Part 12

All this—in fact, everything about her—took George Norton by storm when he turned up, fresh from a freshwater university farther west, to fill the Slocum professorship. He found in her the splendor that he’d been stranded away from in “real life,” and had never had time or imagination to find in books. She represented great, glorious things beyond his ken—civilization, culture, society, foreign lands across the sea for which his appetite had been whetted by the holiday tour he took to Bermuda after getting his A.B. with highest honors in history and government. He was about forty or so, and lived alone with his mother.

Rumor had it (and it may have been well founded, it’s so difficult to tell what goes on in the minds of those small, meek men), that he had always wanted to discover an “Egeria-like woman,” and that, once he stepped into Mrs. Braxton’s drawing-room and saw—and heard—Miss Haviland discoursing on “The Overtones in Swinburne’s Prose,” his wildest hope was realized. Be that as it may, his recognition must have been overpowering to have won her attention so easily; for her standards wouldn’t have permitted her, by any stretch of imagination, to think of him as an Egeria’s man—however she may have felt she merited one.

But she wasn’t, with her looks and distinction and learning, the sort to attract men readily. She was too self-sufficient and flagrant, to begin with. She left no medium of approach suggested. She offered no tender, winning moments. Her aspect for men, as well as for women, implied that she thought she knew their ways and methods better than they did.... It shows as a weakness in her stories, I think—the temerity with which she assumes the masculine role, the possible hollowness of her assumptions not once daunting her. Remember the one that begins, “I had just peeked into the bar of the Savoy Hotel”? I could never, when I read it, think of anything except just how Marian Haviland herself would look, in a black evening gown and her other regalia, “peeking”—as she no doubt longed to do. But I’m drifting again.... Her favor might have fired the heart of a _grand seigneur_, I don’t know; to the men of Newfair it was too much like a corrective. George Norton, I guess, was the only one who ever craved it. He courted the slavedom of learning to be her foremost satellite.

His courting went on at all the assemblages. The moment he entered a room, you could see her drawing him like a magnet; and him drawn, atom-like, with his little round beard and swallow-tail coat and parsonish white cravat, to wherever she ensconced herself. No sooner would he get near than she’d address a remark almost lavishly to somebody on the other side, and not deign to notice until the topic had been well developed, and then she would only frown distantly and say:

“Mr. Norton, how are _you_ this evening?”

But he would bob, and smirk consciously, up and down on his toes, and slap one hand against the other in an appreciative manner; undismayed if she looked away to talk quite exclusively to somebody else for another five minutes, just perhaps glancing fugitively over at him again to suggest:

“It’s too bad you must stand, Mr. Norton.” Or, when another pause came, “Can’t you find a chair?”

But you could see her still holding him fast behind her while she finished her own chat, and before she had leisure to release him at last with some cue like:

“That chair, perhaps, over there—no, _there_, Mr. Norton.”

Nice little man. He would fetch the very one. He would even keep it suspended in the air until she pointed out the exact spot and, with eyes and eyebrows tense, nodded approval of her scheme—asking him, however, after he was seated, to stand a moment, so she could move her own chair a bit farther to the right, away from the person whose foot had been planted, as she all the time knew, upon a rung of it.

He would yearn up to her presently and murmur, “A beautiful room, don’t you think, Miss Haviland?”

At which she would wince, and whisper down in his ear; and he wag his head and roll his eyes surreptitiously, sure of not appearing to observe any details she was kind enough to instruct him on. He would smile gratefully, proudly, after it was over, as if her words had put them into a state of blissful communion.

I remember well the day I met them together when she told me Hurrell Oaks was coming to Newfair. I can see her now as she sauntered across the campus, in slow, longish strides, and the would-be graceful little spring she gave when her feet touched the ground, and her head set conveniently forward on her shoulders. She looked at me, and then smiled as if to let me know that it wasn’t her fault if she had to take me all in so at a glance. Why, in a glance like that she’d stare you up and down. If your hat was right, she’d go on toward your feet, and if your shoe-lacings were tied criss-cross instead of straight, it meant something quite deplorable. And if she wasn’t fortunate enough to meet you or anybody else on the way, she doubtless scrutinized the sky and trees and grass with the same connoisseurship. I actually believe she had ideas on how birds ought to fly, and compared the way they flew at Ravenna with the way they flew at Newfair.

