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 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.

[8]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[9] 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.[10] 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[11] 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[12] 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[13] 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[15] 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.

[16]“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[17] 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[18] 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[19] 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[20] 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[21] 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[22] 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[23] 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?”