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[51] 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[52] 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.
[53]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[54] 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[55] 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[56] 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. Na?ve, 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.”
[57]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[58] 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.[59] 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[60] 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[61] 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.