The Squirrel-Cage Part 44

"Say, Lydia," said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the house a few days after the French lecture, "say, I'm awfully sorry I told Paul! I never supposed he'd go and get mad. It was just my fool notion of being funny."

Lydia was dusting the bal.u.s.trade, her back to her visitor. She tingled all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work, trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of the incident to which Madeleine's remark seemed to refer, or if she should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned of matters pertaining to Paul's profession except from chance remarks of his business a.s.sociates. He had not even told her, until questioned, about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at her desire to know of it.

She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. "I don't know what you're talking about, Madeleine," she said, turning around, dust-cloth in hand, trying to speak casually.

Her sister-in-law stared. "Didn't Paul come home and give it to you? He looked as though he were going to."

Lydia's heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. "Paul hasn't said anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about 'Stas.h.i.+e? She's been back several days now, but I thought he hadn't noticed her much."

"Well, he _hasn't_ said anything, that's a fact!" exclaimed Madeleine, with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed Lydia's statement. "My, no! It's not about 'Stas.h.i.+e. It's about the French lecturer."

Lydia's astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her breath. "_About the_--" she began.

"Why, look-y here, it was this way," explained Madeleine rapidly. "I told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul about the mash you made on old What's-his-name--about your sitting off on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn't even notice when the whole gang of us came to look at you--and maybe I stretched it some about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes--" She broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious att.i.tude toward life. "Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him jealous once in a while. Keeps 'em from getting too stodgy and husbandy."

"Jealous!" cried Lydia. "Paul jealous! Of me! Never!" Her certainty on the point was instant and fixed.

"Well, you'd ha' thought he was, if you'd seen him. I was jollying him along--we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that early car so's to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown suit he's making for me is a _dream_, simply a dream! He's put a little braid, just the least little bit, along--"

"What did Paul say?"

"Paul? Oh, yes--How'd I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn't say _anything_; that was what made me see he wasn't taking it right. He just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I thought he'd jolly me back, you know. He's usually a great hand for that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a thundercloud--that nasty look he has when he's real mad. When we were children and he'd look that way, I'd grab up any old thing and hit him quick, so's to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry, and I said, 'Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you--' but he said he guessed I'd told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth he dropped off the car. We'd got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be our _grandfather_!"

"When did this happen?"

"Oh, I don't know; three or four days ago--why, Thursday, it must have been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that--"

"And this is Monday," said Lydia; "four days."

At the sight of her sister-in-law's troubled eyes, Madeleine was again overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder hearteningly. "I'm awfully sorry, Lyd, but don't you go being afraid of Paul. You're too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can't afford to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can't do that if you don't knock 'em the side of the head once in so often. It's good for 'em. Honest! And about this, don't you worry your head a minute.

Like as not Paul's forgot everything about it. He'd forget anything, you know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig's white hair and pop eyes, and he'll laugh at the joke on himself."

Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. "Don't talk so--as though Paul could be so--so vulgar."

Madeleine laughed. "I guess you won't find a man in _this_ world that isn't 'vulgar' that way."

"Why, I've been _married_ to Paul for years--he wouldn't think I--no matter what you told him, he couldn't conceive of my--"

Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother's wife very diverting. "Of your doing a little hand-holding on the side? Oh, go on! Flirting's no crime! And you did--honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow's head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you."

Lydia cut her off with a sharp "Oh, _don't_!" She was now sitting, still absently grasping the dust-cloth.

Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence rather unusual for her. "Lydia, you don't look a bit well," she said kindly. "Are you still bothered with that nausea?" She sat down by her sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly responsive to tenderness. "What's the matter, Lyd?" Madeleine went on.

"Something's not going just right. Are you scared about this second confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. n.o.body gets anything in this world if they don't put up a fight for it."

Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew a long breath, and laid her head on the other's shoulder. More than wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced, once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.

She kissed her husband's sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere fact of her presence. "You're good to bother about me, Maddely," she said, using a pet name of their common childhood. "I guess I'm not feeling very well these days. But that's to be expected."

"Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't be so patient about it as _you_ are!"

cried the other wife. "It's simply horrid to have all this a second time, and Ariadne so little yet. It's _mean_ of Paul."

She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding, lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant, so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms.

She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked down--"Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed this one! It would be just a little _too_ much if they made you nurse it!"

Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could rea.s.sure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make another "odd" speech to her. She renounced all common life except the childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. "How did those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner's, Madeleine?" she asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. "I hope the blue one _didn't_ fade."

Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more "like folks," and seemed more like herself than she had since her father died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a neighbor, after all.

But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches!

Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of desperation.

She did not believe Madeleine's story, or, at least, not her interpretation of Paul's att.i.tude, but she felt a dreary chill at his silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.

When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the breakfast-table--such was their convention--did he allow himself to become absorbed in the news.

Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where Patsy O'Hern, 'Stas.h.i.+e's cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made Ariadne a "horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and she loved him as much as she did 'Stas.h.i.+e, and wasn't it good to have 'Stas.h.i.+e back, and--"

Paul frowned silently over his pie.

"Come, dear; it's seven o'clock and bedtime," said Lydia, leading the little girl away.

When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone almost half an hour. She was surprised to see Paul still in the dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was sitting in an att.i.tude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically tired.

No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband, feeling a great longing to be close to him.

As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen, followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul's tense face snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. "Oh, _d.a.m.n_ that idiot!"

he cried.

The door opened behind them. 'Stas.h.i.+e stood there, her red hair hidden in a ma.s.s of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her perspiring, laughing face. "I just wanted to show you what a comycal thing happened, Mis' Hollister," she began, in her familiar way.

"'Twould make a pig laugh, now! I'd begun my bread dough, and put it on a shelf, an'--"

"Oh, get out of here!" Paul yelled at her furiously. "And less noise out of you in the kitchen!"

He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.

"I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish s.l.u.t to my wishes," he said.

His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.

She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: "You know very well--" and stopped, horrified at the pa.s.sion which rose clamoring to her lips.

"I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are consulted," said Paul, catching her up.

"I will dismiss 'Stas.h.i.+e to-morrow," returned Lydia with a bitter, proud brevity.

"You're rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As for your saying that you can't get anyone else, and can't keep house decently as other decent people do, there isn't a word of truth in it!