beginning with the year 1921 many men, who had too swiftly acquired fortunes in the handling of government contracts, began to pass under the rod of investigations concerning such wartime profits. george cutter was one of these. somebody, with a talent for figuring up the cost and sales price of lumber left over from a half-finished training camp for soldiers, discovered that the said george william cutter had failed to turn in one million eight hundred and some odd thousands of dollars due the government. this statement appeared in a new york paper. nothing followed. and nothing was heard of mr. cutter for another year.
then one afternoon in may, of 1922, a corpulent, extremely bald-headed man, with a seamy face and pouched eyes, stood up in the day coach of a train which was pulling into shannon. he reached for his hat in the rack overhead, put it on jauntily, pulled down his vest, which had wrinkled up so often when he sat down and had been pressed so rarely that it remained faintly fluted diagonally across his broad expanse. he[264] squared his shoulders, you may say with a former air, and stepped briskly down the aisle and waited meekly on the platform between the coaches while several people descended at the station. then he came down, and moved off hurriedly.
no one recognized him. misfortune does something to you. it changes your manner, and takes the swagger out of your step, especially if you are the author of your misfortune.
this man walked heavily out wiggs street, looking about him furtively until he came to the cutter residence. then he lifted his eyes and beheld it in utter amazement—a fine, wide-winged, colonial mansion where a cottage had stood when he left shannon five years before.
“i have missed her. she is gone,” he mumbled.
at this moment he caught sight of a small girl, who had already got sight of him and was regarding him curiously from the shade of a lilac bush.
there was a time when he would have strode finely up to the door, rung the bell and inquired for mrs. cutter; but now he was not equal to that display. he had lost his presence. he would get the information he needed from this child after the manner of the class to which he now belonged, the surreptitious class.
[265]“how do you do, my dear,” he said from the pavement to the small lady under the lilac bush.
she stuck a finger in her mouth and continued to regard him.
“who lives here?”
“my muvver,” she answered, not pridefully, but with assurance.
“and what is your name?”
“helen.”
he sat down on the terraced wall and stared so long at the ground that she feared he had forgotten her, and she was not of the age or sex to endure the idea of being forgotten.
“my muvver’s name is helen, too,” she informed him. “and my brover’s name is sammy. what’s yours?”
“mine’s george. ever heard it?” he asked.
she shook her head.
“what is your father’s name?”
“we don’t keep him wiv us,” she explained.
“oh, you don’t? where is he?”
she did not know where this parent was, but she could show him sammy. and off she ran, dark curls flying.
the man watched her. then he fell again to staring at the ground. fervent ejaculations occurred[266] to him, but he uttered not a word. the histrionic had died in him.
he saw a car coming rapidly along the street. when it passed, he would get up and move on. this house, these children made him a stranger and an outcast here as he was everywhere. why had he returned? why had he not accepted the sentence of shame and defeat, slid on down where men rest from honor and hope, that last refuge of complete degradation?
but the car turned into the driveway, covering him with dust as it whirled past, and through the dust he beheld the face of his wife. he came to his feet and followed with a hurried, shuffling step. he was still some distance away when the driver halted before the house, then drove on out of sight.
at this moment helen, who had been about to mount the steps, caught sight of him.
he came on, wondering if she recognized him. it was incredible that she should know him. when you have been defeated, degraded, caught the shadows of prison bars that never lift from before your vision, you do not expect recognition; you only fear it. he feared now, with a sort of truculent impotence, what might be going to happen. still he came on with that courage of[267] mean despair which men still show when they have fallen to the last degree of shameless shame.
their eyes met—hers calm and steady as the horizon of a perfect day, his wavering between doubt and determination.
“helen!”
her lips moved as if speechless words died there.
thus they stood, he at bay, she with the light falling upon her, grave and sweet, not condemning him, seeing in him the answer that love and fate make to such women.
“helen,” he cried again, “are you my wife?”
she lifted her hand in that old gesture to her breast, the same pale look of ineffable goodness which he remembered. then, still looking back, she turned, mounted the steps and entered the door of her house and stood before him as if she waited. she showed against the shadows like the figure of a shrine upon a dark hillside above a dusty road over which pilgrims come and go. they are never moved, these shrines, from age to age. they are altars that do not fall. so are some women. they are the sanctuaries of mankind. it is the fashion to despise them, but they hold the world together.
cutter came slowly up the step, with a flash[268] of life and hope in his face—an ignoble and worthless man made safe in the shelter of a woman’s heart, whose wish was that none should perish who looked to her for comfort. it was not love, but honor that opened the door of her house to him.
