A FEW MORE YEARS AT THE COTTAGE
As the days, weeks, and months slipped by Susan came more and more to
let circumstances get the better of her; her husband's will and
personality dominate their joint life; her own individuality sink and
be submerged in a groove of narrow household drudgery, with almost no
life outside the four walls of their cottage except that which she
got from her lively correspondence with Eleanor--all idea of any
closer contact under present conditions seeming impracticable; from
her flying about the country in her husband's car (a wonderful safety
valve); from her relation with her sisters and a few of her
Pennsylvania Dutch neighbours; but most of all from books, through
which she "roamed at large o'er all this scene of man." It was her
avid love of books, and her growing devotion to Josie during the next
four years that kept her soul alive in an otherwise deep and heavy
loneliness and isolation.
It seemed to her sometimes, as she would move mechanically through
the household tasks which never had and never would seem worth doing,
but which she nevertheless faithfully performed, that life for most
people was nothing more than going through a succession of senseless
movements which led nowhere.
"We lie down and rise again; wash dishes and put them away; take them
out again and put them away again; get into bed and out of it and
into it again; dress and undress and dress again; a succession of
motions! What for? What is the Universe doing with us? Are we
fools, not to cut loose and do what we want to do?"
But what did we want to do? The eternal question!
"It ain't respectable, the way you won't go to church," Joe sometimes
grumbled. "I want Josie brang up respectable. You had ought to take
him to Sabbath school still."
"But I do go sometimes with Georgie along, Father," said Josie. "The
last time I went with him along, I ast the teacher was the Holy Ghost
a spook, or whatever? And she says no, but you couldn't see it, you
could only per-theeve it. So I guess," added Josie, thoughtfully,
"it's somepin like a skunk."
"Now will you listen to that!" cried Joe with an accusing eye upon
Susan. "That my son should by growin' up that ignorant as to think
that the Holy Ghost is like a skunk yet!--just because you won't take
him to Sunday school to get learnt right!"
"I suppose you went to Sunday school when you were a little boy,
Joe?" asked Susan.
"Sure, I did. Sometimes I went pretty often, too."
"Then you can tell Josie what the Holy Ghost is. I don't know
myself."
"Well, with all the education _you're_ got, you anyhow know it ain't
like a skunk!"
"Why do you think I ought to go to church when you never go?"
"Women had ought to be more religious than men. It comes natural to
'em. You had ought to go to church to set a good example to Josie.
To be sure, I know a preacher believes an awful lot that _ain't_.
But still, religion is _religion_. A body's got to have religion."
"Look at Mother!" cried Josie, "trying not to leave you see her near
bustin' to laugh!"
Susan let it come then, the little shriek of laughter which her
effort to suppress had turned her crimson.
Joe looked offended. "Ain't you got no reverence for nothing,
Susan?" he demanded, disapprovingly.
"Well, yes," Susan admitted. "For babies."
"Och, Susan," Joe said, impatiently, "sometimes you talk so dumb!"
A growing source of anxiety and distress to Susan was her sisters'
increasing poverty with their advancing age. To eke out a living
they boarded the school teacher in the winter and took a few summer
boarders during the vacation; but the extra work which this entailed,
in addition to the heavy labour involved in getting a living out of
their bit of land, was quite too much for them.
There was just one respect in which Susan, after seven years of
married life, knew her husband to be invulnerable to any attack or
strategy which she might employ to move or change him, and that was
his penuriousness. She did not waste herself upon useless attempts
to make him generous. She submitted to the limited expenditure which
he allowed her in spite of the fact that she knew he must every year
be adding enormously to his inheritance from his uncle, the interest
of which he never spent.
But her mind was constantly active in devising ways and means of
helping Addie and Lizzie without his knowledge; a most difficult feat.
"I'm growing actually cunning!" she would bitterly tell herself while
carefully calculating how much sugar and coffee she might slip to the
little household in Reifsville without Joe's missing it; or how many
extra cookies she might venture to bake to carry to her sisters
without Joe's noticing how fast the flour "got all".
Josie early proved to be a stumbling-block in the way of her giving
her sisters aid. He was so constantly her companion that it became
increasingly difficult to elude his seeing how she circumvented his
father's meanness. It was not so much because of her fear of Joe as
of setting an apparently bad example to the growing boy, that she
tried to escape his unchildlike vigilance of her.
Sometimes she suspected that Joe actually set his son to watch and
spy upon her. It depressed and discouraged her even more than it
angered her when, after a visit to his "aunties", Josie, a great boy
of nine years, would run to his father and, deliberately and with the
keenest relish, "tattle" to him that Mother had given "aunties" a
package of tea and a half-dozen oranges.
