For the first week he drove all day from one school to another, distributing settings of eggs and seed potatoes, and leaving with the children such scientific information as they might apply in directing the increase thereof. In the evenings he talked late with labor-harassed farmers who came to get him to negotiate for hired men, and remained to discuss other less urgent matters. As soon as he could see a free eveningahead, he phoned Miss Evison to ask if he might call.
He heard a dozen receivers come down while someone went to bring her, and when her voice did come over the wires the clear, smooth staccato was not reassuring. It had the ring of a woman with much business to despatch, but who hadn’t yet learned the art of handling each case whole-heartedly.
“Mr. Withers?” she repeated with doubtful inflection, then, “Oh, yes, I do remember. I believe I had you confused with someone else.”
This was less complimentary than puzzling, since the local papers had advertised widely the coming of the new Agricultural Representative, in one case, by some strange accident, directly following an account of Miss Evison’s card party in the “society column.”
She would be glad to see him, however; the difficulty was just to find an evening free. She counted over her engagements, beginning at the end of the week and working back, and decided she could give him the next evening. He came away from the interview grateful, but unhappy. Two things troubled him. When she could be so charmingly cordial, why did she ever assume that tantalizing aloofness which made a man wonder how much discomfort his attention was giving her? And why, when she must have known who he was, did she pretend to have forgotten? Tohis simple standards of honesty it was disappointing. Then he reflected that he didn’t understand girls—that, of course, a girl of her popularity must be bored to death with cases like his own and had a right to use her own methods of defence.
It was a maid in uniform who admitted Billy to the Evison home and ushered him into a parlor to wait for Miss Marjorie. As it was his first experience with this formality he was a little embarrassed. The room itself was not just fashioned to put any one at ease. He didn’t know much about house furnishings, but he judged from its fantastic twistings and carvings that this was copied from some antique historic period. He knew also that it must have cost about as much as he would have to spend in equipping a whole house. A level shaft of warm, yellow light from the sunset came through the curtain and touched a vase of long-stemmed jonquils, but the highly cut points of the glass caught the light and splintered it into a dazzling spectrum, leaving the delicate beauty of the flowers pale and lifeless.
Somehow the picture remained strangely in his mind when Marjorie came. There was something dazzling about her, just as there had been when she played a local magnet in the college ballroom, and it seemed to outshine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his ownideals and his lover’s interpretation of a few of her passing moods had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the assured graciousness cultivated of constant social experience that he knew nothing about. He was frankly embarrassed and he didn’t care. Weighed against her cool indifference, it seemed to save a remnant of reality in his dream.
The April evening out of doors was inviting. The night air was sweet with the perfume of budding orchards, the roads for miles around were smooth and damp, and the Department of Agriculture car was at their service. Billy considered her dress, doubtfully; very pretty it was, sheer and white, with little blue flowers sprinkled over it; very short, like a little girl’s, showing white silk stockings dotted with the same blue flowers.
“I just wondered,” he ventured, “if you’d care to wrap up and come for a drive?”
Her composure left her instantly. She drew in her breath in childish anticipation.
“Down to the city?” she asked. “I haven’t been there for ages. They’re playing The Follies to-night. Do you think we’d be in time if we hurried?”
A few minutes later she ran downstairs in her motoring outfit, followed by her mother. She was very proud of her mother, because, impressed by the striking resemblance, people alwaysthought, “Just like the daughter will be twenty years from now.” She was very pretty, willowy and girlish with a youthfulness that told of painstaking preservation, effusively gracious, in a subtly superior way, years of social practice in the same groove having equipped her with a supply of stock-phrases ready to be tripped off glibly to any occasion.
“You’ll take good care of our little girl?” she said. “She doesn’t make a practice of running off like this unchaperoned, but we want her to have a good time and it’s really very dull for her here. Since Mr. Evison got the farming bug he has become a hopeless recluse. He runs out to the farm almost every day, and I tell him he’ll soon be driving his own pigs in to the market.” She laughed gaily at the idea, a silvery little descending scale, and Billy wondered why she should have bothered for him. “You’re connected with the Farmers’ Institute or something here yourself, aren’t you?” she continued.
Billy explained as briefly as he could what he was trying to do, and received at the end of each department, the safe comment, “How interesting!”
Of course it wasn’t interesting, as he told it. There’s nothing interesting about dealing out setting eggs and potatoes to school children all day, and trying to round up elusive and indifferent farm laborers at night. Personally he sawsomething very much worth while beneath these externals, but weighed by her standards they shrank perceptibly. Not that he attached any importance to her judgment; only she was Marjorie’s mother, and her opinion might matter a good deal.
Nature never intended a motorist to speed through the soft dusk of an April night in the country. The breath of the balm of Gilead tree, the scent of whitethorn blossoms, the rich, earthy odors from fresh-ploughed fields, were lost in a chill, damp wind driving in their faces; the blurry outlines of heavily tasselled willows on the roadside, and lamplight pictures caught through the windows of farm houses—mothers bending over children at their lessons, or a late supper group where the day’s work had been unusually long, all shot past like dizzy films on a crazy reel; the musical roar of high, boiling creeks, and the sleepy chirp of nesting birds were drowned in the pounding of the engine. It wasn’t the hilarious joy of speeding, just the strained sitting-tight and making time. There was a rough, noisy climb up a stony hill, and the city glittered in a bowl below.
They coasted down silently, and when Billy could take his eyes from the wheel, to fairly look at the girl, he found her bright with excitement.
“I wonder if I’ll see anyone I know,” she said.
The play was not inspiring, to make the bestof it. This didn’t matter much to Marjorie, because she had not forgotten her opera glasses, and seemed to find a wonderful interest in searching the audience. Suddenly she brought the glasses down, and directed her attention solely to Billy and the stage. Billy didn’t look near the stage much; his knowledge of plays was limited, but critical, and on the night when the hope of four years had its first gift of reality, it would have seemed a prodigal waste to give his attention to stage fiction. He found quite heaven enough for the present in her nearness, the beauty of her white, regular profile, and her adorable way of leaning the merest trifle over the arm-rest between them.
When it was over, and the car was gliding quietly over the road home, she slid down snugly in the seat like a satisfied child, and he thought, with large plans for the future, how little it took to make her happy. He didn’t know, of course, that the satisfaction of her evening had begun when her glasses caught the attention of a very desirable acquaintance whose interest of late seemed to require some stimulation. If she had had all gifts of the gods at her command, nothing, she reflected, could be more effective than to be seen with Billy with his good looks and the unaccountable impression he gave of “being somebody.” None of her friends would know who he was, of course, and she didn’t intend thatthey ever should know. Altogether she had spent a very profitable evening. Then there was something very gratifying about Billy’s company; he gave so much and asked so little. She was accustomed to lavish attention from other men, but none of them ever offered her the deference of a saint and the indulgence of an irresponsible child. It was an understood part of their social code that she work her resources to the limit to be entertaining, that she make the most of her beauty, that she play the game for what it was worth. With this she had an easier trick of her own—to set them off against each other through the gentle art of inviting opposition.
