The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that beset her class—for instance, why it was only women in frontier conditions, like Harry’s wife, who could share in their husband’s lives; why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much closer knowledge of their husbands’ characters than they, their wives, had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman’s club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who was, so a visitor from Chicago’s æsthetic circles informed them, the “latest thing” in art interests.

She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit, deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They were both so young yet. They could begin now.

Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: “There! take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes.”

He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind full of busy thoughts.

Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman—and Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally troublesome to the men of her family—any sensible woman kept her thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over without interfering with the business on hand.

As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul’s face sharpen in his concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.

Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably separated her husband from her.

For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had heard her father so unsparingly condemn—silly, childish, egotistic women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly. She did not want all of Paul’s time; she wanted only some of it. And then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound, well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward. Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people “did.” She asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so tired!

It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this, felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul’s complete ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour’s conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague aspiration toward an ideal—an aspiration that came to her clearly only at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at rest.

She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.