And Helen went home, let herself into her fine house, took off her
things and sat down before the library fire.
She really had imported a maid, an ex-modiste of mature years, who
would be of service to her in the choosing of her clothes and dressing
herself properly. She could hear this woman now moving about in the
next room getting out her things. She was practicing dressing for the
evening, because now she had a purpose and a future in view which some
years hence might involve toilettes and magnificence.
It certainly does change a woman to lose her husband. It buries her
or brings her out. I suppose if Helen’s husband had been properly
and providentially parted from her by death, she might have retired
sorrowfully into her widow’s state and effaced herself or devoted
herself quite differently to good works. But the passing of George
Cutter left no such sanctities to dignify her. On the contrary she had
been abandoned on account of her virtues and stupid devotion to home.
She was like Job. She held on to her integrity and was sustained, as he
was, by her conceit.
But unlike Job, who suffered considerable financial losses during
this period, she had come into a considerable estate. She had been
paid off by this deflecting husband. Money will sustain your pride
and courage as an outraged woman when mere faith in God may leave you
exalted in the ditch of every worldly misfortune. Helen had remained
the proper resurrection period flat on her back in bed, not from
histrionic design; but she was actually able to rise on the third day.
My belief is that everything in the Scriptures is true, if you adjust
yourself to the way it is true. Thus, if you will not waste your vital
forces in emotional dissipations of grief when overtaken by sorrow or
humiliation, if you are really willing to live again normally, three
days down will usually put you on your feet with sufficient courage
and strength for the performance. It is no use to send for the doctor.
In cases of this kind a physician is a sort of psychic drug you take,
which requires a repetition of his soothing presence. Thrice fortunate
are they who dare to discover that the wings of adversity are the
strongest wings upward in human affairs.
Helen, penguin bred, had acquired this serene flying power. She had
been absolved from a depressing devotion to an ignoble man. She came
out of her travail informed with pride, the cold fury which good women,
scorned, feel, and with a determination to have what she had always
wanted and could not have as a wife.
She leaned back in her chair before the library fire, clasped her
hands over her head and looked anticipatingly at the ceiling, a queer
expression on this formerly merely dutiful woman’s face, like a song in
her eyes, like faith that smooths the brow, like a hope that lifted and
sweetened the corners of her mouth; there were no shadows of fear to
dim this gentle effulgence of eyes, lips and brow.
To be loved does make a woman happy, but it never endows her with her
own peace, only protection. There is a difference, if you know how to
read it, between love and hope in her face. The former is conferred and
may be taken away: the latter is an act of faith and cannot be dimmed
or destroyed. Helen had this look of “anticipation,” as some physicians
call it, a mark which Nature confers upon women like a meek distinction.
Helen finally went to her room to practice her evening toilette. At
five o’clock she was dressed and standing before the mirror studying
this cream-colored frock of crêpe, that clung to her figure like
long folded wings. It was not “trimmed.” She insisted upon a certain
primness, as good women do who have no sense of style.
Some women live and die so virginal that they never know why other
women wear a rose, or display the sparkle of a jewel upon their breast.
If they put on these invitations to love it is merely copying the
universal feminine custom. They do not know how to mean the rose or
catch the sparkle of the jewel in their manner.
Helen wore no invitations. She was simply anxious to look the mistress
of this establishment, never to be mistaken for a dutiful servant. The
horror she had felt of this impending fate since shortly after her
marriage, when she knew that she was not to have children, and the long
sentence she had actually served in this capacity rankled.
A bell rang somewhere in the house. She paid no attention, since
she had no visitors and the front door bell never rang except when
something was delivered.
A moment later there was a tap on her door and the maid entered. “Some
one to see you, Mrs. Cutter,” she announced.
“Who is she?”
“A man.”
“Not Read?” referring to one of the workmen.
“No, Mrs. Cutter; this is a gentleman. I left him in the parlor.”
Helen frowned.
“He is somebody. I am sure of that. And he said that you knew him,” the
woman explained.
“That I knew him? Then he--why, it must be Mr. Arnold,” Helen said.
Arnold was the only man in Shannon who might have any reason for
calling on her.
The woman hesitated, gave her mistress a fluttering glance as if some
sort of gibbering, peeping thought had suddenly popped up in her mind.
“This is not Mr. Arnold,” she said. “I think he is a stranger. Shall I
tell him you are not at home?”
“I will see him; but hereafter, Charlotte, I am not at home to any one
who does not give his name.”
“Yes, Mrs. Cutter,” Charlotte answered meekly, closing the door behind
her. Then she glanced again at the crumpled bill she held in her hand,
thrust it into her pocket, wrinkled her nose, sniffed and discreetly
disappeared.
