Chapter XI: 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."