The Squirrel-Cage Part 31

Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which, although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.

She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in the crisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and a.s.sured that all that would be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury's leading caterer.

Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had met with Paul's hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably hired-for-the-occasion n.i.g.g.e.r waiters were very bad form, and belonged to a phase of Endbury's social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.

In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makes.h.i.+ft help in the kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust the carved bal.u.s.trades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as dressing rooms in the evening, answered the 'phone a thousand times, arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss Burgess, gave cut gla.s.s and china its final polish, laid out Paul's evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready--it was five o'clock!

There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no longer put off setting the table.

It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain reeled over the vast quant.i.ty of knives and forks and plates and gla.s.ses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.

They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron--a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, "If I tried as hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to please than St. Peter himself."

"My Aunt Alexandra will be here," said Paul, the humorous side of her speech escaping him.

Lydia set down a tray of gla.s.ses, and broke into open, shaking, hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently light-hearted, mirth put the finis.h.i.+ng touch to a picture that could seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish, att.i.tude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results expected from her efforts.

"I hope very much that everything will go well," he said curtly, turning away. "Our first dinner party means a good deal."

But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten to caution her rattle-brained a.s.sistant that she had already seasoned the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly, beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps. Paul took up sorrily his wife's rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But there was no laughter in his heart.

Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such fiasco had ever resulted from anything he _had_ been responsible for, he thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was eating his salad with the latter implement. "Lydia has no right to act so," he thought.

The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with her on exciting occasions.

"Your wife is a beauty," said the street-railway magnate, looking down the disorganized table toward her.

Paul received this a.s.surance with the proper enthusiastic a.s.sent, but something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. "I have _some_ rights," thought the young husband. "Lydia owes me something!" He never before had been moved to pity for himself.

Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served, unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself, wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance.

She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of things, and darkness and quiet.

After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She looked at him with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless voice: "The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee," she said. "There isn't any, I remember now."

He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.

There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her place by the piano, a.s.suming carefully the correct position. Lydia watched her balance on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, lean forward a little, throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life and tragic betrayal.

A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: "I couldn't make out what it was all about--never can understand a song--but, say! can't she put it all over the soprano that sings in the First Methodist."

His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it: "Why, that is how we are living, all of us!"

The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician pa.s.sed on to the rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention mocked her with its futility.

She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.

When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time, their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost intolerably affected before the end of the selection.

"That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that selection?" he went on, leaning forward.

The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen."

"Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation.

"All of that?"

After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the old pianist, who played das.h.i.+ngly some bright comic-opera airs. The furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly, hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual efforts to have the evening pa.s.s off well. She was very grateful for this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the experience.

But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compa.s.sion suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought in mortified chagrin.

After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to face each other.

Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: "You would better go to bed, Lydia; you must be very tired."

With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical, over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply injured.

Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands, conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.

Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward her husband. "Oh, Paul--Paul!" she cried to him softly, in a tremulous voice of wonder.

He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face.

"What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.

Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to hide her face from him. Finally, "Nothing--nothing--" she murmured.

Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.

Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child.

And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to know motherhood.

CHAPTER XXI

AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY

Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party.

She was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of sn.o.bbishness and social ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!"

Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of the music-makers afterward.

Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else."

"Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know that. The report in the paper--"

"Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every bit--and not--"

Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social function."

Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her with reddened eyes, slowly was.h.i.+ng and putting away innumerable dirty dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on an ap.r.o.n, and, pus.h.i.+ng his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a surgeon's deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him.

Finally, "I hadn't been crying because of dirty dishes," she told him; "I'm not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that awful dinner party. I didn't know what she was talking about a good deal of the time--it was all about what a sn.o.b and traitor to my family I was growing to be."