THE MARRIAGE OF SUSAN

BY

HELEN R. MARTIN

FRONTISPIECE BY WALTER DE MARIS

GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

Books by Helen R. Martin

Barnabetta Betrothal of Elypholate, and Other Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch Crossways Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian Her Husband's Purse Her Courtship Maggie of Virginsburg Martha of the Mennonite Country Revolt of Anne Royle Sabina, Story of the Amish The Fighting Doctor The Marriage of Susan The Parasite Those Fitzenbergers Tillie, A Mennonite Maid When Half-Gods Go

CONTENTS

I. Time, an October Afternoon II. Evening of the Same Day III. The Following Spring IV. A Year Later V. Face to Face VI. The Tentacles Close in Upon Susan VII. July, August, and September VIII. Autumn IX. The House Party X. An Interlude XI. Home Again XII. A Few More Years at the Cottage XIII. In the Big House XIV. Five Years Later XV. A Widow XVI. Susan Realizes Her Freedom XVII. Susan's Reaping

THE MARRIAGE OF SUSAN

CHAPTER I TIME, AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON

As she got off the train at Reifsville the loafers about the little station and about the General Store across the road divined, without knowing just why, that she was too "different," somehow, to be a "lady agent"; not young enough to be an applicant for the school; and too something-else-quite-indefinable to be a possible visitor to any family of the village. So what was there left for her to be? Why was she here? They did not usually have any difficulty in "sizing up" the few daily arrivals by the train.

As she walked out of the station and up the one street of the village, their sleepy eyes followed her with mild curiosity. That any "female" could be very simply dressed and yet not look poor, but, on the contrary, elegant and prosperous, was puzzling. The trig neatness of her hair, her clothing, her shoes, her gloves, the light grace of her walk (though she was at least middle-aged) her assured bearing, the way she carried her head, all proclaimed her as being, at one and the same time, both too grand and too plain to be classified with any feminine species familiar to Reifsville.

"I got it!" exclaimed Abe Duttonhoffer, his tilted chair falling forward suddenly from the shock of his idea. "She's mebby a-goin' to buy Baursox' house that's fur sale."

"No-p. It's put out, now, that there house can't be solt. The lawyer says it's got to lay till Charles is in his age."

"There ain't no funeral goin' on that she'd be comin' to," speculated Jake Kuntz. "The only funeral due in Reifsville, the party ain't dead yet."

"What party are you got reference to? Hess's Missus, mebby?"

"Yes. Her. I'm to haul fur her, when her funeral is, Mister says."

"It's to be hoped she won't keep you waitin' long fur the job!" said a facetious one, provoking a general laugh.

"It wonders me what that there lady a-goin' up the street there is after out here!" persisted Jake.

"Local colour, mebby," suggested Abe.

"What the hell is local colour?"

"You are, Jake," retorted Abe. "It's what female authors that plans books, runs round after."

"After me! A high-stepper like her?" said Jake with a twirl of his thumb in the direction the lady had taken. "She wouldn't want nothin' to do with me! 'Local colour?'" Jake shook his head. "It's new to me."

"It ain't familiar with me, neither," said another of the loafers.

The mysterious lady had by this time walked beyond the line of their vision.

"It's a wonder, Jake, you didn't schnauffle after her and find out what she's here fur?—you want to know so bad!" said Abe; to which Jake replied, indignantly, "Do you suppose I would'a? Do you suppose you would'a?"

"Say!"—Abe had another bright idea—"Mebby she's one of Susan Schrekengust's swell city friends!"

"Och, Susan she never has none of them tony city friends of hern wisit her out here, 'ceptin' her fellah; that there 'ristocratic dood that comes to set up with her Sa'rdays," said Jake.

"I guess Susan she has ashamed, a little, of her folks—her bein' a grad-yate," suggested one of the men.

"Susan Schrekengust ain't proud!" retorted a young man among the group. "She's wery nice and common—fur all she's so grand educated that way!"

"Yes, Susan she took lessons a'ready in both Wocal and both Instrumental, and still she's wonderful common," Jake Kuntz backed up the other young man's statement. To still be "common"—that is, not haughty—after having studied "both Wocal and both Instrumental," was to be rather more than human.

"Our Katy she says Susan she kin play sich Liszt Ee-toods on the pyannah!"

"That ain't so much! There's others in Reifsville kin play Ee-toods."

