“All right,” Austin said, without glancing up. “Just put it on my desk and I’ll look at it later.”
Mr. Holby’s procrastination was a problem that had to be handled delicately. If he had been as successful and as universally respected as Judge King, he might have found it easier to make decisions. Office work bored him. What he needed to marshal his energies was the smell of the courtroom, the sound of the judge’s gavel, whispered consultations at a moment of crisis, a shaky witness to cross-examine, and an audience that he could sway by reason or emotion, depending on the cards he had up his sleeve.
The mantle of the older lawyers should have fallen on his shoulders, but when the time came for him to receive it, the mantle was threadbare and he found himself cheated out of the honour that they had had. His little overnight trips to Springfield and Chicago and St. Louis extended themselves to three days or sometimes to a week and longer. When he was in the office he spent more time talking to old cronies than he gave to legal work. “Just put it there in that pile I have to look over,” he would say, indicating a wire basket full of dusty manilla folders. “I’ll take care of it first thing tomorrow morning.” Or “Let’s wait another month or six weeks and then see where we stand. If we hurry it through——”
Austin King was not entirely free from procrastination himself, and for that reason found it twice as irritating in his partner. Forty minutes passed before he got around to looking at the large document that Miss Ewing had placed on his desk. During that time a fashionably dressed young woman entered the outer office and asked to see Mr. King. “If you’ll just take a chair,” Miss Ewing said, “Mr. King will see you as soon as he is free.” There was nothing she liked better than to keep people waiting, and it often annoyed her that Austin did not use this simple means of building up his prestige. When he called to her, finally, she got up from her desk, smiling, and went into his office.
“Where did you find this deed? It should have been recorded months ago.”
“It was in the files,” Miss Ewing said.
“Did you know it was there?”
Miss Ewing nodded. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Holby several times about it, but——”
She and Austin exchanged a brief, understanding look, and then he said, “I’d better get right over to the county clerk’s office with it.”
“Miss Potter is waiting to see you.”
With difficulty Austin turned his mind away from the things he would have to say not only to the county clerk but also to Mr. Seligsberg, and to Mr. Holby when he returned from his trip to Chicago.
“Miss Potter?” he repeated. “Tell her to come in.”
When Miss Ewing ushered Nora in, Austin got up from his chair. “Well, this is very nice!”
“The county clerk’s office closes at noon today,” Miss Ewing said, and withdrew, shutting the door after her.
“I won’t stay but a minute,” Nora said. “I know you’re terribly busy.”
Unable to deny it in the face of Miss Ewing’s instructions about the county clerk’s office, Austin with a wave of his hand offered Nora the chair beside his desk. She remained standing.
“I came to ask you something.”
“Something of a legal nature, perhaps?” Austin smiled at her.
“No,” Nora said, pulling at her gloves.
The errand that had brought her downtown must be a serious one, Austin decided; otherwise she wouldn’t be so uneasy with him. Again his hand made the same gesture without his being altogether aware of it, and Nora shook her head. “There’s no need for me to sit down,” she said, “and I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. It’s simply this—I came here to ask why you—why you look at me the way you do.”
“Look at you?” Austin repeated.
“Yes. Whenever we’re in the same room or anywhere together I see you watching me, and before I go home I want to know why. I want to know what it is that you are trying to convey to me.”
Austin flushed. “If I have been making you uncomfortable, Nora,” he said, “I’m very sorry. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. Now that you’ve told me, I——”
“Is that all?” Nora’s lips trembled.
“What do you mean ‘all’?”
“I mean—oh, why are you so cautious? You can say anything in the world to me, anything, do you understand?”
“But I really don’t have anything to say to you, Nora.”
The clacking of the typewriter in the outer office added to his sense of helplessness. This is a place of business, the typewriter said. Personal matters should be taken care of after office hours, not here.
Nora turned towards the door, and he said, “Wait!”
“Please let me go,” she said with her back to him.
“Not just yet. I want to talk to you. If I had had any idea that you——”
“You must have known that I was in love with you. Everything else about me you understood so perfectly without my having to tell you. I thought you wanted me to be in love with you.”
“But I didn’t know it,” Austin said, “and I don’t believe that you are in love with me. You don’t know anything about me.” He looked around for some material evidence in support of this statement. The stuffed prairie dog and the photograph of the old Buttercup Hunting and Fishing Club offered, unfortunately, too much evidence. They proved that nobody knew anything about Austin King, that he had taken very good care that people shouldn’t know anything about him.
“I know that you are the kindest, most understanding person I have ever known,” Nora said. “And that I love you and you don’t love me.”
“You’re very young, Nora. Any feeling that you have for me now you will soon get over.”
“How can I get over it when I can’t talk to you? I want to talk to you but I can’t say the things I need and want to say. You don’t want to hear them.”
“Possibly not,” Austin said, “but I want to help you.”
“Besides, I can’t look at you.”
Nora went to the window, and stood looking down. The firemen were sitting in their shirtsleeves in front of the fire station. A buggy went by, and then a farm wagon, drawn by two heavy grey horses. A man came out of Gersen’s clothing store and stood looking up and down the sidewalk, as undecided as a fly walking on a ceiling.
