The Squirrel-Cage. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ though she could not resist the relief that came from expression. “And the cost of living—the necessities are bad enough, but the other things—the things you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it in church. I can’t think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up. Everybody’s getting so reckless and extravagant and I won’t go into debt! I’ll come to it, though. Everybody else does! We’re the only people that haven’t oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts—and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen’s appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars—well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they ‘just had to have it, and you can always have what you have to have.’ It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave cost—” She detected a wavering in her father’s attention, as though he were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with a hurt and impatient “Oh, well, no matter!” and ran down the steps.

      Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints, “Oh, if that’s all you mean. Why, that’s half the fun. I remember when you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses.”

      Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. “Oh, Daddy dearest, it’s a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed up for me—and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my coming-out party.”

      Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife’s expression, and drew her toward him. “Here, Mother, stop staring at Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too.” He bent over her and rubbed his cheek against hers. “Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling better?” He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the parlor. “Here, let’s go in and visit for a while. I’m an old fool! I can’t do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all the way from New York, so that we could hear it together.”

      Lydia protested. “Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I’ve written! There’s nothing you don’t know. There’s nothing much to tell, anyhow. I’ve been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and cultured generally, till I’m full—up to there!” She drew her hand across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, “But I forgot the most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just concentrated on clothes. You don’t mind, do you?”

      As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He patted his wife on the shoulder. “There, there, Mother,” he said vaguely. To Lydia he went on, “You’ve been gone quite a while, you know, and—well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won’t have much notion of how we feel.”

      Lydia’s dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. “I’m just about distracted,” she cried. “I love everybody and everything so, I can’t stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can’t make up my mind which to kiss first—and it’s that way about everything! It’s all so good I don’t know what to begin on.” She brought their faces together and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. “Now, look here! If we stand here another minute we’ll all cry. Come and show me the house. I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new ones Mother’s been writing about.” She seized their hands and pulled them into the parlor. “I’ve been in this room already, but I didn’t see it. I don’t believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so excited. Oh, it’s lovely—it’s lovely!”

      She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was familiar with fond little exclamations. “Oh, that darling little wicker chair!—the picture of the dog!—oh! oh! here’s my china lamb!” and crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.

      “Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch—sofa—what do you call it? Why, it is so beautifully different! Wherever did you get that?”

      Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. “There, Nathaniel, what did I tell you?” she triumphed.

      “That’s one of your mother’s latest extravagances,” explained Judge Emery. “There’s a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture. Maybe it’s all right, but I can’t see it’s so much better than what you buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me.”

      “He doesn’t like the man who made it,” said Mrs. Emery accusingly.

      “What’s the matter with him?” asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa’s high back.

      Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for everything outside the profession of the law, “Oh, I never said I didn’t like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed, conceited—”

      Lydia laughed. She thought her father’s dry, ironic turns very witty.

      “I never saw anything conceited about him,” protested Mrs. Emery, admitting the rest of the indictment.

      Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into shape. “Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you.”

      “I’ve brought you some beauties from London,” said Lydia. Then reverting with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, “Whatever does this man do that’s so queer?”

      “Oh, he’s just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists,” said her father.

      “Back-to-all-fours?” Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be amused.

      “That’s just your father’s way,” exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her daughter’s fondness for the Judge’s tricks of speech.

      “He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in him would be willing to,” said Judge Emery finally.

      Lydia turned to her mother.

      “Why, it’s nothing that would interest you in the least, dear,” said the matron, taking in admiringly Lydia’s French dress. “Only for a little while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an insurance man, like Marietta’s husband, and getting on finely, when all of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that dress?”

      “In the woods!” repeated Lydia.

      “Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him—why you know, you’ve been there ever so many times—the Black Rock woods, the picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his furniture out of the trees.”

      Lydia’s passing curiosity had faded. “Not quite twenty, even—only ninety-two francs,” she at last answered her mother’s question. “You never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should think your carpenter man was crazy.” She glanced down with satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.

      “Oh, СКАЧАТЬ