HOME AGAIN
In the first months of her marriage Susan had not felt that Joe's
dwelling-place was her home; she was neither its creator nor its
mistress; only its housekeeper. The only concern she had felt for
it, therefore, was that she should discharge the obligation she was
under to make her husband comfortable.
But the renewal of her relations with Eleanor had awakened in her a
bit of ambition to try to make the house in which she lived and the
appointments of her daily life a little attractive. After those
weeks at the seaside she came home resolved to experiment with her
situation and see whether she could make it really liveable. Unless
she could change a good many things, both material and spiritual, in
her existence, she saw that if she would save her soul alive, she
must leave her husband.
She realized that there was probably no limit to the power she could
wield over Joe to get what she wanted, if she followed that
suggestion Eleanor had once made to her, that she play upon his
passion for her. Eleanor, of course, had not really understood what
she was saying.
"Even if I loved a man, I couldn't do that!" thought Susan. "That
sort of thing may be feminine, but it certainly is not womanly--and
it seems to me that it's up to a woman to _be_ a woman, not just a
female!"
Her first experiment was to let Joe understand, when, a few weeks
after her return, he suggested that she was now quite strong enough
to dismiss the washwoman, that she did not intend to dismiss her.
"I shall never again, while I live, stand at the washtub. I prefer
school teaching," she told him.
"But you can't school teach now you're married oncet!"
"Oh, yes, I can. If you won't pay for a washwoman, I can easily earn
more than enough to pay for one by substituting in the Middleburg
schools. And as I prefer that work to washing, that is what I shall
do."
"You talk dumb, Susan!" he exclaimed, impatiently. "Fur a married
lady to be talkin' about workin' out yet! Don't be so ignorant dumb!"
But though he never again insisted upon dismissing the laundress, he
never failed on wash day to draw Susan's attention to what they would
be saving if she did the work herself.
"A dollar and a half every week, if you wasn't so high-minded! Yi,
yi, think what that there dollar and a half would buy yet!"
Susan's proposals for re-papering and re-furnishing the cottage Joe
met with the assurance that it would be a useless expenditure because
in a few years they would be living in the big house.
"But White Oak Farm is entailed," she reminded him (as though he ever
for a moment forget it!). "Your brother can't mortgage or sell it."
"Sid is runnin' through with his money as fast as he otherwise can;
he's beginnin' a'ready to draw heavy on his principal. It won't go
long till his money's all. Then when he ain't got none no more fur
to keep this here place a-goin', he'll have to it. He'll rent it to
_me_. See?"
"I wish you'd move away from here altogether."
"Well, I won't!"
"You want me to live in this cottage for five years just as it is?"
"What's five years?--when you'll be livin' in the big house for the
rest of your life!"
"Only until Georgie takes it over."
"But he won't have no money, neither, to run the place. Till Georgie
inherits it a'ready, Sid will have spent the last dollar _he's_ got!
So Georgie, too, will have to rent it out."
No arguments could budge him from his refusal to "spend any" on the
cottage.
"I have some very nice friends, Joe, that I knew at school; I'd like
to ask them out to see me sometimes. I could make this cottage very
attractive if you would let me spend about a thousand dollars on it."
"A thousand dollars yet! On somepin that till five years from now
you won't have no use fur! Och, Susan, just as if I would! Why, I
wouldn't near do somepin like that!"
"Am I to wait five years before I can ask any of my friends to visit
me? For I can't ask them here while things are as they are now."
"Me I don't favour comp'ny, anyhow. I like better to be by ourselfs."
"But I do like company; some kinds."
"Comp'ny costs too expensive. And it takes a woman's mind off her
housework, comp'ny does. And if you have comp'ny, next thing you'll
want to go runnin' yourself and neglect me and Josie. No'p!" he
shook his head. "I see how it's a good thing our cottage ain't so
fancy like you want fur it to be! Yes, anyhow!"
Susan considered several possible schemes for forcing Joe's hand in
this matter. "I might just buy a lot of furniture and charge it up
to him----"
But she knew perfectly well that he would simply send it back to the
shops.
She might go to Middleburg, get a position of some sort, and refuse
to come home until he consented to let her have the kind of home she
wanted and had a right to. But there was Josie--she could not walk
out of the house and desert a four-year-old child.
As time moved on and she took no stand, but just let things slide,
she felt that Eleanor had been quite right, entirely justified, in
calling her "spineless". There had been a time in her life when she
would have braced up and wrestled with any conditions that she
greatly wished to change. But the intensity of her suffering through
Sidney had apparently left her without power to fight her way further
through life. Was she, then, doomed to merely exist, not live, all
the rest of her days?
