THE HOUSE
OF HELEN
CORRA HARRIS
THE
HOUSE OF HELEN
BY
CORRA HARRIS
AUTHOR OF “A DAUGHTER OF ADAM,” “THE EYES OF LOVE,”
“MY SON,” “HAPPILY MARRIED,” “A CIRCUIT RIDER’S
WIFE,” “THE RECORDING ANGEL,” ETC.
AND IN COLLABORATION WITH FAITH HARRIS LEECH:
“FROM SUNUP TO SUNDOWN”
NEW
YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, 1923,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
THE HOUSE OF HELEN. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PART ONE
THE
HOUSE OF HELEN
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
The town of Shannon lay like a wreath flung wide upon the hills above one of those long, green, fertile valleys to be seen everywhere below the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Georgia. It was nothing like a city, merely a neat, little town built by thrifty people since the Civil War. Therefore, there were no colonial residences in it to remind you of the strutting, magnificent past, but the houses in it were smaller, painted any color that pleased the fancy, ruffled from end to end, with spindle-legged porches and scalloped gables. White church spires stuck up out of it like the forefingers of faith in God. There was a town square, around which business was done comfortably and leisurely on a credit basis.
The red-brick courthouse stood in this square, with a long, wide flight of white cement steps to it, showing like the teeth of the law; not that any one minded these teeth. The dome of this courthouse was covered with galvanized tin. It shone above the tufted trees on bright days like an immense silver helmet. And beneath this helmet there was the town clock, a good, old man with a plain, round face with only the wrinkles that marked the hours on it. Half the men in Shannon who carried watch chains carried no watches because this clock was so infallibly faithful to the sun.
At the time of which I write no one in Shannon called the narrow or even the wide spaces, which separated their respective homes from the street, a lawn. It was the “front yard,” and usually divided with a picket fence from the back yard, where the hens attended to business. Flowers, of the kind in service to “ladies” who wear aprons and do their own work and have an artless affection for blooming things, inhabited these front yards, regardless of law and order in the matter of background or perspective. The forsythia, syringas, roses and altheas had been planted with reference to their health in relation to the sun, and, whatever happened, they bloomed. Only the smaller plants, like annuals, were sternly disciplined. They stood up in beds or along the graveled walks, like spelling classes in a properly graded school, every one of them reciting a bloom after the manner of its kind.
These ladies of Shannon also kept “potted plants” and exchanged cuttings. It is only after you have ceased to be thrifty and have become rich that you imprison your flowers in a conservatory or a greenhouse. Shannon reached this scandalous pinnacle of prosperity years later, but at this time there was what may be called miniature “bleachers” on the front porches in Shannon where red and pink and white geraniums doubled up gorgeous fists of bloom, and fuchsias hung their waxened bells in the breeze, and begonias flaunted their rich, dark leaves, and that unspeakably gross and hardy vine, the Wandering Jew, wandered at will.
These flower-laden bleachers were especially characteristic of Wiggs Street, because this was the principal residence street of Shannon. And it was all a family affair. The nieces of the geraniums on Mrs. Adams’ porch bloomed on the porch of the Cutter home across the way. And Mrs. Adams had obtained the root of her sword fern from Mrs. Cutter, and so on and so forth. You might multiply it by the seeds or shoots or roots of ten thousand flowers.
This was why Shannon showed like a wreath on the hills above the valley. The women there were diligent. They loved their homes. So their front yards looked like flowered calico aprons, tied onto these homes as their own aprons were tied about their plump waists. The women were very good; the men were reasonably respectable. There was ambition without culture. But give them time. Already Mr. George William Cutter had sent his son, young George William, to college for two years. That ought to amount to something, culturally speaking. And Mrs. Mary Anne Adams was considering whether she could afford to send her daughter Helen to a boarding school for a year, or whether she would leave Helen to take her chances at George with only a high-school education and her music and a little drawing for accomplishments! But if she did decide to send Helen “off to school,” it ought to amount to a great deal more, culturally speaking. Girls acquire the gloss of elegance and refinement more rapidly than boys do, and it is apt to stay on them longer, no matter what stays in them.
The first definite upward trend in a tacky little town begins when some insolently prosperous citizen sends his suburban-bred son to college just long enough for him to claim that he is a “college man,” and when some valorous mother, usually a widow, follows suit and sends her daughter to a “seminary,” because she is not to be outdone by the above-mentioned prosperous citizen, even if she is not prosperous. When these two young beings return with their intellectual noses in the air, you may look out. The scenes in that town must change.
Business gets a hunch, or somebody’s business goes into bankruptcy. The domestic sphere spins around, loses its ancient balance and the girl gives a really fashionable tea party, after removing the precious potted plants from the front porch and placing her tables there, if it is a pleasant day. These things happen and you cannot help it. Give them an inch of education abroad and they will take an ell of license with your manners, convictions, and prejudices when they come home.
Nothing like this had yet happened in Shannon. Only drummers and salesmen really knew and saw what was going on in the world, and no drummers or salesmen lived there. The town was passing tranquilly through its religious and golden-oak periods. Most people went to church, and everybody who was anybody had golden-oak furniture, including an upright piano, as distinguished from the antiquated square piano. If the latter was for the present beyond their means, they had an elaborately carved and bracketed organ of the same durable wood, through which the Sabbath-afternoon air passed in hymnal strains at about the same hour it bore the aroma of boiling coffee on week days.
This is a mere flash of what Shannon was in those days; such an impression as you might have received from the window of your car if you had been passing through on one of those fast trains that did not stop at Shannon, but roared by as if this little town did not exist. And if you knew all that was to happen there within the next twenty years to only two people, not to mention the remaining six thousand of her inhabitants, to whom a great deal more must have happened, you would agree that I am justified in detaining you a moment before beginning this tale.
Otherwise, how could you understand that Helen belonged by tradition, by environment, by the very petunias that bordered her mother’s flower beds, to the Agnes tribe of meek and enduring women. I am not claiming that this is a wiser, abler tribe than the numerous modern tribes of insurgent women, many of whom have faced the same emergencies. I leave each one of you to decide that question according to your lights, leaving out the traditions and the petunias, because doubtless you have long since made way with them.
My task is simply to set down here exactly what happened, with no more regard for the moral than the facts themselves carry. And so I give you my word that this is a true story, and that the events I have recorded did happen and that the “House of Helen” does stand to this day in Shannon. You may see it from the window of your car, as you pass through, halfway down Wiggs Street, on the right-hand side, and facing you. It is not so large, so pretentious as the other residences which have taken the place of the cottages that stood along this street during the golden-oak period, but it looks different, that house, serene, as a house should that has weathered the storm and has fair weather forever within.
CHAPTER II
It was a day in June, in the year 1902. They are much the same everywhere, only in Georgia there is more June in such a day. Farther south the withering heat hints of July; farther north there may be an edge of cold to the air; but in Georgia it is always perfectly June in June, all softness, fragrance, filled with the fearless growth and bloom of every living thing—the sort of day that seems to hum to itself with the wings of a thousand bees; adolescent weather, fragrant, soft, filled with the growth and yearning of every living thing from the frailest flower that blooms to the oldest tree and the oldest man.
