Bertram Cope\'s Year by Henry Blake Fuller

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BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR

Henry Blake Fuller

CONTENTS

_1. Cope at a College Tea

2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call

3. Cope Is "Entertained"

4. Cope Is Considered

5. Cope Is Considered Further

6. Cope Dines--and Tells About It

7. Cope Under Scrutiny

8. Cope Undertakes an Excursion

9. Cope on the Edge of Things

10. Cope at His House Party

11. Cope Enlivens the Country

12. Cope Amidst Cross-Purposes

13. Cope Dines Again--and Stays After

14. Cope Makes an Evasion

15. Cope Entertains Several Ladies

16. Cope Goes A-Sailing

17. Cope Among Cross-Currents

18. Cope at the Call of Duty

19. Cope Finds Himself Committed

20. Cope Has a Distressful Christmas

21. Cope, Safeguarded, Calls Again

22. Cope Shall Be Rescued

23. Cope Regains His Freedom

24. Cope in Danger Anew

25. Cope in Double Danger

26. Cope as a Go-Between

27. Cope Escapes a Snare

28. Cope Absent From a Wedding

29. Cope Again in the Country

30. Cope as a Hero

31. Cope Gets New Light on His Chum

32. Cope Takes His Degree

33. Cope in a Final View_

AFTERWORD

1

_COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA_

What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with complete
freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But twenty-eight,
for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that age, if endowed with
ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary opportunities, is undeniably--a
man; whereas what we require here is something just a little short of that.
Wanted, in fact, a young male who shall seem fully adult to those who are
younger still, and who may even appear the accomplished flower of virility
to an idealizing maid or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the
kindly indulgence due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of
twenty-eight may seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no
septuagenarian is to figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the
middle forties and the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age
which may evoke their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth,
besides that, their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their
tolerance, their patience, and even their forgiveness.

I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little
group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the
campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day more
than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is all the
better for being just a little ahead.

Of course Cope was not an undergraduate--a species upon which many of the
Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard. "They come, and
they go," said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; "and, after all,
they're more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding." Besides, the
Bigger Town, with all its rich resources and all its varied opportunities,
lay but an hour away. Churchton lived much of its real life beyond its own
limits, and the student who came to be entertained socially within them was
the exception indeed.

No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he was
working along, in a leisurely way, to a degree. He expected to be an M.A.,
or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of later years.
But, anyhow, nothing was finer than "writing"--except lecturing about it.

"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a small
reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held his hand as
long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer than most women
would have felt at liberty to do. And besides speaking loudly and boldly,
she looked loudly and boldly; and she employed a determined smile which
seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I please." Her brusque informality
was expected to carry itself off--and much else besides. "Of course I
simply _can't_ be half so intrepid as I seem!" it said. "Everybody
about us understands that, and I must ask your recognition too for an
ascertained fact."

"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me
because I haven't been here to _be_ known." He spoke in a ringing,
resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good will
and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high degree of
self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with a liberal
exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following his
graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in Wisconsin
and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another bout: "I'm after
that degree," he concluded.

"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you _have_ been here; you must
have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
began again.

"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust. Dirt
beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."

"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his
long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks, anyway.
And the Hanging Gardens...!" She still clung, looking up his slopes terrace
by terrace.

Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.

"Gracious!" he said, no less resonant than before. "Am I a landscape
garden? Am I a stage-setting? Am I a----?"

Medora Phillips finally dropped his hand. "You're a wicked, unappreciative
boy," she declared. "I don't know whether to ask you to my house or not.
But you may make yourself useful in _this_ house, at least. Run along
over to that corner and see if you can't get me a cup of tea."