Occasionally, when she did take issue with Joe, on some point that
seemed to her too vital to admit of indecision on her part, the
ordeal would leave her so limp that she would greatly doubt whether
the gain was worth the cost.
Joe had a way of holding her punctiliously to those of her domestic
tasks which involved his comforts, but it seemed that she had to be
dangerously ill before he felt an equal obligation toward _her_. Let
him come into the kitchen and find a meal not ready on the minute and
he would grumble and sulk for the rest of the day; yet he was himself
extremely unpunctual and irregular and perfectly heedless of the
inconvenience he caused Susan by keeping her waiting (often for a
mere whim) an hour or more beyond the hour for dinner or supper.
"But that's what a woman's work is, to run her house fur her Mister's
conwenience," he would excuse himself when she would protest against
such inconsiderateness.
"I never know when to expect you, Joe, and it keeps me forever in
this dreadful kitchen."
"That's your place, ain't it? Where else had you ought to want to
be?"
"If it were necessary for you to be late all the time, I'd bear it.
But you're simply indifferent to my convenience."
"I do what it suits me to do. I come in to eat when I feel fur
comin'. It's your business to have me a hot meal when I want it."
"Shall I change the dinner hour to one o'clock, since you so often
come in long after twelve?"
"No! Fur when I do come in at twelve, then I want to eat at twelve!
So you see to it that you are got it ready at twelve, still."
"Listen, Joe; I loathe a kitchen. When I am in it my one desire is
to escape from it. You deliberately, for no reason at all, make me
waste hours here that I might be spending on things I like to do."
"'Waste hours!' You are got no need to waste hours! You could find
a-plenty to do in your kitchen, whiles you're waitin' 'round fur me
to come in, if you _wanted_ to find it. You don't keep your closets
very good redd up, I took notice a'ready."
Susan suddenly decided that here was one of the places where it would
pay to take a stand. "Even my spine stiffens when it's a question of
useless kitchen work!" she thought.
"I'll not put up with it any longer, Joe," she informed him.
Joe stared. "What fur kind of lang'age is that fur a wife to use to
her Mister?--'won't put up with it'! Yi, yi, Susan!"
"Don't forget," repeated Susan. "I won't put up with it."
Joe's domestic standards being those of the only home life he had
ever really known, that of the Pennsylvania Dutch farm where he had
lived for so many years of his young manhood, Susan's "putting her
foot down" was, in his estimation, such a usurpation of the male's
exclusive prerogative that it gave him a genuine shock.
"To think I got married to a wife that would sass me like that!" he
exclaimed.
Susan said no more, but as Joe furtively watched her across the
dinner table, he saw no softening signs in her face, of shame for her
unwifely talk.
For the rest of the day he revelled in a perfect orgy of sulking; and
the next morning he put Susan's dictum to the test by deliberately
coming in to dinner at one o'clock instead of the prescribed hour of
noon.
He found the kitchen empty, the table cleared, and no sign of a meal
on the stove.
When he searched the house, he discovered that Susan was not even at
home. Anything more outrageously high-handed!----
"I got to learn her better'n this!" he reflected, darkly.
But how?
"I'm stumped!" he heavily admitted.
He cooked himself a lunch of eggs and coffee, purposely and quite
unnecessarily cluttering up the kitchen and leaving it in a fearful
state of disorder.
His supper hour was half-past five, but to further "try out" the
lengths to which his lawful wife would carry her rebellion, he
avoided appearing until nearly seven.
Again he found emptiness and no supper; and a search of the premises
discovered the car to have been taken from the garage. The kitchen
had been "redd up," so of course she had been back during the
afternoon.
Such reckless indifference to the needs and comforts of her husband!
Such neglect of her house to "go runnin'"! Such a shameless flouting
of his disapproval! What could a mere man do in the face of such
"crazy behaviours"?
When at half-past eight that evening she returned home with Josie,
Joe had not yet been able to reach any decision as to how he would
deal with her.
In his bewilderment and confusion, he actually appealed to her to
help him.
"What kin I do with you when you ac' up like this here?"
"That's easy, Joe--come to your meals on time."
"I'll come when it suits me!"
"Then you take your chances of having to cook your own meals."
"I ain't standin' fur no sich behaviours, Susan!"
"There are a few things that I am not standing for, Joe," she
answered, walking out of the room.