“I don’t have to look at you,” Nora said. “I know exactly how you look anyway. I know you are trying to help me. But when you say kind things, gentle things, it makes me want to die.” Her voice rose in pitch and Austin was sure that Miss Ewing in the outer office could hear everything. The typewriter clacked one more legal sentence and then was still. Any girl who threw herself at a married man could expect no sympathy from Miss Ewing, and neither could the man.
“What I am feeling now,” Nora said, “is, of course, being terribly in love, and I don’t know quite what to do. Sometimes I feel this cannot be happening, must not be happening to me.”
Austin went over to the window, hoping that if he stood near her, she would lower her voice.
“You will be all right, Nora,” he said. “Nothing bad will come of it.”
“Tomorrow I am going home and I won’t ever see you again. You’ll forget that I exist, but I can’t bear not knowing where you are every minute of the day or what’s happening to you. I may begin to imagine all sorts of things.”
Austin saw Dr. Seymour come out of his office, get into his buggy, and drive as far as the iron watering trough on the east side of the square.
“It’s more than likely that we will see each other again, sometime. And in any case, just because you are going back home doesn’t mean that I will disappear from the face of the earth.”
“Doesn’t it?” Nora said anxiously. “You mean I can write to you?”
“If writing helps, you can write to me.”
“But you won’t answer my letters?”
“Perhaps not always. It’s hard to know now what will be best later on. But whatever seems
best for you, I will do, Nora.”
They stood for several minutes more, looking out on the courthouse and the rectangle of asphalt streets. Then, without turning to him, Nora said, “No one has ever felt the way I do when I am with you. They couldn’t. I feel as if I had just come through a terrible fever where everything was distorted and weird and frightening. We’ll never be any nearer to each other, you and I, than we are this moment. Somehow I don’t ever see myself being able to manage the love I have for you, or controlling it so that it isn’t apparent to everyone. I can’t ever be friends with you—really and truly friends—because no one who knows me could ever see me with you and not know I love you. It’s so mixed up, isn’t it?”
Very, said the typewriter in the outer office.
“I may write to you, or I may not,” Nora said. “But even though I do not write, you will feel me thinking of you. I don’t see how you could help it.”
She moved away from the window and stood memorizing the contents of his desk—the litter of papers, the stains on the green blotter, the shape of the pen, the position of the old-fashioned inkwell.
“I’m going now,” she said. “I’m sorry I stayed so long. You aren’t angry with me for coming?”
“No.”
“It’s hard for me to leave, knowing that we probably won’t ever have another chance to talk like this. Standing by the window I began to feel so calm inside. Everything was so wonderful. But I still can’t look at you. I look in your eyes and the whole room falls apart. It’s a quiet feeling, like being suspended in space, but the trouble is I want to go on looking and looking, and I know I must stop. And it’s frightening when you consider that I’m supposed to be a grown woman, not a girl. I was so unkind to Mama last night, and I hate myself for it, and I can’t bear being unkind to her. I wish I could die.”
With her gloved hand on the doorknob, Nora turned back once more. “I will go on writing to you forever.”
“Possibly,” Austin said, “but I don’t think so.”
“You won’t disappear, will you? You’ll remember you promised not to be angry with me if I——”
“No matter what happens,” Austin said, “I won’t disappear and I won’t be angry with you.”
14
The Potters’ visit, which had seemed so spacious in the beginning, came to a hurried end. At eight o’clock on the last morning, the railway express wagon came and took away the two trunks and five suitcases. The Potters had only themselves to worry about; only gloves, pocket-books, spectacle cases, last-minute regrets.
At quarter after nine, Austin drove around to the front of the house.
Randolph took one last conscientious look in the pier glass, as if the mirrors here in the North were more to be trusted than the ones he would find when he got home. “Cousin Martha, don’t forget,” he said. “You’re coming down to stay with us next winter.”
“Is it time to say good-bye?” Mrs. Potter asked. She picked Ab up, kissed her, said “God bless you!” and set her down. Then she turned to Austin. “I’m going to kiss you, too.”
“I’m going to the train with you,” Austin said, accepting her embrace.
“So you are!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed. “I completely forgot. Well, I’ll kiss you again at the station. Where’s Nora?”
“I gave you the address of the bank in Howard’s Landing, didn’t I?” Mr. Potter said to Austin, and then, turning to Martha, “Good-bye, my dear. You’ve made us all happy with your wonderful hospitality.”
“What’s keeping that girl?” Mrs. Potter asked. “I declare, whenever we want to make a train, she’s always late. It’s enough to drive you to drink.… Nora?”
“Coming,” a voice called down from upstairs.
“We may as well start on out to the carriage,” Mrs. Potter said.