The balmy softness of the evening had gone and the air held the chill of midnight. The lights were out in the houses except an occasional night-burning lamp turned low in a kitchen. They saw one bent, white-bearded old man with a lantern coming from the barn, presumably making his anxious nightly rounds to the sheep-fold during lambing time. Marjorie roused from her reverie and shivered a little.
“How terribly lonesome,” she said. “I don’t know how they stand it to live here all the time, but I suppose some people are made for that sort of thing.”
“I suppose so. I’d rather farm than anything else.”
“You would? Of course you mean to managea farm, or to advise other people like you’re doing now. That’s different.”
Billy smiled.
“You don’t advise people much at this job,” he said. “You just try to get the community in line with whatever service the Department of Agriculture (which is their own) has to give them.” And then because he didn’t want her to have any illusions as to the dignity of his work he outlined in detail some of its humblest phases.
“How very funny,” she laughed. “You must be very much amused sometimes, but it must be an awful bore, too, dealing with that class of people day after day. Someone’s generally at home at our house. I know you’d like Dad and I hope we’ll see heaps of you.”
“That’s very kind,” he said, genuinely grateful, “but I didn’t mean that I find it tiresome at all. You see it’s different when you’ve always been a farmer yourself, and I’d like to go back to real practical farming on a place of my own.”
“Yes?” she inquired, beginning to get his viewpoint. “I know a girl friend of mine—and they’re very nice people—they have a farm that they live on the year round, and all summer her father wears a white suit and goes right out among the men.”
Then Billy must have touched something, for the car shot out suddenly, and they didn’t discuss things agricultural any more. He had about decided that the case was hopeless.
The lights were still bright in the house when they drove up, but she led him around to a side door opening into her own little sitting-room. Someone had just kindled a fire on the hearth, and slipping out of her coat she dropped down on a stool. Billy looked down at her with a tenderness that he wouldn’t have dared to let her see, then his eyes wandered to a few of the room’s features that clamored for attention.
It was decidedly a girl’s sanctum. The one soft-shaded light was turned low, but the flickering blaze from the fire showed the walls gay with pennants. On the mantel, the little French writing-desk, and here and there in odd spaces on the walls were photographs; she seemed to have a preference for college graduates in gown and sheep-skin and the smiling assurance that usually goes with a degree before experience has tested its infallibility as a talisman. On a table in the centre of the room, a vase of tall American Beauties served, no doubt, to keep green the memory of some very ardent or wealthy admirer.
A less prejudiced person might have seen in the collection of trophies something in common with the scalps decorating the walls of an Indian tepee, but to Billy it only emphasized his infinitesimal place in her world. There was something very sober and kind in his eyes when they came back again to the thoughtful face with its starry eyes and childish, pursed-up mouth andthe mysterious touch that comes from the glow and shadows of the firelight. He thought how sweet and becoming this seriousness was, compared with her lighter, irresponsible moods, and he looked ahead to the time when life would have taught her more of its meaning. Then the little Swiss clock chimed out twelve and he came to apologetically.
“When may I see you again?” he asked.
She drew her brows together and counted on her fingers a list of engagements for a week.
“You’d better call me up,” she said. “I’m never sure of what I want to do for a day ahead.”
It was the beginning of many such evenings, distracting, uncertain, alluring but promising nothing, and the agricultural office suffered accordingly.
Very often, in planning his trips to examine the children’s school gardens, Billy arranged an itinerary touching the neighborhood of the Evison home, and took Marjorie with him. Very gay little picnics they had. A bank of violets or a nest of young robins never failed to move the girl to ecstasies. They generally stripped the bank of its flowers and she carried them away, withering, laced through her hair and knotted about her dress; and it took a great deal of moral support to keep her from taking the young robins out in her hand to feel the softness of their feathers.
“That’s the way I love things,” she pouted when Billy had warned her of the subsequent fate of the birds if she touched them. “If I want a thing Iwantit. Life must be very easy for you cool, slow-feeling people who can sort of stop and calculate before you know whether you really care about a thing or not.”
If the picnicking did claim undue importance and time in the garden examining, it did not save her from getting a few glimpses of the sterner phases of country life. In the middle of one hot July afternoon they drove up to a farmhome and found the woman bringing in lines and lines of fresh-smelling clothes. She had done the washing herself that morning and judging from the shine and order of her kitchen she had done several other things besides. She wasn’t dressed in any regulation afternoon costume; her gingham dress was turned in low at the neck and the sleeves rolled back at the elbows. A few little damp tendrils of hair cropped out from under her sun hat. She was thin and tanned and a little tired looking, but something about her gave a wholesome impression of health, happiness and usefulness. A perfect little Sandow of a boy a year or so old slept on the porch in a crib canopied over with mosquito netting, and two others in blue overalls hung shyly in the background.
Marjorie was surprised at the dignified kindness of the woman’s greeting. She wasn’t at all embarrassed to be found taking in her washing, but she put her basket down and gave her attention entirely to her visitors.
“I’ll take Miss Evison in where it’s cooler,” she said to Billy, “and when the boys have taken you over their garden they have something to show you in the house.”
The feature of interest in the house was abig velvety cyclopia moth,clinging sleepily to thecurtain—one of the rarest of Nature’s beautiful creations.
“Their father found the cocoon on a peach tree,” the mother explained, “and we have all been watching it ever since. They’re learning a lot from their gardens and chickens and explorations of the fields, that will give them a clearer view of things when the time comes for them to need it. Never a day goes now but I thank God that I am allowed to have my boys grow up on a farm.”
“I didn’t expect to find her like that,” Marjorie remarked when they left her, “so perfectly at ease and so sure of herself. She isn’t the average type of farm woman is she?”
“There isn’t any average type of farm woman,” Billy exclaimed. “They have the most individuality, are the least run in a conventional mould, of any class of women I know. This Mrs. Burns was a trained nurse before she was married. There are a dozen others just as fine and capable scattered through the neighborhood. The community doesn’t know much about them because they’re so everlastingly busy they can’t get away from home much.”
“Can’t they get help, or don’t they want to spend the money?”
“Some of them could afford help, but you can’t get a girl to work in the country. The city offers them good wages, and most of them havean exaggerated idea of the inconvenience of a farm house from a woman’s standpoint. Naturally a girl prefers to work in a house where the water comes hot or cold from a faucet in an enamel sink, instead of where it has to be carried from a pump in the yard, where the washing is done with a power machine or sent to the laundry instead of being scrubbed out on a little zinc washboard, and a hundred other details that make the farm undesirable for a city girl.”
“And the lonesomeness of it! A girl who had lived in town would find it maddening.”
“But women like Mrs. Burns don’t find it lonely. They have grown up with country ideas, and they have a great deal in themselves—they can make their own entertainment; then they have a live interest in their homes and families, and the men in this community are generally a pretty fine lot.”
“Then why don’t they make things different for their wives?”
