And Billy laughed—laughed right into the threatening face with its hardened cunning, laughed for pure joy at the new spirit that had just awakened in him, laughed also because he had measured carefully the distance to the last car of the moving train. He caught it just in time to leave Lou clutching foolishly at the place where he had been.
Miles away the Representative had again relapsed into speculation as to whether his work was worth while.
It was only a few hours from the time Billy left the Swamp Farm until he walked up the lane again, but it seemed as though he had been in a new, bigger country for a long time. He saw the limits of his environment in a new perspective and they looked less binding. The feel of the familiar, worn little door-latch under his hand carried a distinct sense of being back in the right place. Mary, with a way women haveof watching the road while they work, had seen him coming. It wasn’t in her nature to cry out, or to take him in her arms. She just stood immovable, her breath coming fast, but in the glad welcome illuminating the drawn lines of her patient face the boy saw all the wonder of a mother’s unquestioning love, and he knew it would have been the same, however, or whenever he had come back—if she were still there. She didn’t ask him where he had been; she didn’t mention the note he had left; she only said:
“You haven’t had your breakfast.”
And Billy, because he was sixteen years old and practised in curbing his emotions, could not go to her. He just looked back as eloquently as he could, and asked:
“Where’s Jean?”
Jean was crumbled up on the bed in her little cold room upstairs, crying her heart out. Billy could manage with her more easily. He gathered her up and patted her back and smoothed her hair so awkwardly that it tangled about his fingers. He said he shouldn’t have done it, and then told her quite firmly to stop now right away; that he was back and he was going to stay. He was fast becoming a man.
Even Dan realized this when Billy met him in the stable for an interview. The plans he had been designing began to lose shape in the fearlessness of the new individual whom he had alwaysconsidered his child to mould as he liked. Billy’s experience had not given him much of the quality called business sense, so he didn’t ask much—a percentage of whatever profits he could show from the place above an estimate for previous years, and a chance to run a few sidelines of his own. Since this would not interfere with his own interests and would mean still having free labor on the farm, Dan was willing to grant it.
And Billy was happy. He couldn’t have told why. Practically, he was just where he had been before; only he had something to hope for. In the house the ham sizzling in the pan, the smell of turnips cooking for dinner and a spicy apple pie bubbling on the back of the stove, filled him with a very tangible comfort. The world had never seemed so near to heaven.
The agricultural course was full of promise. For some time Billy had been painfully reminded of his scant education. The few brief seasons in the local school, following the cramped and theoretical course of prescribed text-books, and his ill chosen reading afterwards, had not given him much that a young man would need. A class of twenty young farmers leaving their work to meet every day in a room above the local store was different; it had some purpose. The informal lectures and discussions were practical from the beginning. The taking of notes, the preparationof a speech, was new and hard for every one of them, but they were all at the same disadvantage, which carried some encouragement.
On the second day of the course they went to a farm for a class in stock-judging. Boys who would have wormed through a barbed-wire entanglement to get within touching distance of the prize animals at the provincial fair, but who might as well have hoped to enter a sacred temple as a show ring, could examine to their hearts’ content the most aristocratic specimens of Aberdeen-Angus lineage in the country. Added to their instruction in rules and principles they had the unstinted and practical advice of the man himself who had built up the herd, whose name was known to stockmen in every province of the Dominion.
When they had finished he took them to the house. There was a great, long living-room with red curtains and a log blazing in a brick fireplace, and his wife, in a big blue apron, her cheeks red from the warmth of the kitchen stove, gave them hot biscuits and coffee. The man’s voice boomed heartily through the house, and the baby from a quilt on the floor reached up to him. It was amazing the dexterity with which he could tuck the babe away, perfectly contented, in the hollow of his arm, and use both hands in expounding the points of various Panmures and Black Megs, with the history of their ancestorsfrom the oldest farms in Scotland. He made no effort to keep his business affairs out of his home, this man; the two were so intimately connected that their interests were common. Either would have failed long ago without the support of the other. His wife knew exactly what he was talking about. Her pride in the herd was about as great as his own; she had made little sacrifices and taken with him the risks involved in buying new, expensive stock. It was a fine kind of co-operation.
The warmth and peace and genuineness of it all filled Billy with a happy wonder. He forgot to be embarrassed, but he sat in a corner as much out of sight as possible, watching the restful air of content about the woman, and listening to the man’s enthusiastic forecast of the future of the breed in Canada. The stockman noticed his interest, and when they were ready to go he kept the rest waiting while he took him back to go more fully into the peculiar traits of a certain family. Then he asked:
“What do you keep at home?”
“Most anything,” Billy answered, with a grim little smile.
“You ought to get on with stock,” the expert remarked, sincerely. “Come to me when you start for yourself and I’ll give you a bargain on some better than these, if nothing happens.”
Billy looked at the square, curly little beastsas a cripple stares at an athlete’s cup. Then he found all his wandering ambitions coming to a point. Some day he would have a herd of such cattle. He could see their perfect black shapes moving over a sunny field when the autumn frosts had turned the trees and pastures to a glorious gold and crimson background. They would behis, and when he had some of them graded up to a show standard, he himself would groom their curly hides till they shone; he could almost feel the shaking muscles of their broad, level backs as they stood under the hands of the judges. And there would be a house with red curtains and an open fire, where his mother would be safe and comfortable as long as she lived. He fervently hoped his father’s business would continue to take him away from home a lot.
At night he sat up late over a borrowed Aberdeen-Angus history. He sketched over all the paper in the house to show how certain individuals he had seen that day compared with types illustrated. He estimated with reckless optimism what it would cost to start a herd, and how long it would take them to pay for a house with a fireplace and red curtains. At intervals he would get up and walk around the table to work off his enthusiasm. There was nothing reserved about his plans now. His mother felt that her cup was full. She was sure her prayersfor his direction had been answered and she blessed “that agricultural young man” as an agent sent by Heaven.
“What is a butterfly? At bestShe’s but a caterpillar, drest.”—Benjamin Franklin.
“What is a butterfly? At bestShe’s but a caterpillar, drest.”
“What is a butterfly? At bestShe’s but a caterpillar, drest.”
—Benjamin Franklin.
The dreams of our youth are long in coming true. When at last they do arrive we have worked so hard for them, watched them grow from such humble, unpromising beginnings, come through so much commonplace, grinding routine, that we do not recognize them as the reality of the vision that carried us up to the clouds years before.
The more definite Billy’s ideal became, the farther it receded, until at last it seemed so impossible that he said little about it. The only man whom he hoped to believe in it was the District Representative. He had helped him in the selection of a flock of sheep to trim down the rough corners of the neglected farm. He had used his influence to get him credit on a bunch of shaggy, bony calves to turn into the waste places in the spring, and had been the first person to laugh with him over the cheque in the fall. He had initiated him in the art of mixing cement, with the result that the stables, the cellar and the porch around the house were made dry and solid. He had surveyed for drains through a field thathad never grown much but bulrushes, and Billy had another two acres of black loam added to his tillable area. Oh, he was an all-round man, that Representative, with the tentacles of his office reaching out to a thousand sources for help, and placing it to the best of his knowledge wherever anyone in his territory wanted it.
