It was then that Ruth forgot her tiredness. She only ached for her own room at home where she could be alone for a while.
“Not unto the forest, O my lover,O my lover, do not lead me to the forest.Joy is where the temples are, lines of dancers swinging far,Drums and lyres and viols in the town,And the flapping leaves would blind me, and the clinging vines would bind me,And the thorny rose-boughs tear my saffron gown.I will love you by the light, and the beat of drums at night,And the echoing of laughter in my ears,But I fear the forest.”—Greek Folk Song.
“Not unto the forest, O my lover,O my lover, do not lead me to the forest.Joy is where the temples are, lines of dancers swinging far,Drums and lyres and viols in the town,And the flapping leaves would blind me, and the clinging vines would bind me,And the thorny rose-boughs tear my saffron gown.I will love you by the light, and the beat of drums at night,And the echoing of laughter in my ears,But I fear the forest.”
“Not unto the forest, O my lover,O my lover, do not lead me to the forest.Joy is where the temples are, lines of dancers swinging far,Drums and lyres and viols in the town,And the flapping leaves would blind me, and the clinging vines would bind me,And the thorny rose-boughs tear my saffron gown.I will love you by the light, and the beat of drums at night,And the echoing of laughter in my ears,But I fear the forest.”
—Greek Folk Song.
It was Christmas Eve. A soft, light snow had left the country white and downy as a young swan’s breast. As if the feather padding of the road had muffled the engine, the car cut along quietly as a boat, but the clear, cooing tones of the girl’s voice carried far, and her laughter echoed back from the trees like the mimicry of some mischievous nymph. In the after calm of the year’s first snowstorm the purity of the earth and air and sky gave the world that touch of unreality dear to poets and lovers, and Marjorie and Billy had come out in the late afternoon, as they often did on holidays and Sundays, to breathe for miles the air of the hills, to watch the lights of the city rush out through the dusk like streams of little racing fires, and to drivewherever fancy led them, stopping somewhere in town for supper and coming home slowly, very slowly and quietly in the dark.
“Let’s take some road we don’t know,” the girl suggested. “Let’s go over the hills, and then just when it’s getting dark we’ll come to the edge of the heights somewhere and coast right down into the city, like we did the first night you came here—do you remember?”
“Every second of it.”
“That was in the spring. Even the town was half asleep and lazy after the winter’s dissipation; to-night it will be as gay as a debutantes’ ball. In the country it was muddy and the fields and barns and fences stood out ugly and unashamed of themselves, like some old scrub-woman. Now the snow comes and gives her a new dress, you see, and here she is, a lady in white fox and diamonds. Wonderful, isn’t it, what clothes will do? But underneath she’s still the same old scrub-woman, the work-driven, squalid country. How I pity the people who have to stay here all their lives. Where are we going?”
Billy had turned up a new road, the winding, wooded avenue leading to the place on the hill. He had felt that if she could ever see its beauty it would be to-day, with the glow of the sun still pink above the cedars jagging the horizon, and the early moon making sharp shadows and glittering open spaces on the snow. Her last burst ofsympathy for the people who had to live in the country was not encouraging, but he was so filled with the spell of it all himself that it seemed as though he must fire her with some of his enthusiasm.
At the crest of the hill the car stopped and he told her to look. There was nothing tangible to see but a deep expanse of level whiteness with a windbreak of black pines at the back, and one tall gnarl-limbed maple sheltering the remains of a ruined old house. She looked about blankly and asked:
“What is it?”
He smiled. “There’s isn’t much to see, yet,” he said, “but I’ve always wanted to show you this place. I think it could be made a little heaven and I want to buy it. I can just see what it would be like on a night like this with the light shining from the windows and the sparks from the fireplace shooting right up to the sky, and inside——”
“But it would cost an awful lot to fix it up and when you did get it done it would be so far from everywhere. But then you like to be away off from people and towns, don’t you?”
“It wouldn’t matter what I liked. A man can make his home anywhere; I suppose something of the savage in him likes to get out to the wild places. You think this is lonesome, then? It seems the beginning of an Eldorado to me. Listento the trees. On the stillest days you can hear those pines starting up with a low, cooing little shiver, growing louder and louder till you’d think there was a forest of them. It can be the sleepiest or the thrilliest sound in the world, I think.”
