The Squirrel-Cage Part 45

You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn't make an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that disgusting dinner party!"

It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.

"I'm simply not worth putting yourself out for," went on Paul, turning away and picking up his overcoat. "I'm only a common, ignorant, materialistic beast of an American husband!" He added in an insulting tone: "I suppose you'd like two husbands; one to earn your living for you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture with!"

He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.

"I'd like _one_ husband," she cried white with indignation.

"And I'd like a wife!" Paul flashed back at her hotly. "A wife that'd be a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do--a wife that'd be loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners telling her that she's a misunderstood martyr--_martyr_!" His sense of injury exalted him. "Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right, I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money, you're sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a foreigner who tells you--in summer time, while you're enjoying the cool breeze out here on a--maybe you think a dynamo-room's a funny place to be, with the thermometer standing at--what am I _doing_ when I'm away from you? Enjoying myself, no doubt. Maybe you think it's enjoyment to travel all night on a--maybe you think it's nice to make yourself conspicuous with another man that's been abusing your--"

Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then the blackest moment of her life--a sickening scorn for the man before her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His sister knew him better than--she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to be spared the pollution of having her husband--

"I didn't take any stock in Madeleine's nasty insinuations about your flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you've been thinking about me all this time I've been working like a--"

Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:

"Maybe you think I'm made of iron! I tell you I'm right on my nerves every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see him!" There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. "I can't sleep!

I'm doing ten men's work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for business--they've actually been harder because of you!"

He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. "I haven't wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed of it, and to live like other decent people!" He moved to the door, and put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the k.n.o.b. With the unearthly clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, like a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such a pa.s.sionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary and unconscious. "But I don't even ask that now--since it doesn't suit you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any woman to do--not to _bother_ me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don't bother you with my affairs--I haven't, and I never will--why, for G.o.d's sake, can't you-- Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman would have made me a thousand times more successful than I--"

Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: "Do they make them better men?" she asked piercingly.

Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. "Oh, you and your goody-goody cant!" he said, and going out without further speech, closed the door behind him.

The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than five minutes.

CHAPTER x.x.x

TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR

The scene of Paul's departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.

That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child's cheerful blindness to its elder's emotion, and Anastasia detected nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped about quite briskly.

It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant's cessation of the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul's departure was like a black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as wildly about the silent house. "But I can't stand this!--to hate and be hated! I can not bear it! I must do something--but what? but what?" Once she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing herself to an instant's immobility, she heard Ariadne's light, regular breathing continue undisturbed.

She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.

Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering.

In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only unbearable pain--the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her, answering her husband's anger like the reflection of a torch in a mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own, but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now, constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and drawn under his thinning, graying hair.

The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of the night before.

But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it.

'Stas.h.i.+e thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.

Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as 'Stas.h.i.+e had noted, with a strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the child's talk.

"It has come down," she was saying to herself, "to a life-and-death struggle. It isn't a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in me, in our life, we can save. It's whether we can save _any_! How dirty lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal--yes, it is a life and death struggle--I must see to Ariadne's underwear. It is too warm for these sunny days.--Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About such sickeningly trivial things--how badly 'Stas.h.i.+e dusts! There are rolls of dust under the piano--but I thought people only quarreled--quarreled terribly--over great things: unfaithfulness, cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a religion which would--Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway and back. How muddy the driveway is! Paul said it should have more gravel--_Paul!_ How _can_ he come back to me after such--Madeleine says married people always quarrel--how can they look into each other's eyes again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! We _must_!"

The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had, filled her with the most pa.s.sionate self-reproach. It must be at least half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped 'Stas.h.i.+e sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne's health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.

To have achieved this state of pa.s.sionate resolution gave her for a moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze to the world about her.

She noticed that, though it was after twelve o'clock, Ariadne had not been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her mother's call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent's joy, lying too near the very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like everything else, however, the touch of the child's tight-clinging arms about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter's existence, and he never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new att.i.tude on his part.

"When is Daddy coming back to us _vis_ time?" asked Ariadne over her egg.

Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of trouble in the last talk between her master and mistress. The door had slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for him in the kitchen--'Stas.h.i.+e told herself fiercely that "killing wud be too good for her, makin' trouble like the divil's own!" She listened anxious for Lydia's answer.

"Daddy's coming back to us as soon as his business is done," said Paul's wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick vehemence: "No, no! before that! Long before that!" She went on, to cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, "'Stas.h.i.+e, get the baby a gla.s.s of milk."

"The front door bell's ringin'," said 'Stas.h.i.+e, departing in that direction, with the a.s.surance of her own ability to choose the proper task for herself, so exasperating to her master.

She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess apologizing for "coming right _in_, that way," exclaiming effusively at the pretty picture made by mother and child,--"She must be such company for you, Miss Lydia"--Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own position and her hostess', and determinedly pleased with the general state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the tired lines in the little woman's face, told Anastasia to make another cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.

"Oh, delighted, I'm sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with little Miss Hollister."

Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker's accent it was meant as a pleasantry.

Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her visit.

"Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make one objection. It's an idea of my very own. You'll let me get through without interruption?"

"Yes, oh, yes," murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.

The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore heart, as though it had been a common lovers' quarrel, how she and Paul could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was wondering how, with the most pa.s.sionate resolve in the world, she could do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which would weigh her down in the months to come.

Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia's attention. It was all about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most exclusive young people in Columbus--the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with, since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to silence: "You said you wouldn't interrupt! And you haven't let me say _half_ yet! That's your side of it--the side your dear mother would think of if she were only here; but there's another side that you can't, you _oughtn't_ to resist!" She finished her tea with a hasty swallow and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand impressively on the young matron's slim arm. "You're the sweetest thing in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate cla.s.s, you can't realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky _poor_ people are! Of course it stands to reason that you can't even imagine the life of a working-woman--you, a woman of entire leisure, with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street near their work because they can't afford _carfares_!"

Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile, desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment, diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against it. Through her companion's dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it were a magic formula: "If I can only wish hard enough to make things better, nothing can prevent me."

The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say: "It's for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here." She got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a faint murmur from the far end of the hall.

Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the thought and action automatic. She had b.u.t.toned the garment about the child's slender body before she responded again to the little living presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child's breath on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came to pa.s.s for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with Paul after one of their long separations--how mere physical presence can sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.

As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne's father! As soon as he was with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn back and start all over again--there was plenty of time to--

"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and sank upon a chair.

Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long silent instant, searching her face with pa.s.sion. Then she set the little girl down gently. "Run out and play, dear," she said, and until the door had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, "Well?"

she asked.