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Bertram Cope's Year

by Henry Blake Fuller · English · Gutenberg #8101 · 430,028 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bertram Cope's Year

Author: Henry Blake Fuller


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8101]
                Most recently updated: July 19, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR ***




BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR

Henry Blake Fuller


CONTENTS


_1. Cope at a College Tea

2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call

3. Cope Is "Entertained"

4. Cope Is Considered

5. Cope Is Considered Further

6. Cope Dines--and Tells About It

7. Cope Under Scrutiny

8. Cope Undertakes an Excursion

9. Cope on the Edge of Things

10. Cope at His House Party

11. Cope Enlivens the Country

12. Cope Amidst Cross-Purposes

13. Cope Dines Again--and Stays After

14. Cope Makes an Evasion

15. Cope Entertains Several Ladies

16. Cope Goes A-Sailing

17. Cope Among Cross-Currents

18. Cope at the Call of Duty

19. Cope Finds Himself Committed

20. Cope Has a Distressful Christmas

21. Cope, Safeguarded, Calls Again

22. Cope Shall Be Rescued

23. Cope Regains His Freedom

24. Cope in Danger Anew

25. Cope in Double Danger

26. Cope as a Go-Between

27. Cope Escapes a Snare

28. Cope Absent From a Wedding

29. Cope Again in the Country

30. Cope as a Hero

31. Cope Gets New Light on His Chum

32. Cope Takes His Degree

33. Cope in a Final View_

AFTERWORD




1

_COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA_


What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with
complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But
twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that
age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary
opportunities, is undeniably--a man; whereas what we require here is
something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male
who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may
even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid
or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence
due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may
seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to
figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and
the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke
their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that,
their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance,
their patience, and even their forgiveness.

I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little
group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the
campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day
more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is
all the better for being just a little ahead.

Of course Cope was not an undergraduate--a species upon which many of
the Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard. "They come,
and they go," said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; "and,
after all, they're more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding."
Besides, the Bigger Town, with all its rich resources and all its
varied opportunities, lay but an hour away. Churchton lived much of its
real life beyond its own limits, and the student who came to be
entertained socially within them was the exception indeed.

No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he
was working along, in a leisurely way, to a degree. He expected to be
an M.A., or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of
later years. But, anyhow, nothing was finer than "writing"--except
lecturing about it.

"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a
small reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held
his hand as long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer
than most women would have felt at liberty to do. And besides speaking
loudly and boldly, she looked loudly and boldly; and she employed a
determined smile which seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I
please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself off--and
much else besides. "Of course I simply _can't_ be half so intrepid as I
seem!" it said. "Everybody about us understands that, and I must ask
your recognition too for an ascertained fact."

"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me
because I haven't been here to _be_ known." He spoke in a ringing,
resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good
will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high
degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with
a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following
his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in
Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another
bout: "I'm after that degree," he concluded.

"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you _have_ been here; you must
have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
began again.

"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust.
Dirt beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."

"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his
long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks,
anyway. And the Hanging Gardens...!" She still clung, looking up his
slopes terrace by terrace.

Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.

"Gracious!" he said, no less resonant than before. "Am I a landscape
garden? Am I a stage-setting? Am I a----?"

Medora Phillips finally dropped his hand. "You're a wicked,
unappreciative boy," she declared. "I don't know whether to ask you to
my house or not. But you may make yourself useful in _this_ house, at
least. Run along over to that corner and see if you can't get me a cup
of tea."

Cope bowed and smiled and stepped toward the tea-table. His head once
turned, the smile took on a wry twist. He was no squire of dames, no
frequenter of afternoon receptions. Why the deuce had he come to this
one? Why had he yielded so readily to the urgings of the professor of
mathematics?--himself urged in turn, perhaps, by a wife for whose
little affair one extra man at the opening of the fall season counted,
and counted hugely. Why must he now expose himself to the boundless
aplomb and momentum of this woman of forty-odd who was finding
amusement in treating him as a "college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had
actually called him: well, perhaps his present position made all this
possible. He was not yet out in the world on his own. In the background
of "down state" was a father with a purse in his pocket and a hand to
open the purse. Though the purse was small and the hand reluctant, he
must partly depend on both for another year. If he were only in
business--if he were only a broker or even a salesman--he should not
find himself treated with such blunt informality and condescension as a
youth. If, within the University itself, he were but a real member of
the faculty, with an assured position and an assured salary, he should
not have to lie open to the unceremonious hectorings of the socially
confident, the "placed."

He regained his smile on the way across the room, and the young
creature behind the samovar, who had had a moment's fear that she must
deal with Severity, found that a beaming Affability--though personally
unticketed in her memory--was, after all, her happier allotment. In her
reaction she took it all as a personal compliment. She could not know,
of course, that it was but a piece of calculated expressiveness, fitted
to a 'particular social function and doubly overdone as the wearer's
own reaction from the sprouting indignation of the moment before. She
hoped that her hair, under his sweeping advance, was blowing across her
forehead as lightly and carelessly as it ought to, and that his taste
in marquise rings might be substantially the same as hers. She faced
the Quite Unknown, and asked it sweetly, "One lump or two?"

"The dickens! How do _I_ know?" he thought. "An extra one on the
saucer, please," he said aloud, with his natural resonance but slightly
hushed. And his blue eyes, clear and rather cold and hard, blazed down,
in turn, on her.

"Why, what a nice, friendly fellow!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, on
receiving her refreshment. "Both kinds of sandwiches," she continued,
peering round her cup. "Were there three?" she asked with sudden
shrewdness.

"There were macaroons," he replied; "and there was some sort of
layer-cake. It was too sticky. These are more sensible."

"Never mind sense. If there is cake, I want it. Tell Amy to put it on a
plate."

"Amy?"

"Yes, Amy. _My_ Amy."

"Your Amy?"

"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."

Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl behind
the samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that her
ring, borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back
with his plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a
"boy" to a "fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot
through a sublimated butler's pantry?

"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked
lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come, we
will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about
yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled
down into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she
told herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but
slender?--even spare, if need be."

As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he,
restored to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed
exuberance,--a man who stood just within the curtained doorway and
flicked a small graying moustache with the point of his forefinger took
in the scene with a studious regard. Every small educational community
has its scholar _manqué_--its haunter of academic shades or its
intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role
in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the
passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young
present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and
who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he
could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows
enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward
their elders; but a few of them--one now and then, at long
intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. On
these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness, comeliness
and _élan_, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one in all the
long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time. And now
he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might in
time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went
for naught; and the young men let him walk under the elms and the
scrub-oaks neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their
fraternities, and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled
away on the quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only
realized how much a friendly hand, extended to them from middle life,
might do for their futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the
youthful egoists, ignoring him still, faced their respective futures,
however uncertain, with much more confidence than he, backed by
whatever assurances and accumulations he enjoyed, could face his own.

"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"

Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the
observer, the _raisonneur_, in this narrative? If so, you err.
What!--you may ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.

It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted
him into this role.

A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been
asked to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given
abundant opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling
subject--himself. Either she now had enough fixed points for securing
the periphery of his circle or else she preferred to leave some portion
of his area (now ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra.
Or perhaps she wished some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her
admiration and confirm her judgment. At all events----

"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."

Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.

"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous.
"You are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She
paused. "Do you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your
first name?"

"Why, is that necessary?"

"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"

"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."

"Never!"

"Bertram. Why not?"

"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and
guessed----!"

"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."

"You hear, Mr. Randolph? You are to meet Mr. Bertram Cope."

Cope, who had risen and had left any embarrassment consequent upon the
short delay to Basil Randolph himself, shot out a hand and summoned a
ready smile. Within his cuff was a hint for the construction of his
fore-arm: it was lean and sinewy, clear-skinned, and with strong power
for emphasis on the other's rather short, well-fleshed fingers. And as
he gripped, he beamed; beamed just as warmly, or just as coldly--at all
events, just as speciously--as he had beamed before: for on a social
occasion one must slightly heighten good will,--all the more so if one
be somewhat unaccustomed and even somewhat reluctant.

Mrs. Phillips caught Cope's glance as it fell in all its glacial
geniality.

"He looks down on us!" she declared.

"How down?" Cope asked.

"Well, you're taller than either of us."

"I don't consider myself tall," he replied. "Five foot nine and a
half," he proceeded ingenuously, "is hardly tall."

"It is we who are short," said Randolph.

"But really, sir," rejoined Cope kindly, "I shouldn't call you short.
What is an inch or two?"

"But how about me?" demanded Mrs. Phillips.

"Why, a woman may be anything--except too tall," responded Cope
candidly.

"But if she wants to be stately?"

"Well, there was Queen Victoria."

"You incorrigible! I hope I'm not so short as that! Sit down, again; we
must be more on a level. And you, Mr. Randolph, may stand and look down
on us both. I'm sure you have been doing so, anyway, for the past ten
minutes!"

"By no means, I assure you," returned Randolph soberly.

Soberly. For the young man had slipped in that "sir." And he had been
so kindly about Randolph's five foot seven and a bit over. And he had
shown himself so damnably tender toward a man fairly advanced within
the shadow of the fifties--a man who, if not an acknowledged outcast
from the joys of life, would soon be lagging superfluous on their rim.

Randolph stood before them, looking, no doubt, a bit vacant and
inexpressive. "Please go and get Amy," Mrs. Phillips said to him. "I
see she's preparing to give way to some one else."

Amy--who was a blonde girl of twenty or more--came back with him
pleasantly and amiably enough; and her aunt--or whatever she should
turn out to be--was soon able to lay her tongue again to the syllables
of the interesting name of Bertram.

Cope, thus finally introduced, repeated the facial expressions which he
had employed already beside the tea-table. But he added no new one; and
he found fewer words than the occasion prompted, and even required. He
continued talking with Mrs. Phillips, and he threw an occasional remark
toward Randolph; but now that all obstacles were removed from free
converse with the divinity of the samovar he had less to say to her
than before. Presently the elder woman, herself no whit offended, began
to figure the younger one as a bit nonplused.

"Never mind, Amy," she said. "Don't pity him, and don't scorn him. He's
really quite self-possessed and quite chatty. Or"--suddenly to Cope
himself--"have you shown us already your whole box of tricks?"

"That must be it," he returned.

"Well, no matter. Mr. Randolph can be nice to a nice girl."

"Oh, come now,----"

"Well, shall I ask you to my house, after this?"

"No. Don't. Forbid it. Banish me."

"Give one more chance," suggested Randolph sedately.

"Why, what's all this about?" said the questioning glance of Amy. If
there was any offense at all, on anybody's part, it lay in making too
much of too little.

"Take back my plate, somebody," said Mrs. Phillips.

Randolph put out his hand for it.

"This sandwich," said Amy, reaching for an untouched square of wheat
bread and pimento. "I've been so busy with other people...."

"I'll take it myself," declared Mrs. Phillips, reaching out in turn.
"Mr. Randolph, bring her a nibble of something."

"_I_ might----" began Cope.

"You don't deserve the privilege."

"Oh, very well," he returned, lapsing into an easy passivity.

"Never mind, anyway," said Amy, still without cognomen and connections;
"I can starve with perfect convenience. Or I can find a mouthful
somewhere, later."

"Let us starve sitting," said Randolph, "Here are chairs."

The hostess herself came bustling up brightly.

"Has everybody...?"

And she bustled away.

"Yes; everybody--almost," said Mrs. Phillips to her associates, behind
their entertainer's back. "If you're hungry, Amy, it's your own fault.
Sit down."

And there let us leave them--our little group, our cast of characters:
"everybody--almost," save one. Or two. Or three.




2

_COPE MAKES A SUNDAY AFTERNOON CALL_


Medora Phillips was the widow of a picture-dealer, now three years
dead. In his younger days he had been something of a painter, and later
in life as much a collector as a merchandizer. Since his death he had
been translated gradually from the lower region proper to mere
traffickers on toward the loftier plane which harbored the more select
company of art-patrons and art-amateurs. Some of his choicer ventures
were still held together as a "gallery," with a few of his own canvases
included; and his surviving partner felt this collection gave her good
reason for holding up her head among the arts, and the sciences, and
humane letters too.

Mrs. Phillips occupied a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a
mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with
manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau,
the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In
its upper story was the commodious apartment which was known in quiet
times as the picture-gallery and in livelier times as the ball-room. It
was the mistress' ambition to have the lively times as numerous as
possible--to dance with great frequency among the pictures. Six or
eight couples could gyrate here at once. There was young blood under
her roof, and there was young blood to summon from outside; and to set
this blood seething before the eyes of visiting celebrities in the arts
and letters was her dearest wish. She had more than one spare bedroom,
of course; and the Eminent and the Queer were always welcome for a
sojourn of a week or so, whether they came to read papers and deliver
lectures or not. She was quite as well satisfied when they didn't. If
they would but sit upon her wide veranda in spring or autumn, or before
her big open fireplace in winter and "just talk," she would be as
open-eyed and open-eared as you pleased.

"This is much nicer," she would say. Nicer than what, she did not
always make clear.

Yes, the house was nearly three-quarters of a mile to the west of the
campus, but it was twice as far as if it had been north or south.
Trains and trolleys, intent on serving the interests of the great
majority, took their own courses and gave her guests no aid. If the
evening turned cold or blustery or brought a driving rain she would say:

"You can't go out in this. You must stay all night. We have room and to
spare."

If she wanted anybody to stay very much, she would even add: "I can't
think of your walking toward the lake with such a gale in your
face,"--regardless of the fact that the lake wind was the rarest of
them all and that in nine cases out of ten the rain or snow would be
not in people's faces but at their backs.

If she didn't want anybody to stay, she simply ordered out the car and
bundled him off. The delay in the offer of the car sometimes induced a
young man to remain. Tasteful pajamas and the promise of a suitably
early breakfast assured him that he had made no mistake.

Cope's first call was made, not on a tempestuous evening in the winter
time, but on a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of September. The
day was sunny and the streets were full of strollers moving along
decorously beneath the elms, maples and catalpas.

"Drop in some Sunday about five," Medora Phillips had said to him, "and
have tea. The girls will be glad to meet you."

"The girls"? Who were they, and how many? He supposed he could account
for one of them, at least; but the others?

"You find me alone, after all," was her greeting. "The girls are out
walking--with each other, or their beaux, or whatever. Come in here."

She led him into a spacious room cluttered with lambrequins, stringy
portieres, grilles, scroll-work, bric-a-brac....

"The fine weather has been too much for them," she proceeded. "I was
relying on them to entertain you."

"Dear me! Am I to be entertained?"

"Of course you are." Her expression and inflection indicated to him
that he had been caught up in the cogs of a sizable machine, and that
he was to be put through it. Everybody who came was entertained--or
helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of
the establishment.

"Well, can't you entertain me yourself?"

"Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and
isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of
treatment.

"----in the interval," she amended. "They'll be back by sunset. They're
clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them."

She uttered this belief emphatically--so emphatically, in truth, that
it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an
overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should."

"I suppose I have met one of them already."

"You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn."

"What can they all be?" He wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces,
cousins, co-eds, boarders...?"

"Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet."

"Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me
the rest of her name."

"I certainly presented you."

"To 'Amy'."

"Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and
Hortense's name is----"

"Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it
can. Names without people to attach them to...."