Helen stood for a moment with her back to the mirror, as we all do
sometimes when we cannot bear to read in our own faces the fear we have
in our hearts. Since that night six months ago, when Cutter had left
her, she had received no word from him. She had sternly repressed every
thought of him. But never for a day had she been free from the vague
fear that he might return. She no longer loved him; she despised him.
Yet the old habit of submission--if he should return, how could she
find the courage to send him away, if he asserted his claim upon her
as his wife? She must do it. Her plans were made for a different life
altogether. But suppose now, when she was on the point of realizing
her dearest hope, this man waiting for her in the parlor should be her
husband?
She came slowly into the hall and advanced toward the open door of
the parlor. Reproaches, words inconceivable to her until this moment,
trembled upon her lips. This was her house; she had built it for her
own peace and happiness. She would not share it, not for the space of
a breath, with a man so depraved that he could betray his own wife,
abandon her--and so on and so forth as she advanced, halted, and
finally came steadily up the long hall, pale with fury, eyes blazing
blue flames, convinced by her own fears that this man was Cutter. She
was ready to deal with him according to the natural vocabulary of an
outraged woman.
For the gentlest woman, wronged, may suddenly change into a virago
after you have made sure that she will endure anything. But if she ever
breaks, it is like any other form of hysteria, incurable. She will be
subject to verbal frenzies upon the slightest provocation so long as
she lives.
For one instant Helen stood upon the threshold of her parlor,
speechless with amazement. Shaded lights cast a soft glow from above
over the room, where the faintest outline of castles showed between
shadowy trees in the wall paper. And tufted, spindle-legged chairs,
covered with blue-and-golden brocades, flashed like spots of sunlight
in the pale gray gloom.
The visitor was undoubtedly enjoying these effects. He sat, the elegant
figure of a man, on the sofa beyond the circle of light cast from the
reading lamp behind him. His knees were crossed. He was working one
foot musingly after the manner of a man pleased with his reflections.
And he was smiling--not a smile you could possibly understand, unless
you are familiar with the outlaw mind of certain rich men. But, in
case you are scandalously psychic, you might have inferred that he was
smiling at these dim castles in Helen’s wall paper as a prospective
tourist in the romantic lands, where passing rivers sing to these
castles and where scenes, centuries old, are laid for lovers.
He was so much absorbed in whatever he was trailing with his thoughts
that he had not seen Helen when she appeared in the doorway, but almost
at once some sense warned him of her presence.
His startled glance caught her. He was on his feet at once. “Oh, Mrs.
Cutter! This is indeed good of you. I was afraid you would not see me,”
he exclaimed, hurrying to meet her.
“Mr. Shippen!” she gasped, with no marks of pleasure in the look she
gave him. It was strictly interrogative, unfeelingly so.
“Yes,” he returned hastily, interpreting her manner. “I came down to
look after the sale of that mining property. Couldn’t resist dropping
in on my way back to town this afternoon. Wanted to see you.”
She moved past him, sat down some distance beyond and fixed her wide
blue gaze upon him.
He followed, not quite sure about sitting, feeling somehow that she
might be going to keep him on his feet. Still he risked it and chose
a chair politely removed from her immediate neighborhood, which was
chilly, he could not tell whether or not from design.
“You wish to see me?” she asked after a pause.
The question disconcerted him. He flushed, recovered himself and showed
his teeth in a handsome smile. “Yes, do you mind?” he retorted.
“But what do you want to see me about?” she insisted, as if this must
be a matter of business, a painful business, since she knew that he was
associated with her husband.
He snickered nervously, recovered his gravity at once, warned by the
tightening of her lips. “When are you coming to New York?” he asked
suddenly.
She drew back from this adder of a question. “Is this why you came--you
were sent?” she barely breathed the words, laying a hand like a
confession upon her breast.
“I was not sent,” he returned quickly. “You understand?”
She signified that she did with a nod of her head. She released him for
one moment from her steady gaze; then she fixed her eyes on him again
with the same interrogative suspense, as much as to say, “Well, then,
if you were not sent, why are you here?” She could not sense a meaning
that would have been plain to another woman.
It was the stupidity of goodness, he decided, and was charmed by a
certain experimental fear of her. He must proceed cautiously. That
was the delightful part of it, to be obliged to watch his step in an
affair of this kind. He had no doubt of his ultimate success--a married
woman, abandoned by her husband. He knew all about that by inference
from Cutter. Cutter was too brazen in the conducting of his “bachelor”
apartments not to feel perfectly safe.