It was the Representative who revealed to Billy at last that the thing he needed before he would ever be satisfied with anything else was more education. Billy knew that he wanted an education, but he also wanted the fields, the steady quieting toil of seed time and harvest, the care of the cattle, the directing of life and growth with all their mysteries and miracles, and their unfailing obediences to natural laws. He was a born farmer, but he would never be content to farm blindly, mechanically, as an animal follows prey, for an existence. The best solution for his case seemed to be the agricultural college.
A college year leaves considerable free time in the twelve months, and Billy managed somehow to keep the tillable acres of the farm under crop and to harvest what he planted. The first year initiated him into a dozen phases of learning that he had never heard of before. In the second year, partly by accident, partly through the insight of a few semi-professionals, it was discovered that he had some unusual athletic possibilities, and Billy loosened up from his grindsufficiently to learn the hard, clean strain of rugby and hockey, and to warm up daily in the gymnasium. It opened up a new world for him. In his whole life he had never before learned to play, and as it put a new spring in his muscles, a new physical joy of living in his existence, it began to clear away the cloud that had sobered and darkened his outlook. It was in his third year, at the term’s closing dance before Christmas, that he had another awakening.
Up to this time, every attempt of his classmates to draw him across the girls’ campus had failed. The magic force had come to him on the rink that afternoon. A gay little figure in a white wool skating outfit, with a brave dash of crimson here and there, chasing a hockey puck down the ice, skated very close to him, lost the puck around his skates somehow, and as he returned it, she turned in his direction for a moment the most naive, childish gaze from a pair of wonderful blue eyes. At night, to the amazement of his friends, he went to the dance. The girl might be as unattainable as a royal princess—he was quite sure she was; yet, as millions of men had done before him, he took the trail of the impossible with a hope that really promised nothing.
She made the first picture he saw when he went in, standing like a rare bit of Italian china on a space of polished floor, the magnet of a train of sleekly-groomed, linen-bosomed young men.Absently Billy was having a programme thrust upon him. Dazedly the admonition was being borne in on him that he would be expected to do his duty to the end, and distribute himself around well. Already he was entangled, introduced to a girl wearing a committee badge, and his escort deserted him.
The committee girl didn’t disturb his equilibrium at all. It wasn’t necessary to pay much attention to her; she didn’t seem to expect it. She was there for a purpose, to put people at ease, the rare individuals of the twentieth century youth who needed this ministration—and to shuffle them. She handled Billy’s case by reassuring him from the frankest and friendliest eyes he had ever looked into, then following the direction of his gaze, she led him directly to the regal little figure with its buzzing circle of attendants.
Miss Evison’s greeting was not so alluring as her wide baby stare in the afternoon. She turned her meaningless, drawing-room gaze toward him with the indifference due one of her innumerable courtiers, and even glanced with immovable correctness at his hand extended half way across the distance between them. Billy brought the hand back painfully. He had known better, of course, but it seemed such a humanly natural thing to do. Come to think of it, he had shaken hands with the committee girl too, but she must have met him half way, or something, becausehe had never thought of it until now. There was something decidedly chilling, too, in Miss Evison’s clear, blase, very “nice girl,” how-do-you-do, and not being a connoisseur in the ways of women, he took it for a dismissal and turned to go.
Miss Evison had not anticipated this danger. He was walking right away from her, with his rare six feet of athlete, his good looks, and his whole unique farmerish appearance that would make such a striking background for the evening.
She had to think quickly and she was not accustomed to the process.
“I—I think I noticed you at the rink this afternoon?” she threw out desperately.
It was very bad, of course. She should never have admitted that she ever noticed anyone anywhere. It was a decided compromise from the standards she upheld so carefully, and the high tint of excitement in her cheeks deepened and burned at the mistake. Billy sincerely looked his gratitude for the recognition. It was so much more than he had expected from this queenly little personage, with the whole of her narrow little circumscribed world at her feet. He found something very sweet and womanly in the deepening color, in the maidenly lifting and lowering of her eyes—very wonderful eyes they seemed, large and long-lashed, with the beautiful, deep blue and little brown specks that Nature hadgiven them, and the thousand little tricks, flashes and mists and a half-closed dreaminess for which Nature was not responsible at all. They could never be called soft in their expression, but they could be very mysterious. Yet the girl was only twenty.
Billy was not a novice at dancing. He had spent many a night gliding over the candle-waxed floor in the town hall at home. He would never take Jean to these affairs; he hated their atmosphere himself, but he was very human in his fondness for the poetry of motion, and there was very little poetry of anything else in his life. From the time he entered the ball-room, it was his habit to dance constantly until he decided to stop—then he went home. Sometimes, for reasons of his own, he left earlier, but never because he was tired of the dance itself. Here the tone was different.
Unconsciously he attracted some attention by dancing three times in succession with the popular Miss Evison. She had demurred playfully over the second, and seriously over the third, but when Billy apologized for his selfishness, she gave it to him very sweetly. She even managed, though he would never have thought of suggesting it, to give him the second half of an extra, because it does give a certain prestige to a girl’s social standing to have to cut into her dances—and Billy made such a noticeable figure comingacross to claim this mere fragment of her evening, and covering her with confusion, in her effort to be nice to everybody.
In the intervals when she was away from him, Billy stood in the shadows and watched her with a sober tenderness, something akin to worship. She was as remote as the stars, he knew, yet a moment before he had felt her soft, clingy scarf blowing against his face. She was so sort of set apart, so uncertain, so alluringly feminine, from the transparent drape about her white shoulders, and the American Beauties trembling against her with every breath, to her frail, little high-heeled shoes, and he thought happily that she would always need a man to take care of her, to work for her, and to give her these things. Then he came back to earth heavily. He thought of the bleak little, weather-worn house on the Swamp Farm, with the fire now covered up for the night in the chilly kitchen, and the oil lamp turned low. To-morrow night he would be back, it would be Christmas Eve, and until the last few hours the thought of it exalted him. Now it hovered like the proverbial little cloud darkening his skies.
He began to make his way out of the gymnasium with its confusion of crashing music, delicate tinted dresses, gay shaded lights and gliding figures trailing their white shadows after them along the polished floor. Then it occurredto him that he might see Miss Evison again on the pretext of saying good-night.
Miss Evison wasn’t accustomed to this ceremony from the rank and file of the college body. She was rather surprised, but she was too much occupied to be much interested. The diversion was a senior student who was considered exceedingly “interesting” that term, and who had been inattentive enough the last while to set a special premium on his society.
“Oh, going? I’m sorry!” she flipped off in the clear, smoothstaccatothat always came when she had no point in particular. She didn’t offer him her hand, of course not—and Billy went out vaguely unhappy.
The train for home would leave in the afternoon. There were many things Billy could have done with the morning, but he paced moodily among the term’s wreckage in his room. About ten o’clock a crowd of girls passed the window and a crimson scarf flying from a white skating outfit brought him to, suddenly. The next minute he was unstrapping his trunk and groping for his skates.
