The Squirrel-Cage Part 35

At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food, was not too much put out by 'Stas.h.i.+e's eccentricities, since there was no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a whimsical tenderness in Lydia's pa.s.sion of satisfaction with her baby.

He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.

Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby, poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled, fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop pa.s.sionate kisses on the satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment of her earlier life.

It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.

At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know about a baby?" she cried conclusively.

"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.

What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"

Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.

"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.

The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he a.s.sented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.

Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.

After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her G.o.dfather with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as well as I thought I should!"

"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."

If he thought that early married life could also be cla.s.sed among these beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.

Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.

The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted is surer. Babies grow up!"

Lydia felt that her G.o.dfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her "submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.

Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live _like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he concluded.

"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own.

"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.

Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amus.e.m.e.nt over her liability to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her life the enc.u.mbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you let them go too long."

Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and different."

Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse than that! You get left!"

Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured letter.

The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companions.h.i.+p, but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the _least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about; but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her life.

During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued a.s.surances that it was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow, she could be sure of one thing--it was all straight, clean business, designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions, but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.

"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean only suspicion.

Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training in bridge-building, she thought sadly.

One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that astonis.h.i.+ngly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short trousers and round-collared s.h.i.+rt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still the downy bloom of adolescence.

"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.

"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"

"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.

"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old business man to another.

Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.

"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,"

answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.

Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their generators," he went on in explanation.

"Big contract?" asked Walter.

"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.

The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cas.h.!.+"

"They haven't," said Paul briefly.

"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.

"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."

"What's the matter with recording it?"

"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do they?"

"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the other's meaning. "Well, that's _one_ way of gettin' 'round it!" he added admiringly after an instant's pause.

Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew.

The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she really were exhausted by the heat.

"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."

"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I--"

"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about your business than I do."

Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks.

What's that to you?"