Chapter 3

"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.