The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 25

She gave me no time, either, to correct my statement.

"I didn't suppose any one still thought that-except, possibly- Have _you_ ever read Hurrell Oaks?"

I nodded gropingly.

"Miss Haviland was a teacher of mine at Newfair when it happened. That was eight, ten years ago. D'you see?"

"I don't 'see' anything."

"But you do Hurrell Oaks-you're, you're really all 'for' him, I mean? So you'd adore it. It's pathetic, too. Though it is funny!" she cried, avid to tell me more about whatever "it" was.

But the inevitable shift in table talk veered us apart at that moment; and it wasn't until after the long meal was over that we came together again, and could choose a quiet corner away from interruptions.

"Here goes, now," she began, "if you're ready?"

Miss Haviland must have been about thirty when I first saw her. She was tall, handsome in an angular way. Her face was large, her features regular, though somewhat heavy, her coloring brilliant, and her dark hair grayish even then. She was of a stocky leanness, a ruggedness indigenous to northern New England-and perhaps she did "come" from New England; wanderers from those climes can flourish so prodigiously, you know-which only made her pretentious garb and manner the more conspicuous.

To see her at those college parties! She wore black evening-gowns, and a string-a "rope," I think you could call it-of imitation pearls, and carried a fan always, and a loose wrap with some bright lining, and fur on the neck and sleeves, which she'd just throw, as if carelessly, over her shoulders. We used irreverently to say that she had "corrupted" (one of her favorite words) the premise of the old motto, "When you're in Rome" to "Whether or not you're in Rome," so did she insist on being-or trying to be-incongruously _grande dame_ and not "of" the _milieu_ she was privileged to adorn. Without ever letting herself mix with those gatherings really, she'd show her condescension by choosing a place in the most mixing group, and there carry out her aloofness by just smiling and peering reservedly at-at the way a man set a gla.s.s of water upon the table, for instance, as if that const.i.tuted enough to judge him by; as if he'd laid his soul, also, sufficiently bare to her in the process.

And she must have been, as you've seen, a resourceful observer; she had a gift for reacting from people; though how much depended upon the people and what they did and said, and how much upon what she unconsciously-or consciously-adapted from Hurrell Oaks while she gauged them, is a question. The result at least fits the needs of a gaping public. But I'm drifting.

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 Sloc.u.m 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 appet.i.te 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 a.s.sumes the masculine role, the possible hollowness of her a.s.sumptions 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 a.s.semblages. 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 surrept.i.tiously, 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 gra.s.s 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.

n.o.body 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 pa.s.senger 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 a.s.similated 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 s...o...b..tic 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?-sn.o.bbishness, 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.