The Squirrel-Cage Part 42

Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, "Mis'

Hollister, I'm gwine to leave," she announced briefly.

Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the winter, until after her confinement. "What's the matter, Mary?"

"I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks."

"You will stay until--until I am able to be about, won't you?"

"My things is gone aready," said Mary, moving heavily toward the door, "and I'm gwine now." As she disappeared, she remarked casually, "I didn't have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by."

"What's the matter with Mary?" called Paul.

Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. "She's gone--left," she announced.

Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. "You can't break in a new cook _now_!" he said. "She can't go now!"

"She's gone," repeated Lydia wearily. "I don't know how anybody could make her stay."

Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and, sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she were a child. "Now, see here, my wife, you mustn't get your feelings hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You've been telling me what you think about things, and now it's my turn. And what _I_ think is that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own business she'd have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same.

The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your best in them--and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better."

Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was profoundly eloquent. "But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better--"

"There's a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and those that can be changed," said Paul sententiously.

Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the matter. "But who's to decide which our conditions are?"

Paul caught at her, laughing. "I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn't you promise to honor and obey?" He went on with more seriousness, a tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: "Now, Lydia, just stop and think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to settle the affairs of the universe--still all upset about your father's death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head--and with an addition to the family expected! _And_ the cook just left!"

"But that's the way things always are!" she protested. "That's life.

There's never a time when something important hasn't just happened or isn't just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you never--why, Paul, I've waited for two years for a really good chance for this talk with you--"

"Thank the Lord!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "I hope it'll be another two before you treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You're morbid, moping around the house too much--and your condition and all. Wait till you've got another baby to play with--I don't remember you had any doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne's life. You ought to have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle around and keep busy and you won't be so bothered with thinking and worrying."

Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband, the final statement that she wished to hear.

"But to hustle and keep busy--that's good only so long as you keep at it. The minute you stop--"

Paul's answer was an epoch in her thought.

"_Don't stop!_" he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a solution.

At this bullet-like retort, Lydia s.h.i.+vered as though she had been struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms.

"What the devil--what is the matter _now_?" he asked, praying for patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. "What's the matter?" he repeated.

"You've just told me a horrible thing," she whispered; "that life is so dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never looking at--"

Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. "Gee whiz, Lydia! you're enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your cla.s.s and position has to do, you'd have less time to think foolishness--and your husband would have an easier life."

Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm hand. "And now, as your natural guardian, I'm not going to let you say another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it's all been about!"

He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond expression that he had been able to get through it without saying anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on, shaking a finger at her:

"You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going to do? We're going out into that howling desolation that Mary has probably left in the kitchen, and we're going to see if we can find a couple of clean gla.s.ses, and we're going to have a gla.s.s of beer apiece and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that's left over from dinner.

You don't know what's the matter with you, but I do! You're starved!

You're as hungry as you can be, aren't you now?"

Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to her, she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said with a long breath; "yes, I am."

CHAPTER XXVIII

"THE AMERICAN MAN"

A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had been sweeping over the women's clubs of the Middle West, began to agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The Women's Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton's eccentricities than when he had received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just helped to form a "literary club," which would be the "most exclusive social organization" in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been gratified when, on her mother's resignation, Lydia had been elected to the vacant place.

This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle, felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading spirits of the Woman's Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.

They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign of munic.i.p.al house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her mother's club invite to address it the Alliance Francaise lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann Arbor, anyhow--Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury--not far, that is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from Columbia and Harvard to "Michigan State." One of the club husbands was a railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were always anxious to make all the money they could--she was sure that M.

Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be something new in Ohio.

And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December, a very grand "house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance," as Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul's aunt, so that, naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta's house and left her there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her sister's forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join the Woman's Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a tension in the brief conversation over the child's head, and remarked as she and Lydia walked away from the house: "Well, really now, _was_ that the most tactful thing in the world?"

"What else could I do?" asked Lydia, at her wit's end. "I don't dare leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and 'Stas.h.i.+e's not coming back till next week."

"Oh, _she's_ coming again, is she?" commented her companion. "Well, that'll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don't mind him, Lydia." Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal sense of solidarity among her s.e.x. "If he says a word, you poke him one in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought to be allowed to run her house without any man b.u.t.ting in. We let them alone; they ought to let us."

There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage had made less difference than in Paul's sister. She was exactly the same as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,--they all seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.

The two women had reached Madame Hollister's house while Madeleine was expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped military stiffness, and a two-p.r.o.nged grizzled beard. He was looking over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia a secret resentment.

"He's very distinguished looking, isn't he?" whispered Madeleine. "So different! And _cool_! I'd like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be stared at by all this gang of women."

"Oh, he's probably used to it," said her neighbor on the other side.

"They say he's spoken before any number of women's clubs. He does two a day sometimes. He's seen lots of American society women before now."

Madeleine stared at him curiously. "I wonder what he thinks of us! I wonder! I'd give anything to know!" she said. She repeated this sentiment in varying forms several times.

Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her nave, straightforward way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who evaded Lydia's questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this time her usual rough-and-ready methods of a.n.a.lysis seemed at fault.

"Oh, because," she said indefinitely. "Don't you always want to know what men are thinking of you?"

"Men that know something about me, maybe," Lydia amended.

Madeleine laughed. "_They're_ the ones that don't think at all, one way or the other," she reminded her sister-in-law.