THE WORRY OF THE SQUIRREL CAGE
Reference has already been made to _The Squirrel Cage_, by Dorothy
Canfield. Better than any book I have read for a long time, it reveals
the causes of much of the worry that curses our modern so-called
civilized life. These causes are complex and various. They include
_vanity, undue attention to what our neighbors think of us, a false
appreciation of the values of things_, and they may all be summed
up into what I propose to call--with due acknowledgement to Mrs.
Canfield--_the Worry of the Squirrel Cage_.
I will let the author express her own meaning of this latter term. If
the story leading up seems to be long please seek to read it in the
light of this expression:[A]
[Footnote A: Reprinted from "The Squirrel-Cage" by Dorothy Canfield
($1.35 net); published by Henry Holt and Company, New York City.]
When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a
small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio,
they had spent their tiny capital in building a small
story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and
fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus
of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home.
Every step in the long series of changes which had led from
its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying
significance for the Emerys and its final condition,
prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of
wood work in every room that showed, with the latest, most
unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented
their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of
the best society of Endbury.
Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained
with effort, self-denial, and careful calculations, yet still
without incurring debt, so their social position had been
secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of
self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud of
both their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw
no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an
industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children
or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar.
The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember
those early struggling days with as fresh an emotion as
that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent,
sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most
innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave
of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they
painfully groped their way out of chromos.
The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys
began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury
society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before.
Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the honor of her
acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the cold monotony of
her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this wonder
struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that
the lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their
own highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks.
Marietta could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday,
in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at
their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes
open for the first time to the futility of its claim to
sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the
permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
salt-and-pepper 'caster' which had been one of their
most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow
themselves to remember it, so intolerably did it spell
humiliation.
In these quotations the reader has the key to the situation--worry to
become as good as one's neighbors, if not better. _This is the worry
of the squirrel cage_.
Lydia is Mrs. Emery's baby girl, her pet, her passionate delight.
She has been away to a fine school. She knows nothing of the ancient
struggles to attain position and a high place in society. Those
struggles were practically over before she appeared on the scene.
On the occasion of her final home-coming her mother makes great
preparations to please her, yet the worry and the anxiety, are
revealed in her conversation with her older daughter:
'Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you suppose the house will seem
to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope she won't be
disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year, perhaps
she won't like it. And oh, I _was_ so tired because we weren't
able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room
yesterday!'
'Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia. She's
only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and
father it is good enough for her.'
'That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me!
_Is_ what's good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't
anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?'
The attainments of Mrs. Emery both as to wealth and social position,
however, were not reached by her daughter Marietta and her husband,
but in the determination to make it appear as if they were, Marietta
thus exposes her own life of worry in a talk with her father:
'Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid
income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid. There
aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means that I have to
be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three,
part of the time.' She was starting down the step, but paused
as though she could not resist the relief that came from
expression. 'And the cost of living--the necessities are bad
enough, but the other things--the things you have to have not
to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it
in church. I can't think of anything else but the way
the expenses mount up. Everybody getting so reckless and
extravagant and I _won't_ go in debt! I'll come to it, though.
Everybody else does. We're the only people that haven't
oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts--and everybody knows how
much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen's appendicitis,
and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred
dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they
paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they
'just _had_ to have it, and you can always have what you have
to have.' It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And
the last dinner party we gave cost--'
Another phase of the _squirrel cage worry_ is expressed in this terse
paragraph:
'Father keeps talking about getting one of those
player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can't tell
what they are going to be. She says they may get to be too
common.'
Bye and bye it comes Lydia's turn to decide what place she and her new
husband are to take in Endbury society, and here is what one frank,
sensible man says about it:
'It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself
body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to
have--a social position in Endbury's two-for-a-cent society,
but, for the Lord's sake, why do they make such a howling
and yelling just at the tree when Lydia's got the tragically
important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_
wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in
the midst of an earthquake.'
And the following chapter is a graphic presentation as to how Lydia
made her choice "in perfect freedom"--oh, the frightful sarcasm of the
phrase--during the excitement of the wedding preparations and under
the pressure of expensive gifts and the ideas of over enthusiastic
"society" friends.
Lydia now began her own "squirrel-cage" existence, even her husband
urges her into extravagance in spite of her protest by saying,
"Nothing's too good for you. And besides, it's an asset. The mortgage
won't be so very large. And if we're in it, we'll just have to live up
to it. It'll be a stimulus."
One of the sane characters of the book is dear, lovable, gruff Mr.
