Chapter 9

"'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 did not know: in fact, a string of minor embarrassments and expenses....

But the way, this afternoon, was clear and easy; and there were no annoyances save from other walkers along the same path. The sun shone brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad--white, or less white, or even darkling,--the first windy sky of autumn.

Cope and Amy passed the life-saving station, where a few people sat about idly and where one or two visitors pressed noses against glass panes to view the boats within; and they reached presently a sort of little public park which lay along the water. Here a small pier ran out past the shallows, and in front of a shack close by it a man sat resignedly near a group of beached and upturned row-boats. One or two others were still in the water, as was a small sloop. The fellow sat there without expectations: the season was about over; the day was none too promising for such as knew. His attitude expressed, in fact, the accumulated disappointment and resignation of many months. Perhaps he was a new-comer from the interior--some region of ponds and rivers--and had kept through an uneventful summer the notion that so big a spread of water would surely be put to use. The sail of the sloop, half-lowered, flapped in the breeze, and little else stirred.

Our young people overlooked both man and boat.

"It's the same lake," said Amy Leffingwell, rather dreamily, after a common silence of several minutes.

"The same," returned Cope promptly. "It's just what it was a year ago, a century ago; and a millennium ago, I suppose,--if there was anyone here to notice."

She turned on him a rueful, half-protesting smile. "I wasn't thinking of a century ago. I was thinking of a month ago."

"A month ago?"

"Yes; when we were walking along the dunes."

"Oh, I see. Why, yes, it is the same old lake, though it seems hard to realize it. Foreground makes so much difference; and so does--well, population. I mean the human element, or the absence of it."

Amy pondered.

"The one drawback, there, was that we couldn't go out on the water."

"Go out? I should say not. No pier for miles, and the water so shallow that hardly more than a canoe could land. Still, those fishermen out there manage it. But plain summerites, especially if not dressed for it, would have an unpleasant time imitating them."

Amy cast her eye about. Here was a shore, a pier, a boat, a man to let it....

"Would you like to go out?" asked the man himself perfunctorily, as from the depths of a settled despair. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder toward the sloop.

The two young people looked at each other. Neither looked at the sky. "Well, I don't know," replied Cope slowly. The sloop was on a pretty small scale; still, it was more to manage than a cat-boat.

"You have the theory, you know," said Amy demurely, "and some practice."

Cope looked at her in doubt. "Can you swim?" he asked.

"Yes," she returned. "I have some practice, if not much theory."

"Could you handle a jib?"

"Under direction."

"Well, then, if you really wish ..."

The misanthrope, with a twisted smile, helped them get away. The mainsail took a steady set; but the jib, from the first, possessed an active life of its own.

"Not that rope," cried Cope; "the other."

"Very well," returned Amy, scrambling across the cockpit. And so it went.

In six or eight minutes their small catastrophe overtook them. There came a sudden flaw from out one of the racing gray cumuli, and a faint cry or two from the distant shore. Theory had not put itself into practice as quickly as the emergency required,--all the less so in that it had to work through a crew encumbered with a longish skirt and a close jacket. The sloop keeled over; Cope was instantly entangled with the mainsail and some miscellaneous cordage; and Amy, with the water soaking her closely-fitting garments, found herself clutching the cockpit's edge.

She saw Cope's predicament and let go her hold to set him free. He helped shake himself loose with a loud forced laugh and a toss of the head to get his long hair out of his eyes. "We'll leave the wreck," he spluttered, "and make for the shore." The shore, fortunately, was scarcely more than a hundred yards away,--yet never had the great twin towers of the library seemed so distant or the wireless cage on Science hall so futile.

They swam, easily, side by side, he supporting her in her cramped clothes at the start, and she, a bit concerned, somewhat supporting him toward the end. Meanwhile, there was some stir at the life-saving station, a quarter of a mile down the shore.

The last hundred feet meant mere wading, though there was some variability among the sand ridges of the bottom; but the water, at its deepest, never reached their shoulders. Their small accident now began to take on the character of a ceremonial--an immersion incident to some religious rite or observance; and the little Sunday crowd collecting on the water's edge might have been members of some congregation sympathetically welcoming a pair of converts to the faith.

