Helen Reimensnyder Martin

“ Tillie blushed with embarrassment at being caught in an idleness that had to be reproved, and resolutely bent all her powers to her task.
She looked about the room for a subject. The walls were adorned with the print portraits of "great men,"—former State superintendents of public instruction in Pennsylvania,—and with highly colored chromo portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield. Then there were a number of framed mottos: "Education rules in America," "Rely on yourself," "God is our hope," "Dare to say No," "Knowledge is power," "Education is the chief defense of nations." ”

“ He knows how weak and ignorant I am. I will not fear him," she said, her eyes shining. "I will trust myself in his power—and believe in his love."
"The New Mennonite creed won't hold her long," thought Fairchilds.
"Our highest religious moments, Tillie," he said, "come to us, not through churches, nor even through Bibles. They are the moments when we are most receptive of the message Nature is always patiently waiting to speak to us—if we will only hear. ”

“ Such madness of speech, to ears accustomed to the carefully tempered converse of Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkards, was in itself a wickedness almost as great as the deed threatened. The family, from the father down to six-year-old Zephaniah, trembled to hear the awful words.
"Ever dare to touch me again so long as we both live—and I'll stab you dead!"
Mrs. Getz shrieked. Sally and Sammy clung to each other whimpering in terror, and the younger children about the room took up the chorus.
"Tillie!" gasped her father. ”

“ But Christ, you know, did not go about seeking pleasure. And we try to follow him in all things."
"But, child, has not God made the world beautiful for our pleasure? Has he not given us appetites and passions for our pleasure?—minds and hearts and bodies constructed for pleasure?"
"Has he made anything for pleasure apart from usefulness?" Tillie asked earnestly, suddenly forgetting her shyness.
"But when a thing gives pleasure it is serving the highest possible use," he insisted. "It is blasphemous to close your nature to the pleasures God has created for you. ”

“ Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across the garden to the side door which opened into the kitchen. It stood open and she stepped in without ceremony. For a moment she could see nothing but red and yellow flowers and whitewashed clam-shells. But as her vision cleared, she perceived her neighbor, Lizzie Hershey, a well-built, healthy-looking country lass of eighteen years, cutting bread at a table, and her mother, a large fat woman wearing the Mennonite dress, standing before a huge kitchen range, stirring "ponhaus" in a caldron. ”

“ Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie Hershey, Tillie's eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a feminine hunger for romance. Life as yet had not revealed those emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss Margaret—which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment. It was only because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to become "educated" that she was interested in his coming. ”

“ The self-sacrifice which pampers the selfishness of others is NOT creditable. It is weak. It is unworthy. Remember what I say to you—make a fight for your rights, just as soon as you are old enough—your right to be a woman instead of a chattel and a drudge. And meantime, make up for your rebellion by being as obedient and helpful and affectionate to your parents as you can be, without destroying yourself."
Such sentiments and ideas were almost a foreign language to Tillie, and yet, intuitively, she understood the import of them. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Tillie's eyes swept the faces before her, from the stern, set features of her father on her left, to the mild-faced, long-haired, hooks-and-eyes Amishman on her right. The room grew perfectly still as they stared at her in expectant curiosity; for her air and manner did not suggest the humble suppliant for their continued favor,—rather a self-confidence that instinctively excited their stubborn opposition. "She'll see oncet if she kin do with us what she wants," was the thought in the minds of most of them. ”

“ Therefore, when in the course of his career at Harvard, Walter Fairchilds discovered that intellectually he had outgrown not only the social creed of the divine right of the well-born, in which these people had educated him, but their theological creed as well, the necessity of breaking the fact to them, of wounding their affection for him, of disappointing the fond and cherished hope with which for years his uncle had spent money upon his education—the ordeal which he had to face was a fiery one. ”

“ How dared they all make so free with this wonderful young man, marveled Tillie. Why didn't they realize, as she did, how far above them he was? She felt almost glad that in his little attentions to Amanda and Rebecca he had scarcely noticed her at all; for the bare thought of talking to him overwhelmed her with shyness.
"Mind Tillie!" laughed Mr. Wackernagel, suddenly, "lookin' scared at the way yous are all talkin' up to Teacher! Tillie she's afraid of you," he explained to Mr. Fairchilds. "She ain't never got her tongue with her when there's strangers. Ain't, Tillie?" ”

“ Absalom laughed aloud, his eyes glittering as he felt her womanly helplessness in his strong clasp.
"What you goin' to do about it, Tillie? You can't help yourself—you got to get kissed if you want to or no!" ”

“ Delighted as Tillie was to have the book for its own sake, it was yet greater happiness to handle something belonging to Miss Margaret and to realize that Miss Margaret had thought so much about her as to bring it to her.
"It's a novel, Tillie. Have you ever read a novel?"
"No'm. Only li-bries."
"What?"
"Sunday-school li-bries. Us we're Evangelicals, and us children we go to the Sunday-school, and I still bring home li-bry books. Pop he don't uphold to novel-readin'. I have never saw a novel yet." ”

“ Tillie cried. "I can never, never go back to my old life again—that hopeless, dreary drudgery on the farm! I can't, indeed I can't! I won't go back. What shall I do?"
"Look-ahere, Tillie!" the doctor spoke soothingly, "I'll do what I otherwise kin to help you. I'll do, some back-talkin' myself to them directers. But you see," he said in a troubled tone, "none of them directers happens to owe me no doctor-bill just now, and that makes it a little harder to persuade 'em to see my view of the case. Now if only some of their wives would up and get sick for 'em and I could run 'em up a bill! ”