Melton, who is Lydia's godfather, and her final awakening is largely
due to him. One day he finds Lydia's mother upstairs sick-a-bed, and
thus breaks forth to his godchild:
'About your mother--I know without going upstairs that she is
floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease
of _social-ambitionitis_. But calm yourself. It's not so bad
as it seems when you've got the right doctor, I've practiced
for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring
anything new on me. I've taken your mother through doily fever
induced by the change from tablecloths to bare tops, through
portiere inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper,
through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission furniture palsy,
not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the
necessity of having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust
me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her.'
And later in speaking of Lydia's sister he affirms:
'Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too
many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted
into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely
constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her
strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with
her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on
a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five
thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably
forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better
business, and she knows it, though she won't admit it.'
Oh, the pity of it, the woe of it, the horror of it, for it is one of
the curses of our present day society and is one of the causes of
many a man's and woman's physical and mental ruin. In the words of our
author elsewhere:
They are killing themselves to get what they really don't want
and don't need, and are starving for things they could easily
have by just putting out their hands.
Where life's struggle is reduced to this kind of thing, there is
little compensation, hence we are not surprised to read that:
Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the
day's work found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an
ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin, while
she was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's
course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not
accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous
force on her mother's part. Dr. Melton had several times of
late predicted that he would have his old patient back under
his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was
now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a heart-sickening
mixture or apprehension for her and of recollection of his own
extreme discomfort whenever she was sick.
Yet in spite of this intense tension, she was unable to stop--felt
she must go on, until finally, a breakdown intervened and she was
compelled to lay by.
On another page a friend tells of his great-aunt's experience:
'She told me that all through her childhood her family was
saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They
worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they
finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that
was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And
it took the womenfolks every minute of their time, and more
to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
heated, furnished, repaired, painted and everything the way a
fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The
fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took
so much time to--'
Finally Lydia herself becomes awakened, startled as she sees what
everybody is trying to make her life become and she bursts out to her
sister:
'I'm just frightened of--everything--what everybody expects me
to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any
time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be
more things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but
_things!_' She began to tremble and look white, and stopped
with a desperate effort to control herself, though she
burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's face of despairing
bewilderment. 'Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all what
I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand. Can't we
somehow all stop--_now!_ And start over again! You get muslin
curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing
about whom to invite to that party--that's going to cost more
than he can afford, Father says--it makes me _sick_ to be
costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just
so--and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it
won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean.
I would so much rather look after it myself than to have
him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that you
_can't_--you say yourself you can't--and never having any time
to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we'd
all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like.
And when her sister tried to comfort her she continued:
'You do see what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look
forward to just that--being so desperately troubled over
things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having
children, and bringing them to the same thing--when there must
be so many things that do matter!'
Then, to show how perfectly her sister understood, the author makes
that wise and perceptive woman exclaim:
'Mercy! Dr. Melton's right! She's perfectly wild with nerves!
We must get her married as soon as ever we can!'
Lydia gives a reception. Here is part of the description:
Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of
different groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed
mass of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion
as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source,
the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming
enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a
prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.
They heard: '_For over a month and the sleeves were too see
you again at Mrs. Elliott's I'm pouring there from four I've
got to dismiss one with plum-colored bows all along five
dollars a week and the washing out and still impossible! I
was there myself all the time and they neither of thirty-five
cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations
was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy under the
brought up in one big braid and caught down with at Peterson's
they were pink and white with--' ... 'Oh, no, Madeleine! that
was at the Burlingame's_.' Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump
into the din and sank from her brother's sight, vociferating:
'_The Petersons had them of old gold, don't you remember, with
little_--'
The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of
femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the
local fray, emerged at length into the darkened hall where
the air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of
imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie and a
perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's father
alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with
wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan
rate, and as he ate, he smiled to himself.
'Well, Mr. Ogre,' said the doctor, sitting down beside him
with a gasp of relief; 'let a wave-worn mariner into your den,
will you?'
Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an
open laugh. He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next
rooms: 'A boiler factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman,
is it?' he put it to his friend.
'Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that
exhibition!' the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious
savagery. 'I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in
there and listen to them, or come out here and find you
thinking they're _funny_!'
They are funny!' insisted the Judge tranquilly. 'I stood by
the door and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch,
till I thought I should have a fit. I never heard anything
funnier on the stage.'