Miss Evison in her skating rigs seemed far more of a flesh and blood creation than when she was made up for the evening. She was less formal, too, and Billy felt more sure of himself. They had made one circle of the rink when a new crowd of students came in. Billy didn’t knowthem; they belonged to a clique by themselves. They could steer a toboggan down a hill, or balance a tea-cup with the dexterity of long practice. Why they had chosen agriculture as a profession was a mystery, but from the standpoint of tearooms, flowers and theatres, they were very select young men. As she passed them with her new attendant, Miss Evison observed that their attention was casual and it set her thinking. She realized that perhaps she had been overdoing things. It was one thing to let the attentions of a very good-looking and unknown young man create a sensation at a dance, and quite another matter to keep up the acquaintance.
After rapid consideration, she cut right into Billy’s enthusiastic account of the carnival after the last hockey match with a sister college. She didn’t interrupt him rudely, of course. If you’re just socially cultivated enough you can do anything without being rude.
“I had almost forgotten,” she said, “this is the last skate of the year. A lot of the people I know are here, and I don’t want to be—exclusive.”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I should have thought, but it seemed such a little time.”
It had been a little time, scarcely five minutes, and it occurred to her that possibly he had more intuition than she suspected. It was not at all what she desired, that this boy from the country, whom she had chosen to be nice to, should questionanything she wanted to do, whether it was right or not.
“Perhaps the men here are too appreciative of trifles,” she remarked stiffly. “It may be different in the country.”
Billy took her back silently. Thingswerevery different in the country; if she only knew how different, he surmised, she would despise him even more. Turning dazedly to go off the ice he ran right into the committee girl.
It was fortunate that the speed of his arms measured up pretty well with the force of his body, otherwise the girl might have had a bad fall. As it was, there was a blue mark on her shoulder that she kept hidden for some days. The fear that it might be there troubled Billy not a little. He dropped his hand and stood there terrified.
“Thank you,” she said, “I was just about gone,” and then she laughed, just naturally laughed at his confusion, laughed with a frank, reassuring kindness in her friendly eyes, and just as unconcernedly as he had met her the night before, Billy found himself skating down the ice with her. He found himself talking to her without restraint and quite on a level. Then she introduced him to a crowd of the finest girls he had ever known. Altogether, he was having a very good time. He had almost forgotten the agony it gave him to see Miss Evison sweep past, listeningwith rapt attention, evidently, to the social oratory of the “interesting” man, when a thin little voice beside him almost whispered—
“Was I terribly horrid?”
If she had been alluring before in her many variable little moods, she was irresistible when she put all that childish appeal to be forgiven into her misty eyes and pouting mouth. Billy looked and wondered. He couldn’t see that she had done much to require forgiveness, but it made him very happy to have her come back; so he laughed into her troubled eyes as one does to a penitent child, and answered:—
“I think you were. How far will you come now to make up for it?” Considering his inexperience, he was playing up to her lead very well.
She would go any distance. She would even skate with him a little while after the others had all gone—if he had time before his train left. She told him in broken, embarrassed little phrases, that she was impulsive, that she guessed she was spoiled, but she was always sorry after she had been rude; she would do anything to make up, she wanted always to be kind, because she just couldn’t stand it not to have people love her.
And Billy replied gallantly that he didn’t see how anyone could help it.
They had the ice to themselves now, and as they swept down the clear, wide stretch theywere unutterably happy. At least Billy was. He didn’t know that the sudden change in her attitude was due to the fact that he had established his favor with the best girls of the college that morning. If he had known he might have appreciated the kindness of the committee girl even more.
Miss Evison explained her high spirits on the ground that she was going home that night. Mother and Dad had both written that they were dying to see her—that was the worst of being an only child. She had an inkling that Dad was getting her a little runabout for Christmas, sort of a bribe to keep her from wanting to go back to the city next year. Oh, yes, they had a farm—just a hobby, of course. Oh, no, they didn’t live on it. They had a house in the nearest town; there were several congenial families living there, and it was near enough to the city to go in to a show when there was anything really good. But, oh, she loved the country—just loved it.
And what did she think of the college? She loved it, too. She would be sorry when her year was up. She had met some of thedearestgirls, and she had had a perfectlylovelytime. She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place, but Dad had just insisted; he said she was going far too fast at home—it really was hard to get an evening in, because there were someverynice people in the town, for the size of it, and she wassofondof company and excitement. She could just live on it. She told him, with the naivete of a child, of her many amusing culinary disasters, after she had begun to study household science; how the last time she was at home she hadinsistedon getting tea on the maid’s afternoon off; how the souffle had fallen flat and she had forgotten to put the cream of tartar in the biscuits.
When she suddenly remembered that she had an engagement in the afternoon, Billy took off her skates something after the manner of a slave kneeling at the feet of the Queen of Sheba.
“Just to think,” she chattered, “our last skate this year, and I’ve talked all about myself. The next time you must tell me all aboutyouraffairs, and your holidays, and everything.”
Billy smiled and looked away. He realized painfully how difficult it would be to tell this beautiful, irresponsible, “delicately-reared” girl anything about himself or his holidays or anything.
When he opened the Hall door for her she drew from her muff her smooth, supple little hand without even its glove, held it out to him warmly, and left him thrilling from the contact. She rushed upstairs glowing; she had had a glorious time and there were a thousand more glorious times ahead of her—not with Billy—oh, dear no. She confided to a circle of her dearest girl friends that he was “all right in an agricultural setting,” he was “awfully handsome inhis lumbering yeoman style,” he was “splendid to have looking at you with his sober eyes, as though you were a Madonna, or an actress, or something,” but Billy “transplanted to a circle of the class of people a girl would want to live with—heavens!”
And Billy, rushing for his train, staring out at the flying white fields, or figuring on the back of the latest market report of beef cattle, was possessed of one thought. He must make his plans work out; he must be ready to turn things into money fast; he must be successful in some way or other; and he wasn’t thinking of the folks at home this time. He didn’t notice the old familiar landmarks until the train stopped at the home station.
Jean was there to meet him. She had her arms around his neck almost before he reached the platform, and would not let him go till he had fairly crushed the breath out of her.
“And how’s everything?” he asked.
“Just fine—only Mother!”
“Is anything wrong?”
“No, I guess not. She just doesn’t seem very well sometimes.”
Somehow the news filled Billy with foreboding; he could only picture some awful change. He was impatient to get home, yet, so suddenly awakened from his dream of other things, he felt like a stranger as they neared the old place.How little and lonely the house looked in the thickening dusk with the lamplight making red squares of the windows—the frost already creeping out from the edges of the panes, and the white smoke floating up from the two little chimneys. There was a fire in the parlor to-night—a sign of festivity for his homecoming.
The horse had scarcely turned in at the lane when the kitchen door opened, and in the light flooding out, Mary stood waiting with the lantern, on duty as usual. She seemed very frail and little as she hurried to meet him, very pathetic too, with her face lifted shyly, not knowing just what to expect, aching to express her love, but fearful of doing the wrong thing. They grow away from their mothers so fast, these men-children; they get so involved in things outside that the mother who stays at home trembles for the time when they will have ceased to need her.