“Naturally that’s the first question a person would ask. Some of them don’t seem to care much, I’ll admit. A lot of them, though, are ambitious to have the very best things for their homes, but there are two hard rocks in the way. In the first place most farms don’t pay well enough to install big improvements and not many farmers know how to put in a low-cost equipment. Practically every farm that pays its wayat all could afford the essential conveniences, and with labor as it is now, it looks as though power of some kind would soon become an economic necessity. Then, we may see lots of improvements. There’s enough water-power going to waste in this country to supply every farm with electricity, but I guess we farmers will always have to fight the sin of conservatism.”
Marjorie settled back in her corner of the seat. She was ready to drop the subject for something more interesting.
“And yet,” she said, laughing at him through half closed eyes, “you want to be a farmer. Your poor wife!”
Billy looked hard at the road ahead. “It wouldn’t be a very alluring prospect, would it?” he agreed.
For several nights after this the light burned late in the Agricultural Office, and curious sentinels of neighborhood affairs speculated on reasons for the strange behaviour of “the agricultural fellow” during the day. On several occasions he had been seen patrolling the creeks which wound like threads of a spider’s web through the hollows of the rolling land. He always carried an armful of boards and a saw and appeared to be measuring the width of the streams.
“Mebby surveyin’ for an irrigatin’ system,” one of the village store roosters suggested.
When Billy had satisfied himself as to the resources at hand, and his search for technical data had about exhausted the patience of the engineers within reach, he succeeded in getting some twenty farmers to meet in the agricultural office one evening to discuss harnessing and putting to work the water-power in the district. He pointed out how the sight of a dozen young horses running wild in his pastures would impress the average farmer as an awful example of horse-power going to waste, how he would spend a good deal of time and effort and money if necessary to capture a horse-power or two for his own use; while there may be five, ten or twenty horse-power running to waste in the brook that waters his meadows, but he is not inspired with any desire to possess and harness that.
He explained his strange conduct of the past two weeks when he had followed the streams of the district for miles, measuring their flow with a weir, and he gave the results of his prospecting. He told them that every four thousand gallons of water falling one foot in one minute, or every four hundred gallons falling ten feet in one minute meant the power of one horse going to waste; that one water horse-power would furnish light for the average farm; that five water horse-power would furnish light and power for both the barn and the house. He estimated that the cost of installing a five water horse-power wouldnot exceed the cost of one young horse, and that it would have paid for itself in saving wages, by the time the horse was ready to die.
He didn’t expect the men to be carried away by his enthusiasm, and they weren’t. A power system of any kind was a novelty in the section. An itinerant gasoline engine made its rounds every winter to cut the year’s wood, but no one had ventured to adapt even gasoline to any farm work. Naturally, they were skeptical of the energy stored up in their quiet little creeks. Billy knew that the only hope of converting them rested in demonstrating just what a power system could be made to do, and beyond the pine woods, neighboring with the farm he had hoped to own, was a place where a stream from the hills ran everything that had formerly turned with a crank. He could arrange an excursion to the place. He could have the engineer who had gone over the ground here come out and explain just how the same principle could be carried out at home. He could get manufacturers to bring special pieces of equipment and demonstrate their uses. And in order that the scheme might not miss its main objective—to show Miss Evison that a farm home could be made a livable place—he would arrange with the owner and his wife to let him put on a demonstration of a complete home equipment. In the last undertaking his zeal was considerably in excess of his abilityto handle the case. He wrote to ask Ruth Macdonald if she would come and help him.
Ruth said she would come; somehow people always expected that when they went to her for help. Besides, it was part of her professional work. She spent some days consulting with dealers in household equipment, from bath-tubs to wash-boards, and finally got together a collection to fit the needs of any ordinary farm-house. The evening before the day of the demonstration she followed her shipment out to the farm, partly because the work ahead of her would require the thrifty precaution known in country lore as “taking the morning by the forelock,” partly because she wanted to feel again the spell of the moonlight flooding into the room, and the night stirred so little by a breath among the leaves and the distant gurgle of the creek, that she could hardly sleep for the stillness.
She awakened early next morning, to the sound of carefully handled dishes in the kitchen, and the drone of a cream separator in some distant annex of the house. The early October sun was flooding the mists from the fields; a scattered drove of young cattle on the crown of a hill moved like black silhouettes against the blaze. A tingling buoyancy came from looking out over miles of open country and breathing long, dizzy breaths of autumn-scented air, while down in the city the great human herd still slept,catching whatever faint little whiffs drifted in between brick walls. Field after field bristling with yellow stubble told of a harvest gathered in, but the orchards were still heavy with apples, their bright red glowing through a glittering coat of the night’s frost. Here and there a corduroy of black furrows showed where the farmer was already taking thought for next spring’s sowing. Everywhere there was evidence of productive work completed and the urgent call of other work to do; to the born farmer there could be no monotony in the changing seasons. Every morning in town she saw swarms of workers like herself return to their day labors like bees to a hive, each passing mechanically to its own little cell, pigeon-holed somewhere in the make-up of an office building.
She had sometimes thought the lives of women in the country narrow and drab-visioned, but here in the kitchen the farm mother was singing quietly to herself as she cooked her family’s breakfast. She was no mechanical cog in the machinery of the place; she planned and directed and created every day. Under the window her dahlias were blooming gloriously. In the orchard a flock of her turkeys were getting ready for the Thanksgiving market. Overhead was coming the soft thud of her baby’s bare feet on the stairs. On a hill off among the pines a red maple flamed at the door of a crumbling house—an ideal site for a Swiss chalet, Billy had called it one daywhen his enthusiasm had run away with his reserve—and she thought wretchedly of her office with its soft red rug, and its one gloomy window, and of her uncle’s luxurious house where hired experts held the sole privilege of ministering to the family comfort.
However, she had a clear field for working out her own ideas to-day. The house was a roomy, old-fashioned, hospitable place which had made a home for two generations and might yet be the pride of a third. The family had spent a good deal of money in redecorating and refurnishing it as fashions changed or things wore out, and when the stream from the hill was harnessed to furnish power for every machine in the barn, the house was trigged out with a dazzling array of electric lights. Apart from this, the returning ghost of a great-grandfather would not have noticed anything new enough to arouse his curiosity. One look into the barn with its whirring motors, and general hum of activity—everything from the grindstone to the grain chopper turning without a crank and all going at once—would have sent the apparition scurrying back to more primitive quarters.
Some of the women excursionists at the farm that afternoon seemed to be possessed of the same instinct. They clutched at their children when they saw them getting within reach of the electric washer. A few were even afraid to touch itthemselves for fear of a shock. When it was suggested that where electricity was not available any ordinary washer could be driven by a little portable gasoline engine about the size of a lawn mower, they immediately had a presentiment of being caught in the belt. The simplest arrangement demonstrated was the connecting of a water-power machine to the tap in the kitchen sink, but half of the houses in the neighborhood didn’t have kitchen sinks or any water supply other than a pump in the back yard and a rain barrel under the eaves.
