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Page 78
Lena returned with the vest. `Come in and let us look at you as you go
out, Mr. Ordinsky. I've never seen you in your dress suit,' she said as
she opened the door for him.
A few moments later he reappeared with his violin-case a heavy muffler
about his neck and thick woollen gloves on his bony hands. Lena spoke
encouragingly to him, and he went off with such an important professional
air that we fell to laughing as soon as we had shut the door. `Poor
fellow,' Lena said indulgently, `he takes everything so hard.'
After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there were some
deep understanding between us. He wrote a furious article, attacking the
musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him a great service by taking
it to the editor of the morning paper. If the editor refused to print it,
I was to tell him that he would be answerable to Ordinsky `in person.' He
declared that he would never retract one word, and that he was quite
prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite of the fact that nobody ever
mentioned his article to him after it appeared--full of typographical
errors which he thought intentional-- he got a certain satisfaction from
believing that the citizens of Lincoln had meekly accepted the epithet
`coarse barbarians.' `You see how it is,' he said to me, `where there is no
chivalry, there is no amour-propre.' When I met him on his rounds now, I
thought he carried his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode up the
steps of front porches and rang doorbells with more assurance. He told
Lena he would never forget how I had stood by him when he was `under
fire.'
All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena had broken up my serious
mood. I wasn't interested in my classes. I played with Lena and Prince, I
played with the Pole, I went buggy-riding with the old colonel, who had
taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me about Lena and the `great
beauties' he had known in his youth. We were all three in love with Lena.
Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was offered an instructorship at
Harvard College, and accepted it. He suggested that I should follow him in
the fall, and complete my course at Harvard. He had found out about
Lena--not from me-- and he talked to me seriously.
`You won't do anything here now. You should either quit school and go to
work, or change your college and begin again in earnest. You won't recover
yourself while you are playing about with this handsome Norwegian. Yes,
I've seen her with you at the theatre. She's very pretty, and perfectly
irresponsible, I should judge.'
Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me East with him.
To my astonishment, grandfather replied that I might go if I wished. I was
both glad and sorry on the day when the letter came. I stayed in my room
all evening and thought things over. I even tried to persuade myself that
I was standing in Lena's way-- it is so necessary to be a little
noble!--and that if she had not me to play with, she would probably marry
and secure her future.
The next evening I went to call on Lena. I found her propped up on the
couch in her bay-window, with her foot in a big slipper. An awkward little
Russian girl whom she had taken into her work-room had dropped a flat-iron
on Lena's toe. On the table beside her there was a basket of early summer
flowers which the Pole had left after he heard of the accident. He always
managed to know what went on in Lena's apartment.
Lena was telling me some amusing piece of gossip about one of her clients,
when I interrupted her and picked up the flower basket.
`This old chap will be proposing to you some day, Lena.'
`Oh, he has--often!' she murmured.
`What! After you've refused him?'
`He doesn't mind that. It seems to cheer him to mention the subject. Old
men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they're
in love with somebody.'
`The colonel would marry you in a minute. I hope you won't marry some old
fellow; not even a rich one.' Lena shifted her pillows and looked up at me
in surprise.
`Why, I'm not going to marry anybody. Didn't you know that?'
`Nonsense, Lena. That's what girls say, but you know better. Every
handsome girl like you marries, of course.'
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