The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ dear Godfather!” 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 godchild 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 ejaculations 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 godfather.” 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 portière 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 mass of cut-glass 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.”

      “Oh, I remember, you don’t like her,” said Lydia. “She always seems just funny to me—funny and pathetic. She’s so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people’s good times so terrifically.”

      “She’s like some political bosses—admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same.”

      Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. “Flora Burgess a menace to the community!”

      The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. “Me and Cassandra!” he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. “Just you wait and see!”

      He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.

      Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naïve, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite СКАЧАТЬ