While Joe had never been more dumbfounded or more furiously resentful
in his life, it surprised and puzzled him to find that his anger
against Susan only augmented his passion for her.
"She surely has got me, the little feist!" he growled to himself.
For a week he was so painfully punctual and so heavily sarcastic if
she were not entirely ready to serve him the instant he arrived, that
she soon learned to be fully prepared for him at least five minutes
before she could reasonably look for him.
One morning he accosted her ceremoniously, almost melodramatically.
"With your permission, Missus, I'll mebby be late three minutes or
so, this dinner, seein' I got to go to Middleburg over."
"I appreciate your consideration in telling me beforehand, Joe.
Thank you!" she said with such humble sincerity that he found himself
glowing with pleasure, as though she had praised him for a deed of
valour and chivalry.
Having succeeded in making him punctual, her next stand was to insist
on certain table decencies and even niceties which Joe professed to
hold in great contempt. Among the many phases of his jealousy with
regard to her, none was more evident than his jealousy of her
personal superiority to himself. He resented any least thing that
seemed to take her out of his reach or off of his level, and he hated
every manifestation of her better education, her wider experiences,
her finer tastes. The very intensity of his scorn for the table
reforms she introduced was proof to her that he felt them to be a
criticism of himself and a setting up of herself above and apart from
him.
But one day she discovered, to her surprise, that he was really
inordinately proud of this very superiority which he so jealously
resented. A cattle dealer, with whom he had to transact some
business, came over from Fokendauqua to take dinner with them, and
Susan decided that as the man was Joe's guest and not hers, she
would, to-day, dispense with the table formalities and daintinesses
which he so hated.
"I'll serve the dinner as _he_ likes it served."
What, then, was her surprise to find him hurt, angry, and
disappointed at being foiled of an anticipated pride in displaying to
his crude visitor what a "high-toned" wife he had!
"Yes, fur yourself and _your_ friends you'd take trouble!" he
reproached her. "But fur mine, not! Any old thing when my folks
comes; ain't?"
"But I thought you hated napkins and finger bowls and extra forks for
pie and all that! Every day for three weeks you've been telling me
you did. I served the dinner to-day as I thought you liked it."
"Yes, you did!" he sneered, skeptically. "You done it to spite me!"
She wondered wearily whether he really believed that.
"If you _got_ to put on all that there damned style," began Joe--but
Susan checked him with an indignant glance toward Josie.
"You'll teach him to swear!" she warned.
"Nevvy mind, Muvver, me knowed dat word before," Josie said,
reassuringly.
"If you're got to put on style," Joe repeated, firmly, "you ain't got
no need to con_trar_y it all just as soon as strangers comes to eat
along! A awful funny way, I must say--keepin' your fancy manners fur
private and your plain ways fur when comp'ny is here!"
Susan's occasional glimpses of Sidney's wife made her wonder whether
Laura, with her seemingly more fortunate lot, was really any happier
than was she herself.
"She looks so awfully discontented, so soured on life!"
Was it because she depended so entirely upon outside things to give
her happiness?--and had no resources at all within herself?--not even
the love of a child?
One autumn afternoon Susan had the unusual experience of meeting
Sidney's wife face to face in the narrow lane which afforded a short
cut from White Oak Farm to the trolley line to Middleburg. Both the
little roadster of the cottage and the touring-car of the big house
being out of commission, Susan had just returned from town by the
trolley as Laura was walking to the trolley station. The lane was so
very narrow that Laura was obliged to stop and step aside to let
Susan pass. Susan sensed at once that her sister-in-law was going to
be gracious, condescending. Now nothing which Sidney's wife could do
could so much as even prick the surface of Susan's life, let alone
touch the deep places where she had suffered so much. So it was with
a quite detached and very faint curiosity that she contemplated
Laura's bearing toward her in this moment of their unavoidable
meeting. And before this impersonal regard and slightly ceremonious
bow of Susan Laura's intended condescension and graciousness suddenly
collapsed, leaving her actually confused, almost abashed.
As Susan walked on home, the words "aristocracy of the spirit" moved
like a refrain in her brain, as she thought of how she, born of lowly
peasants, had, by virtue of her obviously stronger, more intrepid
spirit, abashed and confused her comparatively high-born
sister-in-law.
She recalled a sentence in "The Water Babies": "A man may learn from
his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he were brought up
in all the drawing-rooms of London."
"After all," thought Susan, "it's only genuine religion that can make
one _truly_ aristocratic."