Bertram Cope's Year Part 14

"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 embarra.s.sed 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: ma.s.ses 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.surance 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sage.

"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 _menage,--hein_?"

This definite inquiry (which carried its own answer) seemed to drive one or two bra.s.s 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 a.s.suredly better than the Greek's. The two had camped out more than once on the sh.o.r.es 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 Ap.r.o.n 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 Warwicks.h.i.+re 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?"