That was autumn of my senior year. Miss Haviland’s first book had been published by then, and acclaimed by the critics. The stories, as they appeared one by one in the magazines, had each in turn thrown Newfair into a panic of surprise and admiration.

Nobody ever knew, you see, until they began, what Miss Haviland did during the long periods she shut herself up in that little apartment of hers in the New Gainsborough. If, as you say, she seemed to burst so suddenly, so authoritatively, into print for you, think what it must have meant for us when we saw such dexterity and finish unfurled all at once in the pages of the _Standard_. Unbeknownst she had been working and writing and waiting for years, with an indefatigable and indomitable and clear-sighted vision of becoming an author. It was her aim, people have told me since, from the time she was a girl.

She had been to Harvard, summers, and taken all the courses which the vacation curriculum afforded—unnoticed, unapplauded, it is said, by her instructors. She had traveled—not so widely, either, but cleverly, eclectically, domineeringly, with her sole end in view. After five minutes with only—say—a timetable, acquired, let us suppose, at Cook’s, Topica, she could as showily allude to any express _de luxe_ there mentioned—be it for Tonkin or Salamanca—as the most confirmed passenger ever upon it. She had mastered French and Italian. And she had—first and last and betweenwhiles—read Hurrell Oaks. I venture to say there wasn’t a vowel—or consonant, for that matter—of the seventy-odd volumes she hadn’t persistently, enamouredly, and enviously devoured.

At Newfair, people had by this time, of course, compared her “work” with the “works” of Hurrell Oaks; but you know how few people have the patience or the taste to “take him in”? And the result of comparisons almost invariably was that Marian Haviland was better. She had assimilated some of the psychology, much of the method, and a little of the charm; and had crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s, and revised and simplified the style, as one person put it, for “the use of schools”; and brought what Hurrell Oaks called “the base rattle of the foreground” fully into play.

Instead of being accused of having got so much from him, she was credited, one thought, with having given him a good deal. You might have guessed, to hear people at Newfair talk, that _she_ was partly responsible for the ovations being tendered him over the country during the season of his return—the first time in fifteen years—to his native land.

“Mrs. ——,” Miss Haviland explained, mentioning a well-known metropolitan name, “has written me” (of course she would be the one literary fact at Newfair to write to on such matters) “to ask if we can possibly do with Mr. Oaks overnight.”

I gaped under my handkerchief at the fluency of her “do.”

“But I don’t just know how,” she went on, “we _could_ make him comfortable. Mrs. Edgerton won’t be well in time. And he _mustn’t_ stay at the Greens’.” She waxed indignant at the very possibility. “In _her_ guest-room, my dear? With those Honiton laces, and that scorbutic carpet, and the whirligig pattern on the walls—and the windows giving on the parti-colored slate roof of the gymnasium?”

I tried, in spite of myself, to think commensurately.

“And Mrs. Kneeland’s waitress wears ear-rings!... No. Now I’ve been thinking—don’t hurry along so, George. You never keep in line! It spoils the pleasure of walking when one constantly outsteps you like that.”

“Pardon,” said George, and fell back.

Miss Haviland winced and shifted her maroon parasol to the shoulder on his side, and smiled attentively at me to sweeten the interval, and continued:

“Now _I_, if you’re interested to hear—”

I was very interested, and told her so. It always piqued my curiosity, moreover, to think why Miss Haviland picked me out—young as I was—for such confidences. I believe it was mostly because I always stared at her so; which she mistook, characteristically, for sheer flattery.

Even as she spoke, I was remarking to myself the frilled languor of her dress, and her firm rather large-boned throat, and the moisture—for it was hot—under the imitation pearls, and the competent grip of her hand on the long onyx handle of her parasol.

She stopped short of a sudden. George took a few steps ahead. She lifted her parasol over to the other shoulder and looked at him, and he fell into line again, a sensitive, pleased, proud smile showing above his little round beard.