"The people will be here presently," Medora Phillips said, rather
shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not
quite the tone usually taken by college boys on their first call. Her
position and her imposing surroundings--yes, her kindliness in noticing
him at all--might surely save her from informalities that almost shaped
into impertinences. Yet, on the other hand, nothing bored one more than
a young man who openly showed himself intimidated. What was there
behind this one? More than she had thought? Well, if so, none the
worse. Time might tell.

"So Miss Leffingwell plays?" He flared out his blue-white smile. "Let
me learn my lesson page by page."

"Yes, she plays," returned Medora Phillips briefly. "Guess what," she
continued presently, half placated.

They were again side by side on a sofa, each with an elbow on its back
and the elbows near together. Nor was Medora Phillips, though plump, at
all the graceless, dumpy little body she sometimes taxed herself with
being.

"What? Oh, piano, I suppose."

"Piano!"

"What's wrong?"

"The piano is common: it's assumed."

"Oh, she performs on something unusual? Xylophone?"

"Be serious."

"Trombone? I've seen wonders done on that in a 'lady orchestra'."

"Don't be grotesque." She drew her dark eyebrows into protest. "What a
sight!--a delicate young girl playing a trombone!"

"Well, then,--a harp. That's sometimes a pleasant sight."

"A harp needs an express wagon. Though of course it is pretty for the
arms."

"Arms? Let me see. The violin?"

"Of course. And that's probably the very first thing you thought of.
Why not have mentioned it?"

"I suppose I've been taught the duty of making conversation."

"The duty? Not the pleasure?"

"That remains to be...." He paused. "So she has arms," he pretended to
muse. "I confess I hadn't quite noticed."

"She passed you a cup of tea, didn't she?"

"Oh, surely. And a sandwich. And another. And a slice of layer cake,
with a fork. And another cup of tea. And a macaroon or two----"

"Am I a glutton?"

"Am I? Some of all that provender was for me, as I recall."

They were still side by side on the sofa. Both were cross--kneed, and
the tip of her russet boot almost grazed that of his Oxford tie. He did
not notice: he was already arranging the first paragraph of a letter to
a friend in Winnebago, Wisconsin. "Dear Arthur: I called,--as I said I
was going to. She is a scrapper. She goes at you hammer and
tongs--pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you..."

Medora Phillips removed her elbow from the back of the sofa, and began
to prod up her cushions. "How about your work?" she asked. "What are
you doing?"

He came back. "Oh, I'm boning. Some things still to make up. I'm
digging in the poetry of Gower--the 'moral Gower'."

"Well, I see no reason why poetry shouldn't be moral. Has he been
publishing anything lately that I ought to see?"

"Not--lately."

"I presume I can look into some of his older things."

"They are all old--five hundred years and more. He was a pal of
Chaucer's."


She gave him an indignant glance. "So that's it? You're laying traps
for me? You don't like me! You don't respect me!"

One of the recalcitrant cushions fell to the floor. They bumped heads
in trying to pick it up.

"Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is
just a necessary old bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about
him--except instructors and their hapless students."

He added one more sentence to his letter to "Arthur": "She pushes you
pretty hard. A little of it goes a good way..."

"Oh, if _that's_ the case..." she said. "How about your thesis?" she
went on swiftly. "What are you going to write about?"

"I was thinking of Shakespeare."

"Shakespeare! There you go again! Ridiculing me to my very face!"

"Not at all. There's lots to say about him--or them."

"Oh, you believe in Bacon!"

"Not at all--once more. I should like to take a year and spend it among
the manor-houses of Warwickshire. But I suppose nobody would stake me
to that."


"I don't know what you have in mind; some wild goose chase, probably. I
expect your friends would like it better if you spent your time right
here."

"Probably. I presume I shall end by doing a thesis on the 'color-words'
in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil has no luck."

"Anybody has luck who can form the right circle. Stay where you are. A
circle formed here would do you much more good than a temporary one
four thousand miles away."

Voices were heard in the front yard. "There they come, now," Mrs.
Phillips said. She rose, and one more of the wayward cushions went to
the floor. It lay there unregarded,--a sign that a promising
tête-à-tête was, for the time being, over.




3

_COPE IS "ENTERTAINED"_


Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young
people who were cheerily coming up the walk. Cope, looking at the
fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room
door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent
in Wisconsin:

"Several girls helped entertain me. They came on as thick as spatter.
One played a few things on the violin. Another set up her easel and
painted a picture for us. A third wrote a poem and read it to us. And a
few sophomores hung about in the background. It was all rather too
much. I found myself preferring those hours together in dear old
Winnebago...."

Only one of the sophomores--if the young men were really of that
objectionable tribe--came indoors with the young ladies. The
others--either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy--went away
after a moment or two on the front steps. Perhaps they did not feel
"encouraged." And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope with
the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for
to-day. She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others
superfluous. But--

"Hum!" he thought; "if there's to be a lot of 'entertaining,' the more
there are to be entertained the better it might turn out."

He met Hortense and Carolyn--with due stress laid on their respective
patronymics--and he made an early acquaintance with Amy's violin.

And further on Mrs. Phillips said:

"Now, Amy, before you really stop, do play that last little thing. The
dear child," she said to Cope in a lower tone, "composed it herself and
dedicated it to me."

The last little thing was a kind of "meditation," written very simply
and performed quite seriously and unaffectedly. And it gave, of course,
a good chance for the arms.

"There!" said Mrs. Phillips, at its close. "Isn't it too sweet? And it
inspired Carolyn too. She wrote a poem after hearing it."

"A copy of verses," corrected Carolyn, with a modest catch in her
breath. She was a quiet, sedate girl, with brown eyes and hair. Her
eyes were shy, and her hair was plainly dressed.

"Oh, you're so sweet, so old-fashioned!" protested Mrs. Phillips,
slightly rolling her eyes. "It's a poem,--of course it's a poem. I
leave it to Mr. Cope, if it isn't!"

"Oh, I beg--" began Cope, in trepidation.

"Well, listen, anyway," said Medora.

The poem consisted of some six or seven brief stanzas. Its title was
read, formally, by the writer; and, quite as formally, the dedication
which intervened between title and first stanza,--a dedication to
"Medora Townsend Phillips."

"Of course," said Cope to himself. And as the reading went on, he ran
his eyes over the dusky, darkening walls. He knew what he expected to
find.

Just as he found it the sophomore standing between the big padded chair
and the book-case spatted his hands three times. The poem was over, the
patroness duly celebrated. Cope spatted a little too, but kept his eye
on one of the walls.

"You're looking at my portrait!" declared Mrs. Phillips, as the poetess
sank deeper into the big chair. "Hortense did it."

"Of course she did," said Cope under his breath. He transferred an
obligatory glance from the canvas to the expectant artist. But--

"It's getting almost too dark to see it," said his hostess, and
suddenly pressed a button. This brought into play a row of electric
bulbs near the top edge of the frame and into full prominence the dark
plumpness of the subject. He looked back again from the painter (who
also had black hair and eyes) to her work.

"I am on Parnassus!" Cope declared, in one general sweeping compliment,
as he looked toward the sofa where Medora Phillips sat with the three
girls now grouped behind her. But he made it a boreal Parnassus--one
set in relief by the cold flare and flicker of northern lights.

"Isn't he the dear, comical chap!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, with
unction, glancing upward and backward at the girls. They smiled
discreetly, as if indulging in a silent evaluation of the sincerity of
the compliment. Yet one of them--Hortense--formed her black brows into
a frown, and might have spoken resentfully, save for a look from their
general patroness.

"Meanwhile, how about a drop of tea?" asked Mrs. Phillips suddenly.
"Roddy"--to the sophomore--"if you will help clear that table...."

The youth hastened to get into action. Cope went on with his letter to
"Arthur":

"It was an afternoon in Lesbos--with Sappho and her band of
appreciative maidens. Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some
pamphlets and paper-cutters off the center-table, and we all plunged
into the ocean of Oolong--the best thing we do on this island...."

He was lingering in a smiling abstractedness on his fancy, when--

"Bertram Cope!" a voice suddenly said, "do you do nothing--nothing?"

He suddenly came to. Perhaps he had really deserved his hostess'
rebuke. He had not offered to help with the tea-service; he had
proferred no appropriate remark, of an individual nature, to any of the
three _ancillae_....

"I mean," proceeded Mrs. Phillips, "can you do nothing whatever to
entertain?"

Cope gained another stage on the way to self-consciousness and
self-control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic curse of this
household.

"I sing," he said, with naïf suddenness and simplicity.

"Then, sing--do. There's the open piano. Can you play your own
accompaniments?"

"Some of the simpler ones."

"Some of the simpler ones! Do you hear that, girls? He is quite
prepared to wipe us all out. Shall we let him?"

"That's unfair," Cope protested. "Is it my fault if composers _will_
write hard accompaniments to easy airs?"

"Will you sing before your tea, or after it?"

"I'm ready to sing this instant,--during it, or before it."

"Very well."

The room was now in dusk, save for the bulbs which made the portrait
shine forth like a wayside shrine. Roddy, the possible sophomore,
helped a maid find places for the cups and saucers; and the three
girls, still formed in a careful group about the sofa, silently waited.

"Of course you realize that this is not such a very large room," said
Mrs. Phillips.

"Meaning....?"

"Well, your speaking voice _is_ resonant, you know."

"Meaning, then, that I am not to raise the roof nor jar the china. I'll
try not to."

Nor did he. He sang with care rather than with volume, with discretion
rather than with abandon. The "simple accompaniments" went off with but
a slight hitch or two, yet the "resonant voice" was somehow, somewhere
lost. Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it
seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some
teacher's none too competent hands, or--what was quite as serious--as
if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete
expression of the singer's nature. Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein--all these
were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically;
and there was a silence. Hortense broke it.

"Parnassus, yes. And finally comes Apollo." She reached over and
murmured to Mrs. Phillips: "None too skillful on the lyre, and none too
strong in the lungs...."

Medora spoke up loudly and promptly.

"Do you know, I think I've heard you sing before."

"Possibly," Cope said, turning his back on the keyboard. "I sang in the
University choir for a year or two."

"In gown and mortar-board? 'Come, Holy Spirit,' and all that?"

"Yes; I sang solos now and then."

"Of course," she said. "I remember now. But I never saw you before
without your mortar-board. That changes the forehead. Yes, you're
yourself," she went on, adding to her previous pleasure the further
pleasure of recognition. "You've earned your tea," she added.
"Hortense," she said over her shoulder to the dark girl behind the
sofa, "will you--? No; I'll pour, myself."

She slid into her place at table and got things to going. There was an
interval which Cope might have employed in praising the artistic
aptitudes of this variously gifted household, but he found no
appropriate word to say,--or at least uttered none. And none of the
three girls made any further comment on his own performance.

Mrs. Phillips accompanied him, on his way out, as far as the hall. She
looked up at him questioningly.

"You don't like my poor girls," she said. "You don't find them clever;
you don't find them interesting."

"On the contrary," he rejoined, "I have spent a delightful hour." Must
he go on and confess that he had developed no particular dexterity in
dealing with the younger members of the opposite sex?

"No, you don't care for them one bit," she insisted. She tried to look
rebuking, reproachful; yet some shade of expression conveyed to him a
hint that her protest was by no means sincere: if he really didn't, it
was no loss--it was even a possible gain.

"It's you who don't care for me," he returned. "I'm _vieux jeu_."

"Nonsense," she rejoined. "If you have a slight past, that only makes
you the more atmospheric. Be sure you come again soon, and put in a
little more work on the foreground."

Cope, on his way eastward, in the early evening, passed near the
trolley tracks, the Greek lunch-counter, without a thought; he was
continuing his letter to "Dear Arthur":

"I think," he wrote, with his mind's finger, "that you might as well
come down. I miss you--even more than I thought I should. The term is
young, and you can enter for Spanish, or Psychology, or something.
There's nothing for you up there. The bishop can spare you. Your father
will be reasonable. We can easily arrange some suitable quarters..."

And we await a reply from "Dear Arthur"--the fifth and last of our
little group. But no; there are two or three others--as you have just
seen.




4

_COPE IS CONSIDERED_


A few days after the mathematical tea, Basil Randolph was taking a
sedate walk among the exotic elms and the indigenous oaks of the
campus; he was on his way to the office of the University registrar. He
felt interested in Bertram Cope and meant to consult the authorities.
That is to say, he intended to consult the written and printed data
provided by the authorities,--not to make verbal inquiries of any of
the college officials themselves. He was, after all, sufficiently in
the academic tradition to prefer the consultation of records as against
the employment of _viva voce_ methods; and he saw no reason why his new
interest should be widely communicated to other individuals. There was
an annual register; there was an album of loose sheets kept up by the
members of the faculty; and there was a card-catalogue, he remembered,
in half a dozen little drawers. All this ought to remove any necessity
of putting questions by word of mouth.

The young clerk behind the broad counter annoyed him by no offer of
aid, but left him to browse for himself. First, the printed register.
This was crowded with professors--full, head, associate, assistant;
there were even two or three professors emeritus. And each department
had its tale of instructors. But no mention of a Bertram Cope. Of
course not; this volume, it occurred to him presently, represented the
state of things during the previous scholastic year.

Next the card-catalogue. But this dealt with the students
only--undergraduate, graduate, special. No Cope there.

Remained the loose-leaf faculty-index, in which the members of the
professorial body told something about themselves in a great variety of
handwriting: among other things, their full names and addresses, and
their natures in so far as penmanship might reveal it. Ca; Ce; Cof;
Collard, Th. J., who was an instructor in French and lived on Rosemary
Place; Copperthwaite, Julian M.; Cotton ... No Cope. He looked again,
and further. No slightest alphabetical misplacement.

"You are not finding what you want?" asked the clerk at last. The
search was delaying other inquirers.

"Bertram Cope," said Randolph. "Instructor, I think."

"He has been slow. But his page will be in place by tomorrow. If you
want his address...."

"Yes?"

"--I think I can give it to you." The youth retired behind a screen.
"There," he said, returning with a bit of pencilling on a scrap of
paper.

Randolph thanked him, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket. A
mere bit of ordinary clerkly writing; no character, no allure. Well,
the actual chirography of the absentee would be made manifest before
long. What was it like? Should he himself ever have a specimen of it in
a letter or a note?

That evening, with his after-dinner cigarette, he strolled casually
through Granville Avenue, the short street indicated by the address. It
was a loosely-built neighborhood of frame dwellings, with yards and a
moderate provision of trees and shrubs--a neighborhood of people who
owned their houses but did not spend much money on them. Number 48 was
a good deal like the others. "Decent enough, but commonplace," Randolph
pronounced. "Yet what could I have been expecting?" he added; and his
whimsical smile told him not to let himself become absurd.

There were lighted windows in the front and at the side. Which of these
was Cope's, and what was the boy doing? Was he deep in black-letter, or
was he selecting a necktie preliminary to some evening diversion
outside? Or had he put out his light--several windows were dark--and
already taken the train into town for some concert or theatre?

"Well," said Randolph to himself, with a last puff at his cigarette,
"they're not likely to move out and leave him up in the air. I hope,"
he went on, "that he has more than a bedroom merely. But we know on
what an incredibly small scale some of them live."

He threw away his cigarette and strolled on to his own quarters. These
were but ten minutes away. In his neighborhood, too, people owned their
homes and were unlikely to hurry you out on a month's notice. You could
be sure of being able to stay on; and Randolph, in fact, had stayed on,
with a suitable family, for three or four years.