The women unanimously agreed that what they wanted most was running water in the house. With a set of little models the girl showed how this could begin with a soft water cistern and a pump plying into a kitchen sink. The next improvement would be a water front on the kitchen range and a hot water faucet, and these would lead directly to a complete bath-room. Even without electricity or any other form of power, a hand force-pump in the cellar could give a water supply for a bath-room.
A genuine interest was kindled when the people began to handle the equipment themselves. The men were not the least interested; those to whom a vacuum cleaner was a new piece of machinery investigated its mechanism with the enthusiasm of a boy with a new engine. They began to realizewhy the family doctor sometimes condemned the straining, twisting motion that goes with sweeping, even though their mothers had lived long and used brooms. Those of a mechanical bent took up the toy dumb-waiter with interest; they didn’t resent being told that every time a woman took a step up in climbing a stair she had to actually lift her own weight—a waste of energy which they overcame in their own work by fitting their barns with feed-chutes and litter-carriers. They even listened with some show of interest to the fact that most of the tuberculosis in the country was due to such poor methods of heating the houses that the windows of sleeping rooms must be kept closed all winter to keep from freezing, and they discussed cost, and advantages of hot air and steam heating systems. Women took up the electric iron, gingerly at first, then freely to test the speed and ease of pressing out clothes with an iron always hot and clean—without fires to keep up, or constant trips to and from the stove. One weary little mother had eyes for nothing but the kiddie-koop, a little screened box on wheels where her baby could play safe and happy always near her, but out of her way, while she cooked meals for a raft of hired men.
After a general discussion, they planned a simple and practical equipment for an average farm house. Then they estimated the cost, andthe practicability of the whole scheme began to waver. In view of the yearly income derived from the average farm, most of the men decided that no farmer could afford to put so much money into an unproductive investment. Their wives generally agreed with them. The farm mortgage is as much a nightmare to a woman as it is to her husband; she is willing to wait for everything until the place is clear, and the most of her life has gone; then, if they still want it, they can afford a most comfortable home to die in. Many parents argued that they had to look ahead if they were going to give their boys a start on farms of their own, but those of wider vision believed that the whole scheme of family life falls down if the home suffers; that it does not pay to build the farm up into a profitable property which is despised by the very children for whom they are giving their lives. Even the most doubtful showed some amusement at the announcement that every essential convenience could be installed in an ordinary farm house for less than the cost of a farm car—and even the poorest of them owned a car.
Late in the afternoon Marjorie Evison and her mother called, as they had promised. For the sake of Mr. Evison’s business they made it a matter of principle to patronize all agricultural movements. They had never known the need of things that were novelties in most farm homes,and could not grasp the significance of the array of washing machines, mops and what not strewn about the big kitchen, but they had time to talk to Ruth for a few minutes—to regret that they couldn’t entertain her at tea, as they were due at a corn roast at the Country Club—and they congratulated Billy on the originality of the idea and hoped they would see more of him now.
Billy had planned to find a spare hour during the day to take Marjorie up to the place on the hill. It was very beautiful now with the maples turning crimson and the sleepy countryside for miles below basking in the sun, making a picture blurred and softened through the purple haze. He wanted to search her face when she saw the wonder and promise of it all for the first time—to try to learn whether it would ever be possible to make her like it. But somehow things had gone wrong; he decided that this was not the right day to try to convert her to the gospel of country life. When she arrived he was standing in the middle of the stream, explaining the mechanics of the water-motor to a group of men. He was blissfully unconscious of how his muddy hip boots, and collarless shirt with here and there a smudge of machine oil, might appear to a girl who never saw men of her own social strata in any outdoor apparel less elegant than white tennis flannels. He didn’t know that his unconcerned appearance as he was seemed almost likeeffrontery. She might have even admired it in some novel hero engineer hewing a railroad through a mountain, but there was nothing romantic about this; it was just grovelling in a muddy stream to show some two dozen farmers how a wheel went round; it was just the dirt and soil of farming and he seemed to like it. She found herself comparing him with the leisurely, polished men of her own littlecoterie, and she decided that she liked clean men. She was also unusually indifferent to-day on account of the event at the Country Club. It was the recognized social centre for urbanites who from choice or necessity had stranded themselves on the dead sands of rural life. They frequently entertained very smart people from town, and Mrs. Evison, with a mother’s ambition, and a social expert’s diplomacy,looked upon it as the one chance in this isolated place,through which she could give her daughter “opportunities.”
The Evisons didn’t want to separate themselves literally from the neighborhood social life, of course; they would try to drop in for a few minutes at every community gathering, and they would give their grounds for garden parties and use whatever other advantage they possessed for the good of “the people,” but it was not to be expected that just because they were back-to-the-landers they should be satisfied with the company of people of entirely different social interests.This agricultural young man who had filled in so nicely to give Marjorie a good time, who was so safe and unpresuming, had always seemed rather superior, probably on account of his college experience. He had always refused to be considered anything but a farmer and they had laughed at him, but to-day, dirty and dishevelled, he looked it. They must hurry on. And Billy watched the scarlet blur of a girl’s motor coat until the long grey car carried it out of sight; then he returned to his water wheel. The shadows were already darkening over the dream place on the hill.
The people went away interested. An agent or two who had hovered tirelessly about the place all day, succeeded, in spite of government regulations, in taking a few orders for their goods on exhibition, and Billy was satisfied with the day’s work. He knew that if one improvement came into actual use in the district others would follow. When the last car had gone he had a scrub up at the spring, made the best of his disordered appearance and went to the house to find Ruth. Notwithstanding the success of the day’s proceedings he had a heavy sense of disappointment. After all, the whole scheme had been inspired by a personal object, and that had failed. To-morrow he would be able to think of some new tack, of course, but to-night he welcomed the buoyant philosophy and sympathetic interest that always seemed to go with Ruth.
He found her in the kitchen helping the farmer’s wife with the supper. It was a repast fitting a day’s strenuous work out of doors—a great iron kettle of sizzling fried potatoes, a cold roast chicken reserved from the weekly market supply, a platter piled with steaming ears of corn, and deep, brown-skinned pumpkin pies. The doors were open and a crackling wood fire warmed the frost-edged air of the October evening. He found an old instinct stirred strangely by something in the genuine home atmosphere of the place. He couldn’t tell whether it was the motherly air of the woman who directed things, or the way the littlest sleepy towhead burrowed into his father’s shoulder, or whether the spell was partly due to the rose-shaded light falling about the girl with her silky, dark hair and glowing eyes. They were not at all practised in magnetic arts, those eyes; they were just frank and kind and happy and rather beautiful, he thought—the light might have been responsible. He had a boyish desire to tell her what troubled him—not definitely, of course; he had a masculine, cautious dislike of personalities, but if he could give her the abstract problem, he might at least get the benefit of a woman’s viewpoint. He had to take her to the station that night and he would drive around by the hill.
The mountain road was beautifully winding. For a stretch the trees arched over, leaving it cut like a black tunnel through the woods; then the rocks shot up a steep wall on one side and on the other a rain-washed slope ran down to a level of flat, tilled fields. At the crown of the hill the woods ended and a plateau of cleared land marked the beginning of the farm.
