The Squirrel-Cage Part 43

The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a sc.r.a.ping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware that they were forming part of one of the most recherche events of Endbury's social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M.

Buisine's sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon promised something more interesting than their usual programme of home-made essays and papers.

Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and variously handsome as visions in a painter's dream--("He's not afraid of laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative laugh)--but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men.

He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life, no knowledge of their children, no interest in education--that, in short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and rending their business compet.i.tors.

He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all aesthetic considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than "success," by which they meant possessing something that they had taken away by force from somebody else.

It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating, interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across the hall began to be filled with waiters preparing the refreshments and an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full and conscientiously elaborated.

The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had read magazine articles on "Why American Women Marry Foreigners" and similar a.n.a.lyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said to one's face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his b.u.t.tonhole,--that brought it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies, they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.

"Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn't he?"

commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the refreshment room. "He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he landed."

Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour's silence. From the sc.r.a.ps of talk that were intelligible, it might have been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.

Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room on the second floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she saw a man's figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pa.s.s. He bowed with an unconscious a.s.surance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity.

A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman's sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng of admirers. Lydia's heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse, astonis.h.i.+ng to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily: "Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn't you think any of us would realize that they are good--our men are--good and pure and kind!

Didn't you think we'd know that anything that's the matter with them must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers!

It's not fair to blame everything on the men! It's not fair, and it can't be true! We're all in together, men and women. One can't be anything the other isn't!"

She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the man's eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women.

The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as grave as her own. Finally, "Madame, you should be French," he told her.

The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia's eyes wavered. "I mean," he went on in explanation, "that you are acting as my wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the first to--Madame, I should like to know your husband!" he exclaimed with another bow.

"My husband is like all other American men," cried Lydia sharply, touched to the quick by this reference. "It is because he is that I--"

She broke off with her gesture of pa.s.sionate unresignation to her lack of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.

"Oh, I can't say what I mean--you must know it, anyhow! You blame the fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives, and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to be--to be--to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were half so--fine--as you tell us, why haven't we changed things?"

The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. "Exactly!

exactly! exactly, Madame!" he cried. "It is the question I have asked myself a thousand times: Why is it--why is it that women so strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the society in--"

"Perhaps it is," said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the surface again and furnis.h.i.+ng her fluency, "perhaps it is because people who see our faults don't help us to correct them, but flatter us by telling us we haven't any, and all the time think ill of us behind our backs."

The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful cynicism: "Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing audiences of women. Would it be tactful to--" but under Lydia's honest eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed hard. "Madame," he said, "you have rebuked me--deservedly. I--I demand your pardon."

"Oh, you needn't mind me," said Lydia humbly; "my opinion doesn't amount to anything. I oughtn't to talk, either. I don't _do_ anything different from the rest--the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there's something wrong--" She found the other's gaze into her troubled eyes so friendly that she was moved to cry out to him, all her hostility gone: "What _is_ the trouble, anyhow?"

The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. "I proudly put at your service any reflections I have made--as though you were my daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married--who faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued--will you not sit down?"

He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her.

"Is not the trouble," he began, "that the women have too much leisure and the men too little--the women too little work, the men too much?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" Lydia's meditations had long ago carried her past that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. "But how can we change it?"

"You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that the culture of American women is like a child's idea of ornamentation--the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame, to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone."

"But how, how--" began Lydia impatiently.

"In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the desertion of their men. Worse--they have encouraged it! Have you never heard an American, woman say: 'Oh, I can't bear a man around the house!

They are so in the way!' Or, 'I let my husband's business alone. I want him to let--'"

He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. "Oh, don't!"

she said. "I see all that."

"You must find few to see with you."

"But how to change it?" She leaned toward him as though he could impart some magic formula to her.

"With the men, work to have them share your problems--work to share theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way--you pointed it out in your first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are yours to make. A generation is a short--"

His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: "But remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what we really wors.h.i.+p, and that no teaching will avail with him if we _teach_ in contradiction to what we _are_."

They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder's handsome head showed through the bal.u.s.trade, and back of her were other amused faces.

"I started to look you up, Lydia," she said, advancing upon them hilariously, "I thought maybe you weren't feeling well, and then I saw you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me, so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I have."

She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation, laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy flower.

"Your _sister_," said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.

"My husband's sister," Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer in one phrase.

"Isn't she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?" cried Madeleine, in her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. "You haven't met many as up-and-coming, have you now?"

"I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is true that I have met few like your brother's wife."

"I'm not Mademoiselle!" Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.

The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the earlier afternoon. "I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than yourself, Mademoiselle," he persisted.

"Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married," said Madeleine proudly.

"You do indeed," said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. "All of you look unmarried."

Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and made a silent gesture of farewell.

He turned back to Madeleine. "But I _am_," she a.s.sured him, pleased and flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. "I'm as much married as _she_ is!"

M. Buisine continued smiling. "That is quite, quite incredible," he told her.

CHAPTER XXIX

"... in tragic life, G.o.d wot, No villain need be. Pa.s.sions spin the plot."