The Open Window: Tales of the Months

by Mabel Osgood Wright

When Professor Hewlett resigned from the chair of English Literature and Letters at B—— College and returned, avowedly, to spend the rest of his days in the home of his forefathers, all Oakland was very glad, but, at the same time, not a little puzzled as to the outcome of the change.

There is certainly nothing extraordinary when a man of sixty-five, even though he is still at his intellectual prime, wishes to free himself from harness, and, without wholly leaving the road for the pasture, travel at his own gait; it was the domestic side of the man’s life toward which interest turned, and this side consisted of the possibility of adjusting his family and work under the same roof, for even in his hours of leisure, no one could believe that John Hewlett would let his mental faculties lie dormant.

To an outsider this adjustment would have seemed the simplest matter possible, for though the Professor had been twice married, he had survived both wives, each of whom had left an only daughter; but these two, who composed his family, were as unlike in temperament as in personal appearance.

The first Mrs. Hewlett, a very handsome woman, whom the Professor had married the year after leaving college, was several years his senior. The Hewletts and Bartons had been people of culture as well as neighbours, and the marriage was the logical outcome of long friendship, rather than the focus of spontaneous love. Father, who was the friend of both, says that at this time John Hewlett was a dreamer, who walked head and shoulders in the air, never heeded his footing, and knew nothing of life; while Catharine Barton had made up her mind on practically every matter of importance, a quality upon which she prided herself being that if she once made a decision, she never allowed circumstances to change it. Aggressively devoted to what she considered her husband’s best interests, had she lived, it is very doubtful if John Hewlett would either have gained fame as a scholar, or won a host of friends by his delightful personality. In half a dozen years he found himself alone with a little daughter Catharine, who was turning four, a beautiful child, but having the ice of her mother’s blood in her veins, and rigid even at that tender age, sitting bolt upright in her father’s lap and checking him with wide-eyed reproof if, in clasping her to him, her gown or hair was rumpled. Then the Professor gave the child over to his people to rear, and, turning his face away from women, save in the polite abstract, devoted himself to work.

The Hewlett homestead—a square, substantial structure of the type that has four large rooms on a floor with an L, a wide, central hall, and large fireplaces—fell at this time to the Professor and an older sister, to whom he confided the little Catharine. Without plan or premeditation the house naturally divided itself in half, Miss Hewlett instinctively occupying the northern portion where the strong sunlight did not persist in penetrating to the fading of the much-treasured Turkey carpet that was an heirloom, while the southern portion the Professor filled with his books and such simple fittings as he needed,—a high chest of drawers, and a bed that had been his mother’s, with carved spiral posts and head and foot-rail, being his only ambitious possessions; but in this part of the house the windows were never closed on the sun, that seemed to come in and transfigure and vitalize the Professor’s solitude.

As Catharine grew up, she became more and more incomprehensible to her father, and kept even her very precise, ancestor-worshipping aunt in a state of constant repression by her ideas of propriety and etiquette. At twelve, she never committed the indiscretion of biting an apple, but always pared and cut it with a silver fruit-knife; at eighteen she left school and convinced her aunt that it was time for her to take charge of her father’s mending and the dusting of his study, in which she sat for an hour or so every day that he was at home, this being in the order of her preconceived ideas of duty and pride in his mental achievements, rather than from the love that makes ministry of every form a necessity.

Professor Hewlett, yearning for some sign of affection, took heart at these demonstrations and prepared at once to make Catharine a partner in his simple pleasures as well as a companion in his work, going so far as to suggest that together they establish a winter home in the college town where heretofore he had merely had bachelor accommodations.

To this, Catharine showed quiet, respectful, but determined opposition: she did not wish to leave her quarters at the homestead where she had built around herself an imaginary position of importance. It was one thing to chide her father for always wearing his stockings on the same feet and so poking through the big toe unnecessarily (as though any one does such things on purpose or could if he tried); to persist in sorting his letters and papers, labelling them “answered,” “unanswered,” “lecture notes,” and “proof sheets,” until he was no longer able to find anything; or to hold up her forehead for a good-night kiss,—but to change her plan of living and be submerged by numbers in a larger place was quite another, and asking too much.

Poor old young Professor! He went back to his work that autumn more fully convinced than ever that in it lay all that life had to offer him. Winter had never seemed so long as this, in which his fortieth birthday was creeping toward him with the spring and May. Some of his associates planned a little festival to celebrate the birthday, quite among themselves, arranging that Adela Heyl, a sister of one of the number, who had a fine voice and was coming to pass the spring in the town, should sing some of his songs, that she, without knowing more than the initials of the author, had found sympathetic and had set to music. For as a reflex to the serious student side of the man, he had both a vein of romance in him and a love of nature so exquisite and so delicately keyed that it was in itself an art.

It was a little late when Professor Hewlett entered the Heyls’ cosey, unpretentious house, and while he was touched by the comradeship that was the motive of the festival, yet he at once drew within himself and became diffident at sight of the feminine element that had been introduced in what he had expected was to be a sort of bachelor gathering; for, seated at the piano was a young woman clad in white with a cluster of the white “Poet’s Narcissus” set against her low-coiled dark hair. Shoulder curve and cheek told of the glory of a perfect development; the chin was dimple cleft and dark lashes veiled the colour of the eyes that were fixed on the keys of the instrument, as the accompaniment trickled through her fingers, and her throat began to quiver with song like the vibratory prelude of the wood-thrush.