Cope bowed and smiled and stepped toward the tea-table. His head once
turned, the smile took on a wry twist. He was no squire of dames, no
frequenter of afternoon receptions. Why the deuce had he come to this one?
Why had he yielded so readily to the urgings of the professor of
mathematics?--himself urged in turn, perhaps, by a wife for whose little
affair one extra man at the opening of the fall season counted, and counted
hugely. Why must he now expose himself to the boundless aplomb and momentum
of this woman of forty-odd who was finding amusement in treating him as a
"college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had actually called him: well, perhaps his
present position made all this possible. He was not yet out in the world on
his own. In the background of "down state" was a father with a purse in his
pocket and a hand to open the purse. Though the purse was small and the
hand reluctant, he must partly depend on both for another year. If he were
only in business--if he were only a broker or even a salesman--he should
not find himself treated with such blunt informality and condescension as a
youth. If, within the University itself, he were but a real member of the
faculty, with an assured position and an assured salary, he should not have
to lie open to the unceremonious hectorings of the socially confident, the
"placed."

He regained his smile on the way across the room, and the young creature
behind the samovar, who had had a moment's fear that she must deal with
Severity, found that a beaming Affability--though personally unticketed in
her memory--was, after all, her happier allotment. In her reaction she took
it all as a personal compliment. She could not know, of course, that it was
but a piece of calculated expressiveness, fitted to a 'particular social
function and doubly overdone as the wearer's own reaction from the
sprouting indignation of the moment before. She hoped that her hair, under
his sweeping advance, was blowing across her forehead as lightly and
carelessly as it ought to, and that his taste in marquise rings might be
substantially the same as hers. She faced the Quite Unknown, and asked it
sweetly, "One lump or two?"

"The dickens! How do _I_ know?" he thought. "An extra one on the
saucer, please," he said aloud, with his natural resonance but slightly
hushed. And his blue eyes, clear and rather cold and hard, blazed down, in
turn, on her.

"Why, what a nice, friendly fellow!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, on receiving
her refreshment. "Both kinds of sandwiches," she continued, peering round
her cup. "Were there three?" she asked with sudden shrewdness.

"There were macaroons," he replied; "and there was some sort of layer-cake.
It was too sticky. These are more sensible."

"Never mind sense. If there is cake, I want it. Tell Amy to put it on a
plate."

"Amy?"

"Yes, Amy. _My_ Amy."

"Your Amy?"

"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."

Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl behind the
samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that her ring,
borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back with his
plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a "boy" to a
"fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot through a
sublimated butler's pantry?

"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked
lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come, we
will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about
yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled down
into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she told
herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but
slender?--even spare, if need be."

As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he, restored
to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed exuberance,--a
man who stood just within the curtained doorway and flicked a small graying
moustache with the point of his forefinger took in the scene with a
studious regard. Every small educational community has its scholar
_manqué_--its haunter of academic shades or its intermittent dabbler
in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role in Churchton. No alumnus
himself, he viewed, year after year, the passing procession of
undergraduates who possessed in their young present so much that he had
left behind or had never had at all, and who were walking, potentially,
toward a promising future in which he could take no share. Most of these
had been commonplace young fellows enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly
cursory and inconsiderate toward their elders; but a few of them--one now
and then, at long intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing
intimately. On these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness,
comeliness and _élan_, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one
in all the long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time.
And now he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might
in time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went for
naught; and the young men let him, walk under the elms and the scrub-oaks
neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their fraternities,
and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled away on the
quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only realized how much a
friendly hand, extended to them from middle life, might do for their
futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the youthful egoists, ignoring
him still, faced their respective futures, however uncertain, with much
more confidence than he, backed by whatever assurances and accumulations he
enjoyed, could face his own.

"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"

Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the observer,
the _raisonneur_, in this narrative? If so, you err. What!--you may
ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.

It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted him
into this role.

A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been asked
to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given abundant
opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling subject--himself.
Either she now had enough fixed points for securing the periphery of his
circle or else she preferred to leave some portion of his area (now
ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra. Or perhaps she wished
some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her admiration and confirm her
judgment. At all events----

"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."

Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.

"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous. "You
are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She paused. "Do
you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your first name?"

"Why, is that necessary?"

"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"

"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."

"Never!"

"Bertram. Why not?"

"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and
guessed----!"

"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."

"You hear, Mr. Randolph? You are to meet Mr. Bertram Cope."

