The Squirrel-Cage Part 39

She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.

"If I could cry," she said quietly, "it would be because I feel so little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all--or hardly at all."

The doctor caught at his chair and stared.

"How should I?" she went on drearily. "I almost never saw him. I never spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know me--or anything I really felt."

"What are you talking about?" cried the doctor. "You always lived at home."

"I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did--I suppose now because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never knew what it was--or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me--I remember so many times now--and _that_ makes me cry!--how he tried to love me! He was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe--but he never knew anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a big case. It was all like that--always. He never knew."

Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I cannot let you go on! you are unfair--you shock me. You are morbid! I knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law--as in business."

"When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost you some money, don't you? You know you mustn't let them die of starvation. Why oughtn't you to expect to have them cost you thought, and some sharing of your life with them, and some time--real time, not just sc.r.a.ps that you can't use for business?"

As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: "But, oh, the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish, self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!"

She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She whispered, "It's not that I have lost my father. I never had a father--but you!" She put out her hand and pressed the doctor's hard.

"And my poor father had no daughter."

She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, "And now it is too late!"

Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother's, startled, almost frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She looked solemnly into her G.o.dfather's eyes, and, as though she were taking a great and resolute oath, she said, "But it is not too late for Ariadne."

CHAPTER XXVI

A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD

As the spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking a.s.sociations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger son of the family.

One day in May, a throbbingly suns.h.i.+ny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor.

As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.

"I've come to take you home with me, Momma dear," he said quietly, using the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household since Lydia's early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.

The newcomer smiled at her over his mother's head. It was her father's smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so incongruous on the Judge's powerful face. "I'm your brother Harry, little Lyddie," he said, "and I've come to take care of poor Momma."

During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had clung to him, a.s.senting pa.s.sively to all he said, and peering constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his astonis.h.i.+ng resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his arrival.

He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to see Lydia's home and her little daughter--Paul was away on a business trip--and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot.

The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the "grounds" with a lively interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees; and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.

"She's a dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about her age--say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the rest of 'em--like their mother."

For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of his wife. "Talk about luck!" he said, after a moment's pause, "there never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her, Lyddie. I tell you what--shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she's stood up to things right there beside me for twelve years--Lord! It don't seem more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together--.

She's laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We're all through that now, we're doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to know Annie through and through as I do. There isn't a thing about the business she doesn't know as well as I do, and good reason why, too.

We've worked it all out together. We've stuck close, we have. I've helped in the house and with the kids, and she's come right out into the orchards with me. Share and share alike--that's our motto."

He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne's dark hair gently, and reviewing the past with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "Lord! Lord! It's been a good life!" He turned to his sister with a smile. "Well, Lyddie, I expect you know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and everybody says you've married a splendid fellow."

Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself overwhelming. "Oh, Paul is the best man--" she began, "so true and kind and--and--pure--but Harry, we don't--we can't--his business--" She turned away from her brother's too keen eyes and stared blindly at the wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.

Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia's childhood, Harry asked suddenly: "How'd you happen to give your little girl such a funny name?"

It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track.

It was too late--he would be gone so soon--like something she had dreamed. "Oh, I liked the name," she said vaguely; adding, "Harry! I wish you could stay longer! There's so much I should like to talk over with you. Oh, how I wish you'd never gone away."

"You come out and see us," he urged. "It'd do you good to get away from this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you'd have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids would give you a good time all right."

He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: "Take good care of my little niece for me! I tell you it's the kids that count the most!" It was a saying that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech was increasing out of all proportion to her age.

Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to evade the issue.

Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to shame herself into a little courage.

When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that, responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his solicitude was sweet to her.

He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes, savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American women of the leisure cla.s.s, her education after her marriage consisted princ.i.p.ally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.

But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all seemed remote from her own life and problems. The s.e.xual questions on which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact, according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.

She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that beset her cla.s.s--for instance, why it was only women in frontier conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives; why n.o.body tried to change things so that they could do more of their part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives, had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the "latest thing" in art interests.

She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit, deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They were both so young yet. They could begin now.

Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There!

take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."

He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind full of busy thoughts.

Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how entirely apart from him all her real life was pa.s.sed. The doubts, the racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman--and Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally troublesome to the men of her family--any sensible woman kept her thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over without interfering with the business on hand.

As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.

Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably separated her husband from her.

For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had heard her father so unsparingly condemn--silly, childish, egotistic women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.

She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound, well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.

Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so tired!

It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this, felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague aspiration toward an ideal--an aspiration that came to her clearly only at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at rest.

She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.