Tillie wrote to Miss Margaret (she could not learn to call her Mrs.
Lansing) how that she had "given herself up and turned plain," and Miss
Margaret, seeing how sacred this experience was to the young girl,
treated the subject with all respect and even reverence.
The correspondence between these two, together with the books which
from time to time came to the girl from her faithful friend, did more
toward Tillie's growth and development along lines of which her parents
had no suspicion, than all the schooling at William Penn, under the
instruction of the average "Millersville Normal," could ever have
accomplished.
And her tongue, though still very provincial, soon lost much of its
native dialect, through her constant reading and study.
Of course whenever her father discovered her with her books he made her
suffer.
"You're got education enough a'ready," he would insist. "And too much
fur your own good. Look at me--I was only educated with a Testament and
a spelling-book and a slate. We had no such a blackboards even, to
recite on. And do _I_ look as if I need to know any more 'n what I know
a'ready?"
Tillie bore her punishments like a martyr--and continued
surreptitiously to read and to study whenever and whatever she could;
and not even the extreme conscientiousness of a New Mennonite faltered
at this filial disobedience. She obeyed her father implicitly, however
tyrannical he was, to the point where he bade her suppress and kill all
the best that God had given her of mind and heart. Then she revolted;
and she never for an instant doubted her entire justification in
eluding or defying his authority.
There was another influence besides her books and Miss Margaret's
letters which, unconsciously to herself, was educating Tillie at this
time. Her growing fondness for stealing off to the woods not far from
the farm, of climbing to the hill-top beyond the creek, or walking over
the fields under the wide sky--not only in the spring and summer, but
at all times of the year--was yielding her a richness, a depth and
breadth, of experience that nothing else could have given her.
A nature deeply sensitive to the mysterious appeal of sky and green
earth, of deep, shady forest and glistening water, when unfolding in
daily touch with these things, will learn to see life with a broader,
saner mind and catch glimpses and vistas of truth with a clearer vision
than can ever come to one whose most susceptible years are spent walled
in and overtopped by the houses of the city that shut out and stifle
"the larger thought of God." And Tillie, in spite of her narrowing New
Mennonite "convictions," did reach through her growing love for and
intimacy with Nature a plane of thought and feeling which was
immeasurably above her perfunctory creed.
Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young
girl greater pain than happiness--yet it was a pain she would not have
been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in
her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her
apart and above the villagers and farming people about her--those whose
placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the
distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to
the wide blue heavens.
Thus, cramped and crushing as much of her life was, it had--as all
conditions must have--its compensations; and many of the very
circumstances which at the time seemed most unbearable brought forth in
later years rich fruit.
And so, living under her father's watchful eye and relentless
rule,--with long days of drudgery and outward acquiescence in his
scheme of life that she devote herself, mind, body, and soul, to the
service of himself, his wife, and their children, and in return to be
poorly fed and scantily clad,--Tillie nevertheless grew up in a world
apart, hidden to the sealed vision of those about her; as unknown to
them in her real life as though they had never looked upon her face;
and while her father never for an instant doubted the girl's entire
submission to him, she was day by day waxing stronger in her resolve to
heed Miss Margaret's constant advice and make a fight for her right to
the education her father had denied her, and for a life other than that
to which his will would consign her.
There were dark times when her steadfast purpose seemed impossible of
fulfilment. But Tillie felt she would rather die in the struggle than
become the sort of apathetic household drudge she beheld in her
stepmother--a condition into which it would be so easy to sink, once
she loosed her wagon from its star.
It was when Tillie was seventeen years old--a slight, frail girl, with
a look in her eyes as of one who lives in two worlds--that Absalom
Puntz, one Sunday evening in the fall of the year, saw her safe home
from meeting and asked permission to "keep comp'ny" with her.
Now that morning Tillie had received a letter from Miss Margaret (sent
to her, as always, under cover to the doctor), and Absalom's company on
the way from church was a most unwelcome interruption to her happy
brooding over the precious messages of love and helpfulness which those
letters always brought her.
A request for permission to "keep comp'ny" with a young lady meant a
very definite thing in Canaan Township. "Let's try each other," was
what it signified; and acceptance of the proposition involved on each
side an exclusion of all association with others of the opposite sex.
Tillie of course understood this.
"But you're of the World's people, Absalom," her soft, sweet voice
answered him. They were walking along in the dim evening on the high
dusty pike toward the Getz farm. "And I'm a member of meeting. I can't
marry out of the meeting."
"This long time a'ready, Tillie, I was thinkin' about givin' myself up
and turnin' plain," he assured her. "To be sure, I know I'd have to, to
git you. You've took notice, ain't you, how reg'lar I 'tend meeting?
Well, oncet me and you kin settle this here question of gittin'
married, I'm turnin' plain as soon as I otherwise [possibly] kin."
"I have never thought about keeping company, Absalom."
"Nearly all the girls around here as old as you has their friend
a'ready."
Absalom was twenty years old, stoutly built and coarse-featured, a
deeply ingrained obstinacy being the only characteristic his heavy
countenance suggested. He still attended the district school for a few
months of the winter term. His father was one of the richest farmers of
the neighborhood, and Absalom, being his only child, was considered a
matrimonial prize.
"Is there nobody left for you but me?" Tillie inquired in a
matter-of-fact tone. The conjugal relation, as she saw it in her
father's home and in the neighborhood, with its entirely practical
basis and utter absence of sentiment, had no attraction or interest for
her, and she had long since made up her mind that she would none of it.
"There ain't much choice," granted Absalom. "But I anyways would pick
out you, Tillie."
"Why me?"
"I dunno. I take to you. And I seen a'ready how handy you was at the
work still. Mom says, too, you'd make me a good housekeeper."
Tillie never dreamed of resenting this practical approval of her
qualifications for the post with which Absalom designed to honor her.
It was because of her familiarity with such matrimonial standards as
these that from her childhood up she had determined never to marry.
From what she gathered of Miss Margaret's married life, through her
letters, and from what she learned from the books and magazines which
she read, she knew that out in the great unknown world there existed
another basis of marriage. But she did not understand it and she never
thought about it. The strongly emotional tide of her girlhood, up to
this time, had been absorbed by her remarkable love for Miss Margaret
and by her earnest religiousness.
"There's no use in your wasting your time keeping company with me,
Absalom. I never intend to marry. I've made up my mind."
"Is it that your pop won't leave you, or whatever?"
"I never asked him. I don't know what he would say."
"Mom spoke somepin about mebbe your pop he'd want to keep you at home,
you bein' so useful to him and your mom. But I sayed when you come
eighteen, you're your own boss. Ain't, Tillie?"
"Father probably would object to my marrying because I'm needed at
home," Tillie agreed. "That's why they wouldn't leave me go to school
after I was eleven. But I don't want to marry."
"You leave me be your steady friend, Tillie, and I'll soon get you over
them views," urged Absalom, confidently.