On such a day this story begins, somewhere between half past three and four o’clock in the afternoon. The exact moment makes no difference because nothing that you could see with the naked eye happened when the first scene was laid. (It is only the comedies and crimes of living that catch the eye. The great dramas and the great tragedies begin within, and they end there.) The town was somnambulent—very little traffic; none at all on Wiggs Street. You could only have known by the gentle bending of the frailer-stemmed flowers before the cottages on either side that even a breeze was passing by. But over all this stillness and piercing this droning silence came the notes of a piano, sad, sweet and frequently too far apart, as if this piano waited patiently while the performer found the next note, and then found it again on the keyboard. These desiccated fragments of Narcissus, a popular instrumental piece at that time, issued from the parlor windows of the Adams cottage. Some one, who had no ear for music, but only a conscience, was practicing inside.
Presently this conscience was satisfied, for the lid of the piano went down with a thud. There was a quick step, the whisk of white skirts in the darkened hall, the opening and closing of a door, followed by what we must infer was a sort of primping silence.
Then a voice, firm and maternal, came through the front bedroom window on that side of the house: “Helen, why are you wearing your organdie?”
“I don’t know, mother,” a young voice answered.
I doubt if she did know. Some of the shrewdest acts of a maiden are unintelligible to her.
“Well, it is silly, putting on your nice things to go to choir practice.”
It was silly, but one frequently makes the silliest preparations for happiness. This is the wisdom of youth. Age cannot beat it.
After a pause, the same elder voice, made smoother—“Have you seen George?”
“Not in two years. Why?”
“He has been at home a week, hasn’t he?”
“I don’t know when he came.”
The tone implied that the comings and goings of this George were matters of supreme indifference to her.
“Mrs. Cutter told me his father means for him to work this summer.”
No response.
“He had three months in the University School of Finance last summer, she told me. This summer his father plans to put him through, she said.”
Still no response.
“Don’t forget to call for my pass book at the bank, Helen,” this was said in a slightly higher key, indicating that the girl had left the room. “You had better go by the bank on your way to the church. It closes at four o’clock.”
“Yes, mother;” and at the same moment this young girl came out of the house, down the steps, walking hurriedly.
When she reached the street she began to move more sedately, giving herself an air. Her ankles were slim; her black satin pumps had low French heels. She wore a white organdie. The fineness, tucks and lace of her petticoat showed through the full skirt. The bodice was plain, finished at the neck with an edge of lace, and gathered puffily in at the belt. The fineness, tucks and lace of an underbody clung daintily to her shoulders and showed through. The sleeves were short. Her arms round and very fair. A wide taffeta ribbon sash of pale blue, crushed crinklingly about her waist, was tied in a butterfly bow behind, very stiff and upstanding.
She wore a broad-brimmed, white leghorn hat, trimmed with tiny bunches of field flowers. This hat was tilted slightly to one side, as if she lacked the courage to pull it down, lest she should reveal more than she dared tell of what she was and meant. It rested, therefore, at the merest, most innocent angle of coquetry.
The girl herself was utterly and entrancingly fair. She had straight hair, of the shade called ash blond; no deeper golden lights in it; most of it hidden beneath the encompassing hat. If you found it, you must do so by an act of the imagination. And the absurd primness with which it lay so close and smoothly above her ears teased the imagination. Her skin was white, with that underglow of pink so faint it could scarcely be called color—cheeks round, not too full. The oval chin had the softness of youth. She had a mouth made for silence; it was serious. The under lip was a straight pink line, prettily turned, which did not go very far; the upper lip was distinctly full in the center, with a sort of flute there which ended in a dainty, pointed, white scallop beneath the nose, and it closed purposefully over the lower lip. This was due to the fact that if she was not mindful, it let go, curled up and showed the only flaw she had—two lovely teeth, a trifle prominent because they lapped at the lower edge after the manner of some Anglo-Saxon ancestor from whom she must have inherited them. Her nose might amount to something later in life as an indication of character, but now it was merely a good little nose, rounded at the end where it should have been pointed, and too brief for beauty.
The eyes were this girl’s distinguishing feature. They remained so long after all her loveliness and fairness had changed and failed. They were large, blue, white-lidded, heavily fringed with lashes darker than her hair. And they looked at you, at him, at all the world and the weather, calmly, from beneath long, sweeping brows, as if these brows were the slender wings of the thoughts she had when she looked at you.
This is what a girl is, and nothing more—loveliness, innocence, and the wordless sweet desire of herself. You cannot predict her. Anything may change her; one thing only is certain—she is sure to change. The woman will be profoundly different. This is why writers of mere fiction have discarded the young girl heroine. Nothing can make her interesting but a tragedy, until she develops her human perversities and attributes, which may require more years than the tale can afford.
Helen walked sedately through Wiggs Street, as if every window of every house was an eye that observed her. But when she came to the end, where this street entered the public square, her gait changed, much as your voice changes inflection according to the tune you sing. This was a livelier tune now to which she walked. She stepped along briskly, prettily. Her skirts whisked, her body swayed a little as if this might turn out to be a waltz. Every shop window she passed was a mirror, in which she caught an encouraging glimpse of herself. Once she halted long enough to draw the brim of her hat forward and sidewise. Then she went on, the published truth of herself at last. And her own mother would not have known her.
Few mothers, even in that prunes-and-prism period, relatively speaking, would have recognized their daughters abroad. But every man would. It is Nature having her way, you understand, and no harm done; because in the end these maidens must—and they will—take Nature, which after all is the very nearest relative of maidenhood, into their confidence and be guided by her.
The First National Bank of Shannon was no great institution. Still it was modestly conspicuous. What I mean is that you could tell at a glance and from a distance that this was a bank, not a doctor’s office, by the tall cement columns in front, the only example of four-legged magnificence in the shakily diversified architecture surrounding this square.
But Mr. George William Cutter would never have thought of exalting himself in a private office with a ground glass door, showing the title “President,” published on this door. He sat at a rolled-top desk in a space reserved for him to the left of the door, by a stout oaken banister which divided it from the lobby. The only distinction he permitted himself was to sit with his back to the window which looked on the square. What was more to the point he faced the long cage of the bank proper, and was always in a position to see, know or at least shrewdly infer what was going on inside and outside in the lobby.
But if you were a customer, seeking a loan or even planning to open an account, you must come in and face about before you could face the president. There was dignity, financial assurance, but no offensive pride, in his sitting posture to the public. He was a man with a recognized girth, not entirely bald. His hair was gray; so was his short, clipped mustache. He wore light gray clothes in summer and dark gray clothes in the winter. And he had a fine strong commercial countenance. He might almost have cashed it, his face was so well certified by a pair of shrewd gray eyes, as distinguished from the cunning of similar eyes.
On this June afternoon he sat reared back, his coat thrust clear of the wide expanse of his white shirt front, like the wings of an old gray rooster cocked up on a hot day. He was smoking a black cigar. From time to time he shot a glance into the cage of the bank; and each time the corners of his mouth went up, the fired end of the cigar also went up, his eyes narrowed to a mere gray slit of light as sharp as a lance, and his whole face crinkled into an expression of humor and satisfaction. Sometimes an experienced turfman so regards a young and mettlesome colt that is being broken to the gait, when the colt acts up to his breeding, takes the bit and goes, even if he does waste wind and sweat in the performance.
