The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He bent to kiss her raspingly—there were stiff little stubby white hairs coming out all over his face—and he said, as he trotted on up the stairs, “I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor dear.”

And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own little crib, and when she woke up she wasn’t there at all, but in a big bed in a room at Aunt Julia’s; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy the adventure.

At Aunt Julia’s, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia’s. She conceived of the house in Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still echoing to “Indecent! indecent!” and “What do you suppose people are saying?”

There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened. The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events in Ariadne’s quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne out in the back yard as the weather began to get warmer, and showed her lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter; and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient indulgence of grown-ups’ mistakes. There was not, of course, a single berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue, like huckleberries in milk. She and ’Stashie had gone over them, one by one; they knew.

Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in Bellevue. Muvver wasn’t in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to accounts of what happened in Ariadne’s world and could be told how Aunt Julia said that ’Stashie was quite a help as second girl if you just remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second would have stayed, only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn’t mind. When there wasn’t any cook, if it happened to be ’Stashie’s day off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot some things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she was—and she was good—oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be good—

“Come, dear,” said Aunt Julia, “Mother’s getting tired. We’d better go.”

It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.

She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came teetering out and called the new man to one side, only Ariadne could hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: “It’s no use, Rankin. It’s a fixed idea with her. She isn’t violent any more, but she hasn’t changed. She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint. She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I’m in terror lest she do that. I’ve no authority to prevent her. She won’t talk to me freely about what she is afraid of. She doesn’t seem to trust me—me!”

Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups’ talk, and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her how to use them. Ariadne’s head was full of the happy excitement of those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.

After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and never were.