As she bustled around in happy confusion putting the finishing touches to the supper, Billy struggled to adjust himself. The ceiling of the little room seemed very close to his head, the walls very confining as he paced about, but he noticed that the floor was scrubbed white, that the curtains had been laundered until they fairly bristled out into the room. His foot disturbed a rag mat with some yellow birds hooked into it, and when he got down to straighten it, some good fortune prompted him to observe:
“This is something new.”
“Well, to think you’d notice that! I was afraid I wasn’t going to get it done in time. Do you remember that plaid? It’s some of the first kilts you had. The brighter pieces I’ve worked into a quilt for you when you have a house of your own—if you’d want it.”
Billy did some quick imagining, then, as if challenging some argument against the patched quilt.
“Sure I’d want it,” he said. “I should thinkI wouldwant it.”
All evening he watched to see whether there was any ground for Jean’s fears. It never occurred to him that his mother, with her tactful simplicity, might be watching him too. It was not until after Jean had gone to bed that they came nearer to an understanding. For a few minutes she knitted while he watched her and listened to the clock ticking on towards midnight. Then without looking up she asked:
“Did you have any good times this term?”
She had never inquired about his “good times” before, and he wondered, half pleased, how she knew. He felt a pleasant warmth covering his face as he answered:
“A few, toward the last.”
She didn’t seem to notice his embarrassment. She suggested casually:
“Let’s move up closer to the stove and open thedoor. It’s as good as a fireplace when you want to talk.”
He knew she hoped he would tell her more, and he wished he could, but there was nothing to tell. To repeat anything Miss Evison had said—and heaven knows he remembered every word—wouldn’t give a right impression of her at all. You had toseeher to get any idea of what she was like. Besides there was something about her whole airy, pleasure-loving, exotic presence that didn’t seem to fit in here. He liked to shut his eyes and picture her as she looked standing under the cluster of rose-shaded lights in the college ballroom, but when he opened them on the neat, square little kitchen, with the wood-box behind the stove and the bleary little lamp throwing shadows in the corners, the vision tortured him with the weight of something irreparably wrong. He started from his reverie, remembering that the last thing his mother had said was to the effect that the stove with the door open was as good as a fireplace.
“We were going to have a fireplace of our own, weren’t we?” he began. “You must be tired waiting for it, but it won’t be long now. If I can get through next year——”
He thought he saw the patient lines draw across her face, but she smiled naturally enough.
“It will be fine to be through,” she said, “but you mustn’t worry about the fireplace yet. AndI must tell you, too, because I have to bring myself to it, that you’re a man now. I want you to have your house and your fireplace and everything just like you want it; but you mustn’t go putting your mother in your plans; it isn’t natural. I’d like to see it all, and I’d be so pleased about it—to know you were happy, but young people want their own life. Only there’s one thing I like to feel safe about—you’ll always look out for Jean? I’m glad I can be sure about that.”
And for the first time, watching her as she stared into the fire, her knitting lying forgotten in her lap, Billy saw the change he had been looking for. He came over and knelt beside her in all a boy’s helplessness, tears swimming unhidden in his eyes.
“What is it?” he asked. “Jean said you were not well. What about it?”
He felt her start, but she smiled back as she had done hundreds of times before when things disturbed him.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Did you see the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
She had been trying ever since to forget what the doctor said.
“Oh! He said something about a specialist. They have to say something.”
“You—wouldn’t mind going to the specialist?”
“No; but we can’t think of it now. I don’t feel bad at all. You see I have everything so comfortable since you fixed the house.”
Billy had the happy faculty of making his decisions quickly under pressure.
“But why can’t we go to the specialist now?” he persisted quietly. “I’m not going away again till you’re better. There’s the money for the next term; we’ll use that. Then I’ll be here. I can surely make things a little better in some ways.”
“Oh, no,” she protested in alarm. “You mustn’t think of that. I want to see you get through. If it was the money, there’s some in the bank, but——”
“You want to keep that for Jean, don’t you?”
“I do want her to go on to school. I want her to learn some way of making her living. And if Jean should ever get married——”
“Oh, Jove, we’ll not let her get married,” he exploded with a determination born of his own limited and bitter observation. “I certainly don’t believe in getting married—for girls.”
It took more than Billy’s inexperienced force of argument to persuade his mother that he would not be happy anywhere but at home for the next few months—that the farm was suffering for his attention anyway. When she did agree to his plan it was because she found that in some thingshe was absolutely immovable. He could be steered easily enough to a certain point; after that all the winds of heaven couldn’t influence his course. Even the disturbing visitations of the vision of the satin-shod idol, never once suggested the idea that he might go back.
“That a girl may make five dollars a day in a canning club during the summer, or a boy win a prize of one hundred dollars for feeding a baby beef, is one of the lesser advantages of the great national movement which has caught the imaginative enthusiasm of the Young Generation. It is really leading the way to a finer community life. Many of us remember the old-fashioned chicken suppers in the basement of the church, where the boys sat on the benches by themselves, while the girls looked pityingly and shyly across the intervening space. The club boys and girls in this great industrial college, allied artists in the creation of a better country life, are changing all this. Nothing in rural life has ever been the medium of such good times.”—Stanley Johnson.
“That a girl may make five dollars a day in a canning club during the summer, or a boy win a prize of one hundred dollars for feeding a baby beef, is one of the lesser advantages of the great national movement which has caught the imaginative enthusiasm of the Young Generation. It is really leading the way to a finer community life. Many of us remember the old-fashioned chicken suppers in the basement of the church, where the boys sat on the benches by themselves, while the girls looked pityingly and shyly across the intervening space. The club boys and girls in this great industrial college, allied artists in the creation of a better country life, are changing all this. Nothing in rural life has ever been the medium of such good times.”—Stanley Johnson.
Dan heard of the intended visit to the city doctor with astonishment and annoyance. It wasn’t like Mary to want such a thing, and he attributed it to some more of Billy’s “higher life” ideas. He repeatedly unburdened his bitterness to Mary in Billy’s absence, that he had been fool enough to let him go to school just to come home with his superior ways. To outsiders he had a habit of remarking: “My boy, he’s in college now. Costs a good deal—an education, nowadays, but I want him to have the best I can give him.”
Regarding the consulting of a special doctor he openly disapproved, on the grounds that all a doctor hung out his sign for was to get people’smoney. He had never had a doctor in his life and he never would have one. The best rule he knew for health was to “forget it.” Then Billy came in and he stopped. When Mary came home at night and took up the threads of her work where she had dropped them in the morning, however, he rested more easily. He inquired, apparently amused at the whole affair, when she was going back again, and she said she didn’t have to go back. He reflected then, that it was only a “notion,” as he had supposed, and was satisfied.