Meantime, unconscious of the interest that followed her, the lady walked slowly, almost shrinkingly, through the silent, empty street of the village. The houses she passed looked uninhabited, for every front shutter was closed and bolted to exclude dust, or sunlight which would fade carpets and furniture coverings. Except on Sundays and at funerals the inhabitants of Pennsylvania Dutch villages and farms live in their kitchens. Mrs. Houghton shuddered inwardly as she noted the crudity of the little homes of the place, the flower-beds bordered with oyster shells, the gay colouring of the wood and brick of the houses, the universal cheapness.

It was such a shock and disappointment that her son, her only child, hitherto so entirely satisfactory, should have got himself actually engaged to a girl of a Pennsylvania Dutch community like this!—from a home such as these! Mrs. Houghton was on her way now to see the girl; to feel her way to saving Sidney from a mistake so disastrous. It was surely not his true self, but a lower, hitherto unrevealed self that had led her fastidious boy into such a relation! A little "Dutch" school teacher named Schrekengust!—the daughter of an illiterate Mennonite preacher! How such a thing could ever have happened to Sidney, who had always been rather over-sensitive to crudity, to commonness; whose tastes and instincts were so true and fine; who had sometimes seemed to her, for a man, almost too discriminating in his sense of social values——

Even making all due allowance for youth's hot blood and imprudence, how a son of hers could so have forgotten his traditions, his pride, his consideration for his mother, his ambitions (all of which Sidney had always cherished excessively) as to have let himself be carried away against his judgment, against his self-interest (she had never before known Sidney to act against his self-interest), and actually propose marriage to a Pennsylvania Dutch "girl of the people"——

"It would seem that sex is the strongest force in a man's life," she thought. "It will make a man sacrifice anything! Women ought to refuse to bear sons, for between war and love, what good do we get of them?"

It was a most embarrassing and painful errand, this on which she had come here to-day to Reifsville.

"But I'd go through anything to save Sidney from such a marriage!" she told herself, passionately.

She was quite sure that when he recovered from this vulgar infatuation and came to himself he would thank her with all his soul for having rescued him.

It was trying enough to have your only son, to whom you yourself had always been all the world, transfer his devotion to another; but to have him love an impossible person, one whom, with the greatest straining of your charity, you could not take into your heart and life—this was indeed hard to bear.

The straw to which she clung was the fact that Sidney, though very much in love, was not so far gone as not to be as aware as she herself was of the disadvantages of his entanglement.

"I believe he would be ready to break it off if he had not put himself under such great obligations to her—borrowing money from her!—gracious!—how could he do that?" she marvelled for the hundredth time. "To let a self-supporting girl lend him money!—my son!"

If he himself had not admitted it, she never would have believed it possible. But she had surprised him yesterday with a visit at his lodgings at the university town where he was taking a post-graduate course in International Law, and had found his sitting-room furnished in beautiful mahogany, which he had been obliged to acknowledge had been purchased by him and Miss Schrekengust for their future housekeeping, and paid for with her savings of three years. He was meantime using it. Also his new golf outfit—she had loaned him seventy-five dollars for that!

"But where is your pride, Sidney!" she had cried out to him in shocked astonishment. "To let this working-girl give you things you can't afford!"

"She's not a working-girl, Mother," he had protested. "She's a school teacher."

"A village school teacher—named Schrekenbust!"

"Schrekengust—not bust! Don't make it worse than it is! It's bad enough, in heaven's name!"

"Oh, you admit that it's bad enough?" she had hopefully commented.

"Can there be any doubt of it?"

"Don't you see, you poor deluded boy, that this vulgar girl has tried to make sure of you by buying you?"

"She's not vulgar!—though of course I must admit," Sidney had groaned, "that her people are!"

"She can't be so very different from her people—you say she lives with them. I never would have believed it possible, Sidney, that you could fall in love with a common girl!"

"Mother, I've come to see that there's such a lot of difference between common people and just plain, simple people like the Schrekengusts."

"You know you cannot afford to marry out of your class! Remember, Sidney, you are still dependent on me, and if you should marry beneath you I certainly would not deny myself any least comfort in order to help you and your Dutch wife!"

"Mother, dear, you are wasting breath, for I see it all just as you do! But Susanna's got me!"

"Where did you meet her?"

"At one of the university dances a year ago."

"This thing has been going on a whole year and you have never told me!"

