She gave a little sigh. “Pupils don’t want my pieces,” she said. “Scales; exercises …”
“I know,” he returned. “Themes—clearness, mass, unity. … It’s the same.”
They looked at each other and smiled. “We ought not to think of such things today,” she said.
Mrs. Phillips came along, shepherding her little flock for the return. “But before we do turn back,” she adjured them, “just look at those two lovely spreading pines standing together alone on that far hill.” The small group gazed obediently—though to many of them the prospect was a familiar one. Yes, there stood two pines, one just a little taller than the other, and just a little inclined across the other’s top. “A girl out here in August called them Paolo and Francesca. Do you think,” she asked Cope, “that those names are suitable?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, looking at the trees thoughtfully. “They seem rather—static; and Dante’s lovers, if I recollect, had considerable drive. They were ‘al vento’—on the wind—weren’t they? It might be less violent and more modern to call your trees Pelleas and Melisande, or—”
“That’s it. That’s the very thing!” said Medora Phillips heartily. “Pelleas and Melisande, of course. That girl had a very ordinary mind.”
“I’ve felt plenty of wind on the dunes, more than once,” interjected Hortense.
“Or Darby and Joan,” Cope continued. “Not that I’m defending that poor creature, whoever she was. They seem to be a pretty staid, steady-going couple.”
“Don’t,” said Medora. “Too many ideas are worse than too few. They confuse one.”
And Amy Leffingwell, who had seemed willing to admire him, now looked at him with an air of plaintive protest.
“ ‘Darby and Joan’!” muttered Hortense into a sumach bush. “You might as well call them Jack and Jill!”
“They’re Pelleas and Melisande,” declared Mrs. Phillips, in a tone of finality. “Thank you so much,” she said, with a smile that reinstated Cope after a threatened lapse from favor.
XI
Cope Enlivens the Country
As they drew near the house they heard the tones of a gramophone. This instrument rested flatly on a small table and took the place of a piano, which would have been a fearful thing to transport from town and back. It was jigging away merrily enough, with a quick, regular rhythm which suggested a dance-tune; and when the party re-entered the big room it was seen that a large corner of the center rug was still turned back. Impossible that anybody could have been dancing on the Sabbath; surely everybody understood that the evangelical principles of Churchton were projected on these occasions to the dunes. Besides, the only women left behind had been two in their forties; the men in their company were even older. Medora Phillips looked at Randolph, but he was staring inexpressively at the opposite wall. She found herself wondering if there were times when the mere absence of the young served automatically to make the middle-aged more youthful.
“Well, we’ve had a most lovely walk,” she declared. She crossed to the far corner of the room, contriving to turn down the rug as she went, and opened up a new reservoir of records. She laid them on the table rather emphatically, as if to say, “These are suited to the day.”
“I hope you’re all rested up,” she continued, and put one of the new records on the machine. The air was from a modern opera, true; but it was slow-going and had even been fitted out with “sacred” words. Everybody knew it, and presently everybody was humming it.
“It ought not to be hummed,” she declared; “it ought to be sung. You can sing it, Mr. Cope?”
“Oh yes, indeed,” replied Cope, readily enough. “I have the breath left, I think—or I can very soon find it.”
“Take a few minutes. I’ll fill in with something else.”
They listened to an inconclusive thing by a wobbling soprano, and then Mrs. Phillips put the other record back.
The accompaniment to the air was rather rich and dense, and the general tone-quality was somewhat blatant. But Cope stood up to it all, and had the inspiration to treat the new combination as a sort of half-joke. But he was relieved from the bother of accompanying himself; his resonance overlaid in some measure the cheap quality of the record’s tone; he contrived to master a degree of momentum to let himself go; and the general result was good—much better than his attempt at that tea. Hortense and Carolyn looked at him with a new respect; and Amy, who had been willing to admire, now admired openly. Cope ended, gave a slight grimace, and sauntered away from the table and the instrument. He knew that he had done rather well.
“Bravo!” loudly cried one of the ladies, who felt that she was under suspicion of having taken a step or two in the dance. And, “Oh, my dear,” said Mrs. Phillips to her, sotto voce, “isn’t he utterly charming!”
Cope wiped his brow. The walk had made him warm, and the singing had made him warmer. One or two of the women were using chance pamphlets as fans (despite Mrs. Phillips’ ill-concealed doubts), and everybody showed a willingness to keep in the draught from the open windows.
“Is it close here?” asked the hostess anxiously. “The day is almost like summer. If the water is anywhere nearly as warm as the air is. … Let me see; it’s a quarter to four. I have a closetful of bathing suits, all sizes and shapes and several colors, if anybody cares to go in.”
“Don’t!” cried Cope explosively.
She looked at him with interest. “Have you been trying it?”
“I have. On the way along the shore. I assure you, however warm the air may be, the bathing season is over.”
“Well, I rather thought something had been happening to you. Mr. Randolph, is it as bad as he says?”
“I’ll take his word,” replied Randolph. “And I think all of us had better do the same.”
“We might