Directly in line with his vision a tall, broad-shouldered young man was standing before an adding machine in his shirt sleeves. This was George William Cutter, Junior, inducted into the rear end of the banking business a week since. He was working furiously with the halting earnestness of a man not accustomed to grind up figures in a machine and pedal them out on a long strip of paper with his foot. His hair was red and stood up like a torch on his head. His mouth was warped, his nose snarled, his face was flushed and there was an angry squint in his red brown eyes as he struck the keys, jerked the lever and slammed the pedal once in so often—forty little movements that kept the muscles of his big body in a sort of frivolous activity.
Mr. Cutter, Senior, was thinking: “He’s got it in him, the go. He will make good if he can be made to stick. Ought to marry, ought’er marry right now. That would stamp him down to it.”
What young George was thinking as he paused to mop his steaming brow was: “Gad! If three days in here takes it out of a fellow like this, what will thirty years do to him?”
He knew that he was being groomed to succeed his father. It might be a bright future for a young man, but as a human being it held no brighter prospect than escaping from this cage and sitting where his father sat now, fat and sedentary in all his habits. He was restless. He was red-headed. He was an athlete on the university team. There had been some question about whether he should take his final year. He would let the “old man” know that he was willing and anxious to go back to the university in the fall. He was not ready to be imprisoned for life with dollars, not yet!
At this moment the street door, that had admitted everybody all day from the leading merchants, workers, widows, all the way down to the fat woman who kept the fruit stand, opened again. A young girl came in. It was as if spring and snow and sweetness had entered. There was so much whiteness and coolness in the presence she made. A mere hint of far-off blue skies, and as if Nature had granted her the flowers she wore on this hat. She passed the teller’s window, also the cashier’s window. She looked neither to the right nor the left. The white scallop in the pink upper lip was pressed primly, holding it, like a word she would not say, upon the round pink under lip. She came directly to the bookkeeper’s window, faced it, stared at him and waited.
When she entered he had made three steps backward, which brought him to the wall behind him. He was conscious of being without his coat. But if you are a man in a bank you are not supposed to scamper out of sight like a lady in negligee, if some one comes to call. You stood your ground with dignity, no matter how you looked. He stood his; he did not move a muscle. He may have breathed, but if so it was no more than a secret breath merely to sustain life. Their eyes met; his filled with the fire of an amazement, hers calm and speechless. She regarded him as one regards a picture on the wall.
This was all that happened, lasting no longer than the instant of time required for the bookkeeper to look up, see her and slide himself with one step like a little, thin-necked, bald-headed, stooped-shouldered fact before the window, blotting out the vision of her.
Young Cutter heard her murmur something, saw the bookkeeper draw a pass book from a stack of these dingy records and slide it beneath the wicket of the window.
He heard her say “thank you” in a faint, soft, bell-like voice. Then she turned and went out.
He stared about him. How was this? He expected a wave of excitement to mark her passing, as people exclaim at the sight of something ineffable. Had no one seen her but himself? Apparently not. Every man in there was working with his usual air of absorption. For another instant he stood free, exalted, his eyes filled with the explosive brightness of a great emotion. Then it faded into self-consciousness, a downward look as he sneaked back to his machine, hoping that he had not been observed.
This is the only kind of modesty of which men are capable. If one of them went out with this look of neighing valor on his face he would be arrested, of course, because it is such a perfectly scandalous expression. But if a maid walks abroad with love published in her eyes and on her very lips, you are moved to reverence, because it is a sort of piety which seems to sanctify her.
He bent lower over his task, shot the lever down with a bang, struck the pedal harshly and rhythmically—made a noise, implying that he was and had been, without interruption, wholly engrossed with this business.
“Remember her, George?” came his father’s voice like a shot out of a clear sky.
“Who?” asked George, instantly on his guard.
“The girl that came in just now.”
“I didn’t notice. Who was she?”
“Helen Adams.”
“Never should have recognized her.” This was the truth. He had recognized only loveliness, not the maiden name of it.
“Last time you saw her she was a long-legged, saucer-faced youngster, wearing her hair plaited and tied with a blue ribbon, I reckon.”
“That’s the way I remember little Helen,” George admitted, grinning.
“Two years make a lot of difference in a girl of that age. Pretty, ain’t she?”
The young man did not answer. He was suddenly and unaccountably annoyed. When your whole mind is concentrated on a girl, she becomes your religion and you do not care to enter into a doctrinal discussion of this religion with another man, not even your old, gray-haired father, because she has become the sacred silence of your own soul, no matter what or who she was yesterday, nor even if you never had so much as a twinge of soul until this moment. You practically invent your soul then and there out of the joy and daylight of your youth, because it is the only place suitable for such a creature to occupy. Let Moses and the prophets stand aside! This is your pagan period of vestal virgins; not that you know it, but it is.
Mr. Cutter stood up, produced a heavy gold watch, studied the face of it, grinned, jerked his coat down and around, buttoned one button of it by the hardest work and reached for his hat. “Well, George, I guess you’ll finish before you quit,” he said.
This was a hint. The son took it. “All right, sir. I’ll be along about midnight,” he answered good-naturedly, at the same time making a wry face.
“Oh, you’ll probably get in before suppertime. The work will come easier in a day or two,” the father retorted as he stalked out.
He was scarcely out of sight before the cashier, teller and bookkeeper followed in quick procession.
George was now alone. He changed his scene instantly, as most people do when they are left alone. He straightened up, started smoking, moved directly into the current of the electric fan, folded his arms and thought profoundly, his head lifted, eyes fixed in a noble gaze, as if on no particular object; a heroic figure, blowing volumes of smoke through his nose.
What a young man thinks in this mood may be imagined, but it never can be known. And the writer does not live with the wisdom or grace to translate his deep, singing dumbness into words.
Presently he went back to his task, working now with swiftness and concentration, as if his whole future depended upon finishing what he was doing in the shortest possible time. He finished in thirty minutes, disappeared into the rear of the bank and reappeared five minutes later through the side door. He was brushed, groomed and freshened to the last degree of elegance. His homespun fitted him with an air. He stepped with a long, prideful stride—and got no farther than the corner of the next street. Here he halted, looking all possible ways at once—nobody in sight; plenty of people, you understand, but not the girl. He had seen her pass this corner.
He waited. Wherever she had gone, she should be returning by this time. This one and that one hailed him as they went by. A fellow he knew stopped and engaged him in conversation. He was annoyed. Suppose the girl appeared, how was he to escape from this ass? The ass finally took in the situation and moved on, looking back as he turned the next corner.
George looked at his watch—after five! She certainly should be going home by this time. Everybody in sight was on his way home. Suppose he had missed her; suppose she had gone around the other way! Jumping cats, what a fool he had been, wasting time here! He started off, walking rapidly but still with that magnificent, stiff-legged strut.
Some one came alongside, caught his arm and whirled him half around. “Where you going in such a hurry, Cutter?”
This was Charley Harman, a friend, but this was no time for friends to be butting in.
“Home,” said George briefly, by way of implying that he was not inviting company home with him.
“So am I, but I never walk fast when I’m going home. Let’s get a drink in here”; halting as they came opposite a drug store.
“Take one for me,” Cutter said with a short laugh and moved on so hurriedly that Harman took the hint.
Nothing else happened until he reached the place where Wiggs Street opened on the square. He stared down the flower-blooming vista of this street. He could see men watering their front yards and the women watering their flowers. He could hear the boom of his father’s voice half a block down, talking to some one in the next yard. He saw Mrs. Adams sitting, large and amorphous, in a rocking-chair on her front porch. He supposed that she also was waiting for Helen.
