The House of Helen

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.


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


 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.


 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


 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


 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


 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.