The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ make you see that I didn’t mean to be so—” she hesitated, and fell back on iteration again—“so horrid.”

      The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, “Oh, you were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh. I’m sorry.”

      She challenged his sincerity, “Are you really, really?”

      “Oh, really, really,” he assured her.

      “And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?”

      “Anything,” he promised, smiling at her as at a child.

      “You’ve promised! You’ve promised!” She indulged herself in a noiseless hand-clasp. “Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it.”

      “All about what?”

      “Goodness gracious! Don’t you remember? That’s what we were both horrid about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you—”

      He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from annoyance. “Oh, I’m safe. I’ll never see you to tell you.”

      She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her. “What’s the matter with right now?” she asked, smiling.

      “I’ve got to earn my living right now,” he objected, beginning with a swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.

      She was diverted for an instant. “What are you doing to our nice old newel-post?” she asked. “I thought they said you were going to set up the new sideboard.”

      “Oh, that’s no job at all; it’s done. Didn’t you hear me pushing and banging things around? Now I’ve the job before me of fitting the very latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one.”

      The girl returned to her first attack. “Well, anyhow, if it’s a long job, it’s all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won’t feel you’re wasting time.”

      Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her insistence. “You see, you’re not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I’m a grown-up little pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought it wasn’t so surprising, after all, your doing ’most anything queer.”

      Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. “Little pitchers have tongues, too, I see.”

      Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite confidently, “But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?”

      “It?” He made her define herself.

      “Oh, you know! Give up everything—lose your chance in society, and poke off into the woods to be a common—” In spite of her new boldness she faltered here.

      He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. “Don’t be afraid to say it right out—even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear it.”

      “I knew it!” Lydia exclaimed. “As I was thinking it over on the stairs just now, I said to myself that probably you weren’t a bit apologetic about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself for doing it.”

      He cast a startled look at her. “You’re the only person in Endbury with imagination enough to guess that.”

      “But why? why? why?” she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the eagerness of her inquiry. “I feel just as though I were going to hear the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle.”

      He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. “It wouldn’t be polite to tell you the answer, for what I’m trying to do is to get out of being what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be—except Dr. Melton, of course.”

      “What’s the matter with ‘all the people I know,’ ” she challenged him explicitly.

      He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, I’ve nothing new to say about them. Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi.”

      “They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I know.”

      Rankin looked at her whimsically. “Oh, don’t they?”

      “Do they?” Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought out, as a patently absurd supposition, “You don’t mean to say that Endbury people are wicked?”

      “Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious books? No; Lord, no! I don’t think they are wicked—just mistaken.”

      “What about? Now we’re getting warm. I’ll guess in a minute.”

      He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. “I’m afraid you would never guess. It’s all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and out as you live, every minute.”

      “What? what? what? You can’t say it, you see, when it comes right down to the matter.”

      “Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn’t be a tragedy if they should all be killing themselves to get what they really don’t want and don’t need, and starving for things they could easily have by just putting out their hands.”

      Lydia’s blankness was immense.

      He said, with ironic triumph: “You see, when I do say it you can’t make anything out of it.” After this he turned for a time all his attention to his work.

      He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers, wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect. As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of dismay.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