A device for securing a few dollars to give to her sisters occurred
to her one day as she was driving with Josie to Middleburg to buy a
quantity of groceries: if she should make her purchases at one of the
chain of cut-rate stores, of whose existence Joe had not yet learned,
she might save a bit from the sum he had entrusted to her (after he
had made a most careful and accurate calculation as to what the
groceries would cost) and the bit thus saved could be safely passed
over to Lizzie and Addie.
When on the way home they stopped at the Schrekengusts' cottage at
Reifsville, Susan realized, to her intense disgust, that Josie was
watching her like a detective to see whether any of their load of
groceries was to be given to his aunts. He kept at her heels every
minute, following her about wherever she stepped. She had to watch
for a chance, when Lizzie was giving him an apple, to slip the dollar
she had saved from her shopping into Addie's pocket.
"Och, Susie, saddy*," Addie gratefully whispered. But as Josie, on
the alert, turned back to them, Susan lifted her eyebrows to impose
silence.
* Thank you.
"How nice and fresh this room looks," she said, hastily, stepping to
the threshold of the downstairs bedroom which was rented to the
village teacher.
"Yes, ain't! Teacher she put them white curtains up," explained
Lizzie. "And when Hiram Slosser seen 'em, he come over and ast us,
he says, '_Don't_ you think them curtains is comin' a little near to
bein' fash'nable fur a Old Mennonite?' he says. 'But, Brother
Hiram,' I says, 'look at what Missus over at your place put up at her
windahs!' I says. 'I'm an Old and she's a New, but I ain't got no
sich fixins as hern. Nor I wouldn't, neither,' I says. 'Well,' he
says, 'I tol' Missus when she fetched them curtains of hern from the
store that I had my doubts. But she claims there's nothin' to 'em
but what belongs to neatness.' And I tol' him, 'Hiram,' I says,
'your Missus is listenin' to the temptin's of the Enemy.' Then I
tol' him that me and Addie us we can't help fur what our lady boarder
puts in her own room. Nor we can't, neither, can we, Susie?" she
appealed, highly injured.
"Of course you can't," responded Susan, sympathetically.
"I'm sorry, Susie, the new teacher ain't here to make your
acquaintance," Lizzie continued. "She's so high educated that way
that I know us we seem awful dumb to her, me and Addie. So I wisht
she'd meet up with you oncet, so's she'd see there's anyhow one in
the fambly that ain't so dumb! Yes, she's even higher educated than
what you are yet, Susie! Just to think! It gives me and Addie such
a shamed face to have her 'round, us bein' so dumb that way."
Lizzie and Addie were both looking worried, almost distressed, and
Susan saw with a pang that this innovation of a boarder was a very
considerable strain added to their already burdened lives, especially
as the boarder was, it seemed, a person who gave herself airs of
superiority that humiliated them.
"Damn her!" thought Susan, resentfully.
"She's learnin' the school children such ettik-wetty--manners and
rules of good society, she says," Lizzie went on. "When I tol' her
how educated you was, too, she sayed she'd like so well to have an
interduction to you and she keeps astin' us why you don't come and if
you're too high-minded to wisit us. It is a good whiles since you
was to see us, oncet, Susie; ain't you been good?"
"Oh, yes, I've been well, thank you, Lizzie; I have such a lot of
work to do, it seems to me I'm always grubbing!"
"Me and Lizzie is all the time talking over you to the teacher," said
Addie.
"Och, here she comes now!" exclaimed Lizzie.
A decoratively apparelled young woman of uncertain age, with a
simpering manner, who seemed to ooze sentimentality from every pore,
came into the "front room" where they were gathered; and Susan
realized, when introductions followed, that the school mistress was
evidently applying her "Manners and Rules of Good Society" to the
present occasion, so studied was her bow, so prim her smile, so
carefully enunciated her speech.
"Your sisters tell me that you, too, are litter-airy, Mrs. Houghton."
"Oh, no, I make no such ambitious claim, Miss Miller."
"I understood," said Miss Miller, sadly, "that you were a friend to
litter-at-yure. Are you not?"
"I'm not its enemy."
"I'm so glad!" exclaimed Miss Miller, delightedly.
"Do you like Shakspere?" she abruptly inquired, making Susan feel as
though she had been jerked by a rein.
"It's hardly respectable not to like Shakspere, is it? If I didn't,
I'd not have the courage to admit it."
