“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 participated 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 principal 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 nobody 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 swordguards; a few snuffboxes; 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,” pronounced 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 knickknacks 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 brasswork 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 passage 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 damnably 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 gratitude 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 notebooks 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
