The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ do you do?” asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer, but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. “It’s perfectly desperate at home. I haven’t had a minute’s peace. This afternoon I just got wild, and said I would get away from it for a minute, and just ran away. Father’s nice about it, but he does look something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says that Mother doesn’t have to change more than two or three times a year!” She presented this as the superlative of stability.

      Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation, in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. “You must show me all about how you live, and everything,” she commanded prettily. “I’ve been so curious about it—and now here I am.”

      She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed to seek him out. “What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in that chair-back.” She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark piece of oak. “And so this is where you work?”

      “I work everywhere,” he told her. “I do all that’s done, you see.”

      “You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don’t you?” Lydia turned her white neck to glance inside the house.

      Rankin’s mouth twitched humorously. “You’ll never understand me,” he said lightly. “I get my meals myself, here.”

      Lydia turned on him sharply. “You don’t cook!” she cried out.

      “And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a great while, dust.”

      The romantic curiosity died out of the girl’s eyes into a shocked wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak. Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant “Well!” which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise. Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.

      “It’s so funny,” he explained, “to see the picture of myself I gather from your shocked and candid eyes. I’m so used to my queer ideas nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still seems perfectly crazy to others.”

      “Well, not crazy.” Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. “But it must be horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!” protested Lydia, feeling resentful that her inculcated horror of a man’s “lowering himself” to woman’s work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying. “But I suppose it’s very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I imagine.”

      There was a humorous glint in his eye, “I cook over the best brand of oil-stove that money can buy,” he told her, relentlessly, watching her wince from the sordid image. “I have all the conveniences I can think of. All I’m trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way. It’s more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn’t want to wait on me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can certainly cook like a house afire.”

      At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for her. “Well, honestly, do you know,” she said unexpectedly, “there is a lot in that. I’ve thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on ever so much easier.”

      “And I’ll just warrant,” the man went on, “that I’ve had more time to myself lately than you have, for all I’ve my living to earn as well as the housework.”

      “My goodness!” cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. “That needn’t be saying much for you, for I haven’t had a minute—not even to sit with Mother as much as I ought.”

      “What did you have to do that kept you from that?”

      “Oh, you’re no housekeeper, that’s evident, or you wouldn’t ask. A man never has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house. Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases, and dust, and pick up, and dust—I don’t know what makes things get so dusty. We’ve got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do that!”

      “I had a great-aunt,” began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, “a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that’s why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if they ever ran away they’d be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a river, and the father, who couldn’t swim a stroke, fell in. The horses were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and screamed, ‘Help! help!’ and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down in his anguish of mind over his poor old father’s fate, ‘Oh, help, somebody! Somebody come and help! I can’t leave my horses!’ ”

      He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naïve question, “Well, did his father drown?” before the meaning of the little parable struck her. She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made at her own expense. “Don’t you think you are a good hand at sermon-making!” she mocked him. “It’s all very well to preach, but just you tell me what you would have done in my place.”

      “I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let the dust lie on them—even such an awful thing as that!”

      Lydia considered this with honest surprise. “Why, do you know, it never occurred to me I could do that!”

      Rankin nodded. “It’s a common hallucination,” he explained. “I’ve had it. I have to struggle against it still.”

      “Hallucination?”

      “The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you.”

      Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. “I wonder,” she mused, “if that’s why I always feel so much freer and happier in old clothes—that I don’t forget that they’re for me and I’m not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks get you to thinking that you are for clothes—you’re made to show them off.” Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood. “Here’s your sister’s rain,” he said instead, pointing across the clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. “Why, I didn’t really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta’s—” She glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk of her ruffled skirt.

      Rankin stood СКАЧАТЬ