"Let's hold our heads high and walk straight," said Cope, his arm in hers; "heaven knows whom we are likely to meet. And throw your hat away--you'll look better without it. Lord knows where mine is," he added, as he ran a smoothing hand over his long locks.

"Very well," she said, casting away her ruined, ridiculous headgear with her free arm. The other, in his, was giving more support to him, she felt, than he was giving to her.

Just as they were about to reach dry land, amidst the congratulations and the amused smiles of the little group at the foot of the bluff, the belated crew of life-savers swept up in their smallest boat and insisted on capturing them.

"Oh, Mr. Cope," said a familiar voice, "please let us save you. We haven't saved a soul for months."

Cope recognized one of his own students and surrendered, though a kindly house-owner on the bluff had been quick to cry across the intervening yards of water his offer of hospitality. "All right," he said; "take us back to your place, where we can dry and telephone." He hoped, too, that they might have to encounter fewer people at the other spot than at this.

Meanwhile, another boat belonging to the station had set out to aid the owner of the sloop in its recovery. It was soon righted and was brought in. There was no damage done, and there was no charge that Cope could not meet, as he learned next day to his great relief.

The station gave him a dry outfit of clothes, assembled from here and there, and telephoned to Mrs. Phillips to bring fresh garments for Amy. Neither had time to get a chill. A pair of kindly servant-maids, who were loitering on the shore with their young men, insisted on carrying the heroine of the afternoon into retirement, where they expeditiously undressed her, rubbed her, and wrapped her in a quilt snatched from a life-saving bed. Amy was cold indeed, and inclined to shiver. She understood, now, why Cope had not encouraged that bathing party at the dunes.

In a few minutes Medora Phillips tore up in her car, with Helga and a mountain of clothing and wraps. She was inclined to make the most of the occasion, and she did so. With Helga she quickly superseded the pair of sympathetic and ready maids, whom she allowed to fade into the background with too scant recognition of their services; and when she had got Amy thoroughly warmed and rehabilitated she turned her thought toward Cope. Here, certainly, was a young scholastic recluse who had an admirable faculty for getting into the public eye. If one section of Churchton society had talked about his performance at her dinner, all sections of it would now be discussing his new performance on the high seas. Suddenly she was struck with the notion that possibly his first lapse had not left him in condition to stand this second one.

"How are you feeling?" she asked anxiously. "No chill? No shock?"

"I'm all right," he declared. "One of the boys has just given me a drink of--of----" But it was a beverage the use of which was not generally approved in Churchton.

Mrs. Phillips turned round suddenly. "Amy, did you have a drink, too, of--of--of--if 'Of' is what you call it?"

"I did," said Amy firmly; "and I feel the better for it."

"Well, get in, then, and I'll take you home."

Peter grinned from the front seat of the car; Mrs. Phillips placed herself between the two victims on the back one; the life-savers, who had kept the discarded garments to dry, gave them all a few smiles and hand wavings; the two young women and their two young men looked on with some deference; the general crowd gave a little mock-cheer before turning its Sunday leisure to other forms of interest; and the small party whirled away.

Amy leaned a tired, moist head, but a happy one, on Mrs. Phillips' shoulder. "He was so quick," she breathed, "and so brave, and so strong." She professed to believe that he had saved her life. Cope, silent as he looked straight ahead between Peter and Helga, was almost afraid that she had saved his.

17

_COPE AMONG CROSS-CURRENTS_

Next morning, at breakfast, Amy Leffingwell kept, for the most part, a rapt and meditative eye on her plate. Hortense gave her now and then an impatient, half-angry glare, and had to be cut short in some stinging observations on Cope. "But it _was_ foolish," Medora Phillips felt obliged to concede. "What in the world made you do it?"

But Amy continued to smile at the table-cloth. She seemed to be intimating that there was a special folly which transcended mere general folly and approximated wisdom.

After breakfast she spoke a few words to Carolyn. She had had all night to think the matter over; she now saw it from a new angle and in a new light.

"You should have seen how he shook himself free from that sail, and all," she said. "And while we were swimming in he held his hand under my chin--at least part of the time. And when we reached the sandbars he put his arm through mine and helped me over every one." And in this state of mind she went off to her class.