"There's some that don't like his works, though. And Harold Bell
Wright's works, do you admar them?"
Susan noted how anxious Lizzie and Addie looked lest she fail to hold
up her end with this superior person; so she answered regretfully,
"I'm not familiar with the 'works' of Harold Bell Wright."
"Oh, ain't you? His books are so well liked, far and wide. Then I
guess you don't read wery much, do you?"
"Probably not much that you read, Miss Miller."
"You would find Harold Bell Wright's books enjoyable, I'm sure. His
thoughts are so sa-ad!"
"You find sad thoughts 'enjoyable'?"
"If I do say it myself, Mrs. Houghton, I am without a touch of
frivol'ty in my composition."
"How tragic!"
"But at the same time, I like gay, glad thoughts, too. Sunshine
mingled with Shadow. _Pollyanna_, for instance, I found wery
instructive. Didn't you, Missus?"
"It's title, _The Glad Book_, was as far as I could get. Too
depressing!"
"I had hoped, from what your sisters said of you, to find in you a
kindred mind."
"My sisters flatter me!"
"They speak wery well of you. They said you love a book as I do."
"I'm afraid not as you do, Miss Miller."
"You don't dearly love a book?"
"It depends upon the book."
Miss Miller bent her head to one side, considering. "Yes," she
concluded, thoughtfully, "it does. Some books are more interesting
than other books."
"I have noticed that myself."
"I am very pertikkler about the story books which I recommend to my
pu-pills--that they shall be Clean and Wholesome." She repeated the
words lovingly. "Clean and Wholesome. Books that have no bad
children, no bad words, no bad morals, no bad example. Also nothing
to frighten the Child--no ogres or giants. Only what is sweet and
happy and lovely and--and--Clean and Wholesome."
"My God!" breathed Susan. "Where would you ever find such an insipid
book as that, Miss Miller? Or where the child that would read it?"
"It's the only kind I permit in my school library," said Miss Miller,
primly, disapprovingly.
"But do you forget how when you were a child you thrilled and tingled
over ogres and giants and bad children? Why, you can't have an
interesting story out of just good people. Nothing ever seems to
happen to them. Don't you see your rule would prohibit Mark Twain
and Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley and Dickens and Robert
Burns and----"
Susan stopped short as she noticed Miss Miller's embarrassment before
this array of names. "She's not to be taken seriously," she
decided--and changed the subject. "I understand, Miss Miller, that
you are making a specialty in your school of--er--etiquette?"
"Yes," Miss Miller eagerly responded, recovering from her confusion
at the heavy battery with which Susan had refuted her plea for Clean,
Wholesome Insipidity, and glad to return to familiar ground, "and I
find that my pu-pills are wery receptive to my sudgestions."
"You are making Chesterfields of your Pennsylvania Dutch boys and
girls?"
"Chesterfields was, I believe, Missus, a foreigner and an aristocrat?
_No!_" Miss Miller democratically repudiated all such. "Amurican
manners for our Amurican boys and girls! An Amurican gentleman, an
Amurican lady--that is my highest ambition for our young people of
Reifsville."
"How do you go about it?" asked Susan, curiously.
Miss Miller, in her reply, did not talk, she recited:
"I train them in the accepted usages of the best society in every
walk of life, from the kitchen to the parlour; from the cottage to
the mansion. Yesterday, for instance, I gave them a lesson in
Interductions; the etiquette to be observed is to accompany the gent
to the lady who, if seated, does not rise; whereupon both bow; the
interducer then retires and the interduced at once enter into
conwersation."
"Your pupils will find this instruction very useful, I'm sure,"
murmured Susan.
"I teach them what are breaches of etiquette in a social gathering of
the best society--such as whispering. I tell them what to do if they
commit those breaches--such as, If you strike against another in the
street, apologize with, _I beg pardon_. I try also to inculcate
grace; I endeavour to show my young folks that grace should attend
all movements; that walking, speaking, _and_ so forth should be at
once refined and unostentatious. There is a great art in making a
bow dignified and stately while neither stiff nor awkward."
"I should say there was! A difficult feat, Miss Miller!"
"With patience it can be acquired. I myself acquired this graceful
accomplishment with only a little practice."
"_I_ should think it would take an acrobat to strike such a happy
balance! Come, Josie," Susan put an end to the lesson in etiquette.
"Poor Lizzie and Addie!" she reflected on the way home, "trying to
live up to that poor donkey! And if I tried to show them what a
great big bluff she is, they'd only think I was jealous of her!"