The car stopped abruptly.
“Do you know,” Billy began with animation, “I’ve always thought I’d like to own this place. What do you think of it? I’ve gone over every foot of it and I know it’s a good investment—that it would give a good living at least. Do you think it could ever be made a good place to live?”
Ruth looked at the crumbling house with its background of old trees. She remembered how the maple had flamed in the sun when she saw it from her window that morning. Now with the shadows lying sharp and black on the frosted grass and the moonlight filtering through the branches, it seemed to stand waiting for something to shelter and protect—rather a curious old sentinel too; wondering just what loves and trials and heart breaks would be lived out in the house to be. Suddenly she came to, remembering that he had asked if she thought the place could be made livable.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well—it’s twelve miles from the city——”
“You’d have a car. Why would you want it nearer the city?”
“I wouldn’t. I just wondered——. I want to build a house like a Swiss chalet, low and brown with a little corner tower for a sunroom, and a stone foundation just piling up naturally out of the ground, and a stone chimney with a fireplace as wide as a cave, where a person could dream the wildest kind of dreams and then live them. You can hear the creek roaring over the hill; there’s enough water power there to run a factory, and the house could be made pretty snug, I think; but sometimes I’m afraid I’ve just let myself be carried away with a vision—east is east, and the country will never make a good imitation of the town. You have lived in the city, and you know the country pretty well. Do you think this could be made a place where—well, where anyone not used to country life would be happy?”
“I think it could.” She was looking away and the tone did not sound at all impulsive. Desperately he tried again.
“Do you think a man would be a downright piker to ask a girl who has always had everything she wanted to come to a place like this?”
“No.” The answer was very frank, and the girl bolted directly into a rapid, and not very comprehensive review of plans she had seendeveloped in less promising places. For some reason she seemed confused.
From the day when he took the farmers of his county to see how another man had harnessed the creek which ran wild through his pastures, setting it to work to cut the wood, and grind the grain and to run every hand machine from the fanning-mill to the grindstone, the Agricultural Representative began to see visions.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” one man exclaimed when they were going over the details afterwards. “There wasn’t a darned crank on the place. The thing must do more than one man’s work, and the most soul-aggravatin’ part of the work at that. Now at our place there’s just the boy and me to do everything, and we’re prowlin’ around the barn with a lantern till nine o’clock most nights. We get a man for a month or two sometimes, but the wife isn’t strong and it makes more work for her. Besides, as wages go now it doesn’t pay. I know Jim gets discouraged sometimes. He has a fair schooling and the wages he could get in town must look pretty good compared with what we turn in in actual cash from the farm; a boy doesn’t see what capital’s being laid away in the place every year. If he’s half alive he knows he’s living thebest part of his life now; and he isn’t going to waste it all laying up something for a time when he can’t enjoy it.
“I’ve tried to keep Jim at home by giving him a calf or a colt once in a while, like my father used to do, but if a boy has to feed calves and curry colts long after the hour when every other working man has hung up his overalls, he gets sick of them. I never saw a boy sick of tinkerin’ around a gasoline engine or a motor, though. If Jim goes his mother and I might as well go too, and we’re so used to the old place now that I guess we’d never get over being homesick if we left it. I wish you’d come up and measure the flow of our creek.”
Another evening one of the young men who had taken the junior farmers’ course in the winter came into the agricultural office looking rather embarrassed.
“It’s about the water-power,” he began.
“Oh, yes,” Billy encouraged. He wasn’t thinking of much except water power these days and was glad of an opportunity to unload his enthusiasm. Besides, the boy had just commenced farming on a place of his own, and the agricultural adviser knew that young blood moves more quickly in adopting reforms. “I should think you’d have a pretty good force from that hill of yours,” he said. “What did you think of doing?”
“Well, you see,” the boy stammered, “it’s likethis. I ain’t just sure what’s the best way. I want to get married and I don’t know what to do.”
The Representative stared. He had had varied requests for advice since he came to stand for the Department of Agriculture in the community, but this was something new. Under his quizzical grin the boy reddened painfully. He had never seen the Representative’s steady brown eyes hold such a glint of amusement, and he was afraid he was going to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Billy said without looking particularly sympathetic, “but I don’t know much about it myself. It would just be a case of the blind leading the blind.”
“Oh!” The boy began to grasp things; then he roared. “I guess you’ll learn,” he admitted dryly. “Leastways you don’t strike the neighborhood up around ‘The Heights’ as one that wasn’t interested.”
Billy felt his own face warming up. “The Heights” was the section surrounding the Evison estate, and in his evening spins over the country roads he had often met his client jogging quietly along in a rubber-tired buggy, his feet stretched out comfortably on the dashboard and his interest evidently very much absorbed in a white-robed presence beside him. Billy felt that they had a singularly common interest, and he shook hands with him across the table.
“Go ahead,” he said. “What has the water-power to do with your case?”
“If you’d been down at our club meetings oftener this summer you’d have known I was keeping company with the school-teacher.”
There was an unmistakable pride in the confession. The school-teacher evidently held a rather superior place in the social life of the neighborhood, and again Billy felt the nearness of a kindred interest. At the same time he interpreted something of reproach in the words “if you’d been down to our club meetings oftener....”
Unfortunately the club met on Tuesday evenings and Miss Evison seemed to be free more often on Tuesday than on other nights of the week. Frequently when he was about ready to leave the office the ’phone would ring and the familiar flute-like voice would pipe, “I was afraid you might have gone. I meant to call all afternoon and had almost forgotten.” Then the tone would drop almost to a whisper, “I’m afraid I’ve been very stingy of my time lately, but we’d have the whole evening to ourselves if you’d care to come to-night.”
Once he had been obliged to tell her that this was the night when his Junior Farmers held their meeting and that he had almost promised to be there.
“I’m so sorry,” she replied, with touchingplaintiveness. “We’re having a little euchre. Some friends from town have just dropped in. They’re very informal, and I know you’d enjoy it. You couldn’t leave your precious young farmers for just one night?”
“I’ve done that so many nights. Perhaps I could leave the meeting early and call on the way home?”
She was unmistakably hurt.
“Oh, no; don’t trouble,” she answered quickly. “I wouldn’tthinkof having you do such a thing. It doesn’t matter. I just thought perhaps you’dliketo come.”
Another time he had asked her to come with him. It was an evening when girls attended.
“You know,” she said, “it’s very sweet of you to offer to take me right into your Holy-of-Holies to hear how they feed their calves and the like, but it would be casting your pearls before a very ungrateful little pig. I wouldn’t enjoy it a bit. And I think, too, if you’ll take an experienced person’s advice, that you’re getting too much of it yourself. Do you know that you’ve talked to me an hour now, about waterwheels?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I like to hear about them, and what you’re doing and everything, but don’t you think if you work all day at that sort of thing, it’s enough without running to meetings at night? It doesn’t leave you any time for social interests at all.I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble in getting into the Country Club, and the people there are so different. Most of the members are men and women of wide social experience.”