He supposed there had been some sort of financial adjustment between
him and his wife. He knew very well that the situation in New York
would not last. Cutter was simply the profitable investment a certain
beautiful and brilliant woman had chosen, who had the record of a
sentimental rocket among the sporting financiers of the East. The first
time he came a cropper in the markets, she would abandon him with the
swiftness and insolence that would make the fellow’s head swim. Then
Cutter would return to his wife. They always did.
Sometimes he had regretted not having a wife laid by himself as a sort
of permanent stake, domestically speaking. If only he did not feel
such revulsion toward the candor and monotonous details of actual
married life. His decadent delicacy would be offended by the squalor of
licensed intimacy with a woman. “Squalor” was the word he invariably
used in discussing the psychology of marriage.
Still, he might marry Helen Cutter. She would never be in his way. She
was not in her husband’s way now. And she was singularly refreshing
to his jaded fancy. He had been so corrupt that, by revulsion rather
than repentance, invincible virtue in a woman attracted him. Besides,
it would be a good joke on Cutter to lose his wife--such a wife--while
he was philandering in New York. He had always entertained a secret
contempt for the fellow--a bounder who did not know how to bound; a
gambler with the nerve of a financial adventurer. New York teemed with
men of his type.
They had exchanged some commonplace remarks while he hit this line of
reflection in the high places, having gone over it many times before.
That is to say, he offered the remarks--on the weather, on the growth
of Shannon, and more particularly upon the current aspects of the war.
Helen’s contributions to these topics had been brief. He comprehended
perfectly that she was still in suspense as to the meaning of his visit.
He rose presently, took his chair, advanced with a friendly air and sat
down near her, potentially within reach. And was amused to see that she
still regarded him as from a great distance. “But you have not answered
my question,” he said, going back to that. “When are you coming to New
York to live? Thought you would have been settled there long before
this time.”
“I shall live here.”
“Never in New York?”
“No.”
“But you are not planning to neglect us entirely! Cutter would not
stand for that. You will be coming up occasionally, of course,” he
insisted, smiling.
“No; this is my home.”
Gad, couldn’t she even squirm a bit? Why didn’t she blaze forth at
Cutter or cover the situation with a few lies? He wondered how it would
feel to live with a woman who hit the truth on the head every time, as
if the truth was a nail to be driven in, even if it pierced your vitals.
Shippen swept a complimentary glance around the room as if in reply
to her last remark. “Well, you have certainly made it a beautiful
home,” he said, feeling by the growing emergency of the question in
her eyes that if he did not get off on another tack, she might force
an explanation of his presence here which he was not ready to make
until he had won more of her confidence. “This room is marvelous,” he
went on, “sedate and feminine. It escapes the austerity of being a
noble room by a miracle. What is it? Piety with a flash of color, I
should say. However did you think of such an effect? And how did you
accomplish it?”
“I did not do it. I have learned something,” she said, off her guard
for the first time, following his eyes about this room as if she
accompanied his thoughts.
“What have you learned?” he asked, smiling.
“To buy what I want--not mere things, but taste in the choice of these
things. It is for sale, like any other commodity.”
He laughed, with an appreciative glint of the eye.
“For so long I did not know that taste is the one thing most people
have not got. They only look as if they had it, when in fact they have
purchased it. You buy it from your tailor. The woman whose clothes
please you pays the modiste who makes them much more for her taste than
for her work. You can buy any kind of taste, good, bad or indifferent;
but nearly everybody buys it.”
What she said was not interesting; but he was interested that she could
think it; it showed that she had a mind, which he had doubted. He hoped
she would not develop too much along this line. The perfect woman, in
his opinion, should have loveliness, health, and only a rudimentary
intelligence. He was very tired, indeed, of the rhinestone sparkle of
feminine wit.
“It is the same with the building and furnishing of a house,” Helen
showed up again. “They hire an architect and a decorator. And then
they hire a landscape gardener. And when the whole scene inside and
out is laid, they live in it as if they had planned it and achieved
it. But they have bought every line, every shadow, and all the
perspective--things that you feel and see, but cannot touch. It is not
the house, but the idea it suggests for which you pay most. I had my
own ideas, but I employed professionals to produce them. This is what
I have learned,” she concluded, “not to cobble my own ideas. I simply
told those men what I wanted.”
“I should have liked to hear your instructions,” he said.
“They were short. I told the architect that I wanted an honorable
looking house, not a grand one.”
He nodded, appreciatively, and waited. Some subtle change had taken
place in her mind toward him during this last moment. There was a
compelling power in her expression, as if now she wished to hold his
attention. She had a purpose. He became uneasy and curious.
“And I told the man who was to choose the furniture and do the inside
decorations that I wanted a home, a mild kind of place with some
sadness in it, like the heart of a mother; and rifts of brightness in
it, like the face of a mother when she smiles; and everything very fine
to honor her, the mother, you understand, in the eyes of her children.”