Then he saw her approaching from the other end of the street, not distant, but divided from him by the eyes of all these people sitting and puttering around in their front yards. He thought she walked as if she were sad or good or something. And he had this consolation, as she finally turned in and went up the steps of the Adams’ cottage, he was sure that she had seen him. He was sure that their eyes had met. He also observed when he came down into the street to his own home that she had not stopped on the porch with her mother, but had gone directly inside.
CHAPTER III
When you are in love, everything is important and everything is secret. You become a consummate actor and liar in vain, because the whole world knows your secret almost as soon as you do.
That evening at the dinner table, George was so gay, so full of himself, so ready to laugh and make a joke that Mrs. Cutter was beside herself with pride and happiness.
“He is such a good boy, so unconscious of his good looks and his intellect,” she told Mr. Cutter when they were alone together after dinner.
“Intellect!” said Mr. Cutter in that tone of voice.
“Yes; you know how smart he is; but he is not the least conceited, just light-hearted and happy as he should be at his age. I say it shows he is a good boy.”
“Where is he now?” Mr. Cutter wanted to know.
The question appeared to Mrs. Cutter to be irrelevant. She said she did not know; why?
“Nothing,” answered her husband.
She said he was around somewhere, probably in his room. She went to the bottom of the stairs. “Georgie!” she called.
No answer. Well, then he must be out front somewhere, and went to prove that he was. But she could not find him. Then she came back and wanted to know of Mr. Cutter what difference did it make, if they did not know where he was? George was no longer a child. Couldn’t he trust his own son?
Oh, yes; in reason he could and did trust him. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Maggie,” he added, laying aside his paper and looking her squarely in the face, “George should get married.”
“Married; just as he is ready to enjoy his youth and not even out of the university yet—and only twenty-one. What do you mean?” she demanded indignantly.
“That a blaze-faced horse and a red-headed man are both vain things for safety,” he retorted.
“Do you know anything wrong about George?” she demanded, after a gasping pause.
“No.”
“A single thing?”
“Not a single thing. I was merely stating a natural fact.”
She had risen, a little, slim, fiery-eyed woman. She drew herself up. He watched her ascend. He refused to quail beneath the spark in her eye.
“Mr. Cutter,” she began ominously, because she gave him this title only when she was ominous, “when you married me I had red hair. My hair is still red.”
“Yes, my dear; but you were a girl. I said a man. I meant a young man with red hair. There is all the latitudes and longitudes in life between the one and the other. If you were a red-haired young man, I should think twice before I’d give a daughter of mine in marriage to you. But you will recall that I had black hair,” he concluded, laughing.
A father who would traduce his own son for inheriting hair the color of his mother’s and without cause—well, she could not understand such a father. Whereupon she left the room in high dudgeon, but really to go and look for this son. Her confidence in him had not been shaken, but she was anxious without reason, which is the keenest anxiety from which women suffer.
She found him pacing back and forth in the vegetable garden, arms folded, face lifted like a yowling puppy’s to the moon; not that this simile occurred to her. He appeared to her a potentially great man, breathing his thoughts in this quiet place.
He was annoyed at this interruption. Was he never to have a moment alone to think this thing out! He really thought he was thinking, you understand, when he was only visualizing a girl in a white dress, with a blue sash, blue eyes and blue cornflowers on her hat; blue was the most entrancing color in the world, and so on and so forth. He was trying to imagine what she would say if she said anything, when he saw his mother approaching. He repressed his impatience. They walked together between the bald-headed cabbage and the young, curled-up, green lettuce. She thought she was sharing his thoughts. Something had been said about his experiences in the bank. Many a mother and some fathers would leap with amazement, if they really knew the thoughts they do not share with their sons and daughters at such times.
Still this was an innocent young man, as men go, a good son, as sons are reckoned. He was well within his rights to be pursuing his love fancies. And for a long period of this time he remained in a state of legal innocence of which any man or husband might boast. Mrs. Cutter was entirely justified in despising the opinion Mr. Cutter had given that night of this excellent young man. Sometimes more than twenty years are required to fulfill a paternal prophecy.
Mrs. Adams remained seated on the porch. She supposed Helen had gone to her room to take off her hat and would return presently. It was much cooler out here, and the street was interesting at this hour of the late afternoon, like watching a very good human play, where all the characters are decent.
She saw Mrs. Shaw bustling in and out, herding her numerous family. This meant that they were having early supper, probably cold supper, and that they would go to the band concert afterwards. The Shaws spent a good deal on amusements. She hoped they could afford it.
There was Mr. Flitch sitting alone on his front porch, with his heels cocked up on the banister. This meant that he was in a state of rebellion, because he never stuck his feet on to this immaculately white banister if he was in a proper frame of mind. It also meant that Mrs. Flitch had her feelings hurt again and was probably in her room suffering from this ailment. She had heard that the Flitches did not get on well together. In her opinion this was Ella Flitch’s fault. You could not live diagonally across the street from a waspish woman and belong to the same missionary society without knowing that she was waspish.
I am writing this into the record—it was no part of Mrs. Adams’ reflections—that if you are a woman you always blame the wife for her marital unhappiness; if you are a man you know, of course, that the husband is at fault, even if you listen cordially to your own wife when she is taking the contrary view.
Mrs. Adams turned her neat, little, gray head slowly, surreptitiously and took a swift glance up the street at the Cutter residence. Then she turned it back again. But she had read all the news up there to be seen with the naked eye, assisted by powerful spectacles. Mr. and Mrs. Cutter were seated comfortably in their respective porch chairs. And George was out in the swing, elegantly folded into a sitting posture where he commanded a view of her front porch. If you are the mother of a daughter, you notice such little circumstances whether they mean anything or not, because they may be very significant.
The sight of this young man sentinel reminded her of something. Where was Helen? What was she doing so long inside? She arose at once and went in to see about this.
“Helen!” she called from the hall.
She walked heavily to the closed bedroom door and knocked authoritatively.
No answer. Not a sound.
“Helen, are you in there?”
“Yes, mother,” came the faint reply.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” in a wailing, muffled voice, as if this person who was doing “nothing” was being smothered.
Mrs. Cutter thrust the door open and went in. She was astounded. Her daughter lay face downward across the bed, with her arms wound above her head in two beautifully curved lines of mute despair. Two pretty legs extended stiffly beyond the uttermost that skirts could do to cover them. One slippered foot worked slowly as you move a foot in pain, and at quick intervals the slender form rose and fell convulsively to the passionate rhythm of sobs.
“What on earth is the matter?” the mother exclaimed.
“Nothing.”
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“Has anything happened?”
“Not a thing.”
“I don’t know. Oh, mother, I just want to be left alone”—followed by another paroxysm of weeping.
Mrs. Adams waited grimly until the distressing convulsions of the slender young body subsided. Then she began again: “Well, you can’t be left in this fix. Turn over, Helen. You are mussing your dress.”
The girl turned obediently, her face poignantly, sweetly pink, very sad. Her eyes bright with tears like violets after a summer rain. The flush was ominous. Mrs. Adams had never seen Helen this color before, never in her life. She bent and laid a palm on the girl’s brow—warm, but moist; certainly not feverish.