'Looky here, Nat,' the doctor stared up at him angrily,
'they're not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on
holidays and then laughed at! They're the other half of a
whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the
world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool
trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if
he spent his life so. What they're like, and what they do with
their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than
what the tariff is, let me tell you.'
'I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole
lot!' The Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the
little old bachelor. 'Don't commence jumping on the American
woman so! I won't stand it! She's the noblest of her sex!'
'Do you know why I am bald?' said Dr. Melton, running his hand
over his shining dome.
'If I did, I wouldn't admit it,' the Judge put up a cautious
guard, 'because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as
evidence against me.'
'I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men
as you claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the
American woman. You don't give enough thought to her--real
thought--from one year's end to another to know whether you
think she has an immortal soul or not!'
Later Lydia's husband insists that they give a dinner.
It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of
twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for
so many guests. The number of objects necessary for the
conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her. She was
so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated
processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain
reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates
and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal
occasion. They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal
them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the
soup--that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for
an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron, a
wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of
utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very
grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, 'If I tried as hard
for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have
this dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the
angel choir. If anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll
be because he's harder to please than St. Peter himself.'
During the evening:
Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The
exhausting efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort
of coma of fatigue through which she felt but dully the
successive stabs of the ill-served unsuccessful dinner. At
times, the table, the guests, the room itself, wavered before
her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance. She
did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and
eating nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing
for the end of things, and darkness and quiet.
When it was all over and her husband was compelled to recognize that
it had been a failure, his mental attitude is thus expressed:
He had determined to preserve at all costs the appearance
of the indulgent, non-critical, over-patient husband that he
intensely felt himself to be. No force, he thought grimly,
shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous
resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked
about, locking doors and windows, and reviewing bitterly the
events of the evening. If he was to restrain himself from
saying, he would at least allow himself the privilege of
feeling all that was possible to a man deeply injured.
And that night Lydia felt for the "first time the quickening to life
of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten
that she was to know motherhood." Can words more forcefully depict the
_worry of the squirrel-cage_ than this--that an unnecessary dinner,
given in unnecessary style, at unnecessary expense, to visitors to
whom it was unnecessary should have driven from her thought, and
doubtless seriously injured, the new life that she was so soon to give
to the world?
Oh, men and women of divine descent and divine heritage, quit your
squirrel-cage stage of existence. Is life to be one mere whirling
around of the cage of useless toil or pleasure, of mere imagining that
you are doing something? Work with an object. Know your object, that
it is worthy the highest endeavor of a human being, and then pursue it
with a divine enthusiasm that no obstacle can daunt, an ardor that no
weariness can quench. Then it is you will begin to live. There is no
life in _worry_. Worry is a waste of life. If you are a worrier, that
is a proof you (in so far as you worry) do not appreciate the value of
your own life, for a worthy object, a divine enthusiasm, a noble ardor
are in themselves the best possible preventives against worry. They
dignify life above worry. Worry is undignified, petty, paltry. Where
you know you have something to do worth doing, you are conscious of
the Divine Benediction, and who can worry when the smile of God rests
upon him? This is a truism almost to triteness, and yet how few fully
realize it. It is the unworthy potterers with life, the dabblers in
life-stuff, those who blind themselves to their high estate, those who
are unsure of their footing who worry. The true aristocrat is never
worried about his position; the orator convinced of the truth of his
message worries not as to how it will be received; the machinist sure
of his plans hesitates not in the construction of his machinery;
the architect assured of his accuracy pushes on his builders without
hesitancy or question, fear, or alarm; the engineer knowing his engine
and his destination has no heart quiver as he handles the lever. It is
the doubter, the unsure, the aimless, the dabbler, the frivolous,
the dilettante, the uncertain that worry. How nobly Browning set this
forth in his Epilogue:
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
--Being--Who?
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
No, at noonday in the bustle of man's worktime
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed,--fight on, fare ever
There as here!'
And this is not "mere poetry." Or rather it is because it is "mere
poetry" that it is _real life_. Browning had nearly seventy years of
it. He knew. Where there are those to whom "God has whispered in the
ear," there is no uncertainty, no worry. The musician who knows his
instrument, knows his music, knows his key, and knows his time to play
never hesitates, never falters, never worries. With tone clear, pure,
strong, and certain, he sends forth his melodies or harmonies into
the air. Cannot you, in your daily life, be a true and sure musician?
Cannot you be _certain_--absolutely, definitely certain--of your right
to play the tune of life in the way you have it marked out before you,
and then go ahead and play! Play, in God's name, as God's and man's
music-maker.