The County Seat

“ I AND Ollie and the children are going to —” Susannah Kuhns bent over the salad dressing which she was stirring on the stove as though it, for the moment, took all her attention. Meanwhile, she watched her guest, stout, placid Sarah Ann Mohr, from the corner of her eye. Then she brought out the rest of the sentence with a jerk, - “ are going to move.”

“ T-to m-move!” exclaimed Sarah Ann. “ When, Susannah ? Where will you move ? Why ? ”

Susannah straightened her back, so that it reached the perpendicular and passed it.

“ We are going to move to Allentown. I am sick of Millerstown. Millerstown is too slow and too dumb and too Dutch.”

“ But you will get homesick.”

“ Homesick! For why should I get homesick ? I have my man and my children by me. It is no one in Millerstown I care for.”

“ Ach, Susannah!” Sarah Ann’s eyes filled with tears. She was accustomed to Susannah’s tempers, but she had never seen her in such a mood as this.

Susannah poured the dressing over a bowl of crisp endive and set the empty pan in the sink with a slam.

“ Oliver is sick of working at the furnace. He will go back to his carpenter trade, and in Allentown he will get two dollars a day. And my children will talk English, and when they are through with the school, they can work in the factory.”

“ But your things will get broken when you move.”

“ Pooh, that is nothing. I will just get new ones.”

“ But who will lead the singing in the church ? ”

“ I don’t care.”

“ Won’t you never come back?”

“Never to live.”

“ But why do you go ? ” Not even a plague could have driven Sarah Ann from Millerstown. “ You have here your nice house, and it is where you have always lived, and — ”

“ I hate it,” said Susannah. Then she went to the screen door. “Dinner!” she called.

Sarah Ann rose as the two children, Oliver and Louisa, came in.

“ But you won’t be here for the Sunday-school picnic or the Christmas entertainment.”

Little Louisa answered, her fat cheeks almost cracking with scornful laughter.

“We can go every day to a Sundayschool picnic or a Christmas entertainment in Allentown.”

“ Don’t you sass Sarah Ann,” said their mother sharply. “ This afternoon you are both to help me.”

For the next few days, Sarah Ann went back and forth from her own house to the Kuhnses, with tears in her eyes. Susannah gayly declined her help. She scrubbed the floors, she whitewashed, she washed and ironed and packed. Her husband helped her with the heavy things, and in the intervals of work, wandered miserably about.

“ Do you want to move to Allentown, Oliver ? ” Sarah Ann asked him.

“ Yes,” answered Susannah. “ He does.”

Susannah sang while she worked. She had led the singing in the Evangelical Church since she was a girl, but she would sing there no more. There were great churches in the county seat, churches with stained-glass windows and crowds of people, where they would want her to sing. Then cross, unwilling Oliver would be glad they had moved.

Nearly all Millerstown came to the station to say good-by. Susannah told them again and again how glad she was to leave, and they listened to her silently. She seemed already like an alien.

“ I should not be surprised if it is by and by no one at all in Millerstown,” she said laughingly. “ Millerstown is too slow.”

The eyes of the other women met. They thought Susannah Kuhns had lost her mind. Sarah Knerr joined them just before the train pulled out.

“You forgot your soap-kettle, Susannah,” she said breathlessly. “ I ran all the way to tell you. It hangs yet in the back-yard.”

“ I am not going to take it,” answered Susannah.

“ How then will you boil your soap ?”

“ I ain’t going to boil soap. I buy my soap.”

“ And won’t you make apple-butter, and won’t you butcher ? ” gasped someone.

Susannah did not deign to answer. She looked back as the train started. It would have been a relief to jump up and down in her seat as the children were doing. Oliver told them sternly to “ shut up and sit still,” but they were too excited to obey.

The crowd at the station in Allentown seemed to their unaccustomed eyes great enough for a holiday or fair week. Susannah could hardly follow Oliver, with Louisa hanging from one hand, and Ollie trying to escape from the other.

“ Mom! ” he shrieked every few minutes. “ Look once here! ”

At the big skeleton of the Powers building, Oliver stopped them.