She stood regarding her daughter thoughtfully. Then she sat down on the side of the bed, took one of Helen’s hands in her own harsher, stronger hand, where it lay like a plucked lily, wilted, icy cold. She stroked it gently. Her face softened, her eyes brooded, as if through a mist she beheld a memory of herself long ago, which suddenly freshened and brightened into the figure of the girl she had been.
Mothers are omniscient. They have little paths back and forth through their years by which the ghosts of them can always find you, wherever you are. Not another word was spoken for a long time between these two; the younger, overcome by the future, holding the unsolved, longed-for mystery of love; the other, overcome by the past, which held for her the dreadful reality of love. Neither had or could escape. They accomplished a wordless sympathy on this basis.
Mrs. Adams’ reflections were strangely mixed, what with that sundown feeling she had of her own youth and the anxieties of a mother growing stronger every moment. She would like to know, for example, if Helen had seen George Cutter. Had she gone by the bank for the pass book? But even when she caught sight of this book lying on the dresser, with the ends of many checks sticking out of it, she did not put the question. Love is a wound too painful to be dressed with the tenderest words when it is first made, much less scraped with a question.
She was, over and above her emotions as a woman and a mother, fairly well satisfied with the situation. She inferred that George and Helen had had some sort of passage at arms. And she did not suppose that any man in or out of his senses could actually resist for long a girl of Helen’s soft charm. Mothers have their pride, you understand. This one was shrewd, eminently practical. You must be, to deal with youth at this stage.
The room was flooded with the golden effulgence of a summer twilight when at last she arose, moved gently toward the door, picking up the bank book as she passed the dresser and thrusting it into her pocket. “Helen,” she said from the doorway, “it is the heat. This has been a very warm day. You will be better presently.”
“Yes, mother, I think it was the heat; and I do feel better,” the girl answered faintly.
“There is ice tea and chicken salad for supper,” Mrs. Adams suggested.
“I don’t think I care for anything.”
“Well, later then. I’ll leave the tea and your salad on the ice,” the mother said, going out and closing the door.
CHAPTER IV
This was the beginning of that affair. Helen remembered the day well. A woman never forgets the sky and the weather of the day upon which love called her forth to the vicissitudes of love. But as things turned out, I doubt if she would mention that day now, as other women do when the bloom of their years has past. But at the best a courtship is strangely ephemeral, if you consider the consequences. It is like fugitive verses published to-day, gone to-morrow, like the fragrance of flowers blown upon a wind that passes and never returns. So much of it cannot be made into words; a glance of the eye, quick as light, revealing all; but who can translate the look or the long silences between lovers? Nature knows her business. The whole world, the heavens and the earth and the fullness thereof is an incantation made to ensnare lovers to her purpose. And not a word grows anywhere to betray this charm. You may be strong or weak, wise or simple, cynical, disillusioned, protected with all the knowledge of men, but there is no escape. Nature gets you at last; on honor or dishonor you must pay your debt to her in love. When you are done, nothing remains but your dust, a handful of something with which to fertilize love again—a little retail economy Nature makes in her procreating plans.
The next day after this first day was a Sabbath. I do not believe in predestination, doctrinally speaking. The meaning of that term, I should say, was strictly human, and is derived from our short-winded conception of time, which does not exist either, except in the mortal sense. But by some prearranged prudence of Providence, by which all things come to pass whether we will or no, including the most intimate and personal things, the Cutters attended the same church that the remaining mother and daughter of the Adams family attended. It was a very good little church, glistening white within, shining white without, like an enameled bathtub with a roof and a steeple. I will not be sure, but my impression is that the denomination was Baptist. In any case, Helen Adams belonged to the choir.
On this Sunday morning she sang a solo, Jerusalem the Golden. She had a fresh young voice, roomy and soft at the bottom, triumphantly high and keen at the top. She wore white as usual and little fluttering skylines of blue tied in a bow as usual. When she stood up to sing she lifted her eyes as if these eyes and this face were the words of a young morning prayer; she let go her beautifully crimped upper lip, opened her mouth as if this mouth were a rose bursting into bloom—and sang. I do not know if she sang well, having no skill in these matters; but it is certain that she looked like an angel. What I mean is that if you had no visual acquaintance with angels, you would have known at once that this was the very image of the way an angel should look.
The congregation listened with the peaceful apathy peculiar to every small town congregation, when it is being mulled in the music of a hymn or the Word. This made the one exception the more noticeable.
George William Cutter, Junior, looked and listened with a fervor which far surpassed anything that mere piety could do for a young man’s praying countenance. Fortunately he was seated far back in the publican and sinner section of the church. Thus he escaped the sophisticated attention of the elder saints toward the front. Never had he seen anything so lovely as this girl, the high look she had with the notes of this hymn, trembling as they came from her round, white throat or flaring into a perfect ecstasy of joy.
When she had finally caroled out and sat down, he whispered under his breath, “Lord! Lord!” although he was not a religious man and meant nothing of the sort by this exclamation.
The moment the benediction was pronounced, he stepped briskly from his place in that sparsely settled part of the church, met the slow-moving tattling tide of the congregation coming out as he hurried down the aisle like a good swimmer in sluggish waters until he reached Helen standing in the rear ranks with her mother.
He bowed to Mrs. Adams. He hoped she remembered him—George Cutter, extending his hand.
Oh, yes; she remembered him, she said mildly. No excitement in her mind over the recollection either! Did he think he had improved that much? She let him know that so far as she was concerned he was the same little George Cutter who used to live across the street and sometimes threw stones at her chickens.
No matter if you are a very handsome young man, with athletic laurels hanging to your college coat tails, you cannot make a deep or flattering impression on a middle-aged woman who has a practical, computing mind and knows the romantic value of her beautiful daughter. If Helen had been homely, a little, starched mouse of a girl, who could not sing Jerusalem the Golden or anything else, she would have received George’s salutations more cordially. As it was, she did not have to be more than invincibly polite. All this she let him know with a flat look of her calm blue eye.
It was a waste of excellent maternal diplomacy so far as he was concerned. He had already turned to Helen. He was almost speechless from having so much to say. She was entirely so for a moment. Then she gave him her hand and managed to say, “Howdy do, George,” in a tone a girl uses when the man owes her an apology.
This accusative welcome dashed him. No smile! When he was himself the very pedestal of a smile. Good heavens, what had he done? He was conscious of being innocent; yet he felt guilty.
Mrs. Adams paid no more attention to them. She had gone on, caught up with the Flitches and passed out. This was the only permission he received that he might, if he could, walk with Helen.
The girl’s inclemency stirred him as frosty weather stimulates energy. So they followed. I doubt if they were aware themselves that the distance lengthened between them and other groups of this congregation, which divided and dwindled at every street corner. Lovers are recognized on sight, long before they know themselves to be lovers. People make room for their privacy in public places. These two had a whole block to themselves by the time they entered Wiggs Street. Mrs. Adams had already disappeared in her house. The broad back of Mr. Cutter and the slim back of little Mrs. Cutter were visible for a moment before they also faded through the doorway of the Cutter residence.
Only the Flitches stood en masse on their spider-legged veranda, their eyes glued upon these two stragglers, coming slowly down the sunlit street. The Flitches were good people, of the round-eyed breed. They had a candid, perpetually interrogative curiosity which nothing could satisfy. You know the kind. It is never you, but the family that lives across the street from you, or in the next house with thin eyelid curtains over their windows through which they are perpetually regarding you, striving after omniscience about you and your affairs.
