The Worry of the Squirrel Cage : Part 1

Quit Your Worrying!
by George Wharton James

(Page 12 of 23)

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]

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 - '

About the Author

George Wharton James (1858 - 1923) was a prolific popular lecturer and journalist, writing more than 40 books and many articles and pamphlets on California and the American Southwest. James was born in Lincolnshire, England. He was ordained as a Methodist minister and came to the United States in 1881, serving in parishes in Nevada and southern California.