The Squirrel-Cage Part 36

Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.

He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in--"

"But Dr. Melton _is_ a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of as he lives day after day--there are other things besides technical details and grains of morphine--other problems--human things--Why, for instance, there's one question that torments him all the time--how much it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks to me a great deal about such--"

Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to sell more generators and motors than my compet.i.tors. Come on indoors, Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these to-night."

His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul talk unintelligibly to the business a.s.sociates whom, from time to time, he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.

Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like that myself!"

The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.

"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul remonstrated with justice.

For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he a.s.sumed more and more the airs of a comrade with the lad.

One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps'

stenographer."

"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.

"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say, Fred; write my wife, will you?'"

His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he applauded the joke.

"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."

Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.

When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying, "Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work to do before I get to bed."

Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a child's.

"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.

He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered promptly.

"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.

He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What else?"

Lydia said no more.

She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently, did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.

"It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the game."

"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you know. You can leave the kid with 'Stas.h.i.+e, can't you, once in a while?

She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as though he had a.s.signed to her the simplest possible of all domestic undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"

As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of various fas.h.i.+onable activities which differed from ordinary fas.h.i.+onable enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious, charitable inst.i.tution. And beyond the church there had been no element in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place than she herself had found it. She felt as navely and pa.s.sionately that her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that pitiful, universal prayer.

The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They were not by a hair nor a jot nor a t.i.ttle to be distinguished from their predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul replied, "With 'Stas.h.i.+e to pour soup down people's backs and ask them how their baby's whooping cough is, as she pa.s.ses the potatoes?"

The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent, thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress), Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to "go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very grateful to have little to interfere with her.

The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.

The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive, quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth, but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of protecting love.

Lydia said to her G.o.dfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can be taught how to fight?"

He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"

Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"

He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.

They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to do it?"

"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.

"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coa.r.s.er physical fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody of coa.r.s.er moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of materialism and tragic triviality that--"

"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.

CHAPTER XXIV

"THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART"

One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia's heart swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. "Oh, 'Stas.h.i.+e! Stas.h.i.+e!" she called in a voice that brought the other clattering breathlessly up the stairs. "The baby! Look at the baby! And she won't touch her bottle."

The tragic change in the Irishwoman's face as she looked at their darling, their anguished community of feeling--there was instantly a bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing differences between them. Lydia felt herself--as she rarely did--not alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. "'Stas.h.i.+e, you don't--you don't think she's--_sick?_" She brought the word out with horrified difficulty.

'Stas.h.i.+e was running down the back stairs. "I'm 'phonin' to th' little ould doctor," she called over her shoulder.

Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia's terror, she had sunk into a stupor.

The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby's bed with white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her temperature. "Just turn her so she'll lie comfortably," he told 'Stas.h.i.+e, "and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your mistress."

In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to summon her strength. "Are you fit to be a mother?" he asked harshly.

"Wait a minute," said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the bal.u.s.trade. "Yes," she answered.

"Ariadne's very sick. I oughtn't to have allowed you to wean her with hot weather coming on. You'd better wire Paul."