“Now _I_ think it would be better—simpler, more dignified, and less ghastly for _him_—if he came, say, to luncheon, and if we arranged for a small, a very small, group of the people he’d care most to see—he doesn’t, poor fellow, want to see many of us!—a _small_ group, I say, to come—George! _Please!_ It makes me nervous, it interrupts me, and it is very bad for the path.... Cover it up now with your foot. No—here—let me do it.”

“Pardon,” said George, cheerfully.

Miss Haviland winced again. “I don’t know about _trains_,” she went on, “but we can look one out for him” (she facilely avoided the American idiom) “and then motor him to town in—in Mrs. Edgerton’s car. Don’t you think that will be more _comme il faut_?”

“He’ll be so pleased, he’ll enjoy so much meeting _her_!” exclaimed George to me, rising on his toes repeatedly and rubbing his small dry hands together. “Won’t he?”

Miss Haviland turned to him severely, and at a signal he drew his arm up and she slipped hers through it.

“To worry now _is_ a bit premature, perhaps,” she called back. “We’re off to see the new Discobulus. I fear it’s modeled on a late Roman copy.”

And I saw her, when I glanced over my shoulder a second later, pause again and withdraw her arm to point to the Memorial Library.

“What will he think of a disgrace like that, George?” I heard her imprecating.... “_What?_ You don’t _see_—that the architect’s left off a line of leaves from the capitals? Come on.”

Hurrell Oaks may have been over-fastidious. Yes. But his discernments were the needs of a glowing temperament; they grew naturally out of ideals his incomparable sensitiveness created. Whereas hers—Marian Haviland’s—though derived from him, had all the—what shall I say?—snobbishness, which his lacked utterly. I can’t estimate that side of her, even now, not in view of all her accomplishments, even, except as being a little bit cheap.

I didn’t, of course, though, gather at her first mention of his coming half that it meant to her. And she wouldn’t, I might have known, with her regard for the _nuances_, have let it baldly appear. But I discovered afterward that she had made all sorts of overtures—done her utmost to divert him to Newfair. She didn’t know him; had never set eyes on him; but her reputation, which was considerable even then, helped her a good deal. For she solicited news of him from her publishers; and she wrote Mrs. ——, whatever her name was, finally, when she learned that that was the real right source to appeal to, a no doubt handsome letter, whence came the reply Miss Haviland had quoted to me, but which, as I also afterward found out, only asked very simply, “in view of the uncertainty of Mr. Oaks’s plans,” whether or not he could, in case he had to, “spend the night there.”

Well, it eventuated, not strictly in accord with her wire-pulling, that Hurrell Oaks’s route was changed so he could “run through” in the late afternoon “for a look at the college.” He was to be motoring to a place somewhere near, as it happened, and the Newfair detour would lengthen his schedule by only an hour or two. Word of it didn’t come to her directly, either; that letter was addressed to the president. But it was humbly referred to Miss Haviland in the course of things, and she took the matter—what was left of it—into her own hands.

“No,” she answered, unyielding to the various suggestions that cropped up. “But I’ll tell you what I am willing to do: I will give up my own little flat. Living in London as he does, he will feel—quite at home there.”

Funny though it is, looking back over it, it had also, when all was said and done—particularly when all was done—its pathetic side. For Hurrell Oaks was the one sincere passion of her life. He was religion and—and everything to her. The prospect of seeing him in the flesh, of hearing him _viva voce_, was more than she had ever piously believed could come to pass.

However much she imitated him—and remember, a large following bears witness to her skill—however she failed in his beauty and poetry and thoroughbredness, she must have had a deep, a discriminating love of his genius to have taken her thus far. No wonder she couldn’t, with her precise sense of justice, _not_ be the chosen person at Newfair to receive him. But nobody dared question the justice of it, really. Wasn’t she the _raison d’être_ of his coming?—of his being anywhere at all, as some people thought?

Her very demeanor was mellowed by the prospect. She set about the task of preparation with an ardor as unprofessed as it was apparent. She doffed the need of impressing any one in her zeal to get ready to impress Hurrell Oaks.

