The Squirrel-Cage Part 34

Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the next car left for Bellevue.

"There's been an accident in the power-house, lady," he told her, "and that line ain't runnin'."

Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. "But I must get back to Bellevue to-night!"

Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety 'Stas.h.i.+e would suffer if she did not appear. "Oh, but I can telephone," she reminded herself.

"You kin get out there if you don't mind takin' the long way around,"

the man explained with a friendly interest. "If you take the Garfield line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it'll bring you back on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain't so big but what it won't be a very long walk to where you live."

Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, a.s.suring herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car's departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her little appet.i.te; but to "take care of herself" now seemed at last one of the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a longing.

At seven o'clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend, the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the only pa.s.senger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a broken-necked doll's. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy.

She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for a long time--perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That was a long time ago.

At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step.

"Power's off!" he called back casually into the car to the accountant, who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been carried past his station. "We've got to wait till they turn her on again."

"How long'll that be?"

"Oh, I don't know. The whole system is on the b.u.m to-day. Maybe half an hour; maybe more. Better take another nap."

The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia's eyes, and smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to help her. When he had her established on a gra.s.sy bank he forbore further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by, Lydia almost forgot him.

It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country, s.h.i.+mmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in the great unbroken arch of the heavens.

Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed her eyes.

She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her--the clear, deep voice of a distant 'cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir--fresh young voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous, ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples.

Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant chant up to the stars.

The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and drew a long breath. "They do fine, don't they?" he said. "My oldest girl's learning to sing alto with them."

"He ain't musical himself, is he?" asked the conductor.

"No; _he_ ain't. It's some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It's a nawful good thing for _them_, let me tell you."

"What'd he do it for, I wonder," queried the conductor idly.

"Aw, I don't know. He's kind o' funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach young folks how to enjoy 'emselves without spending money. That kind of talk hits their _folks_ in the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of this farm, you know, and he's given some of the younger kids pieces of ground for gardens, and he's got up a night cla.s.s in carpentering for young fellows that work in town all day. He's a crack-a-jack of a carpenter himself."

"He'll run into the unions if he don't look out," prophesied the conductor.

"I guess likely," a.s.sented the motorman. "They got after Dielman the other day, did you hear, because he--" The talk drifted to gossip of the world of work-people.

It stopped short as the 'cello again sent out its rich, vibrant introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid harmony.

This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when nothing but the 'cello's chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When the music finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one moved for a time.

Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.

"Quite a concert!" said the conductor, starting for the back platform.

"They do _fine_!" repeated the motorman.

The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.

In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful, trembling voice, "Oh, Lydia, it's a girl, a darling little girl!" Lydia opened her white lips to say, "She is Ariadne."

"What did you say?" asked her mother.

"We must see that she has the clue," said Lydia faintly.

Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. "Keep her very quiet," she whispered; "she is a little out of her head."

CHAPTER XXIII

FOR ARIADNE'S SAKE

Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her girlhood. She felt now a more a.s.sured physical poise than ever before, and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of the family. "Girls" had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, "I never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt." Anastasia O'Hern was there, to be sure--heavy-handed, warm-hearted 'Stas.h.i.+e, who took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of joy over her safe arrival; but 'Stas.h.i.+e had proved, as Paul predicted from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia's zealous tuition, to overcome the Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger's, she made light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of cleanliness.

But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle.

Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of Paul's outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything that pertained to the appearance of things, 'Stas.h.i.+e was deaf, dumb and blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and the dishes looked, as Paul said, "as though she had stood off and thrown them at a bull's-eye in the middle of the table." Moreover, she herself could not emanc.i.p.ate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was pa.s.sionately devoted to Lydia, and took with the humblest grat.i.tude any hints about the care of her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to put on a clean ap.r.o.n when she opened the door, even if it were Madame Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes--one of the heavy tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing self. "But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from the time she rang, the poor old soul!" she protested to Lydia, who, at Paul's instance, had taken her to task.

Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an ap.r.o.n."

To which 'Stas.h.i.+e exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"

"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'"

explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear such a characterization.

"But she is that," protested 'Stas.h.i.+e. "Anybody that's her age and hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism--my heart bleeds for 'em."

"She is very rich--" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that 'Stas.h.i.+e's questions brought her to a standstill.

There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive j.a.panese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant, except at comfortable second-hand, of hara.s.sing domestic difficulties.

If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of conduct. 'Stas.h.i.+e was a constant point of friction between husband and wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life but one wretched round of domestic confusion.

Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time, her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the value of her labors.

Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby, was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and incapable--although of course the dearest and sweetest of little wives--for nothing could have been more competent than the way she managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be past.