Helen had admitted that it was a “nice day” when he said it was, as they came out of the church and faced the fair brow of this June sabbath.
He had told her how much he enjoyed her solo. It was wonderful.
She merely replied that she “liked to sing.”
He was still conscious of being in the arctic region of her regard and cast about, with a lover’s distracted compass, to discover the way out. “Weren’t you in the bank yesterday afternoon?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” she answered coldly after a slight pause; “I was about to speak to you, but you did not recognize me,” she added.
“It is the truth. I did not,” he admitted quickly and waited. He could not be sure she got it, the compliment implied. He remembered her as merely sensible, not smart. “You have changed, grown or something,” he resumed. “I couldn’t be expected to know you. All the other girls here look just as they did when I left here two years ago. But you don’t; you are amazingly different. How did you do it?” he exclaimed, regarding her with charmed amazement.
He saw her take it, caught the glance she gave him one instant before she dropped it. The faintest smile sweetened the comers of her mouth. He got that too.
If only he had known of the tears she had shed after the visit to the bank, what a triumph! Fortunately, men do not know what maidens confess with tears to their pillows. If they did it would change many a courtship to one kind or another of ruthless tyranny.
We who study love as if it were a medicine or a disease sometimes speak of “love at first sight,” as if this were an unusual seizure. But love is always love at first sight. You may know this man or he may know you for years without getting that angle of vision; but if you ever do, it is as if you had never really seen him before. In a moment you have endowed him with attributes his Maker would never have squandered on a man of that quality. This is what love is, the conferring of virtues and qualities upon the object of your awakened emotion like so many degrees. He may be a drug clerk, or a chicken-breasted, fat man, or a swank young rascal, but from that moment when love gets sight of him he is a fellow of the royal society of heroes, and you may be so bemused you live a lifetime with him, always conferring more degrees to keep him tenderly concealed from your clearer vision. Or it may happen in a year or twenty years the scales fall from your eyes. Then love becomes a servant, and life a tragedy. But there is nothing in the Scriptures against such a servant or such a life. Rather, I should say the Scriptures make wide and permanent provisions for this deflation in the marital relation.
CHAPTER V
From this day George Cutter spent his spare time in and about the Adams cottage. You might have inferred that he was a homeless man. He accompanied Helen to such entertainments as society consisted of in Shannon, chiefly picnics and fishing excursions at this season of the year. He was by nature an importunate lover, and he was in love. He did not ask himself whether Helen would make a suitable wife for such a man as he was, and would become. He did not know what kind of man he was. He only knew that he wanted this girl, and that no other man should have her.
The decision was natural, entirely creditable. But the approach must be made. So far as he was concerned he was ready to propose to Helen at once; girls, however, were squeamish in matters of love. His instinct warned him that he might lose by an immediate declaration. He spent the time agreeably displaying his wares. He was a university man. He had a smattering of ideas, caught carelessly and selected from the mouthings of this professor and that. He had no doubt that he could make an impression. Helen was village born, village bred. It was well enough to startle her into a profound admiration. Nothing subdued and impressed a woman like brains. He not only had brains, he had views.
Bear in mind this was twenty years ago. The muckrakers were still mucking in the best magazines. The “social conscience,” a favorite phrase at the time, had passed the period of gestation, and had become a sentimental conviction claimed by the best people. Old patriarchal Russian anarchists with pink whiskers, spewed out of Russia, were pouring into this country, the shade of their whiskers due entirely to the action of the salt air during the voyage over on the dye used upon these whiskers by way of disguise until they were safe in a clean land. They brought their doctrines with them. They created a market for socialism, radicalism and communism.
There was no provision then or even now at Ellis Island to exclude these lepers of decaying civilization afflicted with the most insidious social diseases of the mind. They had a fine time working up conditions which were presently to result in mental, moral and social unrest, strikes and the perversions of all sound doctrines. The universities in particular received these doctrines gladly—mere theories, so far as the deans and doctors were concerned, upon which they performed intellectual stunts before their classes; trapeze work, nothing more. At that time the most unscrupulous men in this nation were these teachers of youth. Now they may name their converts by the millions; but then the “young gentlemen” who listened had not got a working use of this diablerie. They talked of liberty as if liberty was license by way of appearing swank intellectually.
George had come home that summer fresh cut from the classroom of a certain professor who held advanced views on what men were really entitled to in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
One evening he was seated beside Helen on a bench beneath an arbor covered with vines of trailing clematis. They had been there a long time. Nothing had happened, to put it exactly as Helen inwardly interpreted the situation. Nothing could happen yet, to put it according to George’s decision. He had been home barely two weeks. Helen impressed him as being so ineffably innocent, so remote from his passion that it would be almost an insult to make love to her. Love enjoined silence like the benediction in a church.
They sat beneath the star-white clematis blossoms, confounded with each other. Helen waited. If only he would say something that would ease her of this pain, this humiliation of feeling as she did toward a man who might regard her merely as a friend! She thought he might be interested in her; he had been there almost every evening since his return. But she did not know. What suspense lovers bear when the whole tittering world knows the truth they dare not believe.
George started to smoke, tilted his chin up, expelled a twin bugle of smoke from his nostrils, narrowed his eyes and stared into the immensity of the night. He was very handsome posed like this, and knew it.
Men are much more presumptuously vain than women. They can be vain with no preparation, in their shirt sleeves, with a three days’ stubble of beard on their faces and no hair at all on their heads. Their vanity seems to be a sort of rooster-tail instinct, with which they have been endowed so that they may do the work of the world and waste no time primping. It is an illusion, of course, this physical egotism, but the queer thing is that it is an illusion of them shared by most women. So they get away with it. And few of them ever know how purposefully and sardonically they are afflicted by Nature with homeliness.
On the other hand, when you get down to the psychological facts, I doubt if women are vain at all. They may be beautiful, but even at that they have so little confidence in their beauty that the last one of them must finance her assurance with all the make-believe art of loveliness. I suppose she has discovered that it is not beauty that wins the lover, but it is the deliberate proclamation she thus makes to him of her charms. And this is no illusion. For the history of that grotesque sex is that the average man will pass a naturally beautiful woman every time to pay his court to a painted, powdered and puffed woman who is not nearly so good-looking, if you washed her face and buttoned her up to the neck-line of modesty.
Here was Helen, for example, seated beside this young man, all whiteness and sweetness, eyes so blue that even in this moonlit darkness they showed like sunlit skies, lips pink, parted like the petals of a rose, teeth like pearls glistening between—the very emblem of loveliness; and yet she was in an anguish of uncertainty, lest he did not and never would care for her. I don’t know—this may be one of the scurvy tricks Nature plays on women to keep them humble. If so, it is not the only one. I admire the achievements and beauties of Nature as much as any one, but I must say from first to last her methods appear to me unscrupulous.
The silence had grown oppressive. Helen made some slight movement. She probably clasped her hands and squeezed her patience. It was hard to be omitted so long from his thoughts. The rustle she made, faint as it was, recalled him, as he let her know with a glance.
“I was just thinking, Helen, what a sorry little runt of a town this is,” he said, lifting his chin a trifle higher over the little runt of a town.
There was a slight pause. You must have a moment in which to adjust yourself to the incredible, especially when you have not been thinking about anything so far removed.