As Susan had not dreamed for an instant that Josie had noticed the
sort of shop at which she had made her purchases that day, great was
her astonishment when, at the supper table, he announced to his
father, "Mother has some change let over from her trading, Father.
She traded at a new kind of store where everything costs a couple
cents littler than what it does at Diffenderfer's, or Saltzgibbler's."
It seemed to Joe, when explanations followed, like actual thieving
from him that Susan should have handed that dollar, saved from her
shopping, to her sisters.
Susan tried, for Josie's own sake, to break him of his pernicious
tattling.
"I'm going to drive to Middleburg this afternoon, Josie," she told
him one day a few weeks later, "and I don't intend to take you with
me, because the last time I took you driving you were very unkind and
made your father angry with me. So to-day I shall leave you at home."
"You're afraid I'll tell Father what you sneak to the Aunties!"
"I'm leaving you at home to punish you for being unkind to me. I
don't want a mischief-maker with me."
"I'll tell Father you're punishing me for telling him you gave
Aunties things!"
"Why do you like to make me uncomfortable, Josie? I don't like to
make you unhappy."
"Yes, you do! You like to _let_ me when you go to Middleburg!" he
whimpered. "I'll tell Father to _make_ you take me!"
When Joe was informed of the proposed trip to Middleburg without
Josie, to punish the boy for tattling, he simply put the car out of
commission for Susan by removing the ignition tip.
"That fixes that little idea of yours, Susan!" he told her,
chuckling; and Josie eyed her triumphantly.
At such times she not only disliked Josie, she shrank from him. She
knew that Sidney's boy, who was constantly at the cottage during the
few months of the year that the big house was occupied by its owners,
was incapable of petty meannesses like this; that he was a generous,
warm-hearted lad; and she wished, almost passionately, that her
foster-child were more like Georgie.
But Josie, though spoiled, tyrannical, and mean, could be
extraordinarily lovable. He was very handsome; he was intelligent
and responsive to her teaching as well as in the reading that they
did together; and, in his own selfish way, he adored his step-mother.
At times he had a cuddling, demonstrative way with her that acted
like an antidote to the poison of his little basenesses.
And, strongest appeal of all to Susan, Josie believed her to be his
own mother. His very tyrannies presupposed a sense of exclusive
possession which somehow made her feel that she and Josie did
inalienably belong to each other. Joe had scrupulously kept the
promise he had made to her before their marriage--that his boy should
never know through him that Susan was not his own mother.
Sidney's increasing indebtedness to Joe and his consequently
decreasing income obliged him to spend more and more of his time
quietly at White Oak Farm. It was evident enough that only the
stress of circumstances, and not choice, kept him there, for almost
in the very hour that his quarterly income fell due he was off again
upon another orgy of extravagance: racing, betting, yachting,
luxurious travelling with people of ten times his means.
Occasionally there were large and festive house parties at the big
house, with decorators, caterers, and orchestras for dancing, all
brought from Philadelphia.
Georgie and Josie played and quarrelled together all day long, and
Susan's heart often reproached her because her step-son seemed to her
so much less lovable than Sidney's boy. Georgie was a dreamy,
thoughtful, gentle child who, behind his slow, quiet manner, had an
unusually strong personality. It was really startling, sometimes, to
see him, after having submitted for days, with entire indifference,
to Josie's aggressive and tyrannical self-assertion, suddenly and
quite unexpectedly turn upon his oppressor with an alarming fury, for
some offence much less aggravating (to the ordinary judgment) than
the things which he had meekly borne without a murmur. For instance,
Josie learned, after three times receiving a blow in the face from
Georgie's fist, as punishment, never to dare to speak rudely to Susan
before his cousin. Susan wished that she were as good a
disciplinarian where Josie was concerned.
On one of these occasions Joe happened to be a witness to the
chastisement inflicted by his nephew upon his son; and the snarling
resentment with which he flung himself upon Georgie to beat him, all
the concentrated hate of years of bitter jealousy ready to wreak
itself upon his defenceless little nephew, made Susan, with a blind
impulse of protection, rush between them, tear the child from Joe's
terrible blows, and stand panting and defiant before him; while
Sidney, who, at Georgie's cries, had rushed down the terrace to the
cottage door, picked up his quivering son and held him in his
arms--looking on, as white as linen, at Susan's fierce defiance of
her husband's brutality.
"It's Josie you should beat, not Georgie!--if you must beat a child!
You _encourage_ Josie to speak to me so rudely that even this
child"--her hand on Georgie, who trembled in his father's
arms--"resents it! Teach Josie to respect me as Georgie does before
you dare to lay a finger on Georgie."
