and twisted
rebelliously in his chair.
Randolph left him to himself and went below.
Downstairs dinner proceeded cautiously. There was no chance for an
interchange of thought until the two young women should have been got
out of the way. Hortense had her own affair at the back of her head,
and Carolyn hers. Neither could sympathize with the other. Hortense's
manner to Carolyn was one of half-suppressed insolence. Carolyn, buoyed
up interiorly, seemed able to endure it,--perhaps was not fully
conscious of it. There was relief when, after dessert, each arose and
went her respective way.
Medora and Randolph settled down on a causeuse in the drawing-room. The
place was half-lighted, but Randolph made out that his companion was
taking on a conscious air of pseudo-melancholy.
Her eyes roved the dim, cluttered room with studied mournfulness, and
she said, presently:
"Dear old house! Undergoing depopulation, and soon to be a waste."
"Depopulation?"
"Yes; they're leaving it one by one. First, Amy. You remember Amy?"
"I believe so."
"She married George and went away. You recall the occasion?"
"I think I was present."
"And now it's Hortense."
"Is it, indeed?"
She told him about the gallant young Southerner in Tennessee, and gave
a forecast of a probable pairing.
"And next it will be Carolyn."
"Carolyn? Who has cast his eye on her?"
Medora shot it out.
"Bertram Cope!"
"Cope!" Randolph gave himself another twist in that well-twisted sofa.
"Cope," she repeated. If the boy were indeed beyond her own reach, she
would report his imminent capture by another with as much effect as she
could command.
And she told of Carolyn's fateful letter.
"So that's how it stands?" he said thoughtfully.
"I don't say 'how' it stands. I don't say that it 'stands' at all. But
he has prospects and she has hopes."
"Prospects and hopes,--a strong working combination."
Medora took the leap. "She will marry him, of course," she said
decidedly. "After his having jilted Amy----"
"'Jilted' her? Do you understand it that way?"
"And trampled on Hortense----"
"'Trampled'? Surely you exaggerate."
"And ignored me----You will let me use that mild word, 'ignored'?"
"Its use is granted. He has ignored others too."
"After all that, who is there left in the house but Carolyn? Listen;
I'll tell you how it will be. She has answered his letter, of
course,--imagine whether or not she was prompt about it!--and he will
answer hers----"
"_Will_ answer it?"
"Not at once, perhaps; but soon: in the course of two or three weeks.
Then she will reply,--and there you have a correspondence in full
swing. Then, in the fall he will write her from his new post in the
East, and say: 'Dear Girl,--At last I can----,' and so on."
"You mean that you destine poor Carolyn for a man who is so apt at
jilting and trampling and ignoring?"
"Who else is there?" Medora continued to demand sturdily. "In October
they will be married----"
"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Randolph.
"You have something better to suggest?"
"Nothing better. Something different. Listen, as you yourself say. Next
October I shall call on you, put my hand in my inside pocket, bring out
a letter and read it to you. It will run like this: 'My dear Mr.
Randolph,--You will be pleased, I am sure, to hear that I now have a
good position at the university in this pleasant town. Arthur Lemoyne,
whom you recall, is studying psychology here, and we are keeping house
together. He wishes to be remembered. I thank you for your many
kindnesses,'--that is put in as a mere possibility,--'and also send
best regards to Mrs. Phillips and the members of her household.
Sincerely yours, Bertram L. Cope.'"
"I won't accept that!" cried Medora. "He will marry Carolyn, and I
shall do as much for her as I did for Amy, and as much as I expect to
do for Hortense."
"I see. The three matches made and the desolation of the house
complete."
"Complete, yes; leaving me alone among the ruins."
"And nothing would rescue you from them but a fourth?"
"Basil, you are not proposing?"
"I scarcely think so," he returned, with slow candor. "I shouldn't care
to live in this house; and you----"
"I knew you never liked my furnishings!"
"----and you, I am sure, would never care to live in any other."
"I shall stay where I am," she declared. "Shall you stay where you
are?" she asked keenly.
"Perhaps not."
"Confess that housekeeping on your own account is less attractive than
it once was."
"I do. Confess that you, with all your outfit and all your goings-on,
never quite--never quite--succeeded in..."
Medora shrugged. "The young, at best, only tolerate us. We are but the
platform they dance on,--the ladder they climb by."
"After all, he was a 'charming' chap. Your own word, you know."
"Yet scarcely worth the to-do we made over him," said Medora, willing
to save her face.
Randolph shrugged in turn, and threw out his hands in a gesture which
she had never known him to employ before.
"Worth the to-do? Who is?"