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[63] 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.
[64]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[65] 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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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[69] 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.
[70]“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.
[71]“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[72] 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.