“ In the course of her career at William Penn, Miss Margaret had developed such a genuine fondness for the shaggy, good-natured, generous, and unscrupulous little doctor, that before she abandoned her post at the end of the term, and shook the dust of New Canaan from her feet, she took him into her confidence and begged him to take care of Tillie.
"She is an uncommon child, doctor, and she must—I am determined that she must—be rescued from the life to which that father of hers would condemn her. ”

“ Even Fairchilds, in the next room, felt himself infected with the prevailing suspense.
"Well!" was Jake Getz's greeting as he entered the kitchen. "Em!" he nodded to his sister. "Well, Tillie!"
There was a note of affection in his greeting of his daughter. Tillie realized that her father missed her presence at home almost as much as he missed the work that she did. The nature of his regard for her was a mystery that had always puzzled the girl. How could one be constantly hurting and thwarting a person whom one cared for? ”

“ The invincible custom of New Canaan of using a bedroom only at night made her unheard-of inclination to sit in her room during the day or before bedtime the subject of so much comment and wonder that, feeling it best to yield to the prejudice, she usually read, sewed, or wrote letters in the kitchen, or, when a fire was lighted, in the combination dining-room and sitting-room. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The child had always really preferred that the others should have "new things" rather than herself—until Miss Margaret came; and now, before Miss Margaret's daintiness, she felt ashamed of her own shabby appearance and longed unspeakably for fresh, pretty clothes. Tillie knew perfectly well that her father had plenty of money to buy them for her if he would. But she never thought of asking him or her stepmother for anything more than what they saw fit to give her.
The Getz family was a perfectly familiar type among the German farming class of southeastern Pennsylvania. ”

“ Very quickly absorbed in her letter-writing, she did not notice the heavy footsteps which presently sounded across the floor and paused at her chair.
"Now that there writin'—" said a gruff voice at her shoulder; and, startled, she quickly turned in her chair, to find the other boarder, "the Doc," leaning on the back of it, his shaggy head almost on a level with her fair one.
"That there writin'," pursued the doctor, continuing to hold his fat head in unabashed proximity to her own and to her letter, "is wonderful easy to read. Wonderful easy." ”

“ Lizzie's face was sullen and her mother's countenance looked grim and determined. Tillie wondered whether their evident ill-humor were in any way connected with herself, or whether her Aunty Em's surmise were correct, and Sister Jennie was really "spited."
"I've come to get two pound of mush," she said, remembering her errand.
"It's all," Mrs. Hershey returned. "We solt every cake at market, and no more's made yet. It was all a'ready till market was only half over."
"Aunty Em'll be disappointed. She thought she'd make fried mush for supper," said Tillie. ”

“ Tillie could see that the young man's eyes rested occasionally upon the handsome, womanly form of her very good-looking cousin Amanda. Men always looked at Amanda a great deal, Tillie had often observed. The fact had never before had any special significance for her.
"Are you from Lancaster, or wherever?" the doctor inquired of Mr. Fairchilds.
"From Connecticut," he replied in a tone that indefinably, but unmistakably checked further questioning.
"Now think! So fur off as that!"
"Yes, ain't!" exclaimed Mrs. Wackernagel. "It's a wonder a body'd ever be contented to live that fur off." ”

“ The Getz farm was typical of the better sort to be found in that county. A neat walk, bordered by clam shells, led from a wooden gate to the porch of a rather large, and severely plain frame house, facing the road. Every shutter on the front and sides of the building was tightly closed, and there was no sign of life about the place. A stranger, ignorant of the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of living in the kitchen and shutting off the "best rooms,"—to be used in their mustiness and stiff unhomelikeness on Sunday only,—would have thought the house temporarily empty. ”

“ His wife, Tillie's stepmother, was as submissive to his authority as were her five children and Tillie. Apathetic, anemic, overworked, she yet never dreamed of considering herself or her children abused, accepting her lot as the natural one of woman, who was created to be a child-bearer, and to keep man well fed and comfortable. ”

“ Margaret suggested.
"Yes, and she'd come that spoilt we couldn't get no work out of her. No, if I hire her out winters, it'll be where I kin draw her wages myself—where's my right as her parent. What does a body have childern fur? To get no use out of 'em? It ain't no good you're plaguin' me. I ain't leavin' her go. Tillie!" he commanded the child with a twirl of his thumb and a motion of his head; "go set the supper-table!"
Margaret laid her arm about Tillie's shoulder. "Well, dear," she said sorrowfully, "we must give it all up, I suppose. But don't lose heart, Tillie. ”

“ You just wait"—he turned threateningly to Tillie as she knelt on the ground—"till I get you home oncet!"
Fairchilds staggered to his feet, and drawing Tillie up from the ground, he held her two hands in his as he turned to confront his enemies.
"You call yourselves men—you cowards and bullies! And you!" he turned his blazing eyes upon Getz, "you would work off your miserable spite on a weak girl—who can't defend herself! Dare to touch a hair of her head and I'll break YOUR damned head and every bone in your Body! ”

“ And what such a trip ought to mean to YOU, who have struggled so bravely to live the life the Almighty meant that you should live, you only can fully realize. You're of age now and can act for yourself. Break with your present environment now, or, I'm afraid, Tillie, it will be never. ”