It was different with Billy. A dozen times a day he came into the house and waited around awkwardly, without asking any questions, but the most his mother ever said about the subject that troubled him was that it was “about time to take the tonic,” as though the completeness of her heart’s desire was assured through that proceeding. Billy had never known her to appear so happy and he knew in his heart that while she had opposed so seriously his staying at home, she felt a support in his presence. A strange dread haunted him that the time might come when she would need him still more. His first important step in the farming operations was to provoke his father’s wrath by the extravagance of adding a bathroom to the house. It was a very simple affair, built on a level with the ground floor, with a hand-force pump and cement storage tank, butit gave a satisfying touch of comfort and refinement.
Early in the New Year Billy received a scribbled note from the District Representative. “Can you help us with our short course? We have about thirty enrolled for the boys’ class, pretty good fellows practically, but most of them, I dare say, could have had all the schooling they ever got crowded into two full years. To make matters worse, we’re putting on a course for the girls—cooking and the like. A girl taking some post-graduate work at the college is coming down. I expect the thing will develop into considerable of a nuisance before we’re done with it, but we’ll have to see it through.”
Billy’s sympathies were aroused. He readjusted his plans so he could get five days a week off, went to call on the Representative and found him troubled.
“You see, it wouldn’t be so bad,” explained that work-driven, detail-harrassed official, “if it were not for this girls’ affair. Even if they’d keep to themselves it wouldn’t matter so much, but I understand there are to be tobogganings and skating-parties and socials—sort of a sleigh-ride-and-taffy-pull phase of the keep-the-young-people-on-the-farm movement, and I expect it will leave them a hundred per cent more of the hoyden, or a hundred per cent more buried in theSlough of Sentimentality than if they’d never been the object of an uplift.”
“I expect it will be the best thing that ever happened to them,” said Billy.“Were you ever so scared of a girl that when you went to a neighbor’s in the evening you’d go around to the stable first and wait there till some of the boys came out and took you into the house, sort of under cover?”
“No,” came witheringly from his superior.
“And did you ever find yourself left alone with a girl that you’d known or should have known all your life, a really good-sense, clever girl who must have had lots of ideas of her own, but neither of you could advance any conversation at all because you hadn’t the first shade of a common ground or a common interest? There was nothing to do but try to imitate the smart talk of the imported store-clerk, or go, so because you didn’t want to make a complete donkey of yourself you generally went?”
“I should say not.”
“Or if you were an easy prey to the hoodlum element hanging around almost every country village, you possibly found your recreation in shooting peas from the back seat of the church at tea-meetings, or cutting harness, or stretching wires across the road on dark nights. When you reached the age of more civil instincts the most alluring social interest was to follow the publicballs from one end of the country to the other. You met the same people, or the same class of people, night after night, and you stayed till four o’clock in the morning. Before it was done half the men would be glazed-eyed and unsteady, and the girls looking dragged out, but sort of tolerating it all; and some of them the best girls in the country, too. They must have gone home heart-sick of it, but they always came back; you can’t wonder much—there was a lot they didn’t know and there wasn’t any other excitement in their lives. A minister in the village here ventured the idea of fitting up a gymnasium in the basement of the church and having moving pictures on Wednesday nights, but one old reprobate of an elder opposed it until it was dropped. He considered it profanity in the first degree, and anyway he didn’t want his daughter going to picture shows or dressing up in gymnasium rigs, but every time she came down to the post office, a new arrival in the village who had come to open a pool-room over the carriage-shop, a social and moral worm, as every man in the place knew, walked part way home with her. She wouldn’t have tolerated him a minute if she could have seen him in comparison with decent men, but her father didn’t believe in the “safety in numbers” fact. She ran away with the pool promoter and married him, and all the time there were a dozen honest, well-intentioned fellowsnative to the farms around, any one of whom she might just as possibly have married, but didn’t for the very good reason that she didn’t know them. I believe this co-education venture will be the best move yet in the ‘rural sociology’ scheme.”
“Well, then, before your enthusiasm cools, I wish you’d go and take a look at the hall we have to fix up for a demonstration kitchen.”
Billy looked at the hall and reported. The next day he brought his tools, and according to directions improvised a table from some rough lumber, nailed some boxes together for a cupboard, then swept out his shavings and incidentally the dust from a year’s meetings of the county council. On the third day he was commissioned to meet the train bringing the teacher.
Billy was not given to questioning orders, but he stopped unloading chairs from a wood-rack to look his chief over with open defiance.
“I’ll do anything in reason,” he said. “I’ll haul the furniture from any part of the county till we get the place equipped. I’ll blacken the stove or scrub the floor if I have to, but I don’t feel at all equal to meeting any post-graduate domestic science girl and escorting her up to the Royal Hotel. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d sit right down on the steps and cry.”
“More likely to sit right down and give you five minutes to find a better place or get a taxi to take her home.”
“Only that there isn’t any better place.”
“Why won’t some of the women take her?”
“Some of them claim to have had previous experience with ‘lady speakers.’ The general trouble, however, is that she comes from the city—is rumored to be something of an aristocrat and the people are afraid of her.”
In spite of these scattered feelings of fear and hostility, the teacher had a pretty fair attendance the first day. The second day it seemed as though some one, probably the girls themselves, had done some additional advertising. Toward the close of the afternoon the Representative suggested to Billy that he go up and see if she wanted anything.
The classes were over, but the girls were still there, and sounds unlike the scraping of pans or handling of dishes, or anything else pertaining to domestic science, came from the room. The door was open, and instead of finding the students bending over a yeast culture or copying the food constituents of cereals, he saw twenty or more girls coming down the hall practising the minuet. The teacher was there, with her back to him, demonstrating, of course; the girls themselves had never seen the minuet before—and Billy stood watching, open mouthed, for a full minute, before someone saw him, and the dance broke up in confusion. He came forwardto apologize to the teacher and when she turned he remembered; she was the “committee girl.”
The class filed out bashfully, and the teacher gave Billy some idea of what she was trying to do. Evidently she thought some explanation was due. The minuet, she explained, was part of some physical culture she was working into the course, and he heartily approved. He had observed a neighbor’s daughter, an awkward girl of sixteen, stiffened and sobered from the care of the family of younger children, actually relaxing and taking the bend with considerable grace. He had noticed the stolid, stoop-shouldered girl from the Home, whose pride, almost her self-respect, had been crushed out of existence, curving her spine and lifting her head in admirable imitation of Miss Macdonald’s poise. He didn’t wonder at this at all. If ever a school of physical culture turned out a model it must be this girl, with her slim, perfect physique, her quiet, supple carriage, her entire absence of self-consciousness. Her whole personality radiated a wholesomeness. From her regular, white teeth, her hair still shining from the brush and sending out little rusty glints from the brown hollows where the light struck it, to her white linen uniform and classy low-heeled shoes, she carried the mark of the thoroughbred. And feeling the warmth of her kind, happy eyes, hazel or gray or whatever they were, it didn’t matter, Billy almostdecided that these things were worth more than being pretty. He considered bringing Jean home from school for the two weeks—not for the sake of the course, just for the atmosphere.
In spite of her poise he surmised that she was taking her job pretty seriously.
