Part 13

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?”

“Yes. Everything’s come. And you’d better come yourself at five o’clock. I know she’s just forgotten—perhaps your invitation got lost like Mrs. Purcell’s. She only got hers an hour ago, I heard.”

“Really, now! Well, I’ll just go home and see. I need a little nap, I guess. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Good-by.”

And he held out his hand, and nodded to me several times, and gave me a sad, cheery, uncertain smile.

It was too bad. I was sure Miss Haviland _had_ forgotten him. I didn’t think—and I don’t think now—that she wilfully omitted to send him an invitation. It was only that her cup was too full to remember his small, meek existence. I wondered if I dared remind her. I was pretty busy all day, however. And I had to get dressed and out by four, as I hadn’t posted my daily theme yet, and the time would be up at half-past. But I thought, even so late as then, that I’d better go by way of the New Gainsborough, and if things seemed propitious, drop a hint to her, for I felt free to say almost anything after my experience of the other evening.

Things weren’t propitious, though, I can tell you.

I was still some distance from the building—it was about fifteen minutes’ walk, I should say—when I heard somebody calling to me in a distressed voice. I looked ’round behind me, and to the right and left; and when finally I walked ahead I saw Miss Haviland fly out through the swinging door of the New Gainsborough and stand there at the top of the high granite stoop, beckoning frantically. She had on a mauve-colored kimono, which she was holding together rather desperately in front, and her hair was uncaught behind and streaming in the wind.

“Edith! Edith!” she called out. “Quick!”

She had never called me by my first name before. What could it be?—at this late hour, too? She waited a second to be sure I was coming, then dodged back under cover.

I ran. I sprang up the granite steps.

“See if you see anybody!” she commanded, breathlessly, peeping out at me.

“No, I don’t,” I said, looking. “There’s nobody, Miss Haviland.”

“But there must be,” she insisted. “Look again! Look everywhere!”

I did so. “There _isn’t_, Miss Haviland,” I said back through the opening. “Why won’t you believe me?”

“Go down again, do go right down,” she kept saying, “and _see_!”

I shook my head. But at that she leaped out on to the stoop and took me by the shoulder and pushed me.

“Run out behind the building—oh, be quick!” she beseeched. “Look all along the road, and if you see anybody, stop him and tell me!”

I ran. The road was empty. I came dazedly back. “There’s nobody in sight,” I panted, “not a soul.”

“Run over to that tree where you can see ’round the turn in the avenue!”

I ran again. I stretched my eyes in vain, but there wasn’t a person of any sort or description.

“Once more—_please_!” She started down the steps as I started up. “Over by the chapel—you may find somebody walking. _Hurry!_”

I hurried. I was out of breath and hardly knew what I was doing.

“They’re all in, getting ready, Miss Haviland. How can you expect me to find anybody now?” I asked, pointlessly, and in some indignation as I reapproached her.

But she rushed down the steps and stopped me halfway, her mauve kimono fluttering open, and the gilt high-heeled slippers she had donned in her haste gleaming garishly against the unswept stone.

“Listen! Harken!” she whispered. “Do you hear a motor? Don’t you? Try again!”

It was still as death.

I stared up at her in terror. Not till then did I realize how serious it was. But I had never seen a woman look like that. I had never seen the anguish of helplessness in the hour of need written so plain. Her eyes seemed to open wider and wider—I had to turn away—and awful lines came on her forehead. She stretched out both arms and uttered a long Oh-h! that started in her throat and went up into a high-pitched note of pain. She was to me positively like a wild woman.

I watched her slowly raise one hand and unclasp it; I saw within a small, a very small, white paper thing, which she held closer to her face and gaped at, as if she couldn’t believe the truth of what she saw.

“What is it? What is the matter, Miss Haviland?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she answered, quite calmly.... “_Listen!_ Don’t you hear—”

But she shuddered. “They’ll be coming, Miss Haviland. Really! You’ve no time left.”

“Yes.”

She tried to smile. It was uncanny. It was hardly more than a distension of her pale wide lips—a relic, merely, of spent resourcefulness. Then the blankness went out of her face, her expression collapsed, and she sobbed aloud.

“Miss Haviland! Miss Haviland! Do let me help you,” I begged, and I put my arm through hers and led her inside the swinging door and up the narrow stairs. “Mayn’t I do _anything_?”

She dragged herself heavily on by my side. But her sobs ceased after the first flight. At the meager landing before her door she broke away and stood erect and faced me and held out her hand. The abruptness of the change in her awed me. I watched her push the hair from over her face and tilt her head back and shake it and gather the folds of the kimono nonchalantly together; and resume the old hard connoisseurship I had seen her exercise from the beginning. Her eyes dilated tensely, and her eyebrows went tensely up, and she gave me that envisaging smile as of yore.

“It was nothing,” she said, “quite nothing. Won’t you step in and wait?... I’m tired, I expect. I was alone here, do you see, taking my bath. The servants” (Mrs. Edgerton’s servants!) “hadn’t come. And that knock on the door upset me. I thought—I thought—it might be—the—the caterer” (she winced at the word, and the wince seemed to help her to proceed) “with the food. So I hurried out and down like mad.... Thanks awfully, though. You’ll be back, surely? Please do.”