The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ that all about?” she inquired simply.

      “Compromise,” he answered. “There are occasions when it doesn’t do any good.”

      “Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do your own cooking?” asked Lydia with something of her father’s shrewd home-thrusting accent. “What would happen if everybody did that?”

      Rankin laughed. “Everybody’d have a good time, for one thing,” he answered, adding, more seriously, “The house of Rimmon may be all right for some people, but my head isn’t clear enough.”

      Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly “bluffing” type of young lady. “Rimmon?” she asked.

      “He’s in the Bible.”

      “That’s a good reason why I’ve never heard of him,” she said ruefully.

      “All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard they don’t really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully mixed up. And certainly they don’t stand any chance of convincing anybody else that there’s anything the matter with the standard. What’s needed isn’t to upset everything in a heap, but to call people’s attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that’s hard to do. And who ever called more people’s attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn’t a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—” He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a touching humility.

      “Oh, you needn’t explain who Tolstoi is. I’ve heard of him.”

      “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 passing 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 embarrassed 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 assured 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 grass 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 shining 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 shimmering 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 СКАЧАТЬ