"I've been engaged to her only six months. It has seemed impossible to tell you—I knew so well how you'd take it, dear. I hated to worry and distress you."

"But why should you do anything that can worry and distress me? Surely your standards and mine cannot be different, Sidney, such close companions as we have always been! I thought we understood each other so perfectly—and now it seems that I did not really know you!"

"I hate to be such a disappointment to you, Mother—but somehow I can't feel that I have lowered my standards in falling in love with Susanna."

"And yet you are more class-conscious than I am, for you are a Houghton! You can't make that girl happy. Such a name! Schrekengust! Why is her name Schrekengust?" she exclaimed, despairingly. "It seems so unnecessary!"

"That objection to her will fortunately be removed by her marriage to me."

"Where does she live?"

"Reifsville. Five miles from here."

"I shall go to see her."

"Don't!" Sidney had exclaimed protestingly; then suddenly, unaccountably, he had laughed. "Really, Mother, dear, I warn you—don't! Susanna'd upset you dreadfully!"

"Why doesn't she upset you, if the bare idea of my meeting her strikes you as so incongruous?"

"She has upset me! Bowled me over!"

Mrs. Houghton had suddenly resolved to say nothing more about going to see the girl. She would take her unawares, as she had taken Sidney to-day.

So here she was in Reifsville, on the very next afternoon, on her way to the home of the Schrekengusts.

It was the last house of the village: a white frame house with green shutters, shaded by great trees. It was really picturesque; the only attractive house in Reifsville. Mrs. Houghton, appraising it while she waited for an answer to her knock on the door (a delightful old-fashioned knocker, no bell), had to admit that by a happy accident the girl's home was, from the outside, very passable.

A typical dialogue between two village women parting from each other at the door of the next house set her nerves on edge at the thought of her son's close association with such people.

"Good-by. Come back again soon. Ain't?"

"Thank you. And you are to come over, mind!"

"Thank you. I will. Good-by. Come over soon, now!"

"Good-by. And don't you forget to come over soon. Ain't, you won't?"

"Thanks; I won't forget. And don't you forget neither to come back."

"Thanks. I won't. I'll be over then again, when it suits. Good-by."

"Good-by. Don't make it too long till——"

Mrs. Houghton was just beginning to wonder whether they ever would succeed in concluding their leavetaking—when the Schrekengusts' door was opened and there stood before her a sweet-faced elderly woman in Mennonite garb who, with mingled shyness and surprise, showed the stranger into the parlour.

And here Mrs. Houghton experienced genuine astonishment. It was not at all the sort of room she had expected to see. Old Sheraton furniture of graceful lines and exquisite inlaid decoration, framed copies of famous paintings, an old woven carpet of the sort the colonists brought over—how had people named "Schrekengust," living in this Pennsylvania Dutch village, come by such things? The room actually showed cultured taste! Could she be mistaken and had Sidney not turned his back on his birth and breeding in choosing this girl——

But that momentary hope was dashed—there was the Mennonite mother who had answered her knock at the door; and Sidney's own admission that his marriage would be disadvantageous and outside his own class.

In a moment Miss Schrekengust appeared in the doorway.

She, too, like the room, was not just what Mrs. Houghton had expected to see. At a first glance one might have made the mistake of taking her, from her dress and manner, for a thoroughbred; indeed, her simplicity and self-possession as, with a slight inquiry in her innocent eyes, she came into the room and offered her hand to the stranger, lent her a certain distinction.

Mrs. Houghton had been prepared graciously to put an awkward country girl at her ease, as a necessary preliminary to convincing her of the undesirability of her marrying Sidney Houghton; but it was she herself who, for a moment, felt confused and at a loss.

"I—you are Miss Schrekengust?"

"Yes?" replied the girl on a questioning note. "Will you sit down?"

Mrs. Houghton pulled herself together to focus her forces upon her purpose to save her son (for however presentable the girl might prove to be superficially, she was nevertheless not of Sidney's world).

"I don't believe she'll be difficult," she thought, noting, as she sat down, the sweetness of the child's mouth, the infantile look of her eyes, the soft drawl of her speech.

"You have something to sell?" inquired Miss Schrekengust, encouragingly.