Cope was received by his own class with a subdued hilarity. His young people felt that he had shown poor judgment in going out on the water at all,--for the University, by tacit consent, left the lake pretty well alone. They thought that, once out, he had shown remarkably inept seamanship. And they thought that he had chosen a too near and too well-lighted stage for the exhibition of both. This forenoon the "Eighteenth Century Novelists" involved Smollett, and with every reference to the water looks of understanding traveled from student to student: that the class was of both sexes made the situation no better. Cope was in good enough physical condition,--the unspeakable draught from the unspeakable flask had ensured that,--but he felt what was in the air of the classroom and was correspondingly ill at ease.

He had had, for several days, an understanding with Basil Randolph that they were to go together to the next weekly reception of the president's wife. Randolph wished to push Cope's fortunes wherever he might, and to make him stand out from the general ranks of the young instructors. He had the entrée to the Thursdays at the president's house, and he wanted Cope to meet personally and intimately, under the guidance he could provide, a few of the academic dignitaries and some of the wealthier and more prominent townspeople. Notwithstanding Mrs. Phillips' confident impression, Cope's exploit at her own table had gained no wide currency. The people she had entertained were people who expected and commanded a succession of daily impressions from one quarter or another. With them, a few light words on Cope's achievement were sufficient; they walked straight on toward the sensation the next day was sure to bring. But of course the whole University knew about his second performance. Some of its members had witnessed it, and all of them had read about it, next day, in Churchton's four-page "Index."

The president's wife was a sprightly lady, who believed in keeping up the social end of things. Her Thursdays offered coffee and chocolate at a handsomely appointed table, and a little dancing, now and then, for the livelier of the young professors and the daughters of the town's best-known families; above all, she insisted on "receiving"--even on having a "receiving line." She would summon, for example, the wife of one of the most eminent members of the faculty and the obliging spouse of some educationally-minded banker or manufacturer; and she herself always stood, of course, at the head of her line. When Cope came along with Randolph, she intercepted the flow of material for her several assistants farther on, and carried congestion and impatience into the waiting queue behind by detaining him and "having it out."

She caught his hand with a good, firm, nervous grasp, and flashed on him a broad, meaningful smile.

"Which saved which?" she asked heartily.

Mrs. Ryder, who was farther along in the line, but not too far, beamed delightedly, yet without the slightest trace of malice. An eminent visiting educator, five or six steps behind our hero, frowned in question and had to have the situation explained by the lady in his company.

Cope, a trifle embarrassed, and half-inclined to wish he had not come, did what he could to deprive the episode of both hero and heroine. It was about an even thing, he guessed,--a matter of cooperation.

"Isn't that delightful!" exclaimed the president's wife to the wife of the banker, before passing Cope on. "And so modern! Equality of the sexes.... Woman doing her share, et cetera! For this," she presently said to the impatient educator from outside, "are we co-educational!" And, "Good teamwork!" she contrived to call after Cope, who was now disappearing in the crowd.

Cope lost himself from Randolph, and presently got away without seeing who was pouring coffee or who was the lightest on foot among the younger professors. The president's wife had asked him, besides, how the young lady had got through it, and had even inquired after her present condition. Well, Amy Leffingwell was enrolled among the University instructors, and doubtless the wife of the institution's head had been well within her rights,--even duly mindful of the proprieties. But "The Index"! That sheet, staid and proper enough on most occasions, had seemed, on this one, to couple their names quite unwarrantably. "Couple!" Cope repeated the word, and felt an injury. If he had known that Amy had carefully cut out and preserved the offending paragraph, his thought would have taken on a new and more disquieting tone.

In the inquiry of the president's wife about the condition of his copartner in adventure he found a second source of dissatisfaction. He had not called up to ask after Amy; but Mrs. Phillips, with a great show of solicitude, had called up early on Monday morning to ask after him. He had then, in turn, made a counter-inquiry, of course; but he could take no credit for initiative. Neither had he yet called at the house; nor did he feel greatly prompted to do so. That must doubtless be done; but he might wait until the first fresh impact of the event should somewhat have lost its force.