Shippen’s agreeable attention changed for one instant to a blank stare;
then he dropped his eyes as she went on with this intimate account of
what she wanted her home to be. Mother! And she had no children. The
term had for him a sort of embarrassing animal significance. It was not
discussed this way in polite circles, even by women who were mothers.
You were supposed not to know it or to forget that this sparkling being
with whom you were conversing, or maybe flirting, had passed through
the experiences of an accouchement. His feelings suffered a revulsion
toward her. But she held him as if she meant that he should carry away
with him the dimensions, the waist measure, the countenance and the
germinating biography of this house.
“I told him,” she went on, still referring to the decorator, “that I
wanted a home inside, where children would look as if they belonged in
it, and not as if they had escaped from their own hidden quarters--soft
places in it, you know, where a baby could just fall asleep, like the
sofa over there,” indicating with a nod a wide, low, old-fashioned soda
shrouded in shadows.
He cast an embarrassed glance at it. His feelings were that a babe
should be kept concealed until it was a child of an age to be decently
exposed and confessed. Some men are like that, and a few women. Their
parent instincts have decayed.
“And when they become grown sons and daughters,” she continued, taking
no notice of his discomfiture, “there should be wide, happy spaces in
here for their joys--a house for lovers and weddings.”
He waited. Apparently she had finished. He raised his eyes and saw her
flushed, animated. “But why should you want such a house?” he asked,
not that it made any difference now what she wanted. So far as he was
concerned the spell of her charm was broken. His one desire was to
escape this disenchantment and to find out what was in the wind for
Cutter. He clung to that joke.
“Because all the time I was a wife I wanted this house, and I longed
for children. Now I can have them.”
Shippen stood up. She remained seated, eyes lifted with that rapt look
fixed upon him.
“Did you say--children, Mrs. Cutter?” he stammered.
“Yes; now I shall have children,” she repeated.
“Well, all right; but under the circumstances, it is a little unusual;
don’t you think so?” he said, the compass of his mind already pointed
toward the door.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed, and was evidently about to launch into
this feature of the case when she saw that he was about to take his
departure. This reminded her of something. “But what was it you wished
to see me about, Mr. Shippen?” she asked, with a return of that vague
anxiety in the tones of her voice.
“Why, merely to resume a pleasant acquaintance, I suppose,” he answered
politely.
“Oh.”
“Thank you for receiving me,” he said. “Can I do anything for you in
New York?”
“No,” she answered quickly, but with no shade of embarrassment to
indicate that she knew he referred to her husband.
He took his departure politely and formally, but he had all the
sensations of flight. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed the moment he was
out of the house. “To think I was on the point of letting myself in for
her! What is a woman, anyhow? Some confounded provision Nature makes
against her own defeat--a snare laid for us, nothing else. They have
their own mind and purposes, contrary to our mind and purposes, whether
they are good or bad. Something infernally tricky about the bad ones:
something infernally permanent about the good ones. They all want to
set, like hens,” he snorted. “No wonder Cutter kicked out. Don’t blame
him. She’s crazy, crazy as a loon, if she is not worse, and of course
she isn’t that. Well, the joke is on me, not Cutter. And mum’s the word
when I get back to New York. Children! Gad, she must be planning an
orphanage. Wonder if he knows what she’s doing with his money. Wonder
if this town is on to the racket.”
He halted under the first street light and looked at his watch; barely
time to meet Arnold at the hotel. They were to dine together and
discuss the sale of the mining property which was to be handled through
the Shannon National Bank. He quickened his step. He must get off on
the eight o’clock express for New York. He had received a shock, a
revulsion of his romantic emotions. Something distasteful had happened
to him. He wanted to get away and recover from this nausea.
We all excite a certain amount of interest among our fellow men,
not because we are interesting, perhaps, but because we live, and
to that extent are in a degree mysterious. But when suddenly a man
or woman becomes aware of a silent and persistent attention, it is
disconcerting, because in secret, at least, he knows he has done enough
to queer himself, if it should be known or even suspected. He has,
however, the usual human confidence in the deferred publication of
these deeds until the day of all revelations, when the Final Courts sit
to judge all men. At this end of time it will not matter, because of
the leveling effects of knowing all men even as they know him.
In my opinion this will be a day of gasping astonishments among the
dusty saints and sinners hurriedly summoned so long after they shall
have forgotten even their virtues, much less their sins, which in
the flesh we manage to bury beyond painful recollection as soon as
possible. But now and then we get a whiff of what will happen, when
a great and good man in the community defaults and absconds with the
church funds. Meanwhile the news that still travels fastest is the news
of some one’s business which is nobody else’s business.