“To me they sound like someone crazy, crying. Let’s go.” She shivered, crept deeper into her furs and consulted her little French wrist-watch. “Do you know it’s getting late?” she finished a little wearily.
Then when the car had started she moved up closer—it was one of the trifling signs that always set him piling up the robes again, and scarcely above a whisper she confided:
“I’m sorry I don’t like your place. I remember, when I was very small, the little boy who played with me came one day to see my new play-house. It was the dream of my heart—up to that time—expressed in wood and paint and wonderful miniature furnishings, and I did so want him to like it. But he came and looked it over for a long time, frowning, with his hands in his pockets, just like a man. Then he said, ‘I don’t like it. It’s too sissy,’ and he walked right away. But when I cried, he came back and he said, ‘I don’t like your house, but that isn’t saying I don’t like you, and ‘cause you’re a girl, I guess maybe I like you better ’cause you like a house like that.’ ... You understand, don’t you, Billy?”
She was rather startled by the intense searching that suddenly came into his steady eyes. His right hand was leaving the wheel and she wasn’t ready for this. She laughed gaily to break the tension, and finished her parable.
“I believe I had almost made you forget that we’re grown up. Things aren’t nearly so simple as when we lived in play-houses, are they?”
“Heavens, no,” he agreed, and went back to the wheel.
To hide the shock of the sudden contact with earth after his insane flight he turned his attention to the car, inquiring lightly:
“Shall we fly for a mile or two? There aren’t any speed laws here, nor many living things to run over. It’s one of the advantages of a place as wild as this, that you can do just as you like.”
So they raced against the wind, the girl looking ahead to catch the first glow of the city lights, and Billy staring blindly at the road and hearing the crying of the pines waiting for a house and warmth and light and life to shelter. He was beginning to accept the haunting suspicion that it wasn’t just the fear for the hard, lonely places that was responsible for the girl’s indifference, but that all his constant, ardent reaching out for her had failed absolutely to awaken anything deeper than a passing delight in being courted. Some unaccountable flash of disillusionment made him wonder if she was capable of anythingmore than this weak, kittenlike playfulness, and as quickly he cursed himself for being an unchivalrous cad, and came to, with all his usual interest.
They were not strangers to the most select cafes in town, and they found a table in a corner close to a blazing fire, half screened from the crowd, but where a panel mirror reflected all the gaiety of the place. They made a very human little pantomime, these pleasure-seekers—over-made-up women with bloated, sated-looking men; gay young college crowds, glowing and noisy, trooping in from an afternoon on the ice; engaged couples making the most of one of the rare celebrations which the limits of their purses and the needs of the half-furnished nest would allow, and other less elated, but obviously more comfortable, men and women whom one could spot immediately as having left the baby with a grandmother and come here to snatch a respite from family ties, only to fly happily back to them again and ask, “After all what did we ever see to prize so much in what we called our liberty?”
At odd moments Billy found himself prospecting their cases in the light of his own ambitions; most of the time he was unconscious of any presence in the room other than the girl sitting opposite him. He was also proudly aware of other admiring glances in her direction. It was the same dazzling attraction that had made her sopopular at dances and house-parties almost before she was grown up. The wild rose color in her cheeks, the gold in her crinkling hair, the bits of just the right shade of an amethyst gown peeping out from her white furs, and the wonderful little hat that had evidently been the breast of a bird—all had their part in the effect. More compelling still were the wavering blue eyes with their little brown specks. They seemed very mysterious and bright and childishly troubled to-night, but that was because she was searching the crowd to see if there might be “anyone she knew.”
Coming back from one of these explorations she suddenly seemed to remember that she owed some attention to Billy. Without thinking much she inquired gaily:
“When you go out to your farm are you still going to come in here sometimes to celebrate?”
“Every Christmas Eve anyway. You don’t think I expect to make a hermitage of the farm, do you?”
“I didn’t know. It’s so hard for me to get your viewpoint.” The tone implied that she would give worlds to acquire the art of getting his viewpoint. Then, lest his courage should surprise her again, she rattled on:
“And you will say to your wife, ‘The girl who taught me to like these things couldn’t have made a pound of butter to save her life’.”