“The playing part of it,” she explained, “will be questioned a good deal, I’m afraid; it isn’t outlined in the programme, but I believe it’s almost the most important here. Most of the girls can cook pretty well; you can tell by the way they listen to the reasons why you put meat to cook in cold water for soup, and boiling water for a stew; and by the questions they ask about why specialists have decided that it’s better to keep a baby’s feeding four hours apart instead of two. You can’t give them very much in two weeks, but they have so much that is practical to begin on that they can go right ahead and apply almost any principle they learn. When they’re through here they should be able to take the best Home Economics literature and study for themselves. We’re considering forming a ‘Better Homes Club’ and linking up with your Junior Farmers. What do you think?”
Billy accepted the idea with encouraging enthusiasm.
“That’s why it seems that the social part of it should be started under some direction. Do the boys skate?”
“I’m afraid a lot of them don’t. I never thought of such a thing until I left here.”
“I’m going to teach some of the girls on the pond on Saturday afternoon. If the boys were interested we could have some skating parties before we finish.”
Billy spent some strenuous nights on the ice, getting the boys interested. At the end of the first week a bonfire of pine roots at the edge of the pond made the illumination for a union skating meet, a laborious exercise for some of the class, but sending everyone home with a happy anticipation for the next time. Before it was over Billy set out with Ruth to follow the creek for a few miles down through the moonlit stretches of frosted barrens. The girl skated as she did everything else, freely and easily with an expression of joy of living in every stroke. He had never seen such rhythmic, easy, independent motion in girls’ athletics, and he wondered how she had acquired it.
“You must have taken to the out-doors soon after you learned to creep,” he ventured.
“I imagine I was kept pretty closely under cover at that time. I know when I was seven years old people still thought I wouldn’t grow up. My mother died when I was a few weeks old and a well-intentioned aunt put me into an exquisite nursery in the attic of her big house, and got an expensive nurse to take care of me, but Ijust wouldn’t thrive. It was a very patient and far-seeing teacher who took me to the fields and taught me to climb trees and spent nearly a whole summer overcoming my fears of the lake. Then suddenly one day I swam away from her; after that I began to live. There must be hundreds of children like that whom no one ever bothers with. Had we better go back?”
“Tired?”
“No, but I think we’ve come far enough.”
She didn’t look tired. Of all the glowing, happy, well-poised creatures under the heavens she seemed the most thoroughly alive. Billy admired the quiet control that never sickened a pleasure with satiety, that reverenced a recreation enough to stop when it had recreated. He thought of the jaded girls he had seen dragging through after-midnight dances, in rooms reeking with air so poisoned that even the lamps burned blue and flickered, and he hoped she would teach them her creed of guarding her physical womanhood as a sacred trust. He hoped she could inspire a love for the clean out of doors that seemed to leave her tingling with the fires of pure oxygen.
Even the Representative, in spite of his prejudices, fell a convert to her social propaganda, and attended with less boredom than he had anticipated the tobogganings and sleigh-rides and taffy-pulling functions. Instead of finding his young people “one hundred per cent more of thehoyden,” he observed an unwonted dignity. He overheard a few conversations discussing landscape effects for the spring planting, and the practicability of power systems for the farms and homes of the districts. Instead of discovering his teen-age irresponsibles floundering “in the Sloughs of Sentimentality,” he found a free and easy mixing of a few older people in every entertainment and none of the clandestine pairing off so general in some of their former affairs. He inquired how the parties and sleigh-rides always came to be chaperoned by some women of the neighborhood, and was informed that the girls arranged it. He marvelled that the gatherings always broke up not later than eleven o’clock, and heard from more than one mystified youth that the girls seemed to have some secret understanding; no one knew what had come over them.
On the last day of the course, when Billy returned from taking the boys to see the Aberdeen-Angus herd that had played such an important part in directing his own early interests, he found the Representative unusually worried, and interrupting his enthusiastic report of the day’s proceedings with the irrelevant question:
“Have you seen Miss Macdonald to-day?”
Billy hadn’t seen her.
“Well, she’s got a beast of a cold, and looks like destruction,” the Representative grumbled. “I wish she was out of that hotel. She nevershould have been there in the first place. I’ll bet the walls are fairly dripping dampness, and you probably know that when she’s at home she lives in a steam-heated, electric-ventilated palace of a place, with a kind of millionaire uncle.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Queer she should care about knocking around at a job like this.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“What would I be likely to do about it? I suppose what she needs is mustard plasters and ginger-tea. What would you suggest that we do?”
Billy stared out the window for a minute.
“I guess I’ll see if she’ll come home with me and let my mother fix her up,” he said.
The Representative contemplated the back of his assistant’s head, wisely, for a minute, then decided he was wrong. He had never in his experience with agricultural undergraduates come across so little presumption and so much cool initiative. It made a puzzling combination.
Ruth heard his suggestion with surprised gratitude. “It’s just the most ordinary kind of a farm house,” he apologized, “but I think it would be more comfortable and a lot safer than staying another night at the hotel.”
She wasn’t afraid of the farm house, but she hesitated at the imposition; she wasn’t accustomed to such consideration. She also realized her danger, and it decided her.
Of the several things in Billy’s later career that had heightened his mother’s hopes for him, this was the crowning event, and in the whole of her orphaned life Ruth had never known so well how much she missed in not having a mother of her own. She felt no homesickness for her uncle’s luxurious house and her aunt’s efficient, methodical ministrations. She liked to lie in the deep feather bed with a flannel-wrapped hot brick at her feet; and she liked to have Billy’s mother coming to see how she was getting on and staying to regret that he hadn’t brought her sooner; and she liked the strong, nippy sweetness of her black currant drinks, even the warmth of her mustard plasters—and shelovedthe mother herself.
Somehow Mary knew it, and was happy. She supposed she would have liked any girl Billy had brought home—certainly she would have tried. But such a girl! She had always treasured the hope that sometime there would be such a one, serious, and wise, and considerate—a girl who would sort of take his mother’s place for a man when she had gone.
She confided the hope to Billy while they watched the fire the next night, and Ruth was probably having dinner in her uncle’s house with no trace of her cold left other than an inconvenient red square on her chest that interfered with wearing the regulation dinner-gown. Helooked up surprised. He stretched his imagination for some time, but he couldn’t picture Marjorie Evison in any such capacity at all; neither could he see why any man would want such a thing. He was still pretty young.
With the unfolding of the willow-buds at the edge of the marshes, and the high, warm sun piercing the March winds, came a change to the Swamp Farm. When every growing thing was stirring into life, happy in its blindness to the rigors of seed-time and harvest and the burdens incident to its later family life, Mary found that her battle was nearing the end. The world was very dear to her too; the oldest and most enduring of human hopes, the possibilities of her children, was beginning to promise the things she had dreamed of—and she wanted to live. But one day she crumpled up like a wilted leaf over a dress she was making for Jean’s commencement, and Billy put her to bed and ’phoned the specialist.
“There’s nothing I can do,” was the hopeless response.
“There must be. I’ll meet you,” came back over the wires in a voice sharp and hard. And the specialist came.