He had a good part of one floor: a bedroom, a sitting room, with a
liberal provision of bookshelves, and a kind of large closet which he
had made into a "cabinet." There are all sorts of cabinets, but this
was a cabinet for his "collection." His collection was not without some
measure of local fame; if not strictly valuable, it was at least
comprehensive. After all, he collected to please himself. He was a
collector in Churchton and a stockbroker in the city itself. The
satirical said that he was the most important collector in "the
street," and the most important stockbroker in the suburbs. He was a
member of a somewhat large firm, and not the most active one. His
interest had been handed down, in a manner, from his father; and the
less he participated the better his partners liked it. He had no one
but himself, and a sister on the far side of the city, miles and miles
away. His principal concern was to please himself, to indulge his
nature and tastes, and to get, in a quiet way, "a good deal out of
life." But nobody ever spoke of him as rich. His collection represented
his own preferences, perseverance and individual predilections. Least
of all had it been brought together to be "realized on" after his death.

"I may be something of a fool, in my own meek fashion," he
acknowledged, "but I'm no such fool as that."

He had a few jades and lacquers--among the latter, the ordinary
inkwells and sword-guards; a few snuff-boxes; some puppets in costume
from Mexico and Italy; a few begrimed vellum-bound books in foreign
languages (which he could not always read); and now and then a friend
who was "breaking up" would give him a bit of Capo di Monte or an
absurd enigmatic musical instrument from the East Indies. And he had a
small department of Americana, dating from the days of the Civil War.

"Miscellaneous enough," pronounced Medora Phillips, on once viewing his
cabinet, "but not altogether"--she proceeded charitably--"utter
rubbish."

And it was felt by others too that, in the lack of any wide
opportunity, he had done rather well. Churchton itself was no nest of
antiquities; in 1840 it had consisted merely of a log tavern on the
Green Bay road, and the first white child born within its limits had
died but recently. Nor was the Big Town just across the "Indian
Boundary" much older. It had "antique shops," true; but one's best
chances were got through mousing among the small scattered troups of
foreigners (variegated they were) who had lately been coming in
pell-mell, bringing their household knick-knacks with them. There was a
Ghetto, there was a Little Italy, there were bits of Bulgaria, Bohemia,
Armenia, if one had tired of dubious Louis Quinze and Empire. In an
atmosphere of general newness a thing did not need to be very old to be
an antique.

The least old of all things in Randolph's world were the students who
flooded Churchton. There were two or three thousand of them, and
hundreds of new ones came with every September. Sometimes he felt
prompted to "collect" them, as contrasts to his older curios. They were
fully as interesting, in their way, as brasswork and leatherwork, those
products of peasant natures and peasant hands. But these youths ran
past one's eye, ran through one's fingers. They were not static, not
even stable. They were restless birds of passage who fidgeted through
their years, and even through the days of which the years were made:
intent on their own affairs and their own companions; thankless for
small favors and kind attentions--even unconscious of them; soaking up
goodwill and friendly offices in a fashion too damnably
taken-for-granted ... You gave them an evening among your books, with
discreet things to drink, to smoke, to play at, or you offered them a
good dinner at some good hotel; and you never saw them after ... They
said "Yes, sir," or "Yep;" but whether they pained you by being too
respectful or rasped you by being too rowdyish, it all came to the
same: they had little use for you; they readily forgot and quickly
dropped you.

"I wonder whether instructors are a shade better," queried Basil
Randolph. "Or when do sense and gratitude and savoir-faire begin?"

A few days later he had returned to the loose-leaf faculty. Cope's page
was now in place, with full particulars in his own hand: his interest
was "English Literature," it appeared. "H'm! nothing very special in
that," commented Randolph. But Cope's penmanship attracted him. It was
open and easy: "He never gave _his_ instructor any trouble in reading
his themes." Yet the hand was rather boyish. Was it formed or unformed?
"I am no expert," confessed Randolph. He put Cope's writing on a middle
ground and let it go at that.

He recalled the lighted windows and wondered near which one of them the
same hand filled note-books and corrected students' papers.

"Rather a dreary routine, I imagine, for a young fellow of his age.
Still, he may like it, possibly."

He thought of his own early studies and of his own early
self-sufficiencies. He felt disposed to find his earlier self in this
young man--or at least an inclination to look for himself there.

The next afternoon he walked over to Medora Phillips. Medora's upper
floor gave asylum to a half-brother of her husband's--an invalid who
seldom saw the outside world and who depended for solace and
entertainment on neighbors of his own age and interests. Randolph
expected to contribute, during the week, about so many hours of talk or
of reading. But he would have a few words with Medora before going up
to Joe.

Medora, among her grilles and lambrequins, was only too willing to talk
about young Cope.

"A charming fellow--in a way," she said judicially. "Frank, but a
little too self-assured and self-centered. Exuberant, but possibly a
bit cold. Yet--charming."

"Oh," thought Randolph, "one of the cool boys, and one of the
self-sufficing. Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good
capacity for self-control and self-direction. Not at all an
uninteresting type," he summed it up. "An ebullient Puritan?" he asked
aloud.

"That's it," she declared, "--according to my sense of it."

"Yet hardly a New Englander, I suppose?"

"Not directly, anyhow. From down state--from Freeford, I think he said.
I judge that there's quite a family of them."

"Quite a family of them," he repeated inwardly. A drawback indeed. Why
could an interesting young organism so seldom be detached from its
milieu and enjoyed in isolation? Prosy parents; tiresome, detrimental
brothers ... He wondered if she had any idea what they were all like.
It might be just as well, however, not to know.

"And, judging from the family name, and from their taste at
christenings, I should say there might be some slant toward England
itself. A nomenclature not without distinction. 'Bertram'; rather nice,
eh? And there is a sister who teaches in one of the schools, I
understand; and her name is Rosalind, or Rosalys. Think of that! I
gather that the father is in some business," she concluded.

"Well, well," thought Randolph; "more than one touch of gentility, of
fine feeling." If the father was in "some business," most likely it was
some one else's business.

"He sings," said Medora, further. "Entertained us the other Sunday
afternoon. Cool and correct, but pleasant. No warmth, no passion. No
special interest in any of my poor girls. I didn't feel that he was
drawing any of them too near the danger-line."

"Mighty gratifying, that. Where does one learn to sing without
provoking danger?"

"In a church choir, of course. He sang last year in the cathedral at
Winnebago."

"Oh, in Wisconsin. And what took us to Winnebago, I wonder?"

"We were teaching in a college there."

"I see."

The talk languished. Basil Randolph had learned most that he wanted to
know, and had learned it without asking too many direct questions. He
began to pick at the fussy fringe on the arm of his chair and to cast
an empty eye on the other fussy things that filled the room. The two
had exhausted long ago all the old subjects, and he did not care to
show an eagerness--still less, a continuing eagerness--for this new
one: much could be picked up by indirection, even by waiting.

Medora felt him as distrait. "Do you want to go up and see Joe for a
little while before you leave us?"

"I believe I will. Not that I've brought anything to read."

"I doubt if he cares to be read to this time--Carolyn gave him the
headlines this forenoon. He's a bit restless; I think he'd rather talk.
If you have nothing more to say to me, perhaps you can find something
to say to him."

"Oh, come! I'm sure we've had a good enough little chat. Aren't you a
bit restless yourself?"

"Well, run along. I've heard his chair rolling about up there for the
last half hour."




5

_COPE IS CONSIDERED FURTHER_


Randolph took the stairs to the second floor, and presently his
footfalls were heard on the bare treads that led from the second to the
third. At the top landing he paused and looked in through the open door
of the picture-gallery.

Over the varnished oak floor of this roomy apartment a middle-aged man
who wore a green shade above his eyes was propelling himself in a
wheeled chair. Thus did Joseph Foster cover the space where the younger
and more fortunate sometimes danced, and thus did he move among works
of art which, even on the brightest days, he could barely see.

He knew the step. "Brought anything?" he asked.

He depended on Randolph for the latest brief doings in current fiction;
and usually in the background--and often long in abeyance--was
something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could
fill the empty hours either through retrospect or anticipation.

"Only myself," replied the other, stepping in. Foster dextrously
manoeuvred his chair toward the entrance and reached out his hand.

"Well, yourself is enough. It's good to have a man about the place once
in a while. Once in a while, I said. It gets tiresome, hearing all
those girls slithering and chattering through the halls." He put his
bony hands back on the rims of his wheels. "Where have you been all
this time?"

"Oh, you know I come when I can." Randolph ran his eye over the walls
of the big empty room. The pictures were all in place--landscapes,
figure-pieces, what not; everything as familiar as the form of words he
had just employed to meet an oft repeated query implying indifference
and neglect.

"How is it outside? I haven't been down on the street for a month."

"Oh, things are bright and pleasant enough." Through the wide window
there appeared, half a mile away, the square twin towers of the
University library, reminiscent of Oxford and Ely. Round them lesser
towers and gables, scholastic in their gray stone, rose above the trees
of the campus. Beyond all these a level line of watery blue ran for
miles and provided an eventless horizon. A bright and pleasant enough
sight indeed, but nothing for Joe Foster.

"Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The
resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and
the sociable.

To the side of this bare place, with its canvases which had become
rather démodé--or at least had long ceased to interest--lay two
bed-chambers: Foster's own, and one adjoining, which was classed as a
spare room. It was sometimes given over to visiting luminaries of
lesser magnitudes. Real celebrities--those of national or international
fame--were entertained in a sumptuous suite on the floor below. Casual
young bachelors, who sometimes happened along, were lodged above and
were expected to adjust themselves, as regarded the bathroom, to the
use and wont of the occupant adjoining.

Foster's own room was a cramped omnium gatherum, cluttered with the
paraphernalia of daily living. It was somewhat disordered and
untidy--the chamber of a man who could never see clearly how things
were, or be completely sure just what he was about.

"There's Pepys up there," he said, pointing to his bookshelf, as he
worked out of his chair and tried to dispose himself comfortably on a
couch. "I hope we're going to get along a little farther with him, some
time."

"As to that, I _have_ been getting along a little farther;--I've been
to the Library, looking somewhat ahead in the completer edition. I find
that 'Will,' who flung his cloak over his shoulder, 'like a ruffian,'
and got his ears boxed for it, was no mere temporary serving-man, but
lived on with Pepys for years and became the most intimate and trusted
of his friends. And 'Gosnell,' who lasted three days, you remember, as
Mrs. Pepys' maid, turns up a year or two later as an actress at 'the
Duke's house.' And 'Deb,' that other maid whose name we have noted
farther along--well, there's a deal more about her than exactly tends
to edification...."

"Good. I hope we shall have some more of it pretty soon."

"To-day?"

"Not exactly to-day. I've got some other things to think about."

"Such as?"

"Well, I expect you're going to be invited here to dinner pretty soon?"

"So? I've been invited here to dinner before this."

"But another day has come. A new light has risen. I haven't seen it,
but I've heard it. I've heard it sing."

"A light singing? Aren't you getting mixed?"

"Oh, I don't know. There was Viollet-le-Duc and the rose-window of
Notre Dame. They took him there as a child for a choral service, and he
thought it was the rose itself that sang. And there was Petrarch, and
the young Milton--both talking about 'melodious tears'--and something
of the same sort in 'The Blessed Damosel.' And----"

"A psychological catch for which there ought to be a name. Perhaps
there _is_ a name."

"Well, as I say, the light rose, shone, and sang. I didn't see it--I
never see anybody. But his voice came up here quite distinctly. It
seemed good to have a man in the house. Those everlasting girls--I hope
he wasn't bothering to sing for _them_."

"He probably was. How did it go?"

"Very well indeed."

"What kind of voice?"

"Oh, baritone, I suppose you'd call it."

"And he sang sentimental rubbish?"

"Not at all. Really good things."

"With passion?"

"Well, hardly. With cool correctness. An icicle on Diana's temple--that
would be my guess."

"An icicle? No wonder the young ladies don't quite fancy him."

"I understand he took them all in a lump--so far as he took them at
all. Treated them all exactly alike; Hortense was quite scornful when
she brought up my lunch-tray. Of course that's no way for a man to do."

"On the contrary. For certain purposes it might be a very good way."

"'On the contrary,' if you like; since frost may perform the effects of
fire. Medora herself is beginning to see him as a tall, white candle,
burning in some niche or at some shrine. Sir Galahad--or something of
that sort."

Randolph grimaced at this.

"Oh, misery! I hope she hasn't mentioned her impression to _him_!
Imagine whether a man would enjoy being told a thing like that. I hope,
I'm sure, that no 'Belle Dame sans Merci' will get on his tracks!"

"If he goes in too much for 'palely loitering' he may be snatched."

"Poor fellow! They'd better leave him to his studies and his students.
He has his own way to make, I presume, and will need all his energies
to get ahead. For, as some one has said, 'There are no tea-houses on
the road to Parnassus.' Neither do tea-fights boost a man toward the
Porch or Academe."

"He's going in for teas?"

"I won't say that. But it was at a tea that I met him. A trigonometry
tea at little Mrs. Ryder's."

"You've seen him then. You have the advantage of me. What's he like?"

"Oh, he has points in his favor. He has looks; a trim figure, even if
spare; well-squared shoulders; and manners with a breezy, original
tang. The kind of young fellow that people are likely enough to like."

"What kind of manners did he have for you?"

"Well, there you rather get me. He called me 'sir,' with a touch of
deference; yet somehow I felt as if I were standing too close to an
electric fan."

"Yes, even when they indulge a show of deference, they contrive to blow
our gray hairs about our wrinkled temples."

"Don't talk about gray hairs. You have none; and mine are not always
seen at first glance."

"Medora begins to tax me with a few. Don't you see any?"

"Not one. I concentrate on my own. Tush, you're only forty-seven."

"Or fifty-seven, or sixty-seven, or seventy-seven...." Foster adjusted
his green shade and attempted an easier disposition of his twisted
limbs on the couch. "Well, forty-seven, as you suggest,--as you insist.
How old is this young fellow?"

"Twenty-four or twenty-five."

"Well, they can make us seem either younger or older. That rests with
ourselves. It's all in how we take them, I expect."

"Better take them so as to make ourselves younger."

"Then the other question."

"How they take us?"

"Yes. We're lucky, in this day and generation, if they take us at all."

"You may be right," assented Randolph ruefully. "Yet there are gleams
of hope. The more thoughtful among them have a kind of condescending
pity to bestow----"

"And the thoughtless?"

"They can find uses for us. One of the faculty was telling me how he
tried to give two or three of his juniors an outing at his cottage over
in Michigan. Everything he gave they took for granted. And if anything
was lacking they took--exceptions. Monopolized the boats; ignored the
dinner-hour.... Sometimes I think that even the thoughtless are
thoughtful in their own way and use us, if we happen to have lands and
substance, purely as practical conveniences. I've been almost glad to
think that I possess none myself."

"Don't stay here and talk like that. This is one of my blue days."

"I wish I had brought a novelette. Sure you don't want to hear a little
more about the Countess of Castlemaine and the rascalities of the Navy
Office?"

"No; some other time, when I feel a bit more robust. It isn't every day
that the mind can digest such a period with comfort."

"Are we two old fogies beginning to wear on each other?"

