The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ felt about him all his life the inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea. Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry smile.

      A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fête, given for the benefit of St. Luke’s church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery, smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the child and of tenderness for its early weakness.

      The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious, individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade party had not been held in their parlors, they congratulated themselves.

      A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery’s life might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia’s light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn out to be not the “right thing” after all. Marietta did not recall more vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never, as the phrase in the town ran, “made on the side.” Of his temptations and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more, naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life, which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much larger income.

      Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in the contrast between the daughter’s face, stamped with a certain tired, unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman. At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six. Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty, a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and she envied her mother’s single-minded satisfaction in getting what she wanted.

      Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been sorely vexed by her second son’s unfortunate marriage. He had always been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious, uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother. She sometimes thought he had married the grocer’s daughter out of “contrariness.” The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery’s mind than any blow given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near her, although her mother’s heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents, refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the continent and her son’s intense distaste for letter-writing separated them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud affection on her youngest child.

      It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a merciful Providence in order that she might make that “fresh start all over again” which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity. Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years meant much—meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts, coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She had married the first man who proposed to her—a young insurance agent. Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta’s parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was due to Marietta’s unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up appearances.

      All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, СКАЧАТЬ