The Squirrel-Cage Part 40

Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"

"How so?" she asked.

"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning, anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"

Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.

She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it a mere chance remark--a little stone in the garden path--or was it the first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?

The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles "to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike navete, that Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents that filled their days.

If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well.

She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever.

Paul was always so kind--when he saw!

She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night, she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would have to speak.

'Stas.h.i.+e was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite period, for Patsy's steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the satisfaction she took in Patsy's exemplary career was tinctured with vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied; but her fixed intention to "talk things over with him" was not shaken.

And yet--day after day went by with the routine unvaried--there was no time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business a.s.sociate home for dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.

Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood--a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day dance!

One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as they ran along: "I come to tell ye--I come to tell ye, mortals--" to his scurrying audience.

When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn, and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding vigorously at the end. "Who _is_ he?"

"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.

"He's a very especial friend of mine."

"Well, you can bet he'll get on," her father had a.s.sured her.

The opening of the Brownie's speech had come to be one of the humorous catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the scene--the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon, and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could protect her now.

She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.

CHAPTER XXVII

LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND

Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of."

As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child: "Now, I mustn't get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not because we're handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we can't do that if we don't really put our minds to it and make that the thing we're trying hardest to do. The other things--the parties and making money and dressing better than we can really afford to--they're only all right if they don't get to seeming the things to look out for first. We must find out how to keep them second."

A golden shaft of winter suns.h.i.+ne fell on Paul's face. He opened his eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his strong hand in hers.

"Oh, you india-rubber ball!" he cried in humorous despair at her. "Don't you know a woman with your expectations oughtn't to go hurling herself around that way?"

"I know--I'm too eager always," she apologized. "But, Paul, I've been waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about something that's troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn't wait another minute."

Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. "Why, fire away, Lydia dear.

I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you?

What is it? More money?"

"Oh, no, _no_!" She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, "Well, you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?"

Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the desire to speak clearly. "Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too.

I'm very unhappy about the way we are--"

A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. "Now, you other little forlornity, what's the matter with you?"

Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she noticed with an inward laugh that he continued b.u.t.toning his vest as he caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary alertness. "Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table," he went on briskly. "I'm all ready to go down." He pulled his coat on with his astonis.h.i.+ng quickness, and ran downstairs.

Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook, moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but, hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him impatient of the delay.

He fell to with a hearty appet.i.te as soon as the food was set before him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when I'm not here to keep track of you."

He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.

"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia a.s.sured him, with her quick acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or something, and I got yours first."

Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying the--"

"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily terror of her life.

"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it."

The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim.

She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning!

"Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray.

"I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate drinking?"

"I'll try," said Lydia.

Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.

Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him.

"Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it?

Something about the plumbing?"

In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. "Never mind," she said, leaning against the newel-post, "I'll tell you--I'll tell you some other time."

He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.