“Shannon?” she asked in an exclamatory tone.
“Yes; it is. You can’t imagine how it looks to me after two years away from it, how it compares with the big places I have seen—dried up, sun-baked, no atmosphere, no culture.”
She said nothing. What can you say when you hear a man blaspheming the very cradle where he was rocked in infancy. Besides, the contempt seemed to include her. She was a part of it, and she loved it.
“I saw a handsome plant of some sort blooming in a tin bucket on Mrs. Flitch’s front porch the other day. That’s what I mean,” he went on.
“But what do you mean?” she asked, regarding him vaguely.
“Well, the bucket was tinware, as I said, and published on it, still in red letters, was the red label of a superior shortening.” He laughed.
“She is so fond of flowers,” Helen expounded gravely.
His eyes snickered at her. “But the bucket,” he exclaimed, “the tin bucket, the old tin bucket with the red label—with a gardenia blooming in it. Naïve, I’ll admit, but about as appropriate as sticking an ostrich plume over the kitchen sink.”
Helen made a hasty mental inventory of the Adams flower pots and thanked heaven they were correct.
“The people here do not think; they merely gossip,” he went on. “They have no ideas, no purely mental conceptions. They do not know what is going on in the mind of the world, how men’s views of life are changing and broadening.”
She did not follow him, but she felt the wind of the world beneath her wing.
“Two years here made no difference. You don’t grow. You don’t develop. But away in a university, where your business is to get what’s going and learn to think, two years change a man. I am a stranger here now. My own father and mother do not know me.”
“Oh, George, yes, they do!” she exclaimed consolingly.
Then she caught his eye and perceived that he was in no need of consolation. He was boasting, prouder than otherwise of being this stranger. “It’s a fact; they make me feel like a whited sepulcher,” he complained.
“But you don’t,” she exclaimed loyally, but really in great trepidation lest he might be this awful thing.
“Of course not,” he returned, pleased to have excited her anxiety. “But what would my father think if he knew I am interested in socialism, that my best friends in the university are radicals?”
She was not competent to express an opinion. She was not skilled in politics.
“And what would my mother think if she knew that I no longer accept the Scriptures literally as she does, as you all do in this town; that I know the Bible to be fragments of history and tradition, much of it mythical, the priestly literature of the Jews, gathered from dreams and hearsay, and interpreted to control the lives and liberties of men.”
“Oh, George! you must not say such things. You are a member of the church. I remember the Sunday morning when you were baptized.”
“A public bath! And there is no ‘the Church,’ Helen; did you know that—unless it’s the world; that’s the big church,” said this grand young man, delivered from the faith of his fathers.
This was awful. She stared at him through tears, but not with any shrinking; rather her heart yearned toward him. There is no doubt about this—all women, however young, have wings and a sort of clucking mind, spiritually speaking.
He was moved by the sight of these tears to a loftier, transient mood of himself. He turned so as to face her, seized her hand, bent his brows upon her in a strained, long look. It was powerful, this gaze. She trembled. Her hand became icy in his hot palm. He tightened his clasp upon it.
“Listen, Helen,” in the deep bass tones of a terrific emotion, “I wish you to know me as I am. I would not take advantage of a girl like you. I will keep nothing from you. It is necessary if—if my hopes are realized.” He left her in this suspense while he bowed his head and struggled to stem his tide. “I am not a good man,” he began. It was the opening sentence of a proclamation, not a confession, as if he had said: “I have a cloven foot and am proud of it.” “But I have my convictions, and no man on God’s green earth is more faithful to his convictions.”
She was holding her breath, only letting it out when she could hold it no longer in a soft sigh, and taking in another for the next sigh. If you are doing it for exercise you call it “deep breathing.”
“And I have my ideals,” he added impressively.
She was relieved. If he was not an entirely good man, he could not be a bad one; he had “convictions” and he had “ideals.” What more could she ask?
“For example, I believe in the freedom of love,” he announced, and waited for this shocking piece of news to take effect.
The effect was marvelous. Her cheeks bloomed scarlet. Nature flung a wreath of palest pink upon her forehead—only for an instant; then this aurora of love’s emotion faded. “I am afraid I don’t know much about love,” she said faintly, lowering her eyes before his gaze.
He leaned back, gratified. He had her secret; but she had not got his meaning. The dear little innocent! He was tempted to kiss her.
This was really the case. She had not recognized the phrase. There was no use for it in Shannon. The worst thing she had ever heard was Sammy Duncan swearing at the cat. Her reading had been sternly censored. Mrs. Adams took no morning paper, “on account of Helen”; a magazine, yes; and there were Scott’s novels. These had been the girl’s text books of love. She had never even read the Song of Solomon. Mrs. Adams had forbidden her this richer scriptural food. “You won’t understand it,” the mother had said. And Helen obediently skipped it when she turned the pages of her Bible. She had secretly wondered why Solomon was in the Bible anyway. He was not a proper person, if one believed the preacher, and one must do that. Neither was David all he should have been by all accounts. But here she veered again and merely learned her Psalms, making no inquiries into the author’s private life, which was very ladylike of her. In short, brought up according to a standard of innocence which amounted to a deformity, at this moment she was stripped of every weapon by which she might have defended herself against an iniquitous doctrine.
George decided not to go too fast with his teaching on this subject, for he was determined that she should learn it and accept it. He kissed her hand instead and told her that she was all there was of love so far as he was concerned.
CHAPTER VI
From this time their affair progressed with reeling swiftness. Helen assumed an air of independence, as if she had suddenly come into possession of a private fortune. This is ever the effect of riches upon the meekest of us. She was now a lovely young insurrection in her mother’s house. She had opinions and expressed them boldly in opposition to those of her mother.
This had never happened before. Mrs. Adams was astonished, but she conformed to the natural order of parents. She abdicated, merely trailing clouds of futile protests as she descended, also after the manner of parents. You may manage a son in love by putting the financial brakes on him; but you can do literally nothing with a daughter in love, because her sense of responsibility is purely devotional and sentimental. She will risk a husband because she will not be obliged to support him. This is the difference, which she may discover afterwards does not exist. But she thinks it does, which comes to the same thing.
If you are a girl you cannot stir up any great issue. Helen simply made those within her reach. For one thing she decided to wear “pink.”
“But blue is your color,” Mrs. Adams objected.
“But it is not one of my principles, mother. I am tired of blue. I have worn it all my life as a rabbit wears one kind of skin. I’m human. I can wear any color.”
And she did. She tried every shade of the rainbow that summer. She was extravagant.
“Helen, where are your economies?” Mrs. Adams exclaimed, as if she referred to certain necessary fastenings on the feminine character.
This was a day in August, when Helen wanted yet another hat and frock.
“They were never mine; they were yours, mother,” was the unfeeling reply. “I want the dress and the hat.”
“You have had two hats this season.”
“This one then will make three.”
Clothes had become her obsession, a silent way she had of extorting admiration from George.
“Well, if this keeps up I cannot afford to send you away to school this fall,” Mrs. Adams told her.
“I don’t want to go away to school. I am tired of being just taught. I want to do my own learning,” Helen informed her.
And when you consider how simple she was, this was a rather profound thing to say. The desire to chase our own knowledge is as old as Eve. But from then until now it has led to a sort of independent, sweating self-respect. We pay the highest price of all for it, as Helen was destined to learn—among other things. But I reckon it is worth it, if anything is worth what we pay for the experience by which life unfolds.