Billy knew something of their social experience, but he didn’t tell her. Neither did he make any effort to gain admittance to the club, but he did spend more evenings attending theatres and motoring excursions than was good for his Junior Farmers’ Society. He felt that he deserved the unconscious reproof, “If you’d been at our meetings oftener,” from this young man whose aspirations were, after all, so like his own. Evidently, however, his friend’s efforts had accomplished something, while his case was as uncertain as ever.
“You’re going to marry the teacher, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” There was no doubt about that. “She isn’t afraid to go on a farm because she doesn’t know anything about it. She’d always lived in town before she came here, but she’s crazy about the country, and no gush about it either. She takes the kids to the woods and has them making gardens at the school, and all that. When I bought the farm every old wiseacre in the settlement came and said: ‘You’re making a mistake. That girl’s never done farm work and wouldn’t stand it for a year.’ I could have wrung their necks. I didn’t want to marry any girl to haveher help to support the place. I thought I could make things so she wouldn’t have to work any harder to take care of a home out here than she would in town. There was no person I could ask about it until you brought that girl out to the farm excursion. I didn’t know what she’d think, but I didn’t suppose I’d ever see her again, anyway, so I asked her if she thought a fellow had any right to take a girl who didn’t know anything about farming out to a place like mine, and if she thought a farm house could be made just as comfortable and handy as a place in town. She’s some girl that. She never smiled, and she didn’t seem surprised—she was a sight more considerate than some other people I know. She said that a girl worth having wouldn’t be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man, but that the work on an average farm with no conveniences at all was too hard for any woman. Then she showed how an ordinary house could be made a regular doves’ nest for the price of an automobile.”
Billy was thinking of his own inquiry on the way to the station. It struck him with a certain grim amusement that she would be rather impressed with the prevailing sentiment. And she had said: “A girl worth having wouldn’t be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man.” She hadn’t told him that.
When he came out of his reverie the boy was still talking.
“So I thought if you’d come and measure the flow of the creek,” he was saying, “I’d know what to do. If there isn’t enough water power, I’ll get a gasoline engine big enough to pump water for a bathroom and do the power work around the house, anyway.”
A few other inquiries for power systems came in, but their motives were more purely economic. The labor problem was becoming more baffling every year; hired men were expensive, and they wouldn’t stay. The water power, once installed, would cost nothing; it would work all day and all year until the bed of the stream was worn level. Billy knew that once started the fever was bound to spread, and he had visions.
When his car climbed the hills at sunrise, as it often did now that the work was pressing, with school fairs and marketing associations busy disposing of the year’s harvests, he frequently saw a round-shouldered, blue-overalled boy, half awake, plodding out to the barn. He remembered well the sleepy stupidness, the torturing ache of the body weakened by the fever of growth, and stiffened by long hours of a man’s work. Some day, he believed, every farm in the district would have mechanical power doing the heartbreaking drudgery which was making boys shiver at the thought of farming all their lives. Occasionallya woman coming from the barn with her milk-pails and a fretful little toddler or two tagging along after her would startle him with a crowd of memories which he had been trying hard to forget. Whatever changes might come now, he would always have to remember that until he was old enough to do it himself, nothing had been done to make things easier for his mother. In the evenings when he drove home late and saw families still struggling with belated chores, he had a dream of a time when every farm would have regular hours, when the family would gather in the evenings not too tired to enjoy each other, when the mothers of the farms, famed in all history for giving the world its sturdiest, brainiest children, would have time to give their best to all their children, to put their best work on the black sheep, or misfits, or handicapped, or delicate ones, for whom there is little special provision in the country outside their own homes.
A speaker at a political meeting in the town hall had recently expressed something of the same ideas. “There is a movement for better things among the farmers’ wives,” he said. “The idea is finding recognition among them that all the prizes of progress are no longer to be allowed to go to the man-life on the farm while the woman-life is left to vegetate. The woman on the farm must bear the oncoming hosts of strongmen, or they will not be borne. And unless the farm women can live under conditions which make for happiness, health and pride our whole nation will be weakened by ill-health, unhappiness, and unrest of the mothers and wives.”
A few of the more adventurous women had accompanied their husbands to hear the speaker, but they gave little sign of their approval or disapproval of his sentiments. A week or two later Mrs. Burns called at the agricultural office to see if the Representative would have time, with all the community water-power demands, to help do something for the children. Billy hoped he would have time. Recollections of certain experiences of his own childhood on the Swamp Farm had left his sympathies quick for any youngster suffering possibly some of the same tribulations. Yet he knew the homes in the neighborhood pretty well, and he knew that child-labor could not be called an evil of the section, except in the backward crevices of the hills, and in the best counties of the province there are “way-back” places where a lot of evils go unmolested. Even on one of the leading farms near the town, where the children of the family were perhaps over cared for, there was a “Home-boy,” stolid, stunted, stupid-looking, who couldn’t talk plain, and who went around with his mouth open and a painful, bitter look about his eyes. Billy had misgivings as to how thingswere going with him. He felt ready to support any movement which Mrs. Burns might have in mind.
“You remember hearing that political speaker say that the woman on the farm gave the world its sturdiest children?” she began. “Well, after what I had seen in hospital work, and what I’ve seen right around home, I wondered. Last week we had a doctor talk to us at the Women’s Institute, and he showed us that the tradition that children brought up in the country are healthier than children brought up in the city is all a lie. He showed us that while the death rate in the cities has been going down steadily for the last ten years, in the country it maintains a pretty straight line. The beginning of most of it starts with the children. In the country we don’t go to doctors or dentists or oculists until the case gets desperate; it’s a good deal of trouble to go, and often the cost has to be considered. Most people have never been taught that “little” things like enlarged tonsils or bad teeth can become very serious.
“I was in a house the other day when one of the girls came home from school crying with a toothache. She had been suffering for weeks, but they said it was only a first tooth; it would soon come out itself. She had never gone to a dentist in her life, and her front teeth were so crooked as to be a disfigurement. If somethingisn’t done soon she will have to go through her whole life disfigured. It isn’t fair.
“One of our neighbor’s boys had always been considered stupid. The teachers didn’t know what was wrong with him; he just didn’t grasp things. He also made a great deal of amusement for the school by his awkwardness; he couldn’t walk across the room without bumping into things. They have just by accident discovered that he’s nearly blind. The oculist can do a good deal for him even yet, but he can never bring his sight back perfectly, and his school years have been wasted. That could have been prevented.
“In a garden in our little village at home, a young woman with a twisted back works all day with the flowers—they are the closest friends she has. I’ve noticed that she is always there in the morning and afternoon when the school children go past. They pick the flowers through the fence and go on unrebuked, and I’ve seen her stand watching them up the road, especially the little five-year-olds, with tears in her eyes and a look almost rebellious. She won’t ever have any children, you see. And it’s all because no one noticed the curvature when it was just beginning and could have been straightened. She was sent to school to sit in the same old painful seat day after day so she might ‘pass the entrance.’
