In 1913, Shannon had grown amazingly. The square was now a “plaza,” surrounded by handsome brick business houses. There were two or three factories on the outskirts of the town. The little old churches that used to be filled on Sabbath mornings had given place to fine churches with stained-glass windows, which were greatly reduced in membership. What I mean is that the town was prosperous, and had a beam in its eye. Wiggs Street was completely changed and there was some talk of changing the name to “Cutter Avenue.” But this was not done. Every man has his enemies. There were many pretentious residences now where cottages formerly stood. Some of them had conservatories. Nobody kept potted plants on the front porch, but some of them had got as far as keeping potted cedars on their stone gate posts and a colored man in rubber boots to scrub the front steps. George Cutter, no longer known as “young George” since the death of his father, received much credit for the growth and development of the town. It was Mr. Cutter who had induced[111] certain Eastern capitalists to locate these factories near Shannon. He was more than a prominent citizen at home. He was somebody in New York. He had “influence” in Washington. Otherwise Shannon would never have obtained her hundred-thousand-dollar post office. He carried Shannon County in his pocket, politically speaking, and he kept his congressman in the other pocket, in the same figurative manner.
Five years after he entered the bank, he was occupying the chair and desk on the left side of the door where his father sat when George began his career on the adding machine in the cage. Mr. Cutter, Senior, was still the nominal president, but he had a finer desk and more comfortable, less businesslike chair in the rear of his son. He was now a fat old man, drooling down to a heavy old age. He was merely president from force of habit. He did nothing but watch, with slumberous pride, his son paw the markets, reach out, speculate, risk and win, make a name for himself in the financial world.
But in 1913 all this was ancient history. The young wolf had been just beginning then to get a toothhold. Now he had arrived. He had “interests” in the big corporations. When he became president, after the death of his father, the first[112] thing he did was to sell this small building to a local trust company and build a finer, larger place for his bank. Here he had an office, off the directors’ room in the rear, as magnificent and grave as a sanctuary. And it was so proudly private that there was no spangled glass door leading to it visible to the vulgar public eye. Capitalists and promoters visited him here, but the regular customers of the bank rarely saw him except by accident when he issued from this office, hatted, spatted, coated, carrying a cane hooked over his arm, and stepping briskly across the lobby through the door to where his car stood and shone against the curb. In that case their eyes followed him. And if these eyes belonged to women, of whatever age, they were likely to exclaim, breathe or think, “What a handsome man!”
He was more than handsome, a “presence,” almost a perfect imitation of elegance. He was the kind of man who kept his years under foot. He trod them down with so much swiftness and power in this business of getting on that they had not marked him. His face was smooth, his red hair still opulent, his eyes brilliant, masterful. When he came in or went out or passed by, they were always fixed on something straight ahead, as[113] if you were not there, anxious to catch his glance and have the honor of speaking to him. Probably you wanted to remind him of how well you remembered when he started to work in the old bank. And you were a friend of his father, and had always kept your account in this bank and would continue to do so. But you must be a wheedling, forward old man to get the chance to say such things to him, because your account means nothing to him now, and your good memory only annoys him.
The reason so many men, after they become distinguished or successful, get this habit of looking straight ahead when we are standing ingratiatingly near, wishing to claim acquaintanceship with them in their humbler past, is because they wish to forget this past, and especially you who retain the speaking tongue of it.
George Cutter had outgrown Shannon. Shannon might be proud of him, but it could not be intimate with him. He did not belong there. He was a big town man. You could almost smell Wall Street as he passed you, Williams Street, anyhow, which is only one of the elbows of Wall Street—a notable perfume, I can tell you, of pop-eyed dollars and busy bonds that never rested, but were always being sold again.
[114]Seeing George thus, enhanced by ten additional years, you naturally want to know what changes have taken place in Helen.
Sometimes a slender, fair woman might be seen in Cutter’s limousine, waiting at the curb before the bank. But if you saw her, you scarcely noticed her, because there was nothing distinguishing in her appearance. She always sat very still with her hands folded, her lips closed so tightly that they appeared to be primped, and with her eyes wide open, very blue like curtains drawn before windows, concealing every thought and feeling within. When Cutter came through the door of the bank, stepped quickly forward and swung himself into this car with the air of a man who has not a moment to spare, she always drew a trifle closer into her corner of the seat. Then they slid away noiselessly across the square and out Wiggs Street. Even the chauffeur knew that Mr. Cutter never had a moment to spare and invariably exceeded the speed limit.