He didn’t laugh and he didn’t play up to her banter as he generally did. He looked away from her, and she knew he was angry. She leaned forward, but failed to get his attention; then she called softly:
“Billy——”
It was the irresistible childish plea to be forgiven, but for the first time it failed to move him. His hand was resting on the table. She reached across until her fingers almost touched his and again she called, “Billy,” but it was almost a whisper this time and very unsteady. The brown fingers closed quickly and warmly over the reconciliatory hand and held it for a minute longer than necessary, but the hurt had not quite left him. With all her “socially trained” delicacy, he realized that she had no scruples about rushing into what he considered sacred ground. The armor of her frivolity was always ready as a check to his seriousness, and while she could seem alluringly in earnest herself sometimes, the minute he turned to follow her again she brought his pursuit down to the level of common philandering. Suddenly he reddened and slowly released her hand; at the next table a sleek, muddy-eyed man with a theatrical-looking woman, was doing the same thing.
Whether it was an effort or not, he caught the spirit of her gaiety very well after that. On their way to the theatre they called at a florist’s and heexperienced a new, thrilling sense of nearness in being allowed to hold the long-stemmed roses in place while she pinned them to her dress. It was nearly midnight when their car threaded its way out from the flashing, snorting tangle of limousines and taxis, and gradually leaving the lights and the noises behind, purred out toward the snowy darkness of the hills. The moon had gone; there were no lights in the houses, and they felt strangely alone and quiet.
Presently in a thin, groping little voice she said:
“I almost made you angry to-night, didn’t I?”
He laughed. “I’m afraid you did. A man is generally an awful crank about some things, and if a thing means very much to him he can’t stand to have it handled lightly.”
“You mean——”
“That I love you. You see I’ve been trying so long to let you know. Most of the time I see what a fool I am to dream of such a thing. Then sometimes I go blind for a while and almost wonder if you don’t care a little; but all the time, whether you care or not, it seems impossible to think of going on without you.”
He was talking with a hard edge in his voice, both hands gripping the wheel as though he could manage them better if he kept them there. When she didn’t answer, he turned and searched herface hungrily for a minute, but looked away again unrewarded.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said gently. “I almost knew you couldn’t. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Marjorie was not accustomed to such unsensationaldenouementsas this. She caught her breath in something so nearly like a sob that he came back more penitent than ever.
“Don’t,” he pleaded. “It’s all right, I shouldn’t have told you.”
“But I didn’t say that I didn’t care—” She was going on to explain that a highly emotional nature was capable of varying shades of caring, but there was nothing in Billy’s simple code of ethics to anticipate such a fine analysis of the case. Perhaps he waited for one breathless second to be sure he had heard aright; the next, she was pushing him away.
“How could you!” she stormed. “How could you!” She was angry and injured and tearful—or she seemed to be, and for the minute the thought of his mistake staggered him. Then very quietly he said:
“I didn’t understand, and I’m sorry; but I’m not ashamed. I know I’ve offended you, but you wouldn’t be offended if you knew what I meant. You think it’s savage and primitive. It is that, I guess; but I want you to know that at least it’s genuine, and—it’snotbrutal. If things hadbeen different, if you could have cared and married me, you would know.”
Marjorie was considering. It was not her first experience of this kind. You can’t make a practice of playing with animals and not get mussed up sometimes, but with a girl in her social position most men of the “socially experienced” set would not have blustered into things so whole heartedly. If they did, beneath their cajoling apologies afterwards, there would lurk a quizzical half-smile, as much as to say, “What did you start the thing for? Just what is the game?” It generally meant the end of a flirtation and the loss of the girl’s prestige in that particular quarter; but, somehow, Billy had left her with all her self-respect. It was hard to know what to do, for even with the weak passion of which her selfish make-up was capable, she had unwittingly stumbled into a little love herself.
“I—I don’t want to be silly about this,” she advanced magnanimously after a while. “I’m not offended, but don’t let’s spoil everything by being serious on our last night together.”
“Ourlastnight?”