Mrs. Adams was not crushed by this flare of ingratitude. She was simply confirmed in her suspicions.
Meanwhile Mr. Cutter, Senior, was also confirmed in his suspicions. Young George informed him early in August that he just about had enough of the university; he believed the wisest thing for him to do under the circumstances was to settle down to business. He did not name the circumstances, but by this time everybody knew what they were, including Mr. Cutter.
“You are of age—your own man; the decision rests with you,” he had said to George on this occasion, by way of washing his hands of any responsibility, after the cool-headed manner of fathers.
As a matter of fact, he was very well satisfied. Helen Adams was a good girl; pretty; she would eventually inherit some property. Besides, he thought George had better settle early in life, else he might not settle at all.
“I’ve made the decision,” said George, like a man in a hurry. “With the hope of getting a raise in salary soon,” he added, with a note of financial stress in his voice.
“Oh, I guess we could manage that in case of an emergency,” his father replied in the same matter-of-fact tones.
This is the way men deal with one another, even if somewhere behind the dealing deathless love is at stake. And it is not the way women deal with one another. For some reason, when they settle down in their years, and recover the powers of sight according to reason, they are ready to inflict death on love upon the slightest provocation.
Mrs. Adams suddenly and for no apparent cause ceased to speak to Mrs. Cutter. And Mrs. Cutter with no apparent reason began to refer to Helen as “that Adams girl.” The mother of a son is always jealous. She over-estimates him; no matter whom he chooses for a wife, she thinks he might have done better. Mrs. Cutter was free to tell anybody, and did tell quite a number, that she hoped George would marry sometime; but when he did it was natural that she should wish him to choose a girl who would be equal to the position he could give her in the world. George had a future before him. He was no ordinary young man. By these sentiments she left you to infer what she thought of the “Adams girl.” If you ask me, I say she was correct in her opinion, but futilely so.
Mrs. Adams knew that her daughter could not do better in a worldly way than to marry this young man. But when it came to the pinch, she forgot the world and thought anxiously of Helen. She was a good mother. Her instinct, sharpened by years of living in a world where love plays havoc with hopes and happiness, warned her that while George might settle down in business and become eminently successful, she doubted if he could be domesticated in the strictly marital virtues. He had too much temperament. Perhaps this was the way she had of admitting that Helen was a trifle short on temperament, even if she did have a good singing voice. On the other hand, Helen had the awful sanity of seeing things as they are. She had observed this walking mind of her daughter—no wings upon which to carry illusions. How would such a woman adjust herself to a husband who might have recurrent periods of adolescence? She did not know. Therefore she regarded George with a hostile beam in her eye and quit speaking to Mrs. Cutter.
When you consider the seismic disturbances created about them by only two lovers and multiply them by all the other lovers to the uttermost parts of the earth, it is clear that there never can be any lasting peace in this world, though disarmament might be complete, and all nations might pass a law confirming peace and good will. For this is a natural disturbance beyond the diplomacy of diplomats or of confederated congresses to control. It is the perpetual insurrection of life everlasting in the terms of love, which are never peaceful terms.
Some time during this August, probably the latter part, Helen wore her third degree hat and the new frock. This hat lies now in an old trunk above the attic stairs in the house of Helen. I have seen it. A leghorn with a wide floppy brim, stiff, a little askew and out of shape, as you would be yourself if you had lain so long without so much as a breath of wind to stir you. There is a good deal of lace and ribbon on it and a wreath of wild roses. It looks funny, as a hat always does when it is long out of style, or as a love letter reads when you have been married twenty years to the man who wrote it. But with all there remained something gay and confident about this hat, like the wistful smile and sweetness of a girl’s face, as no doubt there remains in the latter those former scriptures of a valorous love.
Helen was standing beside me when I fished up this little ghost of a hat and held it up in the warm light of the attic. “Put it on,” I exclaimed, not meaning to be irreverent.
“No; oh, no,” she said, drawing back. “It would not become me now.”
And it would not, any more than the love letter would have become the sentiments of the poor, tired, old, middle-aged husband who wrote it long ago.
But what I set out to tell when the former Helen’s hat intrigued me was that she went for a walk with George the first time she wore it. Shannon at that time was such a brief little town that you could step out of it into the open country almost at once.
They took the river road, which was not in very good repute with the guardians and parents of Shannon, for no better reason than that it was sanctified by the vows of so many lovers. But what would you have? These lovers require privacy and some fairness of scenery for their business. You may involuntarily publish love on a street corner, but you cannot declare it there. Your very nature revolts at the idea. So does society. You would be arrested for staging a love scene in public. Old people are not reasonable about this. Parental parlor-supervision has produced more unhappy old maids than the homely features of these victims.
When they had come some distance along the road, George drew her arm in his, and they went on in this beatific silence. “Helen,” he said, “if you should say anything, what would you say?”
She looked, caught his red brown eyes smiling down at her and blushed. “Why, I was not going to say anything. I was just thinking,” she answered.
“What?” he insisted.
“How happy I am now, this moment, and—” she halted.
“Well, go on.”
“Well, just how easy it is to be happy. How little it really takes to make happiness,” she answered truthfully.
“Just you and me,” he agreed.
They went on again walking slowly.
“I never loved a girl before,” he informed her, as if they had been discussing this miracle of love in open speech for hours.
She believed him. We always do believe them when they tell us this, because we need so much to keep this happiness which is founded upon the shifting sands of lovers.
“And you, my beautiful one, you do love me?” he asked, suddenly halting and swinging her in front of him.
She laid her hand upon her breast, looked at him through a mist of tears. “Is this love?” she asked, as if her hand covered leaves and blossoms and singing birds.
“Of course it is,” cried her high priest, clasping her and kissing her.
“Are you sure?” she gasped, with another wide look of joyful fear.
“Absolutely!”
“But, George, how can you know for certain, if you’ve never loved before?”
Sometimes I think for every woman love is an alarm bell which rings perpetually to disturb her peace. It really was a staggering question she had asked, and George staggered like a man. “You know what you feel is love, don’t you?” he evaded.
“What I feel is terror and happiness.”
“Well, that’s love for you. This is love for me,” he exclaimed, kissing her again. “And to know that you are mine entirely, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
The conversation of lovers in fiction rarely tallies with what they actually say to each other in real life. I have read the dialogue of many a brilliant courtship in a novel, but never as an eavesdropper or observer have I known two people in love to utter a single sentence which was sensible or that even escaped absurdity, if you repeated it along with other gossip you have to tell. And yet it is very important, this primer talk, these watching eyes of lovers who place the profoundest significance upon the most trivial act, or even the wavering of a glance between them.
I merely say this in passing, as a challenge to the reader, who may feel a trifle let down, disappointed at the above record of what took place between George and Helen on that day. What I have written is the artless truth of love, not the fabricated philosophy of love, because there is no such philosophy. Love is a state of being beyond our academic powers to expound. It exists, it functions amazingly and that is all we know about it or ever will know about it, the passion-mongers and biologists to the contrary, notwithstanding. They shed no light on this phenomenon, only upon the obvious material results. They do in truth obscure it by gratifying your desire, dear reader, to indulge vicariously in something not suitable to the proper furnishing of your elegant mind.