Outside in the bright sunlight all sense of hurry seemed to leave her. At the foot of the steps she put her arm through Martha King’s and as the two women went slowly down the walk, Mrs. Potter said, “I don’t know what to say or how to thank you. The truth of the matter is that I couldn’t feel any closer to you, not even if you were my own child.… Write to me, won’t you? I want to know everything that you’re doing, all about Ab and Rachel and that darling black child of hers who is always drawing when she should be doing the dishes. She gave me one of her pictures to take home. And about the Danforths and Mrs. Beach and the Ellises and all the people we’ve met. But mostly about you, because you’re the one who really matters to me. All those years when I might have had you, instead of those people who didn’t understand you. If only I’d had you then, after your mother died … but she knows. She’s watching us.”
Mrs. Potter searched the bosom of her dress for a handkerchief, wiped the tears away, and pulled her veil down over her troubled face. Randolph helped his mother into the back seat of the cart and then got in after her. The screen door opened and Nora came out, dressed exactly as she was when she went upstairs; no hat, no gloves, no pocket-book, no light summer coat.
“Now what?” Mrs. Potter cried.
“She’s not going,” Mr. Potter said.
“Nora, go back into the house and——” Mrs. Potter attempted to rise, but Randolph put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
“Her mind is made up,” he said.
“But she can’t stay here,” Mrs. Potter said, looking around wildly. “Cousin Austin and Cousin Martha have their own life to lead, and I won’t have her imposing on them in this way!”
“Mrs. Beach has offered me a room in their house,” Nora said.
“Oh, I don’t know what will become of her!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed. “Mr. Potter, do something! Don’t just sit there!”
Mr. Potter went halfway up the walk and stood talking to Nora so quietly that the others couldn’t hear what he said or what Nora said in reply. He bent down and kissed her, and then came back and climbed into the front seat of the cart. Austin looked at his watch.
“We’d better be starting,” Mr. Potter said.
As the carriage drove away, Nora and Martha King both waved, but there was no response from the back seat.
Hiding behind the purple clematis, Mary Caroline had one last glimpse of Randolph. He was saying something to his mother, and suddenly he turned. It could have been an accident; he needn’t have been thinking of Mary Caroline as they drove past her house, but with such small signs and tokens all of us keep the breath of life in our chimaeras.
15
For most people, having company for more than three or four days is a serious mistake, the equivalent to sawing a large hole in the roof and leaving all the doors and windows open in the middle of winter. Out of a desire to be helpful or the need to be kind, they let themselves in for prolonged spells of entertaining, forfeit their privacy and their easy understanding, knowing that the result will be an estrangement—however temporary—between husband and wife, and that nothing proportionate to this is to be gained by the giving up of beds, the endless succession of heavy meals, the afternoon drives. Either the human race is incurably hospitable or else people forget from one time to the next, as women forget the pains of labour, how weeks and months are lost that can never be recovered.
The guest also loses—even the so-called easy guest who makes her own bed, helps with the dishes, and doesn’t require entertaining. She sees things no outsider should see, overhears whispered conversations about herself from two rooms away, finds old letters in books, and is sooner or later the cause of and witness to scenes that because of her presence do not clear the air. When she has left, she expects to go on being a part of the family she has stayed with so happily and for so long; she expects to be remembered; instead of which, her letters, full of intimate references and family jokes, go unanswered. She sends beautiful presents to the children at a time when she really cannot afford any extravagance, and the presents also go unacknowledged. In the end her feelings are hurt, and she begins to doubt—quite unjustly—the genuineness of the family’s attachment to her.<
br />
During their stay, the Potters had managed to invest the rooms they slept in with much of their personality. They had moved things, chipped things, left rings in mahogany, left medicine stains, left the impression of their bodies in horsehair mattresses. Living partly out of suitcases and partly out of untidy dresser-drawers, with disorder lying on the floor of their closets, with toilet articles spilling over their rooms, they had achieved a surface of confusion that Martha King had long since given up trying to do anything about. And even after all or nearly all of their possessions had been stuffed into trunks and suitcases and the Potters were on the train, the work of restoration had to be carried on, inch by inch.
With their heads tied up in dustcloths, Martha King and Rachel went to work and, like archæologists chipping plaster from a ninth-century Byzantine mosaic, restored the house on Elm Street. Turn a mattress and who can say what manner of person has been sleeping on it? A bed remade with clean sheets and a fresh counterpane will look as if it had never been slept in. By nightfall, the guest-rooms had regained their idealized, expectant air, and there was a large square package (containing a black velvet bow, a sandalwood fan, a toothbrush, a necktie …), all wrapped and ready to mail, on the downstairs hall table.
Without the two extra leaves, the dining-room table was round instead of oval, and brought Austin and Martha and Ab much closer together under the red-and-green glass lampshade.
“Is the steak the way you like it?” Martha inquired from her end of the table.
“Yes,” Austin said, from his.
“Not too done?”
“No, it’s fine. Just the way I like it.”
“I asked Mr. Connor for veal chops and he said he had veal but he wouldn’t recommend it, so I got steak instead.”
“Mr. Holby is going to Chicago next week,” Austin said, after a considerable silence.
“Again?”
“He’s going to be gone four or five days. There’s a meeting of the State Bar Association.”