It was Billy’s first experience of coming up against a situation where he was absolutely powerless. He blamed himself that he had been too blind to see it coming, that he had ever lefther to take alone the hardships and worries that made such a large part of the life of the desolate place. He unburdened these confessions to the specialist with shame and bitterness.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” the doctor said, “and there’s nothing you can do now, except to make the waiting easier. I’m just as helpless as you are. It was too late to do anything even when she came to me first. To have saved her I should have been here years ago, when her last child was born.”
Billy went back to the day whose details would always haunt him, when his angry little soul had cried out against it all—but there was no room for the bitterness in his heart now—only a cold, gripping dread, a dread for her, for the suffering and the heart-break of the leave-taking. The thought of going out was something that, in his own young, physical courage, he could not take philosophically.
“Will she suffer?” he asked.
“The worst of her suffering is over. Kept it hidden pretty bravely, hasn’t she?”
“Does she know?”
“She knew when she left my office that it couldn’t be very long. She hasn’t let it shake her grip of herself yet, and she won’t. After all, there comes a time when none of us can hold life for a minute; the one thing we can do, is to makeit as good as we can for the people we live with while we have them.”
And then the old troublesome hate came back savagely. Billy knew that as long as he lived he would have hard memories to fight. When he was alone he waited miserably outside the room wondering how he could go to her, but as usual she understood and called him.
“I just wondered,” she said, “if you would take Jean’s dress to the dressmaker, so she can have it finished in time. I think I’d better not try to sew for a while, and I wouldn’t like her to be disappointed.”
So the days went on without a word of what was to come. Auntie Brown took up her residence in the house. Dan accepted the situation with stoical resignation while he was at home. He couldn’t feel that it was as serious as the rest supposed, but he made an unprecedented attempt at kindness. In spite of his assumed optimism, he had a sinking feeling that something which had contributed indispensably to the background of his life was going to be taken away, and the whole picture would be thrown out of balance. He kept away from home a little more than usual, explaining to his friends in pathetic lapses of despondency that he had to get away to get his mind off things.
But Billy stayed at home constantly. He could always be found within call of the house, andnotwithstanding his young terror of the inevitable, managed to maintain the kindest sort of cheerfulness in his mother’s presence.
Her own fortitude puzzled him. Here and there she dropped many little suggestions for the years to come, but she never spoke of leaving them. Then one day she gave him her philosophy, pointing it out to him on the worn page of a Bible—“If thou hast run with the footmen and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?”
Billy had never heard the quotation. It struck him as pretty strong thinking, a real man’s philosophy for every day living—something he wouldn’t have expected to find in the Bible. He handed the book back soberly, but without a word; he didn’t know what to say. He was not sufficiently sure of the theories so popular with students making their elementary dip into the sciences, to be irreverent, but the Bible opened for discussion on week days embarrassed him.
His mother watched him anxiously, then taking courage said:
“You won’t think I’m preaching to you? I know I can’t understand how a young man looks at things, and I’m not questioning how you feel—but I just hope you’ll think about it. You’ve had a lot of hard things already; there may be moreahead, and I’m afraid for you—not that I think you’d fail where any other man wouldn’t. I feel very safe about you in things that most mothers have to worry about—but it’s too hard for any one to hold out alone. You’ll think about it?”
Billy turned down the leaf by way of assurance. It was the best he had to offer.
A few days later she left them. The turn came suddenly. A nurse was brought down from the city, and with this professional help in charge Dan said good-bye awkwardly each morning and drove off; the strain of things at home made him nervous. It was Billy who stayed day and night within hearing of the room, whose awkward boyish care astonished the nurse with its gentleness and forethought, and it was Billy who steadied the spent, trembling soul in its last great weariness.
All day he had watched the tired eyes closing wearily, only to return with troubled anxiety to Jean, and he had always assured her that he would not forget her plans for the little sister. Then, as the mists began to come over, she looked up again, with an effort, searching for something.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“Where—is your father?”
It was the old, human cry of loneliness, and Billy realized as he had never done before what she had been starving for through all the years. Whatever Dan might be to anyone else, to herhe was the person she had lived for first; she wanted him now and no one knew where to find him. Unless by chance he returned in the next few minutes it would be too late. Even now, when he had not considered the hours precious enough to wait with her, she was anticipating his need of her, thinking ahead for him, with the pure maternal love that rises above personal considerations. Painfully she left her last request with Billy.
“You’ll try to forget ... to think of him as I do?”
And Billy promised. He would have promised anything, and having made a promise he knew he would keep it, whether it seemed impossible now or not.
Then the frail little form settled down close against him, and with the weariness of a hard day ended, the last light flickered and went out.
Three days later, when it was all over, and they had come back to the empty house, when Jean had cried herself to sleep and Billy could go out alone to think, Ruth Macdonald came. She had seen the announcement and had come at once, but when she reached the churchyard everyone had gone, so she came to the house and found Billy alone behind the mat of vines screening the little wooden porch. There was a hardness in his set face, the traces of a fierce battle going oninside. He was still trying to overcome the hate that possessed him.
“It isn’t that she had to go,” he said, bitterly; “it’s the kind of life she had.”
Ruth didn’t say anything. She looked away for a while, then she looked back, and there was a compassion in her misty eyes that Billy had never hoped to receive again, since his mother had gone. And somehow the hardness toward his father and life in general began to melt. He leaned against the wooden rail with his face covered, and Ruth listened silently to the dryest, hardest sobs she had ever heard, listened until it wasn’t in her nature to wait any longer. For the hour he was only a broken-hearted boy and the mother instinct was strong in her. She bent over him as she would to comfort a suffering child, and ran her slim, supple hand through his hair. And because Billy couldn’t speak just then he covered the hand with his own and held it there to show his gratitude. Beyond that he was unmoved, but the girl was startled by a quick, hot rush through her young body. She wormed her hand loose and looked over the fields for a minute away from his stare of bewilderment. After that she was herself again. But long after Billy was asleep that night she lay awake, trying to smother in her pillow a torrent of hard, racking little sounds that would not be kept back.
“We are so often ashamed of the earth—the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness. To us in our fine raiment and soft manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail every one until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil.”—David Grayson.
“We are so often ashamed of the earth—the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness. To us in our fine raiment and soft manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail every one until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil.”—David Grayson.
How pitifully the compass of our lives is played with by the most wanton little winds. When Billy finished college he did not have to grope through the indecision of finding his work; he knew he was a farmer. The conviction was verified one day when, rounding a bend in a drive through a pine-woods country, he felt his pulses bound at the sudden picture of a beautiful stretch of tilled land. It was in the first intoxicating days of spring when the promise of the year is likely to play tricks with our optimism, but the spring never elated him any more. With the breath of the first white thorn blossoms came the memory of another year when their perfume had blown in through the open window of the little Swamp Farm house where his mother waited; and a wonderful quiet possessed him; the old hardness had almost gone. On the day when he had fought his first hard battle with himself, and sobbed out the agony at last, the breaking up had started, and when his father turned tothe road after selling the farm and nailing up the empty house Billy felt a genuine pity for him. Jean had been sent back to school and would soon be ready to teach, but he regretted seriously the loss of a home for her. This was another pressing argument for getting a farm of his own.