“The last for a while, anyway. I guess I didn’t tell you that I’m going to town for the winter—my really officialdebutin society. Auntie wants me, and Dad and Mother have consented to let me go for the season. You see,” she explained rather plaintively, “I’ve never really had an opportunityof trying my wings at all, and I just crave life and excitement and company. Maybe some day I’ll settle down and be the domestic little wren you’d like to see me; but don’t you see, I’m so young—I don’t want to get married. I just want to live for awhile. I think a winter in town will do me lots of good. Auntie knows the very best people, and she entertains beautifully. Would you—I wonder if you’d care to see some of my little dresses?”
Later, in her luxurious little sitting-room, she brought out the “little dresses” and caressingly displayed them one by one for his stupid admiration. They were very artful creations and considerably expensive, but Mrs. Evison, who appreciated the value of clothes as a social asset, considered them a good investment for her daughter. To Billy they emphasized how meagre she would find the kind of life he could give her, so far as purchasable things were concerned.
“You should consider yourself a very privileged person,” she told him archly. “I don’t know another man I’d show them to, but you won’t be there when I wear them, and I just couldn’t go without letting you see them. I wish you were coming, too. I hope you won’t be lonesome when I’ve gone.”
“Can I come to see you?”
She considered, surveying him slantwise. “If you’d asked me that yesterday, I might have said‘yes’; but after to-night—I wonder. You’d better wait. Maybe I’ll send for you.”
When he was leaving her he begged:
“I can see you to-morrow, anyway, can’t I? You say you leave the day after.”
“I’m sorry, but we’re having a little dinner-party to-morrow. Dr. Knight and some of his friends have planned for a sleigh-ride. I guess I’ll have to say good-bye to-night.” Her voice seemed to be trembling a little. “And whatever happens, I’ll always remember our little times together as some of the dearest of my life. You’ve been very good to me, Billy; I know, whatever happens, you won’t think I’ve been heartless, or that I haven’t cared at all. You’re so much more generous than most men. I’ve read, somewhere, that where a girl is concerned, men are generally like boys setting out to catch a bird. They have a cage and they want a bird for it, and someone has told them that they can catch one by putting salt on its tail. Whenever they think they have just caught it, the bird flits off and waits till they come up again; it doesn’t want to go into a cage. When it gets tired being pursued and flies away out of reach altogether, the little savage in them crops out, and they throw stones at the bird for leading them on. You won’t ever think I did that, will you?”
She felt rather alone after he had gone, but then she knew that he would come back any timeshe wanted him. For the present alluring possibilities were awaiting elsewhere. Dr. Knight had been very attentive in the way of motoring out to see her, but of course a great many liked to motor out to pleasant country homes on holidays. Once launched in society under the prestige of her aunt’s influential wing, the situation would be different. From various angles she consulted her mirror, and decided that her prospects were good. She could already picture the quaint old Anglican church in the village decorated for her wedding; there would be lilies and smilax—she had often talked that over with her mother, and she would have a little empire dress, very girlish and bride-like, with her veil caught up in a Juliet cap. She visualized herself very distinctly coming down the church aisle. It would be very hard for Billy, for of course he would be there to follow her with that tragic worship in his sober eyes—it was far from likely that he would ever love anyone else—and when he came to say he hoped she would be happy, she just knew she wouldn’t be able to keep the tears back, and she would lift her face—heavens, no!—she couldn’t do that. Why, everything would be at an end with Billy, and she would have to go away with Dr. Knight. But she would know that he would be thinking about her and loving her just the same. And whenever she came home to her mother’s receptions and things, she wouldsee that he was invited, and she would be very gracious to him.
A wicked little voice suggested another idea. What if she should come back sometime to find Billy in love with someone else? Men were so queer. She had known them to be married a year after some girl had supposedly broken their hearts, and to actually fall desperately and permanently in love with their wives. The possibility made her furious. If only Billy had had Dr. Knight’s position—he would have been so everlastingly good to live with, and recklessly she made up her mind that if nothing materialized from her season in town—if Dr. Knight remained indefinite, she would come back and marry Billy. She couldn’t go on a farm with him, of course, and she couldn’t live all her life in small towns like this, but he could get something else to do; she had heard a man tell her father that he hoped to see him in the federal parliament some day. So if nothing else developed, she would marry Billy. The idea left her feeling beautifully generous and secure.