"I hope not. But when you go down, stop for Medora a minute and see if
she hasn't got something to say."

Medora--when he finally got down stairs--had.

She laid some knitting on the drawing-room table and came out into the
hall.

"No reading this afternoon, I judge. What I heard, or seemed to hear,
was a broken flow of talk."

"No reading. Restless."

"So I was afraid. I'd rather have one good steady voice purring along
for him, and then I know he's all right. Carolyn has been too busy
lately. What seems to have unsettled him?"

"Oh, I don't know. Young life, possibly."

"Well, I've asked and asked the girls not to be quite so gay and
chattery in the upper halls."

"You can't keep girls quiet."

"I don't want to--not everywhere and at all times."

"I have an idea that a given number of girls make more noise in a house
than the same number of young fellows. I know that they do in
boarding-houses and rooming-houses, and I believe it's so as between
sororities and fraternities. Put a noise-gauge in the main hall of the
Alpha-Alpha house and another in the main hall of the Beta-Beta house,
and the girls would run the score above the boys every time. If ever I
build a sorority house, it will be for the Delta-Iota-Nus, and a statue
of the great goddess DIN herself shall stand just within the entrance."

"You discourage me. I was going to give a dinner."

"Go ahead. A few remarks from me won't stop the course of your
hospitality. Neither would a few orations. Neither would a few
deliberative bodies assembled for a month of sessions, with every
member talking from nine till six."

"You think I indulge in too many?"

"Too many what? Festivals? Puns?"

Medora paused, a bit puzzled.

"Puns? Why, I never, never----Oh, I see!"

"Too many dinners? No. Who could?"

"This one was to be a young people's dinner. I was going to invite you."

"Thanks. Thanks. Thanks."

"Still, if you think my girls are noisy...."

"I was speaking of girls in numbers."

"Well, Bertram Cope didn't find them so."

"Why not?"

"Why not, indeed? They collected in a silent little group behind my
sofa...."

"Puzzled? Awed?"

"Fudge! Well, save Thursday."

"Is he coming?"

"I trust so."

"Then they do need a constabulary to keep them quiet?"

"Oh, hush!"

"How many are you expecting to have? You know I don't enjoy large
parties."


"Could you stand ten?"

"I think so."

"Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the
door.

Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a
feeling that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that
the company would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively
so--aside from the hostess and himself. And even she often had her
young days and her young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet
clamor, understood and prepared for, might be met with composure.




6

_COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_


Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the
red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that
Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in
the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology--unless,
indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to
distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material
that made chronology a matter of consequence at all.

"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of
sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer
derived from Beaumont and Fletcher."

He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame
lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and
meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two
stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead,
with some dozen of the more indispensable aids to our tongue's
literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered
with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots
that antedated his own pen. He threw up this covering as it fell over
the front edge of the table, pulled out a drawer, laid a sheet of paper
in the bettered light, and uncorked a black-ink bottle.

"Dear Arthur," he began.

He looked across to the other chair, with its broken spindles and
obfuscated varnish. With things as he wanted them, his correspondent
would be sitting there and letter-writing would be unnecessary.

"Dear Arthur," he repeated aloud, and set himself to a general sketch
of the new land and the "lay" of it.

"Three-quarters of them are of course girls," he presently found
himself writing, "which is the common proportion almost everywhere, I
presume, except in engineering and dentistry. However, there are four
or five men. I've been pretty careful, and they still treat me with
respect. I'm afraid my course is regarded as a 'snap.' Everybody, it
seems, can grasp English literature (and produce it). And almost
anybody, I begin to fear, can teach it. Judging, that is, from the pay.
I'm afraid the good folks at Freeford will find themselves pinched for
another year still."

He glanced across toward the pile of corrected themes. He felt that not
everybody was "called," as a matter of course, to write English, and he
stubbornly nourished the belief that toiling over others' imperfections
was more of a job than boards of trustees always realized.

"Of course," he presently resumed, "things are rather changed from what
they were before. I find more in the way of social opportunities and
greater interest shown by the middle-aged. It is no disadvantage to
cultivate people who have their own homes; the lunch-rooms round the
fountain-square are numerous enough, but not so good as they might be.
And I don't know but that an instructor may lose caste by eating among
a miscellany of undergraduates. Anyhow, it's no plan to pursue for
long."

He sat for a moment, lost in thought over recent social experiences.

"One very good house has lately been opened to me," he continued. "I
dined there last Thursday evening. It's really quite a mansion--a great
many large rooms: picture-gallery, ballroom, and all that; and the
dinner itself was very handsomely done. You know my theory,--a theory
rather forced upon me, in truth, by circumstances,--that the best way
to enjoy a good meal is to have had a string of poor ones. Well, since
coming back, and with no permanent arrangements made, I have had plenty
of chance for getting into position to appreciate the really
first-class. There was a color-scheme in pale pink--ribbons of that
color, pink icing on the cakes, and so on. The same thing could be
done, and done charmingly, in light green--with pistache ice-cream. Of
course the candle-shades were pink too."

His eye wandered toward a small triangular closet, made off from the
room by a flimsy and faded calico-print curtain.

"I had my dress-suit cleaned and pressed, but the lapels of the coat
came out rather shiny, and I thought it better to hire one for the
occasion. There was no trouble about a fit--I have standardized
shoulders, as you know.

"Of course I miss you all the time, and I assuredly missed you just
here. If it is really true, as you write, that you are holding your
summer gains and weigh twelve pounds more than you did at the end of
June, and if you are thinking of getting a new suit, please bear in
mind that my own won't last much longer. I have the chance, now, to go
out a good deal and to meet influential, worth-while people. In the
circumstances I ask you not to bant. One rather spare man in a pair of
men is enough.

"My hostess, a Mrs. Phillips, I met at a tea during my first week. This
tea was given by a lady in the mathematical department, and she and her
husband were at the dinner. They are people in the early or middle
thirties, I judge, and were probably put in as a connecting link
between the two sections of the party. Mrs. Phillips herself is a rich
widow of forty-odd--forty-five or six, possibly,--though I am not the
very best judge in such matters: no need to tell you that, on such a
point, my eye and my general sense are none too acute. The only other
middle-aged (or elderly) person present was a Mr. Randolph, who is
perhaps fifty, or a little beyond, yet who appears to have his younger
moments. There were some girls, and there were two young men in
business in the city--neighbors and not connected with the University
at all. 'For which relief,' etc.,--since it _is_ a bit benumbing to
move in academic circles exclusively;--I should hate to feel that a
really professorial manner was stealing over me. Well, everybody was
lively and gay, except at first Ryder (he's the math. man); but even he
limbered up finally. Mrs. Phillips herself has a great deal of action
and vivacity--seemed hardly more than thirty. Well, I could be pretty
gay too with a lot of money behind me; and I think that, for another
year or so, I can contrive to be gay without it. But after that....

"I wish you had been there instead of Ryder. If you are really going to
be twenty-seven in November--as I figure it--you might yourself have
served as a connecting link between youth and age. No, no; I take it
back; I didn't mean it. I wouldn't have you seem older for anything,
and you know it.

"There were three girls. They all live in the house itself, forming a
little court: Mrs. P. seems to need young life and young attentions. So
not one of them had to be taken home--there's usually _that_ to do, you
know. Not that it would have mattered much, as the distances would have
been short and the night was clear starlight. But they could all stay
where they were, and I walked home in quite different company."

Cope threw back his Oriental table-cover once more and drew out a few
additional sheets of paper.

"One of them is an artist. She paints portraits, and possibly other
things. Oh, I was going to say there is an art-gallery at the top of
the house. Her husband--I mean Mrs. Phillips'--was a painter and
collector himself; and after dinner we went up there, and a curious man
came in, propelling a wheeled chair--a sort of death's-head at the
feast.... But don't let me get too far away from the matter in hand.
She is dark and a bit tonguey--the artist-girl; and I believe she would
be sarcastic and witty if she weren't held down pretty well. I think
she's a niece: the relationship leaves her free, as I suppose she
feels, to express herself. If you like the type you may have it; but
wit in a woman, or even humor, always makes me uncomfortable. The
feminine idea of either is a little different from ours.

"Another girl is a musician. She plays the violin--quite tolerably.
Yes, yes, I recall your views about violin-playing: it's either good or
bad--nothing between. I'll say this, then: she played some simple and
unpretentious things and did them very deftly. Simple, unpretentious:
oddest thing in the world, for she is a recent graduate of our school
of music and began this fall as an instructor. Wouldn't you have
expected to find her demanding a chance to perform a sonata at the
least, or pining miserably for a concerto with full orchestra? Well,
this young lady I put down as a plain boarder--you can't maintain a big
house on memories and a collection of paintings. She's a nice child,
and I dare say makes as good a boarder as any nice child could.

"The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a
secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary
is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the
engagement-book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the
minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite
the mistress of self-respecting adulation. _She_ would know the
difference between Herrick and Cowper!"...

Cope pulled out his watch. Then he resumed.

"It's half past ten, but I think I'll run on for a few moments longer.
If I don't finish, I can wind up to-morrow.--Mr. Randolph sat opposite
me. He looked at me a lot and gave attention to whatever I
said--whether said to him, or to my neighbors right and left, or to the
whole table. I didn't feel him especially clever, but easy and
pleasant--and friendly. Also a little shy--even after we had gone up to
the ball-room. I'm afraid that made me more talkative than ever; you
know how shyness in another man makes me all the more confident and
rackety. Be sure that voice of mine rang out! But not in song. There
was a piano up stairs, of course, and that led to a little dancing.
Different people took turns in playing. I danced--once--with each of
the three girls, and twice with my hostess; then I let Ryder and the
two young business-men do the rest. Randolph danced once with Mrs.
Phillips, and that ended it for him. My own dancing, as you know, is
nothing to brag of: I think the young ladies were quite satisfied with
the little I did. I'm sure _I_ was. You also know my views on round
dances. Why dancing should be done exclusively by couples arranged
strictly on the basis of contrasted sexes...! I think of the good old
days of the Renaissance in Italy, when women, if they wanted to dance,
just got up and danced--alone, or, if they didn't want to dance alone,
danced together. I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a
straightforward outlet for superfluous physical energy. Also, peasants
in a ring--about a Maypole or something. Also, I very much like square
dances and reels. There were enough that night for a quadrille, with
somebody for the piano and even somebody to 'call off,'--but whoever
sees a quadrille in these days? However, I mustn't burn any more gas on
this topic.

"I sat out several dances between Mrs. Phillips and Mr. Randolph. He
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."

"Oh, I hope that doesn't mean," returned Cope, with another ingenuous
unchaining of his native resonance, "that you are afraid of getting a
little too much of mine! I'm fond of novelty, and nobody can frighten
me."

"If that's the case, let's get away as early in the day as we can.
Breakfasts, of course, are late in every household on Sunday. So let's
meet at the Maroon-and-Purple Tavern at seven-thirty, and make a flying
start at eight."

Sunday morning came clear and calm and warm to the town,--a belated
September day, or possibly an early intimation of Indian summer,--and
it promised to be even more delightful in the favored region toward
which our friends were journeying. After they had cleared many miles of
foundries and railroad crossings, and had paralleled for a last
half-hour a distant succession of sandhills, wooded or glistening
white, they were set down at a small group of farmhouses, with a varied
walk of five miles before them. Half a mile through a shaded country
lane; another half-mile along a path that led across low, damp ground
through thickets of hazel and brier; a third half-mile over a light
soil, increasingly sandy, beneath oaks and lindens and pines which
cloaked the outlines of the slopes ahead; and finally a great mound of
pure sand that slanted up into a blue sky and made its own horizon.

"We've taken things easy," said Randolph, who had been that way before,
"and I hope we have enough breath left for our job. There it lies,
right in front of us."

"No favor asked here," declared Cope. He gave a sly, sidewise glance,
as if to ask how the other might stand as to leg-muscles and wind.

"Up we go," said Randolph.




9

_COPE ON THE EDGE OF THINGS_


The adventurer in Duneland hardly knows, as he works his way through
one of the infrequent "blow-outs," whether to thank Nature for her aid
or to tax her with her cruelty. She offers few other means of reaching
the water save for these nicks in the edges of the great cup; yet it is
possible enough to view her as a careless and reckless handmaiden
busily devastating the cosmical china-closet. The "blow-out" is a
tragedy, and the cause of further tragedy. The north winds, in the
impetus gathered through a long, unimpeded flight over three hundred
miles of water, ceaselessly try and test the sandy bulwarks for a
slightest opening. The flaw once found, the work of devastation and
desolation begins; and, once begun, it continues without cessation.
Every hurricane cuts a wider and deeper gash, fills the air with clouds
of loose sand, and gives sinister addition to the white shifting heaps
and fields that steal slowly yet unrelentingly over the green
hinterland of forest which lies below the southern slopes. Trees yet to
die stand in passive bands at their feet; the stark, black trunks of
trees long dead rise here and there in spots where the sand-glacier has
done its work of ruin and passed on.

After some moments of scrambling and panting our two travelers gained
the divide. Below them sloped a great amphitheatre of sand, falling in
irregular gradations; and at the foot of all lay the lake, calmly
azure, with its horizon, whether near or far for it was almost
impossible to say--mystically vague. On either hand rose other hills of
sand, set with sparse pines and covered, in patches, with growths of
wild grape, the fruit half ripened. Within the amphitheatre, at various
levels, rose grimly a few stumps and shreds of cedars long dead and
long indifferent to the future ravages of the enemy. The whole scene
was, to-day, plausibly gentle and inert. It was indeed a bridal of
earth and sky, with the self-contained approval of the blue deep and no
counter-assertion from any demon wind.

"So far, so good," said Randolph, taking off his hat, wiping his
forehead, and breathing just a little harder than he liked. "The rest
of our course is plain: down those slopes, and then a couple of miles
along the shore. Easy walking, that; a mere promenade on a boulevard."

Cope stood on the height, and tossed his bare head like a tireless
young colt. The sun fell bright on his mane of yellow hair. He took in
a deep breath. "It's good!" he declared. "It's great! And the water
looks better yet. Shall we make it in a rush?"

He began to plunge down the long, broken sand-slope. Each step was
worth ten. Randolph followed--with judgment. He would not seem young
enough to be a competitor, nor yet old enough to be a drag. On the
shore he wiped and panted a little more--but not to the point of
embarrassment, and still less to the point of mortification. After all,
he was keeping up pretty well.

At the bottom Cope, with his shoes full of sand, turned round and
looked up the slope down which his companion was coming. He waved his
arms. "It's almost as fine from here!" he cried.

The beach, once gained, was in sight both ways for miles. Not a human
habitation was visible, nor a human being. Two or three gulls flew a
little out from shore, and the tracks of a sandpiper led from the wet
shingle to the first fringe of sandgrass higher up.

"Where are the crowds?" asked Cope, with a sonorous shout.

"Miles behind," replied Randolph. "We haven't come this long distance
to meet them after all. Besides," he continued, looking at his watch,
"this is not the time of day for them. At twelve-fifteen people are not
strolling or tramping; they're thinking of their dinner. We have a full
hour or more for making less than two easy miles before we reach
_ours_."

"No need to hurry, then."

The beach, at its edge, was firm, and they strolled on for half a mile
and cooled off as they went. The air was mild; the noonday sun was
warm; both of them had taken off their coats.

