The Squirrel-Cage Part 22

"Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to it. So it's all right, you see."

Lydia's drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect.

"You mean I'm a poor-spirited, weak thing, who'd better never try to take a step of my own," she said with a sorry smile.

"I don't mean anything unkind," he told her gently. "I've succeeded in convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation--and that's certainly most justifiable. It meant I'd expected too harsh a strength from you--" he went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes did not keep from sadness--"as though I'd hoped you could lift a thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show."

She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent of seriousness as his own. "Why do you live so that people have to lift thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to you?"

"Because I don't dare live any other way," he answered.

"It's hard on other people," Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, "But you didn't help a bit--you left it all to me--"

She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her words.

Rankin's answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on a question. "I'm glad you've given me a chance to say what--I've wished you might know. I thought it over and over at the time--and since--and I'm sure it would not have been honorable--or delicate--or right, _not_ to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide--whether you would take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged you beyond what lay in your heart to do--or to have overborne you against some deep-lying, innate instinct."

Lydia's voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, "Oh, if you knew what the others--n.o.body _else_ was afraid to hurry or urge me to--"

She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of recollections. Rankin's lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.

The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to a woman with two children near him, "Gardenton--this is the cross-roads to Gardenton." Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia and Rankin, now the only pa.s.sengers, "Next stop is Wardsboro'!" His voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake, letting the bra.s.s arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again, and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his features, pathetically young.

"How pale he is," said Lydia, wis.h.i.+ng to break the silence with a harmless remark. "He looks tired to death."

"He probably is just that," said Rankin, wincing. "It's sickening, the way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know."

"No; I didn't know," cried Lydia, shocked. "Why, that's awful. When do they see their families?"

"They don't. One of them, whose house isn't far from mine, told me that he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks."

"But something ought to be done about it!" The girl's deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.

"Are they so much worse off than most American business men?" queried Rankin. "Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about as--"

Lydia cut him short quickly. "You're always blaming them for that," she cried. "You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the children to have bread and b.u.t.ter, isn't it--"

Rankin shook his head. "I can't be fooled with that sort of talk--I've lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn't a question of bread and b.u.t.ter. It's a question of giving the children bread and b.u.t.ter and sugar rather than bread and b.u.t.ter and father. Of course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the b.u.t.ter than the father--let alone the sugar."

"But here's this very motorman you know about--what could he do?"

"They're not forced by the company to work seven days a week--only they're not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating dress, as good as anybody's, and a graduating 'present.' It seems that's the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when she was humiliated by being different from other girls."

"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a girl feels."

Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course,"

she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he _loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."

Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried.

"He can't! n.o.body can do too much for anybody else if it's the right thing."

"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.

"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of her father's point of view--"

"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.

"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized Rankin.

"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia, apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls envious?"

"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_!

There's nothing to go on, if you don't."

As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles, where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed her answer to an honest "I don't believe I know whether I believe you or not. I don't think I ever thought of it before."

"What _do_ you think about?" The question was evidently too sincere an interrogation to resent.

The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her little clear trill of amus.e.m.e.nt. "I don't," she said, looking full at Rankin, her eyes s.h.i.+ning. "You've caught me! I can't remember a single time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think when they're hurrying to get dressed, but I can't."

Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was too young to resist the contagion of Lydia's mirth, and laughed back at her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.

"If you don't think, what do you _do_?" he interrogated with mock relentlessness.

"Nothing," said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.

"What do you feel?" he went on in the same tone, but Lydia's face changed quickly.

"Oh--lots!" she said uncertainly, and was silent.

The car began to pa.s.s some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on, looked back through the window, putting his face close to the gla.s.s to see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at the two pa.s.sengers, and then, apparently rea.s.sured that they were not "company detectives," he pushed open the door. "This is Wardsboro'," he told them as he went down the aisle, "and the next stop is Hardville."

He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child's. As the big motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, "It's against the rules, I know, but there ain't anybody but you two here, and he don't look as though he'd really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain't sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the long hours are too much for him."

"Do you know him?" asked Rankin.

The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. "Who, me?" he asked. "No; I never seen him till to-day. He's a new hand, I reckon." He drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself, and started the car forward.

In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked at each other in a silent transport. Lydia's dark eyes were glistening, and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken "No; don't say a word! You'd spoil it!"

There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of certainty of a common emotion, which had once or twice before marked a significant change in their relation. Finally, "That's something I shall never forget," said Lydia.

Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.

"It's like an answer to what I was saying--a refutation of what Dr.

Melton thinks--about people--"

As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise, "Why, I never saw anything so lovely--that made me so happy! I feel warm all over!"

Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, "It's only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond--" He broke off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.