“ There is where I shall work at two dollars a day,” he said.

In spite of himself there was pride and excitement in his voice.

A little farther on he stopped at the opening of a narrow street.

“ It is here where we shall live.”

“ I see where,” screamed little Ollie.

Their goods were being unloaded before the door of a tiny frame house.

“ I too,” echoed Louisa.

Oliver unlocked the door and let them in.

“ It is not a nice house,” said Louisa.

“ It is a nice house,” reproved her mother sharply. “ It is while it is not yet fixed up that it don’t look so fine.” Then she waved back her husband, who came into the room with a roll of carpet in his arms. “ Don’t bring it in yet. Did you think I should put down carpet when the house is not yet cleaned ? ”

“ But I must go Mondays to work, and Sundays it is no working, and I can only help to-day and to-morrow.”

Susannah looked at him.

“ Do you mean I should put down the carpets before it is everything washed up ? ” she asked.

“ No,” he answered, meekly. “ But you shall wash this room first, and then I can move the things right aways in.”

“ Begin at the bottom to wash the house!” gasped Susannah. “And go up! I guess not. I begin at the top, like always.”

She went upstairs and looked about her. She could not suppress an exclamation of horror. Then she went to the head of the stairway.

“ You shall just come up once and see how dirty it is here,” she called. “ It will be dinner till I make the garret done.”

“ But the things ? Shall they stand all the time out?”

“ You can watch them so it don’t anybody carry anything off.” she replied. “ I — ” The rest of her sentence was lost in the sound of a stiff scrubbingbrush, pushed swiftly across rough boards.

In an hour, Ollie tiptoed softly to the bottom of the garret stairs.

“ Mom,” he called, in a wild whisper. “Come down, come down! ”

“ What is the matter ? ” asked Susannah in fright.

“ The police have got Pop.”

Susannah sprang to her feet, upsetting the pail of water. Little Ollie got nimbly out of her way as she flew.

“ They’ll take him to jail,” he cried.

“Oliver!” called Susannah, “I am coming.”

When she reached the front door she saw Oliver nervously moving the boxes. A policeman had paused in the middle of the street for a last word.

“ They must be off in half an hour.”he said.

Husband and wife scarcely spoke until the things were safely inside.

“ This awful thing shall not come to Millerstown,” said Susannah. Then she thrust a broom into Oliver’s hands. “ Go out and sweep a little off.”

Susannah clattered back into the garret. Brisk worker as she was, it was dinner-time before she finished.

“ I tell you it is clean for once,” she said proudly, as they sat on the boxes, eating the lunch which Sarah Ann had put up for them. The children had begged to take theirs out on the back step, but she would not let them. “ And have all the neighbors know what we are eating! I guess not.”

“ But at home, they know always what we have for dinner,” said Louisa

“ This is home,” corrected their mother sternly.

After dark, they put up two beds by the faint light which came in from the arc light outside. They had no oil for their lamps and they were afraid to light the gas. The children were already asleep on a pile of carpet, and did not wake when they were put to bed.

An hour later, Susannah lay down beside her sleeping husband. There had been one rug which she had not been able to clean before she left Millerstown, and she had taken it down into the yard and had beaten it there. She closed her eyes with a great sigh of relief. Then she sat up. What was this noise ? She was conscious for the first time of the rush of trolley-cars, the roll of carriages, the tramp of feet. Somewhere in the neighborhood a band was practicing. She jumped with fright at the sound of the church clock striking eleven.

“ We must get used to it,” she said to herself. “ It cannot be so quiet here like in Millerstown.”

She was not to get used to it that night, however. She tossed and rolled, determining that she would not hear the clock strike again, then listening and waiting for it. She grasped her husband’s arm in terror, when, toward morning, half a dozen men sat down on the doorstep to finish a noisy argument.

It was dawn when she fell asleep. The milk-carts and market-wagons had begun to come in from the country, and rattled noisily by, and for a while she was conscious of them in the midst of her drowsiness. Then, slowly, they faded away.