Mrs. Houghton smiled involuntarily at being taken for a travelling saleswoman. The girl must, after all, be unsophisticated not to recognize——

"I am Mrs. Houghton—Mr. Sidney Houghton's mother. May I," she quickly added in a tone impressively grave and reserved, to check the girl's start of pleased surprise which seemed to threaten to rush at her with a caress, "have a little talk with you?"

Miss Schrekengust's intuitions were evidently not dull; she recovered instantly from her impulsive delight, folded her hands quietly in her lap, and without speaking, her clear young eyes fixed upon Mrs. Houghton's face, waited.

"My son has told me of his—of your—friendship."

"I appreciate your kindness in coming away out here to see me," said Miss Schrekengust, gratefully.

Mrs. Houghton noted that she spoke without the Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

"But I am sorry to tell you, Miss Schrekengust, that I don't approve of my son's relations with you—his owing you money—his using your furniture! He never went into debt in his life before he knew you, Miss Schrekengust; he never thought of buying things he couldn't afford; I didn't think him capable of doing such things!—such things as he confessed to me yesterday!"

"Confessed?"

"Of course he feels the degradation of such a relation!"

"Oh, I beg your pardon—you got a wrong impression—Sidney does not feel that our relation is 'degrading'!"

"I mean his relation of debtor to you. He was horribly ashamed to admit it to me. Never before in his life has he done anything that he was ashamed to tell me, his mother. I can see that he has really deteriorated; and naturally I am distressed and worried."

Mrs. Houghton paused, feeling that she had put it well.

But Miss Schrekengust smiled upon her reassuringly. "That is too bad, for of course you have misunderstood. It's because Sidney and I have such a high ideal of love that these material considerations don't enter in at all, don't affect us."

Mrs. Houghton checked a smile at this youthfully complacent idealism. It was evidently sincere enough in the girl's case, but Mrs. Houghton could not quite see Sidney so uplifted by love or anything else as to be unaffected by "material considerations!"

"An honourable man cannot ignore 'these material considerations,' Miss Schrekengust, and I am very, very sorry that you have encouraged Sidney to do so. You have meant to be generous to him, no doubt, but unfortunately you have led him to forget the standards of a gentleman, and to do what men of his class, Miss Schrekengust, do not do. Of course I'm quite sure that you erred only in—well, in ignorance. But that does not alter the fact that for the first time in his life I am forced to be ashamed of my son!"

"But I am sure you have no real cause to be," Miss Schrekengust pleaded.

"If your traditions and environment had been just what Sidney's have been—if you had been brought up with his standard—you would see it as I do; as he really sees it."

"Don't you think you take it too seriously? It's after all a very small matter."

"I am extremely sorry," said Mrs. Houghton, gravely, "that you have apparently led Sidney to think it 'a small matter.' I am very much afraid, Miss Schrekengust, that your influence on my son's character does not seem to have been of the best. And surely true love should bring out the best of a man; don't you think so?"

"It surely must," the girl assented.

"That is why I cannot believe that Sidney's feeling for you is quite true. I hope I don't hurt you very much by saying so? If I could find him improved by his relation to you instead of deteriorated——"

The girl's soft eyes met Mrs. Houghton's without a flicker. "I'm afraid you flatter me, Mrs. Houghton."

"Flatter you!"

"When you rate the influence of my short eleven months' acquaintance with your son above your twenty-five years in influencing and moulding him; and above those traditions and that environment to which you referred."

Mrs. Houghton caught her breath as she thought of how "kindly and patiently" she had intended to reason with a crude and probably over-awed country girl!

Miss Schrekengust, on her side, was saying to herself, "Sidney is not doing very well by me in the way of a mother-in-law."

"Your parents are Mennonites?" asked Mrs. Houghton rather abruptly.

"Yes."

"And you have always lived here in Reifsville?"

"Yes, except during the four years that I spent at a boarding school."

"And do you know," asked Mrs. Houghton, gently, "what a very, very different background Sidney has had?"

"In Middleburg?"

Was there a note of laughter in the question? Mrs. Houghton could not be quite sure; the girl's face was serious enough. "My son's associations—at home, in college, in society—his inherited tastes and instincts, Miss Schrekengust, from a long line of—— Oh, my child, marriage at best forces one to so much compromising and adapting and adjusting, that it is very necessary, if there's to be any least chance of making a success of it, for the pair to at least start on an equal footing, with as many points of contact in their background as possible. If they start with wide gaps and differences in their experiences and their bringing-up they are doomed to misunderstanding and failure."