“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 glass of water upon the
table, for instance, as if that constituted 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 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.”