She woke to wonder uneasily where she was. The first stroke of the church clock recalled her to herself. It was five o’clock, and she must get up. No, it was six. How had she happened to sleep so long ? And Oliver was asleep. She laid her hand on his shoulder. As she touched him, the clock struck again. Seven! It could not be.

“ Oliver! ” she called.

“ Yes, yes,” he answered crossly.

Then, deliberately, the clock struck eight.

She lay staring, until the stroke had died away. To sleep until eight o’clock on a day like this, when on ordinary days she got up at five!

All morning she worked feverishly, only stopping to comfort Ollie, who came in crying because some boys had struck him.

“ Nobody would hit me in Millerstown.” he wailed. “ I don’t like it here. We don’t get nothing good to eat,”

“ You just wait once till to-morrow,” his mother consoled him. “ Then we go in the church and the Sunday-school, and I make a good dinner.”

Susannah was growing impatient. She could not find places for her furniture. The kitchen was so narrow that the old-fashioned settle which her mother and grandmother had owned could not go there at all. Where would Oliver rest when he came home tired ? And where would the children play ? Besides, her fire would not burn.

She grew more and more surprised as the hours passed, that no one came in to help. When people moved in Millerstown, everybody helped. She thought with a proud catch in her throat of the morrow. Then her neighbors would be glad enough to know her. Then they would go to church, and she would be invited to sing in the choir. She hummed the first line of “ Ein feste Burg,” then burst into song, her high, shrill soprano dwelling on the notes as long as she could hold them. By the time that she reached the second stanza, there was a rap at the door. She answered it quickly. A little girl stood on the step.

“ My mother says you shall please stop singing. She wants to sleep. She takes a nap in the afternoon.”

“ Takes a nap! ” repeated Susannah, her astonishment for the moment holding her wrath in check. “ Is she sick ? ”

“ No, but she takes a nap. And you shan’t holler.”

She looked up impertinently as she went off the steps.

“ ‘ Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,’ ” began Susannah as loudly as she could, before the door closed. Then she saw across the street the blue coat of the policeman, and thought better of it. They would see. Hollering, indeed!

She looked with proud satisfaction upon her family when they were ready for church the next morning. The house, too, was in fairly good order, although there were many things yet to be done. It did not occur to her to touch any of them to-day. She had never heard of any one working on Sunday. Her eyes widened with astonishment as she listened to the quick strokes of a hammer in the next house.

When the Millerstonians visited the county seat, they went invariably to St. Peter’s Church. There the morning service was still held in German, there was a German prayer-meeting, and a German Bible class. Susannah would have preferred to go to an English church, but Oliver would not hear of it.

The usher showed them to seats well toward the front. The children stared round the great church. Once when a purple gleam from the rose-window fell on little Louisa’s dress, she gasped with delight. Her mother had no eyes for anything but the organ and the choir. The organ seemed large enough to be a church itself. She saw with astonishment that there were only four singers in the choir. Surely they would be glad to have her.

She joined in the singing with a heartiness which made those near her turn their heads. She was pleasantly conscious of their attention.

Afterwards the preacher spoke to them in the vestibule. He hoped they would come regularly to church. They would be glad to have the children in the Sunday-school and their father and mother also.

“ She will sing in the choir,” said Oliver proudly. “ She sang always in the choir at home.”

The preacher hesitated for a second. Susannah’s singing had reached even to him.

“ It is very kind,” he said. “ But we have a quartette. We pay them.”

“ I don’t ask any pay,” said Susannah quickly.

“ But you see these people are engaged for the year,” explained the preacher. “ Their voices are trained. They — ”

“ But she would be willing to sing along with them,” persisted Oliver. “ Would n’t you, Susannah ? ”

Susannah’s face had grown very red, and her black eyes snapped. She had always been quick to take offense.

“ No,” she said sharply. Then she seized Oliver by the arm. “ Come on home.” There were tears of vexation in her eyes. “ He might ’a’ said right aways he did n’t want me,” she said.

