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.
No answer.
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.”
“Why are you crying?”
“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.