The Squirrel-Cage Part 9

"Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!"

"Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute before you believed in."

Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of."

"I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia.

"There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its men," suggested her companion.

"If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her nation.

"I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are pa.s.sing me by; and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_ fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my own way."

The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.

The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on!

I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."

She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to make her either painfully embarra.s.sed or secretly delighted with this impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United States--that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.

They might have been a pair of children.

"You've plenty of time," he a.s.sured her. "Though I live so far out of the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid."

He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.

"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.

"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.

They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into the gra.s.s rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.

Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.

She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.

When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she looked up at him with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "I have made friends with it--your living-room," she said.

As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it--the little house in the clearing--so peaceful, so--just look at it now. It looks like a little house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing and looked back at the pleasant glow s.h.i.+mmering through the windows, then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.

Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly, varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves, the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her, and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing aloud.

She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless communication.

He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road, stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen her.

It was that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted within.

They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails, humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely, moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody.

Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career.

She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired, secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this, or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.

The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin's eyes a tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of the car to which he swung her--she leaned to him with a sweet, unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.

The words hummed meaningless in Lydia's ears, and it was not until some time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: "Ah, my poor child, I am so horribly, horribly sorry for you!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT

Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.

It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.

Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.

In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.

She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself, and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.

Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads."

It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.

Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn, Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not tempered by his occasional amus.e.m.e.nt at her--an amus.e.m.e.nt which Mrs.

Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous, though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had s.h.i.+elded him, as a rule, from the uproar of the engagement.

This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter, he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the older. Of course, he rea.s.sured himself, this had scarcely been a fair trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful, blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent att.i.tude of his family toward household aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to eat.

Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with Mother, now she's sick?"

Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form--very green."

Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to insist on anything. She had succ.u.mbed at the first of his shocked tones of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in her mind which made him uneasy.

However, to-night there were several cheering circ.u.mstances. The doctor had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite herself in ten days--a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of his vest--a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a glimpse of you after he's in town again."

At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically resisted the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of embittered protest that rose to his lips, this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again till after he had served her automatically, das.h.i.+ng the mashed potato on her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody tease me so about him!"

Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."

Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"

Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him--to look anybody in the face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never--"

Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent, he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."

Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid--the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl--went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."

The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia and retreating into the kitchen.

Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the card." He smiled with a tender amus.e.m.e.nt at the girl, who met his eyes with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and navely read the card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've waited so long to see."