It was a beautiful stretch of land at the end of a timbered road, a lonely place, generally considered, but Billy went over it acre by acre with glowing anticipation. Here he would start a permanent pasture for the long dreamed of Aberdeen-Angus herd. Down where the broad creek took such a precipitous leap in its course, he would build a dam and drive the water to the buildings—perhaps install a dynamo later on. The glinting blue stones from the rough little rise back of the barn would make the foundation and fireplace and chimneys for a low Swiss chalet among the trees. He could already see its light blinking down on the highway like a beacon, the welcome to a shelter and resting place where he could dream and hope, blessed with the happy content of having paid his debt to existence through the day.
Billy confided to a classmate, the Jimmy Wood who had piloted him to the brink of his first college social adventure, his plan to buy the place and work it, and Jimmy was disappointed.
“Have you stopped to think what you’re letting yourself in for?” he asked. “You’ve donefarm work at home, and I’ll warrant you’ve hated it, but after four years away from it you’ll find it a sight worse—the dirt and the drudgery and the eternal monotony. Of course, you’d get used to it. At the end of a year I dare say you’d be content to wear overalls and a six days’ beard from Sunday to Sunday. I know we’ve all said we wanted to farm eventually, but not the grubbing, driving, scraping kind of a job that goes with paying for a place. Better make your money at something else and end up with farming as a hobby, when you can afford to be merely business manager yourself. If you start in now with nothing ahead, and have to save every cent, you’ll get so absorbed in yourself, so haunted by the bogey of your mortgage, that by the time you should be some force in the community philanthropically, you’ll be sealed like a clam in the money-getting idea.”
“You mean, then, that the only public-spirited agriculturist is the man who makes his money some easier, faster way, and comes back to donate it here and there for rural uplift, who cultivates a hobby of making speeches on the calamity of rural depopulation?”
“Oh, I know my view of it seems sordid enough,” Jimmy admitted, “but you’re an idealist. And I can tell you there’s no way you’ll lose your vision more surely than in a mill with poverty. Besides, if I’m not uncommonly denseyou’ve set your heart on that place because you want to build a home on it; you know as well as I do, that a farm’s the lonesomest place on earth to go to alone. A man can navigate fairly easily on a single craft anywhere else; he can stop to think whether he can afford a wife and a home or not, and he can wait until he can afford them, but a wife and a home are almost an absolute necessity for a man who owns and works a farm, poor or not. Being an idealist you don’t want anything but the best, and I’ve observed that the best is generally expensive.”
Billy still seemed absorbed in the skyline and his adviser feared that he might have gone too far. He knew that if Billy’s decision had been made, it had no doubt stood arguments quite as enduring as any he could advance, and it wasn’t likely to help things, to remind him of the disadvantages.
“Of course,” Jimmy continued. “I haven’t any fear that you’d make a mess of things, and I know there are compensations, but suppose you do go back and bury yourself there now, you cut yourself off from everything social at least, and I’m afraid you’ll just wall yourself in alone for the rest of your life. On the other hand, you have your choice of two of the best counties in the province for Rep. work. The job has a few allurements apart from the salary, and that reminds me——”
From a collection of letters of various post marks and hand-writing, and sundry photographs, Jimmy produced a snapshot and handed it to Billy. It gave him a wicked satisfaction to see the dull red slowly cover the sober face, for the picture showed nothing more disturbing than Marjorie Evison perched nymph-like on the limb of a blossoming apple-tree. Billy looked for a long time with the same unconscious worship that had followed the airy little figure through the college dance; then he handed the picture back.
“You can have that,” Jimmy offered magnanimously.
Billy stared in amazement. “Don’t you want it?” he asked.
“Not specially.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Slipped it off the mantel right under her eyes.”
Billy looked at the picture again with the same quiet gravity.
“Guess it doesn’t belong to either of us,” he decided, and carefully held it over the fire until the flames covered it.
Jimmy had not enjoyed such an interesting bit of drama for a long time. He also congratulated himself as a rather successful diplomat.
“I suppose you know you have a chance of the office in her county?” he remarked incidentally. “What are you going to do about it?”
Billy didn’t say definitely what he intended to do about it. That night he stood at his window for a long time in the dark and looked out over the roofs of the city, massed off in dark, blurry squares with the street lights stretching between like ropes of toy electric globes strung along a circus midway. Very confining it seemed to his country-bred instincts, while beyond the last flickering lamp in some laborer’s cottage, the moist brown earth stretched for miles and miles in limitless freedom. A thin white mist rose from it now like incense from the hearth of the god of production. It was the wonderful season of beginnings on the farm, birth and promise everywhere—the eternal old mother pulsing with the first life of the bursting seed, warm, yellow beaks chipping their shells, wobbly-legged colts blinking at the light of day, and weak, trembly, clamorous lambs needing the tenderest care of all, and so few people with the right human instinct to look after them.
A passionate hunger for the land possessed him. Beyond the pine-covered hills lay the place he had set his heart on. It would take a long time to work it into the Eldorado it promised, and his restive young muscles ached to get at it. There would be two or three years of the grindingest kind of work, then returns would begin to come in. The quaint Swiss chalet with its low stone wall and chimney would go up among thetrees, and its light blink down through their shelter on the highway at night as he had pictured it for years. There would still be an abundance of man-size tasks to do, and worries to handle, and debts to meet; the same fields would call him to work every day, but there would be the cabin to come back to at night to dream and to love.
As usual his arguments brought him back in a circle. Of course Jimmy had been right in thinking the farm was the loneliest place in the world to go to alone, and of course, whatever Jimmy or anyone else thought, the dreams of the little house were all inspired by a vision that had hovered never far from the surface of his consciousness since it startled him out of his boyhood a few years before. As is usual with idealistic natures, he had endowed his idol with every grace he worshipped; it was strengthened and purified as his experience broadened, until no one else would ever have recognized it as belonging to the silky little kitten of a maid who handled her playthings with such soft-pawed heartlessness. The longer he stayed away from her the more she seemed set apart in a world of other interests and other friends. Now the opportunity had come to live in the same community, and while there were moments when the prospect rather terrified him, it never occurred to him to let it pass. He still wanted the farm,but the farm could wait; the human, jealous fear of losing her stamped out every other ambition. So it came about that the next few weeks found him moving into the county agricultural office.
The work habit is a powerful saving force to tide us sanely over periods of distracting interests. When Billy took on the robes of his office he was not by any means indifferent. He owed enough personally to the Representative in his home county to appreciate the bigness of the job, and his brief experience as assistant made it easy for him to go ahead with the general routine. Against this there was a troublesome undercurrent of dissatisfaction working, a half-ashamed feeling that he was making the position a means to an end. But because he had worked all his life he began at once to dig up something to do. The more he investigated the more he found to do, and the more he found to do the more he became fired with the possibilities of achievement.