This is the only kind of modesty of which men are capable. If one of them went out with this look of neighing valor on his face he would be arrested, of course, because it is such a perfectly scandalous expression. But if a maid walks abroad with love published in her eyes and on her very lips, you are moved to reverence, because it is a sort of piety which seems to sanctify her.
He bent lower over his task, shot the lever down with a bang, struck the pedal harshly and rhythmically—made a noise, implying that he was and had been, without interruption, wholly engrossed with this business.
“Remember her, George?” came his father’s voice like a shot out of a clear sky.
“Who?” asked George, instantly on his guard.
“The girl that came in just now.”
“I didn’t notice. Who was she?”
“Helen Adams.”
“Never should have recognized her.” This was the truth. He had recognized only loveliness, not the maiden name of it.
“Last time you saw her she was a long-legged, saucer-faced youngster, wearing her hair plaited and tied with a blue ribbon, I reckon.”
“That’s the way I remember little Helen,” George admitted, grinning.
“Two years make a lot of difference in a girl of that age. Pretty, ain’t she?”
The young man did not answer. He was suddenly and unaccountably annoyed. When your whole mind is concentrated on a girl, she becomes your religion and you do not care to enter into a doctrinal discussion of this religion with another man, not even your old, gray-haired father, because she has become the sacred silence of your own soul, no matter what or who she was yesterday, nor even if you never had so much as a twinge of soul until this moment. You practically invent your soul then and there out of the joy and daylight of your youth, because it is the only place suitable for such a creature to occupy. Let Moses and the prophets stand aside! This is your pagan period of vestal virgins; not that you know it, but it is.
Mr. Cutter stood up, produced a heavy gold watch, studied the face of it, grinned, jerked his coat down and around, buttoned one button of it by the hardest work and reached for his hat. “Well, George, I guess you’ll finish before you quit,” he said.
This was a hint. The son took it. “All right, sir. I’ll be along about midnight,” he answered good-naturedly, at the same time making a wry face.
“Oh, you’ll probably get in before suppertime. The work will come easier in a day or two,” the father retorted as he stalked out.
He was scarcely out of sight before the cashier, teller and bookkeeper followed in quick procession.
George was now alone. He changed his scene instantly, as most people do when they are left alone. He straightened up, started smoking, moved directly into the current of the electric fan, folded his arms and thought profoundly, his head lifted, eyes fixed in a noble gaze, as if on no particular object; a heroic figure, blowing volumes of smoke through his nose.
What a young man thinks in this mood may be imagined, but it never can be known. And the writer does not live with the wisdom or grace to translate his deep, singing dumbness into words.
Presently he went back to his task, working now with swiftness and concentration, as if his whole future depended upon finishing what he was doing in the shortest possible time. He finished in thirty minutes, disappeared into the rear of the bank and reappeared five minutes later through the side door. He was brushed, groomed and freshened to the last degree of elegance. His homespun fitted him with an air. He stepped with a long, prideful stride—and got no farther than the corner of the next street. Here he halted, looking all possible ways at once—nobody in sight; plenty of people, you understand, but not the girl. He had seen her pass this corner.
He waited. Wherever she had gone, she should be returning by this time. This one and that one hailed him as they went by. A fellow he knew stopped and engaged him in conversation. He was annoyed. Suppose the girl appeared, how was he to escape from this ass? The ass finally took in the situation and moved on, looking back as he turned the next corner.
George looked at his watch—after five! She certainly should be going home by this time. Everybody in sight was on his way home. Suppose he had missed her; suppose she had gone around the other way! Jumping cats, what a fool he had been, wasting time here! He started off, walking rapidly but still with that magnificent, stiff-legged strut.
Some one came alongside, caught his arm and whirled him half around. “Where you going in such a hurry, Cutter?”
This was Charley Harman, a friend, but this was no time for friends to be butting in.
“Home,” said George briefly, by way of implying that he was not inviting company home with him.
“So am I, but I never walk fast when I’m going home. Let’s get a drink in here”; halting as they came opposite a drug store.
“Take one for me,” Cutter said with a short laugh and moved on so hurriedly that Harman took the hint.
Nothing else happened until he reached the place where Wiggs Street opened on the square. He stared down the flower-blooming vista of this street. He could see men watering their front yards and the women watering their flowers. He could hear the boom of his father’s voice half a block down, talking to some one in the next yard. He saw Mrs. Adams sitting, large and amorphous, in a rocking-chair on her front porch. He supposed that she also was waiting for Helen.
Then he saw her approaching from the other end of the street, not distant, but divided from him by the eyes of all these people sitting and puttering around in their front yards. He thought she walked as if she were sad or good or something. And he had this consolation, as she finally turned in and went up the steps of the Adams’ cottage, he was sure that she had seen him. He was sure that their eyes had met. He also observed when he came down into the street to his own home that she had not stopped on the porch with her mother, but had gone directly inside.
CHAPTER III
When you are in love, everything is important and everything is secret. You become a consummate actor and liar in vain, because the whole world knows your secret almost as soon as you do.
That evening at the dinner table, George was so gay, so full of himself, so ready to laugh and make a joke that Mrs. Cutter was beside herself with pride and happiness.
“He is such a good boy, so unconscious of his good looks and his intellect,” she told Mr. Cutter when they were alone together after dinner.
“Intellect!” said Mr. Cutter in that tone of voice.
“Yes; you know how smart he is; but he is not the least conceited, just light-hearted and happy as he should be at his age. I say it shows he is a good boy.”
“Where is he now?” Mr. Cutter wanted to know.
The question appeared to Mrs. Cutter to be irrelevant. She said she did not know; why?
“Nothing,” answered her husband.
She said he was around somewhere, probably in his room. She went to the bottom of the stairs. “Georgie!” she called.
No answer. Well, then he must be out front somewhere, and went to prove that he was. But she could not find him. Then she came back and wanted to know of Mr. Cutter what difference did it make, if they did not know where he was?