She would not go with Oliver and the children to Sunday-school in the afternoon, but she went with them afterwards for a walk. She did not enjoy it. There was no place to go. In Millerstown they went to see either her parents or Oliver’s parent, and always stayed for supper.

The children were restless and uneasy all the evening. There was no place to sit outside but the doorstep, and Susannah would not let them sit there for an instant. It was too close to the woman who said that she “ hollered,” and to the woman who put down her carpets on Sunday. In the morning she would take them to school, then they would have more to interest them.

Oliver started away at six o’clock. The county seat had not yet grown so English that it had forgotten its habit of early rising. Then Susannah called the children and gave them their breakfast. At eight o’clock she took them to school. Little Louisa cried as she came away. She had heard the whispered “Dutehy” from the girl in the next seat, and she did not dare to pinch her as she would have pinched Sarah Knerr.

Nor did Ollie like his seat-mate any better. He hailed him, also, as “ Dutehy,” and when Ollie, who was braver than Louisa, kicked him, he told the teacher, and Ollie spent the rest of the morning on the platform.

His mother declined to listen to their complaints. She had spent all her patience on the stove. What would Millerstown say if it knew that she burned her pies on the bottom and that they were raw on top? She had swept the pavement three times, and still it was dusty, Worse than all, however, had been the insult she had received from the lips of an impertinent resident of the county seat. She had discovered that with the limited storage-room in the house, they would have no place to keep one of her greatest treasures, a large feather-bed. She was trying to decide what to do with it when there came a rap at the door. The young man to whom she opened it told her that he had come to buy old clothes, old furniture, old anything.

“ It is here a bed,” she answered slowly. It would be hard to part with it, but it would doubtless yield the price of a new lounge for the parlor.

The young man stared at it. He had never seen a feather-bed.

“ I might carry it somewhere on a vacant lot,” he said. “ I ’ll carry it away for a quarter.”

For an instant Susannah could not speak. Then, —

“ A vacant lot! ” she repeated. “ Had you never no grandmother what had such a bed ? My grandmother she made it herself, out of her own feathers. What for a bed did your grandmother have, then ? ”

The young man put his head on one side. Whether he resented the implication cast upon his grandmother, or whether he merely desired to be sarcastic, it was hard to tell.

“ How would you like to sleep on somebody else’s grandmother’s dirty old bed ? ” he asked, and was gone.

“ You lie! ” cried Susannah after him. It was not exactly a logical response to anything the young man had said, but Susannah did not care. It showed her wrath and defiance.

It was small wonder that she had little patience for the children’s complaints.

“ You will just have to get used to it,” she said to little Louisa. “ I cannot be always fighting.”

Little Louisa burst into tears.

“ I want to go back,” she wailed.

“Louisa!” began her mother; then she stopped, staring at the doorway. Her husband, whose lunch-pail she had packed that morning, and whom she had not expected to see before night, stood before her. He looked pale, and sick.

“ What is the matter ? ” she faltered. “ Have you got it somewheres, Oliver ? ”

He sat down on the nearest chair.

“ He wants I should work on such a scaffold what hangs out of the window. I fall and break my neck. I won’t break my neck for nobody. He said I could go.”

Susannah looked at him, helplessly.

“ But if you don’t work, how shall we get along ? ”

He shook his head but did not answer.

“What shall we do, Oliver?” she repeated.

Little Louisa looked up at her, her fat face swollen with crying.

“ Mom — ” she began.

“ Be quiet,” said her mother.

Oliver lifted his head.

“ Perhaps, Susannah, if we — ”

“ Be quiet,” said Susannah to him, also. “ I am thinking.”

“ Listen, Mom! ” Ollie began to dance up and down. “ Let us go— ”

“ You hold your mouth, or I send you to bed,” said Susannah. She stood in the middle of the little kitchen, her arms akimbo, a frown above her black eyes. No one would ever have thought that she was really in the choir-loft of the Millerstown Evangelical Church, looking down into the admiring eyes of Millerstown, which, gasping, let her take all the high notes alone.

“ Louisa,” she said sternly, “ if you are quiet and Ollie is quiet and you Pop is quiet, we will go back.”