Chapter 14

CASUS BELLI

Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he queried sharply.

"No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a while. I had a little headache--Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day, and she and Flora Burgess are at the house--"

"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to from such--"

"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old dowdy--only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,' to-night--and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave her."

The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."

He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what are yours going to be like, I wonder?"

"I wonder," she repeated absently.

"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last night is to your taste?"

Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't, Godfather!"

"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the instinct of one who knows his womankind.

There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill and send me home to forget all about everything."

Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes you so troubled?"

She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"

"Yes."

"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He didn't say a thing embarrassing or--or hard to answer, but he let me _see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he and his sister live with, you know."

"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.

"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab, holding on for dear life?"

Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."

"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully exciting--you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get so--so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt very--different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very well, perhaps--or maybe--" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh, Godfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without ambition." She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton with troubled eyes.

He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at her windows. "Oh, Lydia!--Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your future!"

"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her face on his shoulder.

She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter at us?" she reminded him. "We _are_ foolish, too! There's nothing in the world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though--here I am, grown up, and there's nothing for me to do that's worth while--even if--even if--Paul--"

The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father, Lydia? Why don't you ask him about--"

He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "_Father_? Don't you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen--or nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."

The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went to a window, staring out silently.

"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.

"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "Damnation!"

"What did you say?" asked Lydia.

He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said nothing, dear Lydia--I've nothing to say, I find."

Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh--the doctor's volubility was an old joke--and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius, here's Mr.---- why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"

She entered the room as she spoke--a middle-aged woman, with large blue eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother, as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared what she had on, but only what was in her mind--a remark that had once caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.

Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how _good_ you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way, without ringing the bell."

"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves," said the other deprecatingly.

Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here--Oh, it's you, Rankin; come in, come in."

The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia answered with a frank smile.

"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to the other.

"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the first day I was back."

"And when I set up the newel-post--"

"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and umbrella--"

"And then I had to call to take them away, of course--"

They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.

"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other times--we're very well acquainted."

"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.

"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as well as other weighty matters, a great many times."

Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel. "Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and Mr. Rankin get to talking."

"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."

"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.

"They won't--nor anything else," her aunt assured her.

Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man's next statement.

"I've got an apprentice," he announced.

"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.

"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for tools--maybe his ancestors were mediæval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it."

"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.

The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of that."

"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?"

"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's disease at fifty; leave a million."

Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he said.

"So I see--so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You don't believe all that?"

"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly, "Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."

"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked me anything?"

The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.

"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the two women.

Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on. _Would_ you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh, there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying. They just go on and on."

Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway? It's fine."

"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to going?"

"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: "My great-aunt--"

The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.

"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"

"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.

"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it."

"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story.

Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't doubt she _would_ have," he amended.

The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."

"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."

"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."

Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that. It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both."

"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots."

"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while to do--not otherwise."

"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"

"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the women the other way 'round."

The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be done."

"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.

The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change them."

"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take the first step."

"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."

"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't _have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"

The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin," he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of the world?"

The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize it so."

The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most." He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.

"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"

Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go into the labyrinth--that you can live in health and happiness outside."

"There's rather more than that to be done, you'll admit," said the doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.

Rankin colored. "I don't pretend that it's much of anything--what I've done."

The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand nervously over his face. Finally, "But you have done it, at least," he brought out, "and I've only talked. As another doctor has said: 'I've never taken a bribe; but there's a pale shade of bribery known as prosperity.'"

They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth's asking, "Lydia, have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn't expect?"

Lydia did not smile. "I don't know whether we have the book or not, but Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There's a picture of Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere--Munich, I think--or maybe Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then."

The doctor stood up. "Julia, it's nearly half-past now. Who remembered this time? I'm off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely, will you?"

"Oh, I must go too--now, with you." The girl jumped up. "I didn't realize it was so late. They'll be wondering at home."

"Come along, then, both of you. I'll go with you to the corner where I take my car."

The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under endless discussion between them.

The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, "It'd be no use trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others."

Rankin sang out a ringing "Aw, g'wan! It's innate in human nature to murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy'd admit that those aren't the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as they used to be--what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have them--even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish gesture--"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"

They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty years. Which knows human nature best?"

Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"

The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure, contemplating the young people blackly.

"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.

"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues, and I guess he must have caught them from me."

Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.

Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night. Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.

Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension--a certainty--they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry? _What is the matter?_ Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm spoiled with having everything that I want."

"_Have_ you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation was unmitigated.

Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not shown even to the doctor's loving heart. "It's a weight on my very soul--that there's nothing for me to look forward to--nothing, nothing that's worth growing up to do. I haven't been taught anything--but I know I want to be something better than--perhaps I can't be--but I want to try! I want to try! That's not much to ask--just a chance to try--But I don't even know how to get that. I don't even dare to speak of--of--such things. People laugh and say it's Sunday-schooley fancies that'll disappear, that I'll forget as I get into living. But I don't want to forget. I'm afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don't know--"

They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at each other seriously in the starlight.

Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an instant's pause he said, with a deep emotion, "Oh, perhaps--at least we both want to try--_Be Ariadne for me!_ Help me to find the clue to what's wrong in our lives, and perhaps--" He looked down at her, shaken, drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as shining white as his.

He went on: "You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be--I will take whatever you choose to give--and bless you!"

She had a gesture of humility. "_I_ haven't anything to give."

His accent was memorable as he cried, "You have yourself--you--you! But you are too gentle! It is hard for you--it will be too hard for you to do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you would tell me--help you not to forget--not to let life make you forget what is worth doing and learning!"

She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and to say again in wonder, "I'm not anything. What can you think I--what can you hope--"

They were standing now on the walk before her father's house. "I can hope--" his voice shook, "I can hope that you may make me into a man worthy to help you to be the best that's in you."

Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his lips. "Whether to leave you, or to try to--Oh, I would give my life to know how best to serve you," he said huskily. He turned away, the sound of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.

Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.

As she passed her mother's door she started violently, and for an instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name laughingly.

Finally, "Yes," she answered without stirring.

"Oh, come in, come in!" cried Marietta mockingly. "We know all about everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on the front walk. And for all it's so dark, we made out that Paul kissed your hand when he went away."

There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs. Emery gave a scream. "Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?"

They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. "It was not Paul," she said, pale in the doorway; "it was Daniel Rankin."

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