The Squirrel-Cage Part 11

"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"

"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_."

"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.

"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient indifference.

"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic finis.h.i.+ng school."

"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never have anything to say about what their daughters do."

"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--"

"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia, thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."

"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened, and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real pa.s.sion for that you get silenced early in life."

The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you."

He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?"

"No; no cruel force has ever _silenced_ me," the doctor mused, putting his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from the worst fools of us all?"

"Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his doctor's fancies.

"No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not responsible for a daughter."

The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."

"I do," said the doctor.

"Well--?" The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed him the wrong way.

"I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia's eyes than you did hers."

The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an irritated gesture. "Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain fever. You're always proclaiming that parents have no real influence over their children's lives--that it's fate, or destiny, or temperament--and now--you blame me because Marietta's discontented over her husband's small income."

The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. "You think that's the cause of Marietta's discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a convent."

Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. "Oh, Nat, you know what Lydia's always been to me--like my own--as precious--Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can't fight. She can't, even if she knew what was going on to fight against--"

His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and s.h.i.+vered.

Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. "No wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick child. In the Lord's name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her-- Besides, don't we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?"

Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way, his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.

As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too late. "How are you, Hollister?" he called as he pulled off his overcoat.

"Glad to see you back. Let's hear all about the Urbana experience."

Hollister's dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.

As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that n.o.body but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. "Dr.

Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn't come in."

Paul looked brightly at Lydia. "I should hope not! My first evening with her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!" He added the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.

The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, "You're a wonder, young man!" and said instead, "Well, let's hear the news."

Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time during the ready, spirited narrative of the young "captain in the army of electricity," as he had once called himself, Lydia's father felt a qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her father's eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge, moved by the oblique, hara.s.sing intimations he had been forced to hear from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests--an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married."

Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could, somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps if some one had not ignored with him--

"I should have been back ten days ago," Paul drew to the end of his story, "but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since I've adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector's work, we've been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from the accident, what might have happened."

"By the Lord!" cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by the story of danger the other had been relating, "I should think it would turn your hair white every time a dynamo's installed. How did you feel when the fly-wheel broke?"

"The fly-wheel isn't on the dynamo, of course," corrected Paul, "so I don't feel responsible for it in a business way, and that's everything.

As for being frightened, why, it's all over so quickly. You don't have time to take in what's happening. You're there or you're not. And if you are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs," he added, with a simple, manly depreciation of his courage. "You mustn't think it often happens, you know; it's supposed never to."

He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the wires. At no time did Lydia's suitor show to better advantage than in speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden prizes of the profession.

This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia's cheeks. "I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the 'army' of electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody's death, and with us it's simply a question of who's got the most to give. He gets the most back--and that's all there is to it. The company's bound to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two ordinary men's work, you get two men's pay. See? There's no limit to the application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say he'll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn't believe it. But you can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to concentrate--not to lose a detail--to put every ounce of your force into it--that's the thing."

He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were a loosened bowstring beside this tw.a.n.ging, taut intensity. He felt slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this _n_th power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions, hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled certain remarks of Dr. Melton's.

The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. "I mustn't keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose," he said; but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. "You and I will have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won't we? I've been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every single ball this winter, and I think I'm heroic not to insist on more--but her first season--!"

Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, "But suppose you're out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and your three dances come along?"

Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful.

"You're to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of me--of course! I shall be thinking of you."

Lydia's little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and disappeared into the hall.

Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man's desire to be, for the moment, rid of him. "Oh, I _am_ going, Judge," he called after him, unabashed; "it is just a bit hard to tear myself away--I've been waiting so long for her to get back!" To Lydia he went on, "I've grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you--look at yourself, you heartless little witch!"

He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth's total ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia's hand in his, and pointed again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.

The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. "Yes, yes, Judge, I'm off. Good-night, Lydia. Don't forget the theater Wednesday night."

He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge, and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.

After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment, lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her, looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out, the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter to move. He could scarcely see her form--her face not at all, but there flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly, "Lydia--Lydia dear--"

She started. "Oh, yes, of course. It's late." She pa.s.sed, brushed lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was s.h.i.+vering like himself before a crisis--and he could find no word to say.

She had pa.s.sed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had never talked to her about--about things. He stood at the foot of the stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed it.