“These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy, and that unhoped sereneThat men call age; and those who would have beenTheir sons, they gave, their immortality.”—Rupert Brooke.
“These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy, and that unhoped sereneThat men call age; and those who would have beenTheir sons, they gave, their immortality.”
“These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy, and that unhoped sereneThat men call age; and those who would have beenTheir sons, they gave, their immortality.”
—Rupert Brooke.
There was no sense of loss for Billy in the days that followed Miss Evison’s leaving the neighborhood—you can’t lose a thing you never had. Removed from the fascination of her presence, and reviewing one incident after another, there was only one theory to accept. It had been the affair of a moment for her, a diversion acceptable for the want of something better; now it was over, and she wanted to be free from any further obligation. Still, it was disconcerting to an agricultural expert, holding forth late in some village hall, while the fire in the boxstove burned low and the frost patterns crept over the steamy window panes, to have his efforts to inspire a sleepy audience with the need of greater production, suddenly sidetracked by a vision of a regal little figure in some palm-bordered ballroom, brilliant and excited and restless as a beautiful moth that has found the light.
He had now considerable free time in the eveningswhich might be turned to good account in his work, but people had become so accustomed to finding the office locked at night, that they had stopped calling, and it would be difficult to win back their interest. With notes of Miss Evison’s social engagements in town constantly finding their way into the local papers, he could scarcely advertise that henceforth his evenings would be at the service of the community.
But it was not the blow of Miss Evison’s dismissal, nor dissatisfaction with his work, which turned his affairs in another direction where things like these don’t count for much. It was the first winter of the war and like many another young man absorbed in the peaceful industries of the green country, the Representative had had some serious debates with himself. The men who directed his work, peering through the chaos of the country’s general unpreparedness to probable starvation ahead, kept the wires from head quarters hot, suggesting plans for growing bigger crops in the district, leaving it with the Representative to put the plans before the people. This they considered his best service just then. At the same time newspapers were bringing home reports that made it hard for men to go on tilling their fields, even to feed the men who were fighting, or the people whose homes had been outraged by an invading army.
Most of these steady, thinking young men withambitions in other directions, made no attempt to explain the motives which led them to put away all the things they cared for to enter a new life as hateful as it was strange to them. It might have been just the chivalry that guided their every-day conduct in less spectacular ways, or the more plebeian, but equally unselfish, spirit of doing an unpleasant, but necessary, thing because someone had to do it; perhaps the comradeship with others who were making the sacrifice had some part. Anyway, without discussion or ceremony, the Representative gave up his plans for the community and the possibilities of the place on the hill, which of course didn’t mean anything now, anyway, and joined the county battalion. It would have been harder if his mother had been living, but as things were he reasoned it wouldn’t matter much to anyone but Jean, and she had developed a splendid faculty for taking care of herself. It was difficult to associate the easy, self-assured young varsity student with the shy little school-teacher who in the years when she felt the loss of her mother most, had cried to him over problems on which he was helplessly ignorant. His unfailing solution was to send her to Ruth Macdonald for advice, until she acquired the habit of going herself, and didn’t need his help any more. In one way, however, Jean remained unchanged from the little girl who had trotted after him everywherewith the faithfulness of a little spaniel. He had taught her to climb trees, and skate, and swim, and though naturally timid and afraid of the water, she would float with him, perfectly confident, out to the deepest places. When, nervous and ill with the loneliness of her first school, she had sent for him, he had only to gather her up like the child she was, and she went right to sleep, secure and quiet in the strength and gentleness of his great body. With all the admirable, twentieth-century young woman’s independence, he knew that the hero worship of the little sister remained the same, and at the thought of leaving her he was painfully conscious of his neglect since his interests and his holidays had been given so wholly to Miss Evison.
It was when he returned from the ceremony of putting on his uniform that this reproach seemed verified. The mail had brought a note from Ruth Macdonald saying “Jean has just been sent home for a nerve rest. I believe the trouble is mostly loneliness. If you could be with her for a while you might tide it over.”