They sat down under a clump of basswoods, the only trees beyond the
foot of the sand-slope, and looked at the water.

"It's like a big, useless bathtub," observed Randolph.

"Not so much useless as unused."

"Yes, I suppose the season _is_ as good as over,--though this end of
the lake stays warm longer than most other parts."

"It isn't so much the warmth of the water," remarked Cope
sententiously. "It's more the warmth of the air."

"Well, the air seems warm enough. After all, the air and the sun are
about the best part of a swim. Do you want to go in?"

Cope rose, walked to the edge of the water, and put in a finger or two.
"Well, it might be warmer; but, as I say...."

"We could try a ten-minute dip. That would get us to our dinner in good
time and in good trim."

"All right. Let's, then."

"Only, you'll have to do most of the swimming," said Randolph. "My few
small feats are all accomplished pretty close to shore."

"Never mind. Company's the thing. A fellow finds it rather slow, going
in alone."

Cope whisked off his clothes with incredible rapidity and piled
them--or flung them--under the basswoods: the suddenly resuscitated
technique of the small-town lad who could take avail of any pond or any
quiet stretch of river on the spur of the moment. He waded in quickly
up to his waist, and then took an intrepid header. His lithe young legs
and arms threw themselves about hither and yon. After a moment or two
he got on his feet and made his way back across a yard of fine shingle
to the sand itself. He was sputtering and gasping, and the long yellow
hair, which usually lay in a flat clean sweep from forehead to occiput,
now sprawled in a grotesque pattern round his temples.

"B-r-r! It _is_ cold, sure enough. But jump in. The air will be all
right. I'll be back with you in a moment."

Randolph advanced to the edge, and felt in turn. It _was_ cold. But he
meant to manage it here, just as he had managed with the sand-slopes.

Two heads bobbed on the water where but one had bobbed before.
Ceremonially, at least, the rite was complete.

"It's never so cold the second time," declared Cope encouragingly. "One
dip doesn't make a swim, any more than one swallow--"

He flashed his soles in the sunlight and was once again immersed,
gulping, in a maelstrom of his own making.

"Twice, to oblige you," said Randolph. "But no more. I'll leave the
rest to the sun and the air."

Cope, out again, ran up and down the sands for a hundred feet or so. "I
know something better than this," he declared presently. He threw
himself down and rolled himself in the abundance of fine, dry, clean
sand.

"An arenaceous ulster--speaking etymologically," he said. He came back
to the clump of basswoods near which Randolph was sitting on a short
length of drift wood, with his back to the sun, and sat down beside him.

"You're welcome to it," said Randolph, laughing; "but how are you going
to get it off? By another dip? Certainly not by the slow process of
time. We have some moments to spare, but hardly enough for that.
Meanwhile...."

He picked up a handful of sand and applied it to a bare shoulder-blade
which somehow had failed to get its share of protection.

"Thanks," said Cope: "the right thing done for Polynices. Yes, I shall
take one final dip and dry myself on my handkerchief."

"I shall dry by the other process, and so shall be able to spare you
mine."


"How much time have we yet?"

Randolph reached for his trousers, as they hung on a lower branch of
one of the basswoods. "Oh, a good three-quarters of an hour."

"That's time enough, and to spare. I wonder whom we're going to meet."

"There's a 'usual crowd': the three young ladies, commonly; one or two
young men who understand how to tinker the oil-stove--which usually
needs it--and how to prime the pump. They once asked me to do these
things; but I've discovered that younger men enjoy it more than I do,
so I let them do it. Besides these, a number of miscellaneous people,
perhaps, who come out by trolley or in their own cars."

"The young ladies always come?" asked Cope, brushing the sand from his
chest.

"Usually. Together. The Graces. Otherwise, what becomes of the Group?"

"Well, I hope there'll be enough fellows to look after the stove and
the pump--and them. I'm not much good at that last."

"No?"

"There's a knack about it--a technique--that I don't seem to possess.
Nor do I seem greatly prompted to learn it."

"Of course, there is no more reason for assuming that every man will
make a good lover than that every woman will make a good mother or a
good housekeeper."

"Or that every adult male will make a good citizen, desiring the
general welfare and bestirring himself to contribute his own share to
it. I don't feel that I'm an especially creditable one."

"So it runs. We ground our general life on theories, and then the facts
come up and slap us in the face." Randolph rose and relieved the
basswood of the first garments. "Are you about ready for that final
dip?"

Cope made his last plunge and returned red and shivering to use the two
handkerchiefs.

"Well, we have thirty minutes," said Randolph, as they resumed their
march. On the one hand the ragged line of dunes with their draping,
dense or slight, of pines, lindens and oaks; on the other the unruffled
expanse of blue, spreading toward a horizon even less determinate than
before.

"No, I'm not at all apt," said Cope, returning to his theme; "not even
for self-defense. I suppose I'm pretty sure to get caught some time or
other."

"Each woman according to her powers and gifts. Varying degrees of
desire, of determination, of dexterity. To be just, I might add a
fourth _d_--devotion."

"You've run the gauntlet," said Cope. "You seem to have come through
all right."

"Well," Randolph returned deprecatingly, "I can't really claim ever to
have enlisted any woman's best endeavors."

"I hope I shall have the same good luck. Of your four _d_'s, it's the
dexterity that gives me the most dread."

"Yes, the appeal (not always honest) to chivalry,--though devotion is
sometimes a close second. You're manoeuvred into a position where
you're made to think you 'must.' I've known chaps to marry on that
basis.... It's weary waiting until Madame dies and Madonna steps into
her place."

"Meanwhile, safety in numbers."

"Yes, even though you're in the very midst of wishing or of
wondering--or of a careful concern to cloak either."

"Don't dwell on it! You fill me with apprehensions."

Randolph put up his arm and pointed. A roof through a notch between two
sandhills beyond a long range of them, was seen, set high and half
hidden by the spreading limbs of pines. "There it is," he said.

"So close, already?" Such, indeed, it appeared.

"Not so close as it seems. We may just as well step lively."

Cope, with an abundance of free action, was treading along on the very
edge of things, careless of the rough shingle and indifferent to the
probability of wet feet, and swinging his hat as he went. In some such
spirit, perhaps, advanced young Stoutheart to the ogre's castle. He
even began to foot it a little faster.

"Well, I can keep up with you yet," thought Randolph. Aloud, he said:
"You've done very well with your hair. Quite an inspiration to have
carried a comb."

Cope grimaced.

"I trust I'm free to comb myself on Sunday. There are plenty of others
to do it for me through the week."




10

_COPE AT HIS HOUSE PARTY_


"You look as fit as two fiddles," said Medora Phillips, at the top of
her sandhill.

"We are," declared Randolph. "Have the rest of the orchestra arrived?"

"Most of us are here, and the rest will arrive presently. Listen. I
think I hear a honk somewhere back in the woods."

The big room of the house, made by knocking two small rooms together,
seemed fairly full already, and other guests were on the back porch.
The Graces were there, putting the finishing-touches to the
table--Helga had not come, after all, but had gone instead, with her
young man, to spend a few sunny afternoon hours among the films. And
one of the young business-men present at Mrs. Phillips' dinner was
present here; he seemed to know how to handle the oil-stove and the
pump (with the cooperation of the chauffeur), and how to aid the three
handmaidens in putting on the knives, forks, plates and napkins that
Helga had decided to ignore. The people in the distant motor-car became
less distant; soon they stopped in a clearing at the foot of the hill,
and before long they appeared at the top with a small hamper of
provisions.

"Oh, why didn't you ask _us_ to bring something!" cried Cope. Randolph
shrugged his shoulders: he saw himself lugging a basket of eatables
through five miles of sand and thicket.

"You've brought yourself," declared Mrs. Phillips genially. "That's
enough."

There was room for the whole dozen on the dining-porch. The favored few
in one corner of it could glimpse the blue plane of the lake, or at
least catch the horizon; the rest could look over the treetops toward
the changing colors of the wide marshes inland. And when the feast was
over, the chauffeur took his refreshment off to one side, and then
amiably lent a hand with the dishes.

"Let me help wipe," cried Cope impulsively.

"There are plenty of hands to help," returned his hostess. She seemed
to be putting him on a higher plane and saving him for better things.

One of the better things was a stroll over her tumultuous domain: the
five miles he had already covered were not enough.

"I'll stay where I am," declared Randolph, who had taken this
regulation jaunt before. He followed Cope to the hook from which he was
taking down his hat. "Admire everything," he counselled in a whisper.

"Eh?"

"Adjust yourself to our dominant mood without delay or reluctance.
Praise promptly and fully everything that is ours."

The party consisted of four or five of the younger people and two or
three of the older. Most of them had taken the walk before; Cope, as a
novice, became the especial care of Mrs. Phillips herself. The way led
sandily along the crest of a wooded amphitheatre, with less stress on
the prospect waterward than might have been expected. Cope was not
allowed, indeed, to overlook the vague horizon where, through the pine
groves, the blue of sky and of sea blended into one; but, under Medora
Phillips' guidance, his eyes were mostly turned inland.

"People think," she said, "that 'the Dunes' means nothing beyond a
regular row of sandhills following the edge of the water; yet half the
interest and three-quarters of the variety are to be found in behind
them. See my wide marsh, off to the southeast, with those islands of
tamarack here and there, and imagine how beautiful the shadows are
toward sunset. Look at that thick wood at the foot of the slope: do you
think it is flat? No, it's as humpy and hilly as anything ever
traversed. Only this spring a fascinating murderer hid there for weeks,
and last January we could hear the howls of timber-wolves driven down
from Michigan by the cold. And see those tall dead pines rising above
it all. I call them the Three Witches. You'll get them better just a
few paces to the left. This way." She even placed her hand on his elbow
to make sure that her tragic group should appear to highest advantage.
Yes, he was an admirable young man, giving admirable attention;
thrusting out his hat toward prospects of exceptional account and
casting his frank blue eyes into her face between-times. Charmingly
perfect teeth and a wonderful sweep of yellow hair. A highly civilized
faun for her highly sylvan setting. Indifferent, perhaps, to her
precious Trio; but there were other young fellows to look after _them_.

Cope praised loudly and readily. The region was unique and every view
had its charm--every view save one. Beyond the woods and the hills and
the distant marshes which spread behind all these, there rose on the
bluish horizon a sole tall chimney, with its long black streak of
smoke. Below it and about it spread a vast rectangular structure with
watch-towers at its corners. The chimney bespoke light and heat and
power furnished in quantities--power for many shops, manned by
compulsory workers: a prison, in short.

"Why, what's that?" asked Cope tactlessly.

Medora Phillips withheld her eyes and sent out a guiding finger in the
opposite direction. "Only see the red of those maples!" she said; "and
that other red just to the left--the tree with the small, fine leaves
all aflame. Do you know what it is?"

"I'm afraid not."

"It's a tupelo. And this shrub, right here?" She took between her
fingers one large, bland indented leaf on a small tree close to the
path.

Cope shook his head.

"Why, it's a sassafras. And this?"--she thrust her toe into a thick,
lustrous bed of tiny leaves that hugged the ground. "No, again? That's
kinnikinnick. Oh, my poor boy, you have everything to learn. Brought up
in the country, too!"

"But, really," said Cope in defense, "Freeford isn't so small as
_that_. And even in the country one may turn by preference to books.
Try me on primroses and date-palms and pomegranates!"

Medora broke off a branch of sassafras and swished it to and fro as she
walked. "See," she said; "three kinds of leaves on the same tree: one
without lobes, one with a single lobe, and one with two."

"Isn't Nature wonderful," replied Cope easily.

Meanwhile the young ladies sauntered along--before or behind, as the
case might be--in the company of the young business-man and that of
another youth who had come out independently on the trolley. They
appeared to be suitably accompanied and entertained. But shiftings and
readjustments ensued, as they are sure to do with a walking-party. Cope
presently found himself scuffling through the thin grass and the briery
thickets alongside the young business-man. He was a clever,
companionable chap, but he declared himself all too soon, even in this
remote Arcadia, as utterly true to type. Cope was not long in feeling
him as operating on the unconscious assumption--unconscious, and
therefore all the more damnable--that the young man in business
constituted, ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in
other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated
from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their
deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life,
that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and
profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the
separation came. "Enough of _him_!" muttered Cope to himself presently,
and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell was
strolling along alone: he caught a branch of haw from before her
meditative face and proffered a general remark about the beauty of the
day and the interest in the changing prospect.

Amy's pretty pink face brightened. "It _is_ a lovely day," she said.
"And the more of this lovely weather we have in October--and especially
in November--the more trouble it makes."

"Surely you don't want rain or frost?"

"No; but it becomes harder to shut the house up for good and all. Last
fall we opened and closed two or three times. We even tried coming out
in December."

"In mackintoshes and rubber boots?"

"Almost. But the boots are better for February. At least, they would
have been last February."

"It seems hard to imagine such a future for a place like this,--or such
a past."

"Things can be pretty rough, I assure you. And the roads are not always
as good as they are to-day." And when the pump froze, she went on, they
had to depend upon the lake; and when the lake froze they had to fall
back on melted snow and ice. And even when the lake didn't freeze, the
blowing waters and the flying sands often heaped up big ridges that
quite cut them off from the open sea. Then they had to prospect along
those tawny hummocks for some small inlet that would yield a few
buckets of frozen spray, keeping on the right side of the deep fissures
that held the threat of icebergs to be cast loose at any moment; "and
sometimes," she added, in search of a little thrill, "we would get back
toward shore to find deep openings with clear water dashing beneath--we
had been walking on a mere snow-crust half the time."

"Most interesting," said Cope accommodatingly. He saw no winter shore.

"Yes, February was bad, but Mrs. Phillips wanted to make sure, toward
the end of the winter, that the house hadn't blown away,--nor the
contents; for we have housebreakers every so often. And Hortense wanted
to make some 'color-notes.' I believe she's going to try for some more
to-day."

"To-day is a good day--unless the October tints are too obvious."

"She says they are not subtle, but that she can use them."

Well, here he was, talking along handily enough. But he had no notion
of talking for long about Hortense. He preferred returning to the
weather.

"And what does such a day do for you?" he asked.

"Oh, I suppose it helps me in a general way. But _my_ notes, of course,
are on paper already."

Yes, he was walking alongside her and holding his own--thus far. She
seemed a pretty enough, graceful enough little thing; not so tall by an
inch or so as she appeared when seated behind that samovar. On that day
she had been reasonably sprightly--toward others, even if not toward
him. To-day she seemed meditative, rather; even elegiac--unless there
was a possible sub-acid tang in her reference to Hortense's
color-notes. Aside from that possibility, there was little indication
of the "dexterity" which Randolph had asked him to beware.

"On paper already?" he repeated. "But not all of them? I know you
compose. You are not saying that you are about to give composition up?"
A forced and awkward "slur," perhaps; but it served.

She gave a little sigh. "Pupils don't want _my_ pieces," she said.
"Scales; exercises..."

"I know," he returned. "Themes,--clearness, mass, unity.... It's the
same."


They looked at each other and smiled. "We ought not to think of such
things to-day," she said.

Mrs. Phillips came along, shepherding her little flock for the return.
"But before we _do_ turn back," she adjured them, "just look at those
two lovely spreading pines standing together alone on that far hill."
The small group gazed obediently--though to many of them the prospect
was a familiar one. Yes, there stood two pines, one just a little
taller than the other, and just a little inclined across the other's
top. "A girl out here in August called them Paolo and Francesca. Do you
think," she asked Cope, "that those names are suitable?"

