“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.”
I did go back, of course. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds—sad as it
was. There wasn’t such a long interval to wait, either. I wended my way,
and found the theme-box closed, and returned at about quarter past five.
When I entered, the assemblage was in full swing, and Marian Haviland,
in the black afternoon toilette she had sent to New York for in honor of
Hurrell Oaks’s visit, was scintillating in the midst. She had donned her
pearls, and subdued her cheeks unbecomingly, and tinted her lips; and,
going from one person to another, she would, in response to the
indiscriminating compliments they bestowed, just tap them each gaily on
the shoulder with her fan and explain that:
“Mr. Oaks was so sorry, but he couldn’t wait. Yes, he was wonderful,”
she would say, “_perfectly_. We had an immemorial hour together. I shall
never forget it—_never_.”
To this day I don’t blame her for lying. If she hadn’t lied she never
could have stood it. And she had to stand it. What else could she do?
She couldn’t hang a sign on the door and turn the guests away after all
their generous sacrifices to the occasion.
George Norton, needless to say, wasn’t there. She had forgotten—I insist
upon that much—to ask him. But two days later she announced her
engagement to marry him, and in another month’s time the knot was
actually tied.
――――
My companion stopped short there, and leaned back in her chair,
expectantly staring at me.
“Like Marian Haviland Norton’s readers,” I said, “I should like some of
the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted a little more plainly. Don’t spare
me, either, as far as the ‘base rattle of the foreground’ is concerned.
But tell me, please, literally just what you think happened.”
She showed her disappointment at that; looked almost aggrieved. Then she
laughed out in spite of herself.
“Hurrell Oaks didn’t expect a party,” she declared; “he didn’t, at all
events, mean to have one. He didn’t—_she_ was right about that—‘want to
see many of us.’ He didn’t want to see anybody. He just wanted to do his
manners. He couldn’t decently get out of that much. And, although he may
have been asked to come at exactly five—nobody, of course, knows how
_his_ invitation was worded—he reached Newfair earlier, perhaps
unintentionally so, and came instead at four, and knocked politely for
admittance. But Mrs. Edgerton’s servants, unfortunately, hadn’t arrived,
and Miss Haviland was, as she herself admitted, taking a bath. She was
no doubt actually _in the tub_ when Hurrell Oaks slipped his card under
the door.”