The Squirrel-Cage Part 41

After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of importance she had been taught all her life, "Well, it _is_ hard for him to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and best of himself to business." It was not until later, as she was dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that view of the problem.

Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big--as big--

"Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?" Lydia laced up the little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling.

"That was just the trouble, she couldn't make it seem right any more, that Paul's best and freshest should _all_ go to making money and none to a consideration of why he wished to make it."

"Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?"

She began b.u.t.toning the child's dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne's narrative, and the child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, "Come, dear; we must get our breakfasts," said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still flushed and smiling from her play.

Her pa.s.sion for the child grew with Ariadne's growth, and there were times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child's quick, regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul's anything but a dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow--somehow, Ariadne must have a better chance.

Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic, as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the "Black Hole." She thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that, with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not--could not--stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.

On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down at her torn ap.r.o.n, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with Lydia's help the dinner was eatable.

Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table Lydia's heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to burden him already--all he could carry. But she had been so long bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure path, that she clung to her purpose.

After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. "You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with you," she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.

He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary tenderness. "Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now, I suppose. Wait a minute, though." He went to the couch, piled the pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. "I might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn't I?"

"Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!" cried Lydia remorsefully. "I wish I didn't _have_ to bother you!"

"I wish so, too," he said whimsically. "Sure it's nothing you can't settle yourself?" He closed his eyes and yawned.

"I don't _want_ to settle it myself!" cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an opening ready-made. "That's the point. I want you to be in it! I want you to help me! Paul, I'm sure there's something the matter with the way we live--I don't like it! I don't see that it helps us a bit--or anyone else--you're just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us things we don't need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We're not getting a bit nearer to each other--actually further away, for we're both getting different from what we were without the other's knowing how! And we're not getting nicer--and what's the use of living if we don't do that? We're just getting more and more set on scrambling along ahead of other people. And we're not even having a good time out of it!

And here is Ariadne--and another one coming--and we've nothing to give them but just this--this--this--"

She had poured out her acc.u.mulated, pent-up convictions with pa.s.sion, feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself--that at last she had made a breach in the wall that separated her from Paul.

At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of their life, her eyes fell on Paul's face. Its expression turned her cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen asleep.

Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment.

But a cloud had pa.s.sed between her and the sun. She sat there a long time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on her husband's shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at least physically near.

The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his feet, wide awake.

"I bet that's the Washburn superintendent!" he cried. "He said they might call me up here if they came to a decision." He had apparently forgotten Lydia's presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his head was up, like a conqueror's. "I've got their contract!" he told her, and then, s.n.a.t.c.hing her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a "yip!

yip! yip!" of triumph.

In spite of herself Lydia's chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was conscience-stricken. "Oh, I'm a black-hearted monster!" he cried, in burlesque contrition. "I must have dropped off just as you began your spiel. But, Lydia, if _you'd_ taken that West Virginia trip, you'd go to sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days, you know, and, honest, I didn't have three hours' consecutive sleep!

Don't be too mad at me. Start over again. I'll listen to every word, honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting c.o.c.k, anyhow, by this Washburn business! To think I've pulled that off at last!"

"I'm not mad at _you_, Paul," said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with her husband. "I'm mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you couldn't keep awake! All I had to say is that I don't like our way of life--I don't see that it's making us any better, and I want Ariadne--I want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it so."

Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. "Good gracious, my dear! What are you talking about? 'Our way of life!' What do you mean? There's nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just like everybody else's."

Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to advance a step. She cried out pa.s.sionately: "What if it is! If it's not the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody's life _is_ like it!"

The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was rea.s.suring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. "There, Lydia! There, dear!

Don't get so wrought up! Remember you're not yourself. You do too much thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my--"

Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on.

She drew away gently. "_Can_ anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The trouble must be that I'm not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so!

_Please_ help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for organization and for science--if I were a dynamo that wasn't working, you could set me right!"

Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. "I couldn't if the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!" He was paying very little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to see that she got more amus.e.m.e.nt. They said that comic opera now running in town was very funny.

"Paul, listen to me!" she was crying desperately as these thoughts went through his head. "Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we've been living since we were married, and you _must_ see that something's all wrong. I never see you--never, never, do you realize that? except when you're in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and when I'm just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don't really like--or rather people about whose real selves we don't know enough to know whether we like them or not--we have them because they're influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they can help us to get on--or can be smoothed over so they won't hinder our getting on. And there's no prospect of doing anything different from this all the days of our life--"

"But, look-y here, Lydia, that's the way things _are_ in this world! The men have to go away the first thing in the morning--and all the rest of what you say! _I_ can't help it! What do you come to me about it for?

You might as well break out crying because I can't give you eyes in the back of your head. That's the way things are!"

Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. "That's what everybody's been telling me all my life--but now I'm a grown woman, with eyes to see, and something inside me that won't let me say I see what I don't--_and I don't see that_! I don't _believe_ it has to be so. I can't believe it!"

Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You sound as though you'd been reading some fool socialist literature or something."

"You know I don't read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn't understand it if I read it, not having any education. That's one thing I want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children's sake. I can't see that we're learning to be anything but--you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have. I don't seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn't we have time--both of us--to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?"

Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?"

His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can't be changed if people would really try--"

"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.

"Well, if it's true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"

Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_ it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our children! Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."

Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her!

For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul dear--don't look at me so! I never dreamed of _blaming_ you for it! It's just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to--"

"You haven't noticed me complaining any, have you?" put in Paul grimly, still looking at her coldly.

"--It's because I can't bear to see you work so hard to get me things I'd ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can't see anything but business--it seems all twisted! I'd rather you'd pay an a.s.sistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we'd get along on less money--live in a smaller house, and not entertain."

"Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It's not just the money an a.s.sistant would cost! Either he'd not be so good as I, and then I'd lose my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he _would_ be as good and he'd get the job permanently and divide the field with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!"

"But, Paul, what if he _did_ divide the field with you? What if you don't get ahead of everybody else, if you'd have time and strength to think of other things more--you said the other day that you weren't sleeping well any more, and you're losing your taste for books and music and outdoors--why, I'd rather live in four rooms right over your office, so that you wouldn't have that hour lost going and coming--"

Paul broke in with a curt scorn: "Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don't you propose living in a tent, to save rent?"

"Why I would--I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any better!" Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.

At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually swept away by his amus.e.m.e.nt at Lydia's preposterous fancies. It was too foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her s.h.i.+ning dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. "I guess you'd better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might break something if you go charging around it so fierce."

A call came from the darkness of the hall: "Mis' Hollister!"

"It's Mary," said Paul; "probably you forgot to give her any instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her for the Lord's sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was this morning."