"Oh, I don't know," he replied, looking at the trees thoughtfully.
"They seem rather--static; and Dante's lovers, if I recollect, had
considerable drive. They were '_al vento_'--on the wind--weren't they?
It might be less violent and more modern to call your trees Pelleas and
Melisande, or--"

"That's it. That's the very thing!" said Medora Phillips heartily.
"Pelleas and Melisande, of course. That girl had a very ordinary mind."

"I've felt plenty of wind on the dunes, more than once," interjected
Hortense.

"Or Darby and Joan," Cope continued. "Not that I'm defending that poor
creature, whoever she was. They seem to be a pretty staid, steady-going
couple."

"Don't," said Medora. "Too many ideas are worse than too few. They
confuse one."

And Amy Leffingwell, who had seemed willing to admire him, now looked
at him with an air of plaintive protest.

"'Darby and Joan'!" muttered Hortense into a sumach bush. "You might as
well call them Jack and Jill!"

"They're Pelleas and Melisande," declared Mrs. Phillips, in a tone of
finality. "Thank you so much," she said, with a smile that reinstated
Cope after a threatened lapse from favor.




11

_COPE ENLIVENS THE COUNTRY_


As they drew near the house they heard the tones of a gramophone. This
instrument rested flatly on a small table and took the place of a
piano, which would have been a fearful thing to transport from town and
back. It was jigging away merrily enough, with a quick, regular rhythm
which suggested a dance-tune; and when the party re-entered the big
room it was seen that a large corner of the center rug was still turned
back. Impossible that anybody could have been dancing on the Sabbath;
surely everybody understood that the evangelical principles of
Churchton were projected on these occasions to the dunes. Besides, the
only women left behind had been two in their forties; the men in their
company were even older. Medora Phillips looked at Randolph, but he was
staring inexpressively at the opposite wall. She found herself
wondering if there were times when the mere absence of the young served
automatically to make the middle-aged more youthful.

"Well, we've had a most lovely walk," she declared. She crossed to the
far corner of the room, contriving to turn down the rug as she went,
and opened up a new reservoir of records. She laid them on the table
rather emphatically, as if to say, "_These_ are suited to the day."

"I hope you're all rested up," she continued, and put one of the new
records on the machine. The air was from a modern opera, true; but it
was slow-going and had even been fitted out with "sacred" words.
Everybody knew it, and presently everybody was humming it.

"It ought not to be hummed," she declared; "it ought to be sung. You
can sing it, Mr. Cope?"

"Oh yes, indeed," replied Cope, readily enough. "I have the breath
left, I think,--or I can very soon find it."

"Take a few minutes. I'll fill in with something else."

They listened to an inconclusive thing by a wobbling soprano, and then
Mrs. Phillips put the other record back.

The accompaniment to the air was rather rich and dense, and the general
tone-quality was somewhat blatant. But Cope stood up to it all, and had
the inspiration to treat the new combination as a sort of half-joke.
But he was relieved from the bother of accompanying himself; his
resonance overlaid in some measure the cheap quality of the record's
tone; he contrived to master a degree of momentum to let himself go;
and the general result was good,--much better than his attempt at that
tea. Hortense and Carolyn looked at him with a new respect; and Amy,
who had been willing to admire, now admired openly. Cope ended, gave a
slight grimace, and sauntered away from the table and the instrument.
He knew that he had done rather well.

"Bravo!" loudly cried one of the ladies, who felt that she was under
suspicion of having taken a step or two in the dance. And, "Oh, my
dear," said Mrs. Phillips to her, sotto voce, "isn't he utterly
charming!"

Cope wiped his brow. The walk had made him warm, and the singing had
made him warmer. One or two of the women were using chance pamphlets as
fans (despite Mrs. Phillips' ill-concealed doubts), and everybody
showed a willingness to keep in the draught from the open windows.

"Is it close here?" asked the hostess anxiously. "The day is almost
like summer. If the water is anywhere nearly as warm as the air is....
Let me see; it's a quarter to four. I have a closetful of bathing
suits, all sizes and shapes and several colors, if anybody cares to go
in."

"Don't!" cried Cope explosively.

She looked at him with interest. "Have you been trying it?"

"I have. On the way along the shore. I assure you, however warm the air
may be, the bathing season is over."

"Well, I rather thought something had been happening to you. Mr.
Randolph, is it as bad as he says?"

"I'll take his word," replied Randolph. "And I think all of us had
better do the same."

"We might go down to the beach, anyway," she said. "Hortense wants to
make her color-notes, and the color will be good from now on."

Several of the party threaded their way down over the sliding sandy
path which led through the pines and junipers. Cope was willing to go
with the others--on the present understanding. He objected to
promiscuous bathing even more strongly than he objected to promiscuous
dancing.

There were some new cumuli in the east, out above the water, and they
began to take the late afternoon sun. Hortense cast about for just the
right point of view, with Carolyn to help on "atmosphere" and two young
men to be superserviceable over campstool, sketch-block and box of
colors. She brought back a few dabs which may have served some future
use;--at all events they served as items in a social record.

Cope and Amy, with some of the others, strolled off in the opposite
direction. The water remained smooth, and some of the men idly skipped
stones. One of them dipped in his hand. "Cold?" he exclaimed; "I should
say!"

Amy looked admiringly at Cope, as one who had braved, beyond season,
the chill of the great deep, and he tried to reward her with a
"thought" or two. He had skipped stones himself between dips, and
Randolph had made a reflection which he could now revise and employ.

"See!" he said, as a flat, waveworn piece of slate left the hand of the
young business-man and careered over the water; "one, two, three--six,
eight--ten, thirteen; and then down, down, after all,--down to the
bottom. And so we end--every one of us. The great thing is to crowd in
all the action we can before the final plunge comes--to go skipping and
splashing as hard and long and fast and far as we may!"

A valuable thought, possibly, and elaborated beyond Randolph's sketchy
and casual utterance; but Amy looked uncomfortable and chilled and
glanced with little favor at a few other flat stones lying at her feet.
"Please don't. Please change the subject," she seemed to ask.

She changed it herself. "You sang beautifully," she said, with some
return of warmth--even with some approach to fervor.

"Oh, I can sing," he returned nonchalantly, "if I can only have my
hands in my pockets, or waving in the air, or anywhere but on a
keyboard."

"I wish you had let them persuade you to sing another." She was not
only willing to admire, but desirous: conscientious amends, perhaps,
for an earlier verdict. "One or two more skips, you know, after getting
started."

"Oh, once was enough. A happy coincidence. The next might have been an
unhappy one."

"You have never learned to accompany yourself?"

"As you've seen, I'm a rather poor hand at it; I've depended a good
deal on others. Or, better, on another."

She looked at him earnestly. "Have you ever sung to an obbligato?"

"None of my songs, thus far, has called for one. An obbligato? Never so
much honored. No, indeed. Why, to me it would seem almost like singing
with an orchestra. Imagine a 'cello. Imagine a flute--still I'm not a
soprano going mad. Or imagine a saxophone; that might be droll."

He gave out a sort of dragging bleat. She did not smile; perhaps she
felt such an approach to waggery unworthy of him. Perhaps she was
holding him up to the dignity of the natural scene, and to the
importance of the occasion as she conceived it.

Cope had no desire to figure as a comique, and at once regained
sobriety. "Of course," he admitted, "we are not at a _thé dansant_ or a
cabaret. Such things ought not to be thought of--here."

She turned her eyes on him again, with a new look of sympathy and
understanding. Perhaps understanding between them had failed or lapsed
but a moment before.

"How all of this shames the town!" she said.

"And us--if we misbehave," he added.

Mrs. Phillips came scurrying along, collecting her scattered guests, as
before. "Tea!" she said. "Tea for one or two who must make an early
start back to town. Also a sip and a bite for those who stay."

She moved along toward Hortense and her little group. Hortense's
"color-notes" did not appear to amount to much. Hortense seemed to have
been "fussed"--either by an excess of company and of help, or by some
private source of discontent and disequilibrium.

"Come," Mrs. Phillips cried to her, "I need every Martha to lend a
hand." Hortense rose, and one of her young men picked up her campstool.

"So glad you haven't got to go early," said Mrs. Phillips to Randolph
and Cope. "In fact, you might stay all night. It will be warm, and
there are cots and blankets for the porch."

"Thanks, indeed," said Cope. "But I have a class at eight-fifteen
to-morrow morning, and they'll be waiting to hear about the English
Novel in the Eighteenth Century, worse luck! Fielding and Richardson
and--"

"Are you going to explain Pamela and Clarissa to them?" asked Hortense.
She was abrupt and possibly a bit scornful.

Cope seemed to scent a challenge and accepted it. "I am. The women may
figure on the covers, but the men play their own strong part through
the pages."

"I seem to recall," contributed Mrs. Phillips, "that Sir Charles
Grandison figured both ways."

"That prig!" said Hortense.

"Well, if you can't stay overnight," Mrs. Phillips proceeded, "at least
stay a few hours for the moonlight. The moon will be almost full
to-night, and the walk across the marshes to the trolley-line ought to
be beautiful. Or Peter could run you across in eight or ten minutes."

She did not urge Randolph to remain in the absence of Cope, though
Randolph's appearance at his office at ten in the morning would have
surprised no one, and have embarrassed no one.

Tea was served before the big fireplace in which a small flame to heat
the kettle was rising. Randolph set his empty cup on the shelf above.

"Notice," said Mrs. Phillips to him, "that poem of Carolyn's just
behind your cup: 'Summer Day in Duneland'." It was a bit of verse in a
narrow black frame, and the mat was embellished with pen-and-ink
drawings of the dunes, to the effect of an etching. An etcher, in fact,
a man famous in his field, had made them, Mrs. Phillips explained.

"And at the other end of the shelf," she advised him, "is a poem in
free verse, done by a real journalist who was here in June. See:
'Homage to Dunecrest'--written with a blue pencil on a bit of
driftwood."

"Sorry _we_ can't leave any souvenir behind," said Cope, who had stolen
up and was looking at the "poem" over Randolph's shoulder. "But one
must (first) be clever; and one must (second) know how to put his
cleverness on record."

"I shall remember _your_ record," she returned with emphasis. Cope
smiled deprecatingly; but he felt sure that he had sung well.

The moonlight, when it came, was all that Medora Phillips had promised.
There was another stroll on the beach, with Cope between Medora and
Carolyn. Then he and Randolph took the causeway across the marsh,
stopped the trolley by burning a newspaper on the track, and started on
the long trip home.

As the car ran along jerkily from station to station, the earlier void
of Duneland became peopled indeed. The extraordinarily mild day had
drawn out hundreds--had given the moribund summer-excursion season a
new lease of life. Every stoppage brought so many more young men in
soiled khaki, with shapeless packs on their backs, and so many more wan
maidens, no longer young, who were trying, in little bands, to capture
from Nature the joys thus far denied by domestic life; and at one
station a belated squad of the "Lovers of Landscape"--some forty or
fifty in all--came flooding in with the day's spoils: masses of asters
and goldenrod, with the roots as often as not; festoons of bittersweet,
and sheaves of sumach and golden glow; and one ardent spirit staggered
in under the weight of an immense brown paper bag stuffed with prickly
pear. As the tight-packed company slid along, children drowsed or
whimpered, short-tempered young men quarreled with the conductor,
elderly folk sat in squeezed, plaintive resignation.... Soon the lights
of foundry fires began to show on the sky; then people started dropping
off in the streets of towns enlivened by the glitter of many saloons
and an occasional loud glare from the front of a moving-picture
theater....

Through these many miles Randolph and Cope sat silent: there seemed to
be a tacit agreement that they need no longer exert themselves to
entertain each other. Cope reached home shortly before midnight. By
next morning many of the doings of the previous day had quite passed
from his mind. Yet a few firm impressions remained. He had had a good
swim, if but a brief one, with a companion who had been willing, even
if not bold; he had imposed an acceptable nomenclature upon a somewhat
anonymous landscape; and, in circumstances slightly absurd, or at least
unfavorable, he had done his voice and his method high credit in song.
All else went for next to nothing.




12

_COPE AMIDST CROSS-PURPOSES_


Next morning's mail brought Cope a letter from Arthur Lemoyne. The
letter was short--at least when compared with Cope's own plentiful
pennings; but it gave our young instructor a few points to think about
while he was illuminating Clarissa Harlowe and making some careful
comments on Joseph Andrews. Released toward noon, he read the letter
over again; and he ran over it again during lunch. Lemoyne possessed a
variety of gifts, but the gift of letter-writing, in an extended form,
was not among them. He said all he had to say in four moderate pages.

"Yours received," he wrote. "Am glad the year has opened up so
interestingly for you. Of course I want to come down as soon as I can,
_if_ I can, and be with you."

Well, the "if," as the latter part of the letter indicated, was not
likely to prove insurmountable. The assurance that he wanted to come
was grateful, though superfluous: who had supposed for a moment that he
didn't? Still, the thing, put down in plain black and white, had its
look of comfort.

"Of course the business is not gaining much through my connection with
it. I expect father begins to see _that_, pretty plainly. As for the
cathedral choir and the dramatic club and all the rest, I am willing to
throw them over--expecting that larger interests can be opened to me by
you."...

Cope paused on these points. He had suggested that Lemoyne enroll as a
student in some slight course or other, with the hope that his voice
might lead to his wearing cap and gown at chapel services and that his
dramatic experience might give him some role in the annual operetta. In
either of these quarters a good tenor voice was usually to seek. And as
for the business.... Well, he had once overheard the elder Lemoyne's
partner audibly wonder whether Arthur would ever learn how to ship a
keg of nails out of their back door, even.

Cope pushed away his coffee-cup and asked the young Greek for a cut of
pie.


"I sort of sounded father the other day, but he was pretty huffy. I'll
try again, soon; but I doubt if I can manage to come down until after
the holidays. You begin a new term, then, I suppose. The fact is, I
took a week off in the middle of September, and father hasn't forgiven
it. One of our fellows in the choir had just bought a little roadster,
and he invited me for a trip to Green Bay and beyond. We dipped along
through Fish Creek, Ephraim, and so on. Good weather, good roads, good
scenery, good hotels; and a pleasant time was had by all--or, rather,
by both."...

Cope dwelt darkly on this passage. Arthur was flighty; Arthur was
volatile; Arthur was even fickle, when the mood took him. Some
arrangement that partook more of the hard-and-fast was needed. But
there was comfort--of a kind--in the next passage.

"Though father, at best, will do very little, and though I have just
now little enough of my own, there may be somebody or other among your
faculty or trustees who could find me a niche in the college library or
in the registrar's office. Or have all such posts been snapped up by
Johnnys-on-the-spot? A small weekly stipend would rather help our
_ménage,--hein_?"

This definite inquiry (which carried its own answer) seemed to drive
one or two brass tacks with some definiteness. Cope himself was eking
out his small salary with a small allowance from home; next year, with
the thesis accomplished, better pay in some better place. A present
partner and pal ought to be a prop rather than a drag: however welcome
his company, he must bear his share.