She turned and went into the cottage, while Sidney, looking ghastly,
carried Georgie home to the big house.
But a few days later, when again the two boys were together, Josie,
thinking that Georgie having had a dreadful warning against striking
him, could now be teased and tormented to any extent without daring
to defend himself or to fight for his "Aunt Susan," ventured again to
use rude language to his mother--with the prompt result of a blow in
the face that knocked him down.
Susan had noticed the fact that Georgie had struck before looking
about to see whether his Uncle Joe were in sight.
While Josie ran screaming for his father she made Georgie run home as
fast as his legs would carry him.
Georgie was with her one evening when Lizzie and Addie happened to
drive over from Reifsville to see her. They very seldom came to her
home, for they realized that Joe, in his fear of Susan's giving them
something, did not make them welcome. But Susan had not been to see
them for over a week and they had become anxious.
"I overtaxed myself with canning and preserving last week," Susan
explained, as they all sat together on the cottage porch, the two
boys playing near by on the lawn. "And I came down with a nervous
sick headache that kept me in bed two days. This is my first day out
of bed."
She was leaning back in a rocking-chair looking pale and pensive, and
her sisters regarded her with loving anxiety.
"If only Joe'd hire fur you, Susie! You wasn't never used to hard
work; us we always spared you all we could."
"Joe seems unable to see that he loses out by my overworking; I had
to have the doctor; and for two days Joe had to cook and wait on me.
He wanted to send for you, Lizzie, but I would not have it. Addie
could not be left alone with all the work over there."
"Who's the little boy playing with Josie?" asked Addie.
"Sidney's son."
The announcement was followed by a silence which seemed to Susan to
take on the character of a deep and pregnant stillness. She glanced
at her sisters. They both looked white and frightened.
"Poor things!" thought Susan, "I suppose they're thinking of my
child--that was Sidney's!"
Before her sisters left, Lizzie walked hesitatingly across the grass
and drawing Georgie to her, looked long into his face; then stooped
and gently kissed him.
Susan saw, to her astonishment, as she said good-night to her
sisters, that they were both crying.
"They would have loved my baby so!" she reflected, mournfully, as she
walked slowly into the house.
It was that night, when she and Joe were alone in their room, that
she learned of the immediately impending great change in her life.
Joe informed her quite casually that Sidney had come to the end of
his rope.
"I left him go to it and spend! I left him borrow off of me all he
wanted; and him, the poor simp, never seen through it! Thought I was
bein' brotherly and generous! Me! To him! Him that his mom always
learnt to treat me like the dirt under his feet! Well, now I _got_
him! He's in my power! He owes me more'n he kin ever pay!"
"What are you proposing to do?"
"Next month us we move into the big house and Sid and his Missus and
his kid _moves in here_!"
"They'll never do it!" exclaimed Susan, startled. "Move in here!
They can't be _that_ poor!"
"I tell you Sid has run through with every dollar of his principal.
Ain't he the darned fool though! All he'll have to live on for the
rest part of his life is the rent of White Oak Farm, and only part of
_that_, fur half of it goes to pay me back what he's borrowed off of
me."
"His wife will surely leave him; she will never live in this cottage!"
"But her money's all, too. And you know her father died a couple
years back a'ready. So it's this here cottage fur her, or work fur
her livin'! And as she wasn't raised to fit into neither of them
humble stations in life, here's _your_ turn, Susan, to come it over
her the way she's been turnin' _you_ down ever since I got married to
you. If you don't give her as good as what she always sent you, I
won't think much of your spunk!"
"She never lifted a finger to hurt me; she never for a moment had it
in her power to! And I don't think, Joe, that I have it in my power
to hurt her. Her life and mine simply do not touch."
"That ain't the high-minded way _she's_ feelin', I bet you! I bet
you she's eatin' her heart out with spite that now you're a-goin' to
be in her place, to hold your head as high as what she held hern and
to turn up your nose at her the way she done to you!"
Susan wondered, as she lay sleepless that night, whether Sidney, like
Joe, knew her so little as to think that because he had once done her
a great, irreparable injury, she now gloated over his downfall. She
searched her heart to learn what really she felt about this strange
twist of fate that was taking from Sidney and giving to her all those
things for which he had once sacrificed her. And all she could find
there was a profound indifference. Sidney no longer seemed a part of
her life.
"Georgie is the only one in that family that interests me in the
least," she decided, as she closed her eyes and went to sleep.