Chapter 9

THE DAY BEGINS

She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous, rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall, turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn's coolness; the day had begun.

Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more conversation.

Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the excitement of Lydia's return. She had slept badly, and was quite uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time. After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs. Mortimer asked, "How in the world does it happen that you're up at this hour?"

Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, "Who do you suppose came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?"

Judge Emery laid down his paper. "What under the sun was he prowling about for at that hour?"

"He wasn't prowling," said Lydia. "He was fairly tearing along past the house so fast that he 'most ran over me before I saw him. I'd forgotten he is so handsome."

"Handsome!" Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. "With that beard!"

"I like beards, sometimes," said Lydia.

"It makes a man look like a barbarian. I'd as soon wear a nose-ring as have Ralph wear a beard."

"Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache, anyhow," opposed Lydia. "I got to liking to see them."

"Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes haven't a word to say." Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a sharper edge to the words.

"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically; "you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly not very polite."

"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise, laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the sisters.

Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like that."

"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her snappy."

She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our parlor."

"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying glasses," suggested the doctor.

"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had assured him.

"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.

Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes, and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched off."

"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the last.

After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage, she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising, breathless, moist heat.

Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother's room. She was looking forward to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone, because she had been at home too short a time to have received any letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day before by her mother's competent hands, which had also arranged every detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.

Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in prolonged meditation.

In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.

Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. "Hush! Don't make any more noise than you can help. Mother's still asleep." At his gaze of stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, "Why, I always seem to strike you speechless. What's the matter with me now?"

The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of her tone, "I was wondering if I oughtn't to apologize to you--if I should ever see you again--for being so curt this morning. And then you spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do. I'm very sorry."

They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional situation, but, in spite of this, the young man's apology was not without the accent of serious sincerity.

Lydia responded heartily in kind. "Oh, it was I who was horrid. And--wasn't it funny--I was just thinking--wondering if I should ever have a chance to try to 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 looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal, although he smiled at its form. "You speak as though I had my reason tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out."

Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected resolution: "Well, I _will_ tell you."

He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the girl. "It's very simple--nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn't see how I could earn my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any other--only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess the businesses my friends were in weren't very different. At least, I didn't think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was going to grow more and more absorbing--or, at least, that was the way it affected the older men I knew--so that at forty I shouldn't have any other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of insurance.

"Now, what was I to do about it? I can't make speeches, and nobody but crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I'm not a great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn't want to fight so hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from having the necessaries, and didn't give myself time to enjoy things that are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr. Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to do, if I didn't like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do something harmless, at least, if I didn't have gumption enough to think of something worth while, that might make things better.

"I like the cabinet-maker's trade, and I couldn't see that practicing it would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me. Oh, I know that it's the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day; I haven't any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But, anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employés, and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted, and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money, and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.

"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later. And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent."

Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--" she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My sister's husband is in the insurance business."

"You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite."

Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his living."

Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man. It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has, whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called success--"

Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is anybody knows everybody else!"

"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else. If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation, there aren't many folks--yes, even here in Endbury that seems so harmless to you because it's so familiar--who wouldn't be horrified at the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat."

"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.

The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop." His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I _hate_ it!"

Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!" she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not hate."

He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of silence that followed.

Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice vibrating, and turned away.