“Just one other case. On the farm next ours, a girl with brown eyes like a Madonna’s, and theproverbial crown of red-gold hair, is suffering everything from the consciousness of a cruel disfigurement. When she was three years old an adenoid growth blocked the natural breathing passage, and the only thing left for her to do was to keep her mouth open and catch whatever air she could. Of course, the result was that the upper jaw narrowed and the teeth protruded, taking the character entirely away from the lower part of the face. She kept having colds, and became so deaf that when she was about grown up it was necessary to operate and remove the growth. Her hearing came back pretty well, but the natural lines of her face will never come back. An operation at the beginning would have changed her whole life.
“Now we want to have a doctor come and examine the children in the schools, and then if there’s anything wrong we want to have a clinic and get them taken care of. We don’t know just how to go about it. Will you help us?”
The Representative was not indifferent or pessimistic. He knew that other Women’s Institutes had engineered Medical Examination campaigns in the public schools, that they had even held school clinics, and brought a surgeon to operate on the youngsters who needed it, and he knew that in some way the Department of Agriculture stood back of them in the undertaking. That was as far as his interest had gone.As for helping personally with the procedure, he would rather blunder into a hornets’ nest than get mixed up in the detail of a women’s organization. As usual, when he needed help, he thought of Ruth. She would understand just how to map out the whole campaign. She was working for the Department, and if Mrs. Burns would write, no doubt they would send her. Of course, he would be pleased to give any incidental help he could.
Ruth came and outlined the plan. The Institute would first have to get the school board’s consent to let them go on with the work. Then they could get the local doctors to look the children over and see if there were any suffering from the troubles that could be remedied. If they could have a nurse to help with the inspection and to visit the homes in a neighborly way and report what the kiddies needed, so much the better. If they wanted to make the campaign of real, practical help, they could hold a clinic and have the children actually treated.
It was well on in December before the clinic could be arranged, and the general excitement kept the telephones busy and caused considerable delay in picking the geese for the Christmas market. Mrs. Burns had offered to turn her house into a hospital for the day and other members of the Institute were contributing supplies of sheets and towels for the occasion. Mrs.Evison had dropped in at an Institute meeting to express her delighted approval of the plan and to say that her daughter would be pleased to drive their car all day, if necessary, to fetch the children to and from the clinic. Billy placed the Department of Agriculture’s car at their service, praying in secret that they wouldn’t send him out alone with any of the patients. A surgeon, young, but notoriously successful, was being brought from the city, and Ruth was coming to help.
On the evening before the day of the clinic, when Billy was driving home, he overtook the “Home boy” trudging up to the village to get what little social color he could from the gossip of the regular store roosters. He climbed into the car with his accustomed sullenness—or what was generally considered sullenness. Billy knew it was only a painful self-consciousness dulled a little by dragging dog-tiredness. He was breathing audibly through his distorted mouth, and his deafness gave a stupid look to his face.
“Why don’t you come up to our Junior Farmers’ meetings?” the Representative began.
The boy didn’t look up.
“They ain’t for the likes of me,” he said.
“Of course they are,” the Representative declared, warmly. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t mean that your fellows are snobs,” the boy admitted, “but there’s a difference, andyou know it. They’re used to being out. They can make speeches and talk, and me—I can’t talk.”
Billy had never realized before how the boy’s pride had suffered through his affliction. He wondered if the school clinic would admit him; or, what would be more difficult, whether he could persuade him to go. He made the proposition as tactfully as he could.
“I don’t belong there, neither,” the boy replied. “I’ve never gone to school, and, anyway, I ain’t in the same class. I don’t know any of the folks except the men I meet at threshin’s. Jim that come out here the same time I did, it’s different with him. At the place where he works, they don’t make much difference by him. But the folks at the Home thinks if they once gets us out to what they call the ‘green country,’ they’ve sort of landed us in ’eaven. Men send in for ‘a boy to do chores,’ but we know it’s a hired man they want. ‘Course it’s different with Jim, but then I’m different to Jim. If you can’t talk an’ you can’t hear, an’ your mouth hangs open, you can’t expect folks to want you around more-n-s necessary.”
Billy had never tried so hard to argue anyone out of a mistaken idea. His own experience had given him an insight into a boy’s sensitiveness at the time when life is opening a strange world to him, and he needs a confidant, and he hadnot forgotten how the “Representative” in his county at home had given him confidence. He determined to stay right with this boy until he saw him past the turning-place. When he let him out of the car at the store rendezvous, he urged:
“Now, you’ll come to-morrow and let them fix you up? I’ll go with you.”
The boy eyed him shrewdly for a minute, then his face softened.
“I guess you’re all right,” he conceded. “I guess you wouldn’t take it as any trouble, but that’s not sayin’ what the others ’ud think. I’ll think it over. If I can bring myself to it, I’ll call in an’ tell you before I go back.”
In the office Billy sorted over his mail, and pushed it away. Some of the letters dealt with marketing news that meant hundreds of dollars gain or loss to the community; one carried a promise of a co-operative creamery that had been one of his main ambitions for the district—but these things didn’t seem so important to-night. If the clinic to-morrow could remove one boy’s handicap and give him the chance for life that Nature meant him to have, it would be worth more than several reforms for more profitable farming. If he were not taken care of now the chances were that he would never be. He decided to walk over to the store and makesure of seeing him before he went home. Then the phone called him.
“Oh, youarethere at last!” It was the soft little purring tone that always set his pulses pounding. “Could you possibly run up for a little while?”
“I’m afraid—” he began.
“But listen,” she interrupted. “I’m going to help you to-morrow, you know, and mother and I have some plans we’d like to talk over with you. We’re delighted that you’re having such a distinguished surgeon as Dr. Knight. It’s really very unusual for him to go out of the city at all, and we thought you wouldn’t want him to go to the Village Inn—it’s quite impossible, you know, so mother thought you’d better have him come here. Dad has met him, I think, and we’d be glad to have him. Perhaps Miss McDonald would come, too, though she’s so used to going to all sorts of places.”
“All right,” he agreed, absently. “And you’re going to help”—that was the thing that impressed him. “That’s fine.”
“I’m going to drive the car all day,” she announced, emphatically.
“That’s fine,” he said again. At last she was interested. Of course, she couldn’t resist the children—she was such a feminine bit of creation.
“And I know you’re going to say you havesome state council or something on to-night,” she rattled along; then dropping her voice appealingly, “I know I’m an awful nuisance, that I’m just hindering you all the time, but Idowant you to-night. Was it anything important?”
“Why, I wanted to see the boy who works at McGill’s. I was wondering if we could get him into the clinic to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’msurewe could. I’ll get Mother to speak for him. I’m so glad it was nothing urgent. I’ll expect you, then. You’ll hurry?”
Billy didn’t exactly hurry. He walked up and down the office a few times, looking more like swearing than his friends would have thought possible. Then he remembered the confession, “I know I’m just hindering your work all the time.” Now, when she was beginning to be interested, to even try to help, he was losing his temper over having a plan of his own upset. He got ready to go—which took some time—and on the way out he called at the store. They told him the boy had gone.