The stenographer covertly sizing up the Representative, with the popular feminine admiration for a uniform, wondered if his courage had suddenly failed him that he went so white. The idea wasn’t convincing, however. The afternoon mail offered a more interesting explanation. With amazing constructive genius she reportedthat Miss Evison had written offering to take him back—“and him signed up,” she lamented tragically. The theory gained weight, but travelled faster, when Billy was seen taking the first train for the city.
Even Ruth became a victim to circumstantial evidence. The next day she found Jean alone, and troubled.
“Billy’s enlisted,” she shuddered.
Ruth experienced all the cold terror that the news has given women the world over when the men they cared about joined the army. She didn’t say anything—people are so sick of the glib platitudes about the glory of sacrifice when they can’t drive from their imaginations the actual torture of soul and body. Besides it never mattered whether Ruth put her sympathy into words or not. It came to you from the understanding kindness in her eyes, the quick, warm pressure of her hands, and a thousand little thoughtfulnesses which anticipated your needs. Her concern was perhaps too evident, for Jean hurried on to explain.
“Oh, it isn’t just that he’s going. I was expecting that, but everyone is saying he’s going broken-hearted. Look—”
She indicated a paragraph in the morning paper which stated that Mr. and Mrs. Evison announced the marriage of their daughter, Marjorie Angela, to Dr. Knight.
Then Billy came in. He didn’t look broken-hearted. In fact, for a man who had just lost the love of a life time he seemed in a much too healthy frame of mind to have any sentiment at all. As a matter of fact, of course, he hadn’t seen the little announcement; he had some time ago stopped reading the social columns where Miss Evison’s name figured, but with sisterly consideration Jean left the paper in his room where he could read it and have his battle out by himself. Ruth shared this consideration. When the evening papers, crowded with the latest draught of casualties, found space to describe at length the flowers and dresses at some tea given in honor of “the popular Miss Evison,” the girls so obviously avoided any comment that Billy rather wondered if he shouldn’t draw their attention to the fact that Miss Evison would be charming indeed in the gown of some imported-sounding stuff with pearls and lilies of the valley. Such wooden creatures men can be, where a little tragedy would seem the appropriate thing.
Jean’s nerves were soon restored to smooth running order, for which the doctor gave no small share of credit to Ruth’s efforts to keep her out of doors. The county battalion was training near the city, and every evening Billy could get off, the three of them would tramp out in moccasins and general Indian accoutrements to the edge of the city, to toboggan down a snow-crustedhill, or to skate for miles down some winding creek straggling through spooky cedar swamps and open, moonlit fields. It was an invigorating change from the theatres and cafes that had been Billy’s late amusement haunts—not that he had buried all these in the ashes of the past, but they seemed to have their purpose in catering to the needs of people who wanted their pleasures ready-made for them. His sister, by chance or design, frequently added other friends to their party, and he found himself, either by chance or design, taking Ruth farther up the ice than anyone else cared to go.
Of course it was natural enough; no other girl could skate so far without tiring; no other girl could abandon herself so wholly to the joy of a sport and still keep about her a sort of reverence for it. And when he watched her from a distance, slim, buoyant, wholly alive, taking the ice like a sail before a breeze, and remembered the unconscious glow in her friendly eyes as he had skated with her, he realized that it was rather gratifying to a man’s pride to know that, while he was so unnecessary to her in a material way, she still cared to have him around. That there was something strained underneath her casual friendliness he knew, and wondered; he was beginning to find it hard to be perfectly natural himself. But when he took her home one night, and verysoberly asked if he might come in and talk to her, she said “It’s pretty late.”
He wasn’t surprised. He felt that it was pretty late. He had been a long time awakening. No woman would value very highly the interest of a man supposedly trying to gather himself together from the blow of his ideal woman’s engagement to another man, and she was not the type of girl likely to accept a compromise. The next day the battalion moved to a farther camp.
