The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

CHAPTER XXX

TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR

The scene of Paul’s departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.

That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child’s cheerful blindness to its elder’s emotion, and Anastasia detected nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped about quite briskly.

It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant’s cessation of the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul’s departure was like a black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as wildly about the silent house. “But I can’t stand this!—to hate and be hated! I can not bear it! I must do something—but what? but what?” Once she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing herself to an instant’s immobility, she heard Ariadne’s light, regular breathing continue undisturbed.

She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.

Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering. In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only unbearable pain—the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her, answering her husband’s anger like the reflection of a torch in a mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own, but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now, constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and drawn under his thinning, graying hair.

The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of the night before.

But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it. ’Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.