"Look about a bit for quarters," Lemoyne went on, drawing toward his
conclusion. "I presume room-rent is little more for two than for one.
Possibly," he put down in an afterthought, "I might get a job in the
city;" and then, "with warm regards," he came to a close as "Art."

Cope finished his lunch and walked out. If Arthur could do one thing
better than another, it was to make coffee; his product was assuredly
better than the Greek's. The two had camped out more than once on the
shores of Lake Winnebago, and Arthur had deftly managed the
commissariat. They had had good times together and had needed no other
company. How had it been on Green Bay--at Eagle Cliff and Apron Bluff
and all the other places lately celebrated in lithographed "folders"
and lately popularized by motorists? And who was the particular
"fellow" who ran the roadster?

Late that afternoon Cope chanced upon Randolph among the fantastic
basins and floral parterres of the court in front of the Botany
building: Randolph had had a small matter for one of the deans.
Together they sauntered over to the lake. From the edge of the bluff
they walked out upon the concrete terrace above the general boiler-room
and its dynamos. Alongside this, the vast tonnage of coal required for
the coming winter was beginning to pile up. The weather was still mild
and sunny and the lake was as valiantly blue as ever.

"It doesn't look like the same body of water, does it?" said Cope.

"It might be just as beautiful in its own way, here, as we found it
yesterday, out there," returned Randolph. "I've asked my
brother-in-law, I don't know how many times, why they can't do better
by this unfortunate campus and bring it all up to a reasonable level of
seemliness. But----"

"You have a relative among the----?"

"Yes, my sister's husband is one of the University trustees. But he
lives miles from this spot and hardly ever sees it. Besides, his
aesthetic endowments are not beyond those of the average university
trustee. Sometimes they're as hard on Beauty as they are on Free
Speech."

"I see they're hard on beauty; and I may live to find free speech
mauled, too."

"Well, you're not in Sociology or Economics. Still, don't trifle with a
long-established aesthetic idol either. Trustees--and department
heads--are conservative."

"Oh, you mean about----?"

"About your immortal William. He wrote them. Don't try to rob him.
Don't try to knock him off his pedestal."

"Oh, you're thinking about my thesis. What I said about Warwickshire
was just a little flight of fancy, I guess,--a bit of doorstep travel.
I'm likely enough to stay where I am."

"Well, how about the thesis, really?"

"I think I shall end by digging something out of Here and Now. 'Our
Middle-West School of Fiction,'--what would you think of that?"

"H'm! If you can make it seem worth while...."

"Well, can't I?"

"Your work, from the very nature of it, must be critical. Now the
critic, nine times out of ten, takes down a volume from its established
shelf, dusts it off, ruffles the leaves a bit, and then puts it back
where it was. The ruffling is sometimes very nice and interesting and
often gives the ruffler a good position in the glorious company of
earlier rufflers----"

"I shouldn't be satisfied with anything like that. Things have got to
move. I want to take some recent, less-known men and put _them_ on the
shelves."

"Yet you don't want to waste work on material which time may show as of
transient value, or of none."

"A fellow must chance it. Who gives quickly gives twice;--I suppose
that applies to praise as well as to money. It irks me to find more
praise bestowed on the praised-enough,--even on groups of secondary
importance, sometimes just because they are remote (in England,
perhaps), and so can be treated with an easy objectivity. To dig in
your own day and your own community is harder, but I should feel it
more rewarding."

"But aren't the English books really better? Haven't they more depth,
substance and background?"

"Possibly,--according to the conventions they themselves have
established--and according to the society they depict."

"Well, Academe hasn't nailed you yet!"

"No; and I hope it won't. I should like to write a whole book about our
new men."

"But don't write a thesis and then expect to publish it with profit
_as_ a book. That's a common enough expectation--or temptation."

They turned away from the lake terrace and the imposing coal-pile.
Cope, Randolph saw, was in quite a glow; a generous interest had
touched him, putting fresh light into his eyes and a new vigor into his
step. He had displayed a charming enthusiasm, and a pure, disinterested
one. Randolph, under a quiet exterior, was delighted. He liked the boy
better than ever, and felt more than ever prompted to attach him to
himself.

"How are you pleased with your present quarters?" he asked, as they
returned through the Botany court. He thought of the narrow couch, the
ink-spotted cover on the deal table, the few coats and shoes (they
_couldn't_ be many) behind that calico curtain.

"None too well," replied Cope. "I shall soon begin to look for another
room. I rather expect to change about holiday time."

"I am thinking of making a change too," declared Randolph.

"Why, could you better yourself?" asked Cope, in a tone of surprise. "I
never knew a bachelor to be better fixed."

"I need a little wider margin of room. I can afford it, and ought to
have had it long ago. And I learn that the lease of the people I'm with
expires in the spring. My collection is growing; and I ought to have
another bedroom. Think of not being able to put a man up, on occasion!
I shall take a small apartment on my own account, catch some Oriental
who is studying frogs' legs or Occidental theology; and then--open
house. In a moderate measure, of course."

"That listens good--as the young fellows say," replied Cope. "A not
uncommon ideal, possibly; but I'm glad that some man, now and then, is
able to realize it."

"I should hope to see you there," said Randolph intently.

"Thank you, indeed. Yes, while my time lasts. But my own lease is like
your landlord's--short. Next year,--who knows where?"

"Why not here?"

"Oh!" Cope shrugged, as if conscious of the need of something better,
and of presently deserving it. "Some big university in the East?"
wondered Randolph to himself. Well, the transfer, if it came, was still
a long way ahead.

As he walked home to dinner he entertained himself by imagining his new
regime. There would be an alert, intelligent Jap, who, in some
miraculous way, could "do for him" between his studies. There would be
a cozy dining-room where three or four fellows could have a snug little
dinner, with plenty of good talk during it and after it. There would
be, finally, a convenient little spare room, wherein a young knight,
escaped from some "Belle Dame sans Merci," might lean his sword against
the wardrobe, prop his greaves along the baseboard, lay his steel
gauntlets neatly on the top of the dresser, fold his hands over the
turned-down sheet of a neat three-quarter-width brass bedstead, and
with a satisfied sigh of utter well-being pass away into sleep. Such
facilities, even if they scarcely equaled a chateau on the Ridge or a
villa among the Dunes, might serve.

Cope, on his own way to dinner, indulged in parallel imaginings. He saw
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."

Then he dropped back into thought. He was devising an outing designed
to restore Cope to condition. If Cope could arrange for a free
Saturday, they might contrive a week-end from Friday afternoon to
Monday morning. It was too late for the north and too late for the
opposite Michigan shore; but there was "down state" itself, where the
days grew warmer and the autumn younger the farther south one went.
There was a trip down a certain historic river,--historic, as our
rivers went, and admirably scenic always. He recalled an exceptional
hotel on one of its best reaches; one overrun in midsummer, but
doubtless quiet at this season. It stood in the midst of some striking
cliffs and gorges; and possibly one of the little river-steamers was in
commission, or could be induced to run....

Foster dropped his muffler pettishly. "Read,--if you won't talk!"

"I can talk all right," returned Randolph. "In fact, I have a bit of
news for you."

"What is it?"

"I'm going to move."

Foster peered out from under his shade.

"Move? What for? I thought you were all right where you are.

"All right enough; except that I want more room--and a house of my own."

"Have you found one?"

"I've about decided on an apartment. And I expect to move into it early
next month."

"Top floor, of course?"

"No; first floor, not six feet above the street level."

"Good. If they'll lend me a hand here, to get down and out, I'll come
and see you, now and then."

"Do so."

"That will give me a chance to wear this muffler, after all."

"So it will."

"Well, be a little more cordial. You expect to see your friends, don't
you?"

"Of course. That's what it's for. Have I got to exert myself," he
added, "to be cordial with _you_?"

"What's the neighborhood?"

"Oh, this one, substantially. The next street from where I am now."

"Housekeeper?"

"I think I'll have a Jap alone, at first."

"Dinners?"

"A few small try-outs, perhaps."

"Mixed parties?"

"Not at the beginning, anyhow."

"Oh; bachelor's hall."

"About that."

Foster readjusted his shade, and drove his needles into his ball of
yarn.

"Complete new outfit?"

"Well, I have some things in storage."

"How about the people you're with now?"

"Their lease is up in the spring. They may go on; they may not. Fall's
the time to change."

Foster drew out his needles again and fell to work.

"You ought to have seen Hortense the next morning. She put my tray on
the table, and then went down in a heap on the floor--or it sounded
like that. She was fainting away at dinner, she said."

"She found it amusing?"

"I don't know _how_ she found it," returned Foster shortly. "If ever
_I_ do anything like that at your house, run me home."

"Not if it's raining. I shall be able to tuck you away somewhere."

"Don't. I never asked to be a centre of interest."

"Well," returned Randolph merely, and fell silent.

Foster resumed work with some excess of vigor, and presently got into a
snarl. "Dammit!" he exclaimed, "have I dropped another?"

Randolph leaned over to examine the work. "Something's wrong."

"Well, let it go. Enough for now. Read."

There followed a half hour of historical essay, during which Foster a
few times surreptitiously fingered his needles and yarn.

"Shall you have a reading-circle at your new diggings?" he asked after
a while.

"If two can be said to make a circle,--and if you will really come."

"I'm coming. But I never understood that only two points could
establish a circle. Three, anyway."

"Circle!" exclaimed Randolph. "Don't worry the word to death."

He went away presently, and as he walked his thoughts returned to
Indian Rock. The excursion seemed a valid undertaking at an
advantageous time; and he could easily spare a couple of days from the
formation of his new establishment. He called on Cope that evening.
Cope felt sure he could clear things for Saturday, and expressed
pleasure at the general prospect. He happened to be writing to Lemoyne
that evening and passed along his pleasure at the prospect to his
friend. A few jaunts, outings or interludes of that kind, together with
his week at his home in Freeford, over Christmas, would agreeably help
fill in the time before Arthur's own arrival in January.

Randolph received Cope's response with gratification; it was pleasant
to feel oneself acceptable to a younger man. In the intervals between
his early looking at rugs and napery he collected timetables and
folders, made inquiries, and had some correspondence with the manager
of the admirable hotel. He had a fondness for well-kept hostelries just
before or just after the active season. It was a pleasure to breakfast
or dine in some far corner of a large and almost empty dining-room. It
would be a pleasure to stroll through those gorges, which would be
reasonably certain to be free from litter, and to perch on the crags,
which would be reasonably certain to be free from picnic parties. It
would be agreeable also to sleep in a chamber far from town noises and
grimes, with few honks from late excursionists and but little early
morning clatter from a diminished staff. And the river boats were still
running on Sunday.

"It will brace him for the rest of his fall term," thought Randolph,
"and me for my confounded shopping. And during some one of our
boat-rides or rambles, I shall tell him of my plans for the winter."

The departure, it was agreed upon, should take place late on Friday
afternoon. On Friday, at half past eleven, Randolph, at his office in
the city, received a long-distance call from Churchton. Cope announced,
with a breathless particularity not altogether disassociated from
self-conscious gaucherie, that he should be unable to go. Some
unexpected work had been suddenly thrown upon him.... He rather thought
that one or two of his family might be coming to town for over
Sunday....

The telephone, as a conveyor of unwelcome message, strikes a medium
between the letter by mail and the face-to-face interview. If it does
not quite give chance for the studied guardedness and calculated
plausibility of the one, it at least obviates some of the risk involved
in personal presence and in the introduction of contradictory evidence
often contributed by manner and by facial expression. And a long
distance interview must be brief,--at least there can be no surprise,
no indignation, if it is made so.

"Very well," said Randolph, in reply to Cope's hurried and indistinct
words. "I'm sorry," he added, and the brief talk was over. "You are
feeling all right, I hope," he would have added, as the result of an
afterthought; but the connection was broken.

Randolph left the instrument. He felt dashed, a good deal disappointed,
and a little hurt. He took two or three folders from a pigeon-hole and
dropped them into a waste-basket. Well, the boy doubtless had his
reasons. But a single good one, frankly put forth, would have been
better than duplicate or multiple reasons. He hoped that, on Sunday, a
cold drizzle rather than a flood of sunlight might fall upon the autumn
foliage of Indian Rock. And he would turn to-morrow to good account by
looking, for an hour or two, at china.

Sunday afternoon was gorgeously bright and autumnal in Churchton,
whatever it may have been along the middle reaches of the Illinois
river; and at about four o'clock Randolph found himself in front of
Medora Phillips' house. Medora and her young ladies were out strolling,
as was inevitable on such a day; but in her library he found Foster
lying on a couch--the same piece of furniture which, at a critical
juncture, had comforted Cope.

"Peter brought me down," said the cripple. "I thought I'd rather look
at the backs of books than at the fronts of all those tedious pictures.
Besides, I'm beginning to practice for my call at your new quarters."
Then, with a sudden afterthought: "Why, I understood you were going
somewhere out of town. What prevented?"

"Well, I changed my plans. I needed a little more time for my
house-furnishing. I was looking yesterday at some table-ware for your
use; am wondering, in fact, if Mrs. Phillips couldn't arrange to give
me the benefit of her taste to-morrow or Tuesday...."

"She likes to shop," replied Foster, "and taste is her strong suit.
I'll speak to her,--she's gone off to some meeting or other. Isn't this
just the afternoon to be spending indoors?" he commented brusquely.
"What a day it would be for the country," he added, sending his
ineffectual glance in the direction of Randolph's face.

"We Churchtonians must take what we can get," Randolph replied, with an
attempt at indifference. "Our _rus in urbs_ isn't everything, but there
are times when it must be made to serve."

Foster said nothing. Silent conjecture, seemingly, was offered him as
his part.




15

_COPE ENTERTAINS SEVERAL LADIES_


Cope's excuse, involving the expected visit of a relative, may not have
been altogether sincere, but it received, within a week or so, the
substantial backing of actuality: a relative came. She was an
aunt,--his father's sister,--and she came at the suggestion of a
concerned landlady. This person, made anxious by a languid young man
who had begged off from his classes and who was likely to need more
attention than her scanty margin of leisure could grant, had even
suggested a hospital while yet it was easy for him to reach one. Though
Cope meant to leave her soon, it did not suit him to leave her quite as
soon as this; and so Aunt Harriet came in from Freeford to look the
situation over and to lend a hand if need be. She spent two nights in a
vacant chamber at transient rates; was grudgingly allowed to prepare
his "slops," as he called them, in the kitchen; and had time to satisfy
herself that, after all, nothing very serious was the matter.

Randolph did not meet this relative, but he heard about her; and her
coming, as a sort of family representative, helped him still further in
his picture of the _res angusta_ of a small-town household: a father
held closely to office or warehouse--his own or some one else's; a
sister confined to her school-room; a mother who found the demands of
the domestic routine too exacting even to allow a three-hour trip to
town; and a brother--Randolph added this figure quite gratuitously out
of an active imagination and a determined desire not to put any of the
circle to the test of a personal encounter--and a brother who was
perhaps off somewhere "on the road."

The one who met Aunt Harriet was Medora Phillips, and the meeting was
brief. Medora had heard from Amy Leffingwell of Cope's absence from his
class-room. She herself became concerned; she felt more or less
responsible and possibly a bit conscience-stricken. "Next time," she
said, "I shall try to have the ventilation right; and I think that,
after this, I shall keep to birch beer."

