The Squirrel-Cage Part 8

"And I'll just warrant," the man went on, "that I've had more time to myself lately than you have, for all I've my living to earn as well as the housework."

"My goodness!" cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. "That needn't be saying much for you, for I haven't had a minute--not even to sit with Mother as much as I ought."

"What did you have to do that kept you from that?"

"Oh, you're no housekeeper, that's evident, or you wouldn't ask. A man _never_ has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house.

Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases, and dust, and pick up, and dust--I don't know what makes things get so dusty. We've got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do that!"

"I had a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a river, and the father, who couldn't swim a stroke, fell in. The horses were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and screamed, 'Help! help!' and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down in his anguish of mind over his poor old father's fate, 'Oh, help, somebody! Somebody come and help! I can't leave my horses!'"

He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the nave question, "Well, did his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her.

She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just you tell me what you would have done in my place."

"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let the dust lie on them--even such an awful thing as that!"

Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never occurred to me I could do that!"

Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had it. I have to struggle against it still."

"Hallucination?"

"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."

Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and happier in old clothes--that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks get you to thinking that you are for clothes--you're made to show them off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.

"Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted down to the dry gra.s.s. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's--" She glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk of her ruffled skirt.

Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't get wet."

Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't hurt _me_ to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."

Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence, apparently with surprise.

"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French finery dry."

He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair, peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.

"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified for me."]

Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said, "what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so familiar to me--so good--" She went closer to where, still holding out the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.

She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every once in a while you see somebody--an old man or woman, perhaps, on the street cars, in the street--and somehow the face goes home to you. It seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very--" She broke off, helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions which made her life so full of invisible incidents.

But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified for me. I've been fond of them before--they're the background to a good many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but now--" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of the dried gra.s.s under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless bag that sheltered it.

Lydia pointed to it. "You're musical!" she said, as if she had made an important discovery.

Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook his head. "No; I can't play a note," he said cheerfully, laying the rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box; "but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that 'cello. It had belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week he comes out here with an old crony who plays the 'cello, and they make music till they get to crying on each other's necks."

"Do you cry, too?" Lydia smiled at the picture.

Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. "No; I'm an American. I only blow my nose hard," he said gravely.

"Well, it must be lovely!" She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in her chair. "I love music so it 'most kills me, but I don't get very much of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted to, and so I didn't get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear more. But perhaps it's just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so excited. I'm sure I should cry, along with the Germans."

"They would like that," observed her host, "above everything."

"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can't tell what they are going to be.

She says they may get to be too common."

Rankin looked at her hard. "Would you like one?" He asked this trivial question with a singular emphasis.

"Why, I haven't really thought," said Lydia, considering the matter.

The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.

Finally, "Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If they are really good, I should want one, of course."

Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a sudden thought.

"I don't see any oil-stove," said the girl, skeptically, looking about her.

"Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It's there," he nodded back of him; "and two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in to town. Oh, I have lots of room."

"It looks really rather nice, now I'm here and all," Lydia vaguely approved; "though I don't see why you couldn't have gone on more like other folks and just changed some things--not been so _awfully_ queer!"

Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this remark he sat back on his heels, and began: "My great-aunt said that there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear.

Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good measure."

Lydia's astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, "I spare you the rest of the dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he was a rich man--that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store, bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!"

Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to his feet again, "What was that all about?" she inquired simply.

"Compromise," he answered. "There are occasions when it doesn't do any good."

"Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do your own cooking?" asked Lydia with something of her father's shrewd home-thrusting accent. "What would happen if everybody did that?"

Rankin laughed. "Everybody'd have a good time, for one thing," he answered, adding, more seriously, "The house of Rimmon may be all right for some people, but _my_ head isn't clear enough."

Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly "bluffing" type of young lady. "Rimmon?" she asked.

"He's in the Bible."

"That's a good reason why I've never heard of him," she said ruefully.

"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are.

And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced n.o.bleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi _did_, but--" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a touching humility.

"Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him."