The Squirrel-Cage Part 13

"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as well as other weighty matters, a great many times."

Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.

"Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and Mr. Rankin get to talking."

"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."

"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.

"They won't--nor anything else," her aunt a.s.sured her.

Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man's next statement.

"I've got an apprentice," he announced.

"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.

"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a pa.s.sion for tools--maybe his ancestors were mediaeval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it."

"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.

The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of that."

"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?"

"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your compet.i.tors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's disease at fifty; leave a million."

Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he said.

"So I see--so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You don't believe all that?"

"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly, "Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."

"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked me anything?"

The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.

"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the two women.

Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, n.o.body ever can make out what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.

_Would_ you make this in sh.e.l.l st.i.tch? It's much newer, of course, but they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh, there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying.

They just go on and on."

Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?

It's fine."

"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to going?"

"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: "My great-aunt--"

The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.

"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"

"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.

"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it."

"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story.

Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't doubt she _would_ have," he amended.

The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best advertis.e.m.e.nt? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."

"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."

"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' a.s.sociates and a fas.h.i.+onable school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."

Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.

It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both."

"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots."

"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while to do--not otherwise."

"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"

"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the women the other way 'round."

The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be done."

"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.

The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change them."

"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take the first step."

"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."

"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't _have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"

The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin,"

he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of the world?"

The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize it so."

The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most."

He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.