The Squirrel-Cage Part 27

Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the s.h.i.+ning little needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her mind that their respective att.i.tudes were symbolical of their lives, and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course, meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.

"_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate, hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.

Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister, sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell you about it, and see if you can't help me."

Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.

She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"

"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"

"But I can sew and listen, too."

"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.

Just a little while!"

The hara.s.sed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized for interrupting her. "But I do want you to really think of what I am saying. Everybody's always so busy thinking about _things_! Oh, Etta, I'm just as unhappy as I can be--and so scared when I think about--about the future."

Mrs. Mortimer's face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia's dark hair. "Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother couldn't help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without anybody to help me or to say a word. Oh, I'm so glad I can help my little sister. _Don't_ be afraid, dear! There's nothing so terrible about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find it doesn't make a bit of difference to you. Everything's just the same as before."

Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of matrimony. "I don't know what you're talking about, Etta!" she cried in a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.

"Why--why, being married! Wasn't that what you meant?"

"Oh, no! _No!_ Nothing so definite as that! I couldn't be afraid of Paul--why should I be? I'm just frightened of--everything--what everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be more things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things_!" She began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's face of despairing bewilderment, "Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all what I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand! Can't we somehow all stop--_now_! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to that party--that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that you _can't_--you say yourself you can't--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like--"

At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer's head whirled.

She took hold of the arms of her chair as if to steady herself, but, conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl's confidence, she nodded gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up, her eyes s.h.i.+ning. "Oh, you dear! You _do_ see what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately troubled over things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having children, and bringing them up to the same thing--when there must be so many things that do matter!"

To each of these impa.s.sioned statements her sister had returned an automatic nod. "I see what you mean," she now put in, a statement which was the outward expression of a thought running, "Mercy! Dr. Melton's right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon as ever we can!"

Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice.

Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn.

I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head.

But n.o.body else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to."

She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of all we do?"

Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in the world's history that it had pa.s.sed the lips of humanity. Her curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.

Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you, Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."

Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a smile of superior wisdom at the other's face of tragedy. "Don't go, Lyddie, don't go!" She tried to put her arms around the flighty young thing. "Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That's all that's the matter with you. There's nothing else! Look here, dear, there _are_ moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout for them,--for everything, don't you see?"

"They look out for _moths_, all right," said Lydia in a low tone. She submitted, except for this one speech, in a pa.s.sive silence to her sister's combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.

She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on her "tragedy way of taking the world." At the gate, she paused, and then came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.

Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her appearance of lightly estimating Lydia's depression as superficial, she had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia's mournful emphasis as she went on: "I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was sent over for. You're to be sure to order the perforated candles. It's the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn't look mussy on the outside, and it's very, very important to have the right kind of candles."

Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her sister's troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself, for the understanding word.

"You're a darling, Lyddie," said the elder woman, kissing her again; "but you are certainly _too_ absurd!"

BOOK III

A SUITABLE MARRIAGE

CHAPTER XVIII

TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION

Lydia's unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but chief among the small a.s.sortment that she took away from her mother's house had been the high morality of keeping one's husband unworried by one's domestic difficulties. "Domestic difficulties" meant, apparently, anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme desirability of this wifely virtue. "It pays! It pays!" Mrs. Emery had often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter's presence. "I've noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry about domestic machinery and their children don't get on so well. Their minds are distracted. Their thoughts _can't_ be, in the nature of things, all on their business." She was wont to go on, to whatever mother she was addressing, "We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don't we, how perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children--to say nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I'd like to know! Besides, if one person's got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do it all and be done with it. It's easier, besides, to have only one head.

Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You can't keep from quarreling with them--angels couldn't."

She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton, who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes, indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do, that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their wives at all."

Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested.

"Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--"

"Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--"

"Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his capacity to pull off a big deal the next day."

Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement, but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea, had given a qualified a.s.sent in the shape of silence and a turning of the subject.

Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic, convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of that kind. "We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give course dinners--why need we pretend we don't?" she had thought on several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being _the_ bride of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being _the_ debutante.

The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of what was coming to her.

"Oh, my dear! Isn't it too good!" said her mother, clasping her for a moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room of a common acquaintance. "Aren't you the lucky, lucky thing!"

"I don't know. I don't know a thing about it," Lydia returned unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled tremulously. "Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I've been trying to get a moment's time to think it over, but you--"

"It's something to _feel_, not to think about!" cried her mother. "You don't need time to feel."

"But I'd like to think about everything!" cried Lydia, as they moved down the stairs. "I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I'm not quick to think, and I never have any time--they're always so many other things to do and to think about--the dinner, getting Paul off in time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen--"

"Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says _laundress_ now!"

"--And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we've incurred this winter. Everybody's invited us. It makes me wild to think of how we owe everybody."

"Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more exclusives. You won't need to be out of things till June--with the fas.h.i.+on for loose-fitting evening gowns; you're so slender. And you'll be out again long before Christmas. It's very fortunate having it come at this time of year."