Medora called up Amy at the music-school, one afternoon, at about four.
She assumed that the day's work was over, told Amy she was "going
around" to see Bertram Cope, and asked her to go with her. "You may act
as my chaperon," she said; "for who knows where or how I shall find
him?"

As they neared the house a colored man came out, carrying a small trunk
to a mud-bespattered surrey. "What! is he going?" said Medora, with a
start. "Well, anyway, we're in time to say good-bye." Then, "What's the
matter, Jasper?" she asked, having now recognized the driver and his
conveyance.

"Got a lady who's gettin' away on the four forty-three."

"Oh!" said Medora, with a gasp of reassurance.

Cope's aunt said good-bye to him up stairs and was now putting on her
gloves in the lower hall, in the company of the landlady. Medora
appraised the visitor as a semi-rustic person--one of some substance
and standing in her own community; marriage, perhaps, had provided her
with means and leisure. She had been willing to subordinate herself to
a university town apprehended as a social organism, and she now seemed
inclined to accept with docility any observations made by a confident
urbanite with a fair degree of verve.

"These young men," said Medora dashingly, "are too careless and proud."

"Proud?" asked the other. She felt clearly enough that her nephew had
been careless; but pride is not often acknowledged among the members of
an ordinary domestic circle.

"They're all mind," Medora went on, with no lapse of momentum. She knew
she must work in brief, broad effects: the surrey was waiting and the
train would not delay. "They sometimes forget that their intellectual
efforts must rest, after all, on a good sensible physical basis. They
mustn't scorn the body."

The departing visitor gave a quick little sigh of relief. The views of
this fashionable and forthputting woman were in accord with her own,
after all.

"Well, I've told Bert," she said, buttoning her second glove, "that he
had better take all his meals in one place and at regular hours. I've
told him his health is of just as much account as his students and
their studies." She seemed gratified that, on an important point, she
had reached unanimity with an influential person who was to remain
behind; and she got away without too long delaying the muddy surrey and
the ungroomed sorrel.

Medora Phillips looked after her with a grimace. "Think of calling him
'Bert'!"

Cope, when advised, came down in a sort of bathrobe which he made do
duty as a dressing-gown. He took the stairs in a rapid run, produced an
emphatic smile for the parlor threshold, and put a good measure of
energy into his handshakes. "Mighty good of you to call," he said to
Mrs. Phillips. "Mighty good of you to call," he said to Amy Leffingwell.

Well, he was on his feet, then. No chance to feel anxiously the brow of
a poor boy in bed, or to ask if the window was right or if he wouldn't
like a sip of water. Life's little disappointments...!

To Amy Leffingwell he seemed pale, and she felt him as glad to sit down
at once in the third and last chair the little room offered. She
noticed, too, an inkstain on his right forefinger and judged that the
daily grind of theme-correction was going on in spite of everything.

"Did you meet my aunt before she got away?" he asked.

"We did," said Medora, "and we are going to add our advice to hers."

"That's very nice of you," he rejoined, flattered. "But within a couple
of months," he went on, with a lowered voice and an eye on the parlor
door, "I shall be living in a different place and in quite a different
way. Until then...." He shrugged. His shrug was meant to include the
scanty, unpretending furnishings of the room, and also the rough casual
fare provided by many houses of entertainment out of present sight.

"I almost feel like taking you in myself," declared Medora boldly.

"That's still nicer of you," he said very promptly and with a
reinforcement of his smile. "But I'm on the up-grade, and pretty soon
everything will come out as smooth as silk. I shall have ten days at
home, for the holidays; then, after that, the new dispensation."

Amy Leffingwell tempered her look of general commiseration with a
slight lapse into relief. There was no compelling reason why she should
have commiserated; perhaps it all came from a desire to indulge in an
abandonment to gentleness and pity.

"Do you know," said Cope, with a sort of embarrassed laugh, "I feel as
if I were letting myself become the focus of interest. Oughtn't I to do
something to make the talk less personal?"

He glanced about the meagre little room. It gave no cue.

"I'm sure Amy and I are satisfied with the present subject," returned
Medora.

But Cope rose, and gathered his bathrobe--or dressing-gown--about him.
"Wait a moment. I have some photographs I can show you--several of them
came only yesterday. I'll bring them down."

As soon as he had disappeared into the hall, Mrs. Phillips gave a
slight smile and said quickly:

"For heaven's sake, Amy, don't look so concerned, and mournful, and
sympathetic! Anybody might think that, instead of your being my
chaperon, I was yours!"

"He doesn't look at all well," said Amy defensively.

"He might look better; but we can't pity a young man too openly. Pity
is akin to embarrassment, for the pitied."

Cope came down stairs the second time at a lesser pace. He carried a
sheaf of photographs. Some were large and were regularly mounted;
others were but the informal products of snap-shottery.

He drew up his chair nearer to theirs and began to spread his pictures
over the gray and brown pattern on his lap.

"You know I was teaching, last year, at Winnebago," he said. "Here are
some pictures of the place. Science Hall," he began, passing them.
"Those fellows on the front steps must be a graduating class.

"The Cathedral," he continued. "And I think that, somewhere or other, I
have a group-picture of the choir.

"Sisterhood house," he went on. "Two or three of them standing out in
front."

"Sisterhood?" asked Mrs. Phillips, with interest. "What do they do?"

Cope paused. "What do they do, indeed? Well, for one thing, they
decorate the altar--Easter, Harvest home, and so on."

"That isn't much. That doesn't take a house."

"Well, I suppose they visit, and teach. Sort of neighborhood centre.
Headquarters. Most of them, I believe, live at home."

"Dear me! Is Winnebago large enough to require settlement-work?"

"Don't drive me so! I suppose they want to tone in with the cathedral
as a special institution. 'Atmosphere,' you know. Some tracts of our
great land are rather drab and vacant, remember. Color, stir,--and
distinction, you understand."

"Is Winnebago ritualistic?"

"Not very. While I was there a young 'priest,' an offshoot from the
cathedral, started up a new parish in one of the industrial outskirts.
He was quite earnest and eloquent and put up a fine service; but nobody
except his own father and mother went to hear him preach."

Mrs. Phillips returned to the Sisterhood house.

"Are they nice girls?" she asked acutely.

"Oh, I guess so. I met two or three of them. Nice girls, yes; just
trying to be a little different. Here's the boat-house, and some of the
fellows in their rowing-clothes. Some sail-boats too."

"Can you sail?" asked Amy. She had the cathedral-choir in one hand and
now took the boat-club in the other. She studied both pictures
intently, for both were small and crowded.

"Why, I have all the theory and some of the practice. Those small
inland lakes are tricky, though."

"Probably no worse than ours," said Mrs. Phillips. "Do help poor Amy,"
she went on. "_Are_ you in either of these groups?"

"No. Didn't I tell you I was trying to get away from the personal? I'm
not in any of these pictures." Amy unconsciously let both half-drop, as
if they held no particular interest, after all. And the hand into which
the next photograph was put gave it but lukewarm welcome.

Mixed in with these general subjects were several of a more personal
nature: groups of twos and threes, and a number of single figures. One
face and figure, as Mrs. Phillips presently came to notice, occurred
again and again, in various attitudes and costumes. It was a young man
of Cope's own age--or perhaps two or three years older. He was of
Cope's own height, but slightly heavier, with a possible tendency to
plumpness. The best of the photographs made him dark, with black, wavy
hair; and in some cases (where sunlight did not distort his expression)
he indulged a determined sort of smile. He figured once, all by
himself, in choir vestments; again, all by himself, in rowing toggery;
a third time, still by himself, in a costume whose vague inaccuracy
suggested a character in amateur theatricals.

"Who is this?" inquired Mrs. Phillips, with the last of these in hand.

Cope was prompt, but vague.

"Oh, that's a chum of mine, up there. He belongs to a dramatic club.
They give 'The School for Scandal' and 'Caste,' and--well, more modern
things. They have to wear all sorts of togs."

"And here he is again? And here? And here?"--shuffling still another
picture into view.

"Yes."

"He's fond of costume, isn't he?"

"Very versatile," returned Cope, lightly and briefly. "Clothes to
correspond."

Mrs. Phillips began to peer again at the picture of the choir-group.
"Isn't he here too?"

"Yes. With the first tenors. There you have him,--third from the left,
just behind that row of little devils in surplices."

"You and he sing together?"

"Sometimes--when we _are_ together."

"'Larboard Watch' and 'Suona la Tromba' and----?"

"Oh, heavens!" said Cope. He threw up his head quite spiritedly. There
was now more color in his cheeks, more sparkle in his eyes, more
vibration in his voice. Amy looked at him with a vanishing pity and a
growing admiration.

"Let us fellows be of our own day and generation," he added.

"Willingly," said Mrs. Phillips. "But my husband was fond of 'Larboard
Watch'; I heard him sing in it before we were married. Shall I ever
hear you sing together?" she asked.

"Possibly. He is coming down here early in January. To look after me."

"After you?" Mrs. Phillips reviewed the photographs once more. "I
imagine you may sometimes have to look after him."

Cope sobered a little. "Sometimes," he acknowledged. "We shall look
after each other," he amended. "We are going to live together."

"Oh, then, he is coming to _stay_? You've been a long time in reaching
the point. And why do you say 'possibly' when I ask about your singing
together? Aren't you coming to my house 'together'?"

"I withdraw the 'possibly.' Probably."

"And now withdraw the 'probably.' Make it 'certainly.'"

"Certainly."

"'Certainly,'--of course."

"That's better," murmured her companion.

Then Mrs. Phillips must know the new-comer's name, and must have an
outline of the proposed plan. And Amy Leffingwell began to look with
renewed interest on the counterfeit form and features of the young man
who enjoyed Bertram Cope's friendly regard. And so the moments of
"entertainment"--Cope's in turn--went on.

"I'm glad he really appears to like _somebody_," declared Mrs.
Phillips, on the way home; "it makes him seem quite human." Inwardly,
she was resolving to have both the young men to dine at the earliest
possible date. It was not always practicable to invite a single young
man as often as you wished. Having two to ask simplified the problem
considerably.

Cope, flushed and now rather tired, walked up stairs with his
photographs, took a perfunctory sip from a medicine-glass, looked at
the inkstain on his finger, and sat down at his table. Two or three
sheets of a letter were lying on it, and he re-read a paragraph or so
before dipping his pen.

"You were rather exacting about that week-end excursion. Mr. R. was all
right, and a few days of new air and new scenes would have done me a
lot of good. Still, I acknowledge your first claim. But remember that I
gave up Indian Rock for you, even if you didn't give up Green Bay for
me. I hope the fellow who took you hasn't got anything further to
propose. If he has, I ask for a tip in turn.

"Naturally it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to explain to him,
and I haven't seen him since. But I can truly say that a relative _did_
come, and that she was needed--or thought she was."

He picked up his pen for a fresh paragraph.

"The new photos--added to those I had--have come in quite nicely. They
have just helped me entertain a couple of callers. Women have abounded
in these parts to-day: Mrs. Peck, scurrying about more than usual; an
aunt from home, getting away with her baggage--more than she needed to
bring; and then the two who have just gone. It all makes me feel like
wanting to take part in a track-meet or a ball-game--though, as I am
now, I might not last two minutes at either. The lady who called was
Mrs. Phillips. I thought she might as well know that you were coming.
Of course you are already invited, good and plenty, to her house. Look
in old music-books and see if you can't find 'Larboard Watch.' If it
turns out you can get away _before_ the holidays, come down and go out
with me to Freeford for Christmas. I have had some rather glum hours
and miss you more than ever. I have been within arm's length of one of
the University trustees (who can probably place me _now_!)--but I don't
know just how much that can be counted upon for, if for anything. Show
yourself,--that will help.

"B."




16

_COPE GOES A-SAILING_


Cope was himself in a few days. He set aside his aunt's counsel in
regard to a better regimen, as well as her more specific hints,
made in view of the near approach of rough weather, that he provide
himself with rubbers and an umbrella, even if he would not hear of a
rain-coat. "Am I made of money?" he asked. He gave a like treatment
to some intimations contributed by Medora Phillips during her call:
he met them with the smiling, polite, half-weary patience which a man
sometimes employs to inform a woman that she doesn't quite know what
she is talking about. He was presently in as active circulation, on
the campus and elsewhere, as ever. The few who looked after him at all
came to the view that he possessed more mettle than stamina. He had no
special fondness for athletics; he was doing little to keep--still less
to increase--a young man's natural endowment of strength and vigor.
Occasional tennis on the faculty courts, and not much else.

So the vast gymnasium went for little with him, and the wide football
field for less, and the great lake, close by, for nothing. This last,
however, counted for little more with any one else. Those who knew the
lake best were best content to leave it alone. As a source of pleasure
it had too many perils: "treacherous" was the common word. Its
treachery was reserved, of course, for the smiling period of summer;
especially did the great monster lie in wait on summer's Sunday
afternoons. Then the sun would shine on its vast placid bosom and the
breeze play gently, tempting the swimmer toward its borders and the
light pleasure craft toward its depths. And then, in mid-afternoon, a
sudden disastrous change; a quick gale from the north, with a wide
whipping-up of white caps; and the morrow's newspapers told of bathers
drowned in the undertow, of frail canoes dashed to pieces against piers
and breakwaters, and of gay, beflagged steam-launches swamped by the
newly-risen sea miles from shore: the toll of fickle, superheated
August. But in the late autumn the immense, savage creature was more
frankly itself: rude, blustery, tyrannical,--no more a smiling, cruel
hypocrite. It warned you, often and openly, if warning you would take.

It was on the last Sunday afternoon in October that Cope and Amy
Leffingwell were strolling along its edge. They had met casually, in
front of the chapel, after a lecture--or a service--by an eminent
ethical teacher from abroad,--a bird of passage who must pipe on this
Sunday afternoon if he were to pipe at all. Cope, who had lain abed
late, made this address a substitute for the forenoon service he had
missed. And Amy Leffingwell had gone out somewhat for the sake,
perhaps, of walking by the house where Cope lived.

They passed the Science building, with its tower crowned by an
ornamental open-work iron pyramid for wireless, and the segregated
group of theological dormitories through whose windows earnest ringing
young voices were sometimes heard at the practice of sermon-delivery,
and the men's club where the billiard tables were doubtless decorously
covered with their customary Sunday sheets of black oilcloth, and took
intuitively the path which led along the edge of the bluff. Beyond
them, further bluffs and a few low headlands; here a lighthouse, there
a water-tower; elsewhere (and not so far) the balconied roof of the
life-saving station, where the boats, light and heavy, were manned by
muscular students: their vigilance and activity, interspersed with long
periods of leisure or of absence, helped them to "pay their way." Out
toward the horizon a passenger steamer en route to some port farther
north, or a long ore-freighter, singularly uneventful between bow and
far-distant afterhouse, on its way down from the iron-ranges of
Superior.

The path was narrow, but Cope, unexpectedly to himself, had no
complaint to make. Really, the girl did better here, somehow, than lots
of other girls would have done on a wide sidewalk. Most of them walked
too close to you, or too far from you, altering the interval suddenly
and arbitrarily, and tending to bump against you when you didn't expect
it and didn't want it. They were uncertain at crossings; if it was
necessary for them to take your arm, as it sometimes became, in the
evening, on a crowded street, why, they were too gingerly or else
pressed too close; and if it happened to rain, you sometimes had to
take a cab, trafficking with a driver whose tariff and whose
disposition you 

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