No word of greeting was exchanged between this husband and wife—not even a look. She did not so much as unpurse her lips to smile. His arrogant silence implied that he was alone in this car. Yet we must know that it was his wish she should come for him, since she so often did[115] come and wait for him with this look of dutiful patience.
The married relation is not vocative. It tends toward silence and a sort of dreary neutrality, arrived at by years of mutual defeats. It is easier for a man to be agreeable to another woman who is not his wife for the simple reason that he is innocent of this stranger. She knows none of his faults and she has not failed him in anything. And every woman knows that she is instinctively more entertaining to a man who is not her husband, even if she despises this man and truly, patiently loves her husband, because she is under no bond to agree with him nor to avoid his prejudices. There is nothing accusative or immoral in this fact, any more than there is in a momentary change of thought. It is perfectly natural, when you consider how many years they must dwell upon the same common sense of each other.
If the weather was fine, Cutter only stopped long enough to drop Helen at the house. He might tell her he would be late for dinner or he might be late without telling her. Then he was driven at the same spanking, glittering speed to the golf and country club for a foursome previously arranged.
Cutter had imported the idea of this club. As[116] Cadmus introduced letters into Greece, so had he brought golf to the business men of Shannon. Until then middle-aged citizens accepted the sedentary habits of their years and went down to their graves corpulent and muscleless, developing only a little miserliness toward the last or a few crapulous vices. But now these men, grown bald and gray, who had never spent a surplus nickel nor taken more exercise than healthy invalids, hired caddies for fifty cents an hour, and spent recklessly for golf sticks and especially golf stockings and breeches. And they were to be seen any afternoon stepping springily over these links, whacking balls—for the ninth hole at least—with all the reared-back, straddle-legged, arm-swinging genuflections of enthusiastic youth. Missionaries have spent twenty years in the heart of Africa without accomplishing so much healthful good for the savages there. But in that case the idea of course is not to prolong the life of a savage, but to save his soul. Still, Cutter was a successful missionary in this matter of golf, because the souls of the men in Shannon had long been sufficiently enured to the gospel to be saved, if they could be.
As for the women, that was a different matter.[117] Very few people ever worry seriously about the salvation of these milder creatures. Until quite recently they have been so securely preserved, sheltered and possessed that it was actually difficult for a woman to lose her soul by any obvious overt transgression. Even then you could not be sure she had lost it, since she suffered such overwhelming martyrdom for her offense. And we do not know what kind balances may be arranged in the Book of Life for these poor victims of life in the flesh.
There was also a different standard for women in the matter of outdoor exercise, even at so recent a date as this of which I write. They might caper adventuresomely in the open as girls, but the idea of a married woman spreading her feet and swinging her club at a ball on the golf links at Shannon was unthinkable. If they wanted the air, let them go out-of-doors; if they wanted exercise, let them go back indoors and do something.
So Helen never accompanied her husband to the golf links. She always went in the house and did things that would please him, or at least satisfy him when he came home.
They were still living in the house at the end of Wiggs Street. No changes had been made in[118] it, not a stitch had been added to it. It was simply laundered, so to speak, once in so often with a fresh coat of white paint.
But it was not so sparsely settled within as it had been when she came there as a bride.
Two years after Helen’s marriage Mrs. Adams had passed away with no to-do about going at all. She was ill three days, very quietly and comfortably unconscious. Then she had gone to join that highly respectable class of saints in paradise to which no doubt her carpenter husband already belonged. Helen inherited her mother’s estate, which consisted of a few thousand dollars’ worth of securities in her safety box at the bank, the cottage on Wiggs Street and the contents of this cottage. The cottage was promptly sold and, together with the sale of the securities, furnished George with the money for his first successful speculation.
But Helen would not part with the furniture. She had it brought to her own house. When she had distributed it in the rooms, the hall, all available spaces were filled with it. Her father’s portrait, done in crayon, hung above the parlor mantel. Her mother’s portrait, also a crayon, hung on the oppo............