Cope, who had risen and had left any embarrassment consequent upon the
short delay to Basil Randolph himself, shot out a hand and summoned a ready
smile. Within his cuff was a hint for the construction of his fore-arm: it
was lean and sinewy, clear-skinned, and with strong power for emphasis on
the other's rather short, well-fleshed fingers. And as he gripped, he
beamed; beamed just as warmly, or just as coldly--at all events, just as
speciously--as he had beamed before: for on a social occasion one must
slightly heighten good will,--all the more so if one be somewhat
unaccustomed and even somewhat reluctant.

Mrs. Phillips caught Cope's glance as it fell in all its glacial geniality.

"He looks down on us!" she declared.

"How down?" Cope asked.

"Well, you're taller than either of us."

"I don't consider myself tall," he replied. "Five foot nine and a half," he
proceeded ingenuously, "is hardly tall."

"It is we who are short," said Randolph.

"But really, sir," rejoined Cope kindly, "I shouldn't call you short. What
is an inch or two?"

"But how about me?" demanded Mrs. Phillips.

"Why, a woman may be anything--except too tall," responded Cope candidly.

"But if she wants to be stately?"

"Well, there was Queen Victoria."

"You incorrigible! I hope I'm not so short as that! Sit down, again; we
must be more on a level. And you, Mr. Randolph, may stand and look down on
us both. I'm sure you have been doing so, anyway, for the past ten
minutes!"

"By no means, I assure you," returned Randolph soberly.

Soberly. For the young man had slipped in that "sir." And he had been so
kindly about Randolph's five foot seven and a bit over. And he had shown
himself so damnably tender toward a man fairly advanced within the shadow
of the fifties--a man who, if not an acknowledged outcast from the joys of
life, would soon be lagging superfluous on their rim.

Randolph stood before them, looking, no doubt, a bit vacant and
inexpressive. "Please go and get Amy," Mrs. Phillips said to him. "I see
she's preparing to give way to some one else."

Amy--who was a blonde girl of twenty or more--came back with him pleasantly
and amiably enough; and her aunt--or whatever she should turn out to be--
was soon able to lay her tongue again to the syllables of the interesting
name of Bertram.

Cope, thus finally introduced, repeated the facial expressions which he had
employed already beside the tea-table. But he added no new one; and he
found fewer words than the occasion prompted, and even required. He
continued talking with Mrs. Phillips, and he threw an occasional remark
toward Randolph; but now that all obstacles were removed from free converse
with the divinity of the samovar he had less to say to her than before.
Presently the elder woman, herself no whit offended, began to figure the
younger one as a bit nonplused.

"Never mind, Amy," she said. "Don't pity him, and don't scorn him. He's
really quite self-possessed and quite chatty. Or"--suddenly to Cope
himself--"have you shown us already your whole box of tricks?"

"That must be it," he returned.

"Well, no matter. Mr. Randolph can be nice to a nice girl."

"Oh, come now,----"

"Well, shall I ask you to my house, after this?"

"No. Don't. Forbid it. Banish me."

"Give one more chance," suggested Randolph sedately.

"Why, what's all this about?" said the questioning glance of Amy. If there
was any offense at all, on anybody's part, it lay in making too much of too
little.

"Take back my plate, somebody," said Mrs. Phillips.

Randolph put out his hand for it.

"This sandwich," said Amy, reaching for an untouched square of wheat bread
and pimento. "I've been so busy with other people...."

"I'll take it myself," declared Mrs. Phillips, reaching out in turn. "Mr.
Randolph, bring her a nibble of something."

"_I_ might----" began Cope.

"You don't deserve the privilege."

"Oh, very well," he returned, lapsing into an easy passivity.

"Never mind, anyway," said Amy, still without cognomen and connections; "I
can starve with perfect convenience. Or I can find a mouthful somewhere,
later."

"Let us starve sitting," said Randolph, "Here are chairs."

The hostess herself came bustling up brightly.

"Has everybody...?"

And she bustled away.

"Yes; everybody--almost," said Mrs. Phillips to her associates, behind
their entertainer's back. "If you're hungry, Amy, it's your own fault. Sit
down."

And there let us leave them--our little group, our cast of characters:
"everybody--almost," save one. Or two. Or three.

2

_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 campus. 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 ball-room. 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-a-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..."

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