The Squirrel-Cage Part 6

"No; I'm not going to cry," Lydia told him with a very small smile, "but it would serve you right if I did."

The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. "What, can I do for you?" he asked.

"If you're really serious in asking that," said Lydia with dignity, "I'll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what you started out to--the real reason why you are a common carpenter instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none of my concern, that's another matter. But you said you would."

Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal, although he smiled at its form. "You speak as though I had my reason tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out."

Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected resolution: "Well, I _will_ tell you."

He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the girl. "It's very simple--nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn't see how I could earn my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any other--only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess the businesses my friends were in weren't very different. At least, I didn't think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was going to grow more and more absorbing--or, at least, that was the way it affected the older men I knew--so that at forty I shouldn't have any other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of insurance.

"Now, what was I to do about it? I can't make speeches, and n.o.body but crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I'm not a great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn't want to fight so hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from having the necessaries, and didn't give myself time to enjoy things that are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr.

Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to do, if I didn't like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do something harmless, at least, if I didn't have gumption enough to think of something worth while, that might make things better.

"I like the cabinet-maker's trade, and I couldn't see that practicing it would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me.

Oh, I know that it's the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day; I haven't any illusions about the sanct.i.ty of the hand-crafts. But, anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employes, and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted, and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money, and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.

"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later.

And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent."

Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--"

she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My sister's husband is in the insurance business."

"You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite."

Lydia seemed in no haste to a.s.sure him that he had not been. She pulled absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his living."

Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man.

It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has, whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called success--"

Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amus.e.m.e.nt at his heat. "Why, you're talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is anybody knows everybody else!"

"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.

If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation, there aren't many folks--yes, even here in Endbury that seems so harmless to you because it's so familiar--who wouldn't be horrified at the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat."

"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.

The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop."

His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I _hate_ it!"

Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!"

she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not hate."

He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of silence that followed.

Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice vibrating, and turned away.

CHAPTER VI

LYDIA'S G.o.dFATHER

Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about to weep.

"Oh, dear G.o.dfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"

He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated, "anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."

His voice, though high, was very sweet--a quality that made it always sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent, dropping his _r's_, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his speech. He now looked up at his tall G.o.dchild and said without a smile: "If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."

Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon him. "Why, how _awful_!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd _forgotten_ Mother!"

Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already, in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these broken and meaningless e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns seem to indicate."

He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but he flowed steadily on.

"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian G.o.dfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. "About your mother--I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from table-cloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."

He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change of manner: "But what's the matter with _you_?"

Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder.

"I--why, I--just--" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what _is_ the matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the world.

Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart, or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you, my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me!

Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening, now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of the morning? I hope you slept late."

Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."

Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.

"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.

"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.

The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems.

Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."

He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent, and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child, had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.

"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."

Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating ma.s.s of cut-gla.s.s and silver, and yet without what could really be called ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"

"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."