Bertram Cope's Year Part 5

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 p.r.o.nounced. "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 partic.i.p.ated 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 princ.i.p.al 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 n.o.body 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," p.r.o.nounced 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 bra.s.swork 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 pa.s.sage 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 d.a.m.nably 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 grat.i.tude 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-a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sion. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 antic.i.p.ation.

"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?"