The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their tools. Paul Hollister’s face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment later he caught the faraway five-o’clock whistles calling from the city. He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going even better than ever.

The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining, the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and Lydia’s father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law did not allow himself to be “done” by those past masters of the art. It argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia’s attention to the trait with approval.

Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister’s sister had accompanied her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine—at this point Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia’s hand and had informed her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with her young man and couldn’t get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he and Lydia.

That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul—his sister’s recent engagement to their uncle’s partner in the iron works, a very prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, “taken a club to him.” It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. “It must shoot the chutes, or nothing,” she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful, high-spirited manner.

Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their lives thus far.

He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it, she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had not been on that one. The harsh jar of the trolley’s progress died away in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait for the next one.

He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the “surburban” look which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself, and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech trees.

He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.

A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in his future and Lydia’s. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected her from all the asperities of reality; a good father—he had almost an actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in life—girls of Lydia’s beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and uprightness—and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from now—in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess, a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his arm out.

“It’s all up to me,” he said aloud. “I can do it if I go after it hard enough. I’ve got to make good for Lydia’s sake and mine. She must have the best I can get—the very best I know how to get for her.”