Her tone became warm and affluent as she went about asking this person and that to lend things for the great day: Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, Mrs. Braxton’s brocades; a fur rug of Mrs. Green’s she solicited one noon on the campus as if from a generous impulse to slight no one. And even when Mrs. Green suggested timidly that she would be glad “to pay for having the invitations engraved,” Miss Haviland didn’t correct her. But—

“No, dear,” she said. “I think I won’t let you do that much—_really_. There aren’t to be so many, and I shall be able to write them myself in no time.”

I can see her now, fingering her pearls and peering as hospitably as she could manage into Mrs. Green’s commonplace eyes, and George Norton hurrying across the grass to catch a word with her without avail. He was the only person whom she was, during those perfervid preliminaries, one bit cruel to.

But him she overlooked entirely. She didn’t seem to see him that day at all. She just peered obliquely beyond him, and, engrossed quite genuinely, no doubt, in Mrs. Green’s fur rug, took her arm and strolled off. She had lost, for the time being, all use for him. He was left deserted and alone at the teas and gatherings, magnetized from one spot to another whither she moved forgetfully away.

I met him in the park and pitied his shy, inept efforts not to appear neglected.

“Well, I kind of think it may rain,” he essayed, half clasping his small hands behind him and looking sociably up around the sky for a cloud. “But I don’t know as it will, after all.” And then, “Have you seen Miss Haviland lately?” he asked out in spite of himself.

“Not since yesterday’s class.”

“How’s the improvements coming?”

“All right, I guess. The new stuff for the walls arrived, I heard. It hasn’t been put on yet.”

“Oh—she’s papering, is she?”

“And painting.”

He tried to sparkle appreciatively. “Well, it takes time to do those things. You never know what you’re in for. She’s well?”

And he swayed back and forth on his heels, and teetered his head nervously. Poor thing! The gap he had tried so hard to bridge was filled to brimming now by the promised advent of Hurrell Oaks.

Miss Haviland called me on the telephone one afternoon as the day was approaching to ask if I would lend her my samovar; and she wanted I should bring it over presently, if possible, as she was slowly getting things right, and didn’t like to leave any more than was necessary to the last moment. So I polished the copper up as best I could and went ’round that evening to the New Gainsborough to leave it.

The building looked very dismal to me, I recall. A forlorn place it seemed to receive the great guest. It had been a dormitory once, which had been given over, owing to the inconveniences of the location, to accommodate unmarried teachers. It was more like a refined factory than an apartment-house. The high stoop had no railing, and the pebbles which collected on the coarse granite steps added to the general bleakness of the entrance. The inner halls were grim, with plain match-board wainscots and dingy paint, and narrow staircases that ascended steeply from meager landings. Miss Haviland’s suite was three flights up.

But when I got inside it, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Her door was slightly ajar—it was the way Miss Haviland avoided the bother and the squalor of having to let people in—and at my knock she called out in a restrained, serene tone, “Come!” And I stepped through the tiny vestibule into the study.

It was amazingly attractive—Hurrell Oaks himself would have remarked it, I’ll wager. Nobody except Marian Haviland could have wrought such a change.

Of course there were Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, and Mrs. Braxton’s brocades, and—yes—Mrs. Green’s fur rug, to say nothing of numberless other borrowed _objets_, to help out the lavishness of the effect; but the synthesis was magnificent. Everything looked as if it had grown there. One might have been in an Italian palace. And Miss Haviland, seated at her new antique walnut desk with the ormolu mounts, looked veritably like a chatelaine. She had always, too—I ought to have seen it before—a little resembled a chatelaine, a chatelaine without a castle.

But she had for the moment her castle now—enough of it to complete the picture, at any rate. There was a low smoldering fire on the hearth, and the breeze that played through the open window just swayed the heavy damask hangings rhythmically. My samovar, as I set it down on a carved consol near the door, looked too crude and crass to warrant the excuse of my coming.

She read my dazed approval in a glance and laid down her pen, and, with one experienced _coup d’œil_ over the manuscript before her, leaned back, clasping the edge of her desk with both hands and staring at me. She was wearing one of those black evening gowns, and a feather fan was in easy reach of where she sat; and I noticed all at once that the string of pearls was dangling from the gas-jet above her head.