When Billy drove his ambulance out to the Burns farm the next morning and carried a little blanket-wrapped patient into the house, he found Ruth already there. She was bending over a cot, evidently trying to restore courage to a brave little fellow who was having a hard struggle to keep the corners of his mouth from going down. The child said something at lastand her head went down beside him on the pillow. There was an unsteady little gurgle of a laugh, so low and deep and comrady that it made him shiver a little. He had heard the little sob catch at the end of it and he was aware that it meant a good deal. When she looked up and saw him she colored warmly, then came straight to meet him in her frank, friendly way; but he thought she left him very soon to go back to her work. He would have liked to stay and watch her putting the children to bed. There was something so strong and easy in the way she lifted them; something so clever and steady in her supple hands—you could almost feel the touch in watching them; something so close and reassuring in the way she held the nervous ones. But his presence seemed to embarrass her, so he went away.
He didn’t see her again until evening. He had finished his part of the day’s programme, and had helped the doctor to pack away in the long, deep-purring Evison car the patients who required the easiest riding. He had never known Marjorie to be so adorable. She was unnecessarily solicitous for the comfort of the children, and she took orders from the doctor with a demure seriousness that was most becoming. When he tucked the rugs about her as she started off with her last convoy, she leaned down and whispered, “We’re expecting you for dinner.You’ll bring the doctor—and Miss Macdonald, if she’ll come.”
As she bent over the wheel in her red motoring outfit, with the wind whipping a bright color in her cheeks, and her eyes dark and glowing, she seemed like nothing so much as a brilliant scarlet tanager, poised for flight. It was unreasonable, he reflected, to expect a girl like that to conform to standards set for ordinary people. Her heart was in the right place, however irresponsible she might seem sometimes. How thoughtful she had been for the children.
In the house the women were clearing away the litter from the day’s work. Ruth was still busy. Her white uniform had lost some of its crispness; her face was flushed; her hair was straying out from under her nurse’s cowl. It had been a busy day. She was testing the heat of some irons on the stove when Billy came in.
“Are you nearly through?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do? I want to take you to Evison’s for dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve just had another patient come in. The doctor’s operating now.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Iron his bed.”
He smiled to think she knew the homely trick; then a sharp, pained look crossed his face.
“My mother used to do that,” he said.
She put the iron down and looked at him just as she had done when she followed him home from his mother’s funeral and heard him sob out his agony for the things he couldn’t help.
“I know,” she said. “She did it for me once, too. I don’t wonder that you remember how good she was.”
The little worried wrinkle had gone from between her eyes. In some inexplicable way she seemed to be getting across to him the warmth of her sympathy, and he felt for the first time the full wonder of it. What a treasure would be there for some man to explore, and how blind and ungrateful he had been all along. He had never done anything but go to her for help. Even now she looked tired enough to go into hysterics instead of troubling to think about him, and he felt he had been nothing less than brutal. She was gathering up her irons.
“When you get that done will you come?” he begged. “We’ll drive around till you get rid of the ether you’ve been breathing all day. I didn’t think what I was getting you into.”
“But, you see, it’s a pretty bad case, and I’m going to stay all night with the boy.”
“Why can’t some of his own people stay?”
“He hasn’t any people, nor evidently any friends. He’s a boy from the Home, who works somewhere around. He came in alone at the last minute, and you could see it had been prettyhard for him. We want to make it as easy as we can.”
She went away smiling, and Billy went out, bitterly ashamed of himself. It had been hard for the boy to come, and he hadn’t done anything to help him.
An hour later the doctor came out.
“I suppose we’re late,” he grumbled. “I don’t know whether to curse that girl or go down on my knees and worship her. I’d had about enough bad tonsils to-day without this last case, and there was no reason under the sun why we should take an outsider like that in a school clinic, but she held me right to it. Now she’s going to see him through the night.”
The evening at Evison’s held a new atmosphere for Billy. The elegant luxury of the place seemed very restful after the crowded confusion of the Burns home. Marjorie was unusually quiet and sweet and dignified. She seemed even a little shy in the presence of the notorious surgeon, listening with charming attention to all he said, but saying little herself. However, the men talked, and they talked to her and for her—Billy with his usual sincere interest; the doctor with his clever way of unconsciously saying the most complimentary things. It was quite possible that he had said them before, of course, and quite probable that he would say them again and keep right on saying them so long as peoplewith grown-up daughters continued to shower him with their hospitality. Several times she caught Billy watching her with the sober tenderness that he always dropped apologetically when she looked, but the doctor looked her over with a daring admiration that might mean anything or nothing. It was splendid to have Billy there, because whatever the doctor’s attitude might be, he couldn’t help seeing that another man—a rather exceptional man, too—was in earnest, and that meant a great deal for a girl sometimes. Altogether, she felt that she was being a great success.
Marjorie had an idea that men, at least men with a reputation, liked to talk about themselves, and under cover of the general table conversation, she confided to Dr. Knight that she thought it waswonderfulto be able to do so much for people, especially for “the little children.” “When I see other people doing things like that, I just wonder what I’m living for,” she confessed, gravely, as though she had just been awakened to the responsibility of existence through his greatness. “It’s simply unbearable to see people suffer and do nothing to help them—especially the babies. Don’t you think it’s rather hard to be a girl?”
“What about training for a nurse?” he suggested practically.
She hadn’t expected anything like that, and she thought it was scarcely kind of him. She looked appealingly at her mother.
“I guess Marjorie’s a home girl,” the mother explained, smiling with indulgent pride at her daughter. “And, of course, her father wouldn’t think of letting her go away from home. She was at college two years ago studying domestic science and she did enjoy that so much, but we were completely lost without her. I guess we’re rather selfish.”
And the men both smiled across at her with the masculine equivalent for her mother’s expression. She had always found it most gratifying to be admired by two men at the same time.
Of course, she was “a home girl,”Billy thought, as he drove home.Every little grace of her feminine personality proclaimed her made to be taken care of, and how proud of her a man would be. He imagined with some anxiety how hard it would go with her if she ever came to a place where she wouldn’t have the consideration they gave her at home, and he found himself wondering just what manner of man this Dr. Knight was, apart from his profession. When he had left them he was turning her music and he had never known her to be so generous with her playing. He wouldn’t admit that he was jealous, but one of those proverbial little clouds the size of a man’s hand seemed to be threatening his skies.
When he passed the Burns house he saw a dim light in an upstairs window and was reminded bitterly again of his neglect of the Home boy. However, Ruth would take care of him. He could see her shadow moving against the blind now, and he thought how tired she must be. He didn’t know that her tiredness had gone, leaving something infinitely more painful in its place.
Under the anesthetic the boy had mumbled something about the “agricultural man” who had told him to come.
“Mr. Withers takes an interest in everything,” Mrs. Burns had remarked. “He’s an exceptionally fine young man. There’s just one thing that’s spoiling his work a little. He’s very much in love with Miss Evison. You can imagine how seriously he would take anything like that, and it interferes with his work sometimes.”