The Worry of the Squirrel Cage : Part 2

Quit Your Worrying!
by George Wharton James

(Page 13 of 23)

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!

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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.