“The new fixtures—the electric ones—will be bronze,” she hastened to say.

I shall never forget, not to my dying day, the sight I had of her sitting there; in that room, at that desk, in a black evening gown—_writing_! And the string of pearls she had slung across the condemned gas-jet by way of subtle disarmament for her task! The whole place had the hushed grand air of having been cleared for action by some sophisticated gesture; as if—the thought whimsically struck me—she might have just rung for the “second man” and bidden him remove “all the Pomeranians” lest they distract her.

“It’s too lovely, Miss Haviland; I can’t tell you what I think it is,” I exclaimed, blankly.

She stood up, reached for the rope of pearls, and slipped them over her head.

“I want you to see the hall,” she said. “Isn’t it _chic_?... And the bedrooms. The men will leave their hats in the south chamber—my room—in here; and the women will have the other—this one.”

She preceded me. She was quite simple in her eagerness to point out everything she had done. Her childlike glee in it touched me. And she looked so tired. She looked, in spite of her pomp and enthusiasm, exhausted.

“How he—how Mr. Hurrell Oaks will love it,” I cried, sincerely. “If he only realized, if he only could know the pains you’ve taken for him.”

“_Pains?_”

She leaned forward and let me judge for myself how she felt. Her eyes glowed. I had never seen her with all the barriers down.

“It isn’t a _crumb_ of what’s due him,” she pleaded. “Do you think I expect he’ll love it? No. It’s only the best I could do—the best I _can_ do—to save him the shock of finding it all awful. Oh, I didn’t, I so don’t want him to think we are—barbarians!”

She gave it out to me from the depths of her heart, and I accepted it completely, with no reservations or comments. It was the one real passion of her life, as I’ve said. She was laying bare to me the utmost she had done and longed to do for Hurrell Oaks.

“To think that he is coming here!” she murmured. “I’ve waited and hoped so to see him—only to see him—it’s about the most I’ve ever wanted. And it’s going to happen, dear, in my own little rooms. He is coming to me! Oh, you can’t know what he’s meant to me in all the years—how I’ve studied and striven to learn to be worthy of him! _All_—the little all I’ve got—I owe to him—everything. He’s done more than anybody, alive or dead, to teach me to be interested in life—to make me happy.”

She threw her long arms around my shoulders and pressed me to her, and kissed me on the forehead. The chapel clock struck ten.

“You’ll come, too, won’t you?” she asked, stepping back away from me in sudden cheerfulness. “For I want you to see how wonderful he will be.”

She put her arms about me once more, and went with me to the door when I left. In her forgetfulness of all forms and codes she had become a perfect chatelaine. She opened the door almost reluctantly, and stepped out on to the meager landing, and stood there waving her hand and calling out after me until I had got well down the narrow staircase.

The day dawned at last. The hour had been set at five o’clock, as Miss Haviland’s Shakespeare course wasn’t over until three-thirty, and the faculty hadn’t seen fit, after “mature consideration,” to give her pupils a holiday. But the elect of Newfair were talking about the event, and discussing what to wear, and whether they ought to arrive on the dot of five or a few minutes after, or if they wouldn’t be surer of seeing him “at his best” by coming a few minutes before.

I met Professor Norton again in the park that morning.

“All ready for this afternoon?” I asked him.

His lips went tight together, and quivered in and out over his small round beard as he tried to face me. And then he looked down away, and began digging another hole in the gravel walk with the broad toe of his congress boot. He shot a glance at me, in a moment, and gazed off at the falling leaves.

“Aren’t you interested in Hurrell Oaks?” I persisted.

“I’m interested in everything Marian Haviland likes,” he declared, boldly, focusing his eyes full upon mine. “But—but the apartment’s small, and—and I reckon there wasn’t room.”

_Room?_ Was any place too _small_ for him? It made my blood—even at that age—boil.

“She’s had enough to do to keep half a dozen busy,” I said, tactlessly.

“_Has_ she?” he echoed in hope. “How—how’s she got on?”

“She’s been wonderful,” I said, feeling kindlier toward her as I spoke. “She’s made that apartment regal.”

“I’m glad, I’m glad! I knew she had it in her. Did the new sofa come?”