Bertram Cope's Year/Chapter 2
Chapter II
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 cam-pus. 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 ballroom. 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-à-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.