A few people, dependent entirely upon statistics for their information, have believed that the farming districts were not touched by the war, that the great, green country smiled peacefully through it all, hoping only that the allies might have favorable weather for their task. Investigations show few homes that have not suffered the anxiety of waiting, or the grief of loss. Many of the first to go from the cities had been nurtured in the austere discipline of some rocky farm whose meagre income did not appeal to an ambitious young man; or, if the family was large, it behooved some of them to move out and leave a delving-ground for the rest. Nor was the change to military life quite so hard for those who had rubbed against the world in many places, as for the brothers at home for whom the thought of even a training camp had a homesick apprehension.
A boy from a farm back among the hills occasionallydropped into a back seat at the village recruiting meetings. He heard unmoved the argument that he would be handsome in khaki, and listened with cynical but well-concealed amusement to girls who sang, with more zeal for, than appreciation of, the cause, “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.” Then one night the officer made a sincere and rather strong appeal. He didn’t minimize the hardships so far as he knew them, and he described the brutalized misery of the invaded countries as graphically as a good imagination could picture it. The boy from the farm listened with little outward sign of emotion, but a battle was going on inside. He didn’t go to the platform with the few others who responded to the appeal: he had never stood before a crowd in his life. He was not used to crowds; all his life had been spent in the quiet of the fields, and the long hours of constant, necessary toil had left little time for exploring other places. He didn’t know the ways of men in companies, and it would have taken more courage than he possessed to stand up before an audience and take their approval. He waited at the door until the officer came out—and he joined the army. Then he went home.
In the kitchen the fire burned low. A few geraniums had been moved to the table, that they might not freeze against the window-panes. Beside them lay the day’s paper and his father’sglasses; the father and mother had acquired a habit of discussing the war news long after he went to bed at night, and he had often wondered why they should be so interested; he knew now. Always on the rare occasions when he was out late, he came in quietly, took off his shoes and went directly upstairs, but to-night he sat on the wood-box, staring at the ashy fire and listening to the regular breathing in the little bedroom off the kitchen. There was only one of these comfortable, sleepy sounds to-night; his mother was awake. After all the sleepless nights she had spent over the family it was hard to think of the vigils she would keep when he had gone. It was hard to think of leaving them with the work of the farm; they were getting old and the mortgage was still hanging over them. It meant hard work and careful living to keep afloat, even with a young man’s steady work. They couldn’t afford to hire help, even if the help were available, and he could see his father, in the evenings of the next harvest, crippling over the fields, footsore and bent, to bring the cows home for milking. They would be standing at the bars, in the dusk, those cows, lowing and nervous from waiting, as though they wondered why the work was never done. And his mother would come out with the pails, and on into the dark there would be no sound but the regular flow of the milk streams, and the contented breathing of theanimals. The aching loneliness of it! And he, the last of their sons, who had hoped to make things easier, to some day fit up the other house on the place and bring home a girl who would be a daughter to them—after all they had hoped of him, where would he be while they were trying to do his work? Lying out under the sky somewhere, maybe, as powerless to ever help them again, as though he had never been. Yet the recruiting officer had said—and the arguments came back as logical and appealing as when he had placed them before an enthused audience. But to the boy trying to do the right thing, the problem was cruelly complicated.
Then his mother called quietly:
“There’s nothing wrong, Jim?”
“No. Did I wake you coming in?”
“I was awake. I guess thinking about the boys, lying out, made me anxious. It’s good to know you’re in.”
She left a good opening for the argument that he couldn’t rest at home while the others were “lying out,” but knowing her anxiety he hadn’t the heart. He would tell her in the morning, and she would accept it as other mothers had done, as motherhood has always accepted things that paid little for its sacrifice. Maybe she would even be proud to be the mother of this man-child who was willing to suffer the inquisition of warfare, with a motive as chivalrous as thosewhich prompted old-time knights to historic adventures, but in her secret moments, remembering the poignant joy of the hour when she had heard his first cry, and felt the helpless, clinging little body groping toward her and snuggling down safe in the warmth of a protecting presence, she would know that to her he would always be the little child who needed her, and, like thousands of other mothers, she would cry out fearfully and rebelliously, “God, why should these things be?”
It remained with people less personally concerned to express the fitting public appreciation of the county battalion. Mrs. Evison became the leader of a very popular suburban “khaki club,” which had neither the time nor the skill to do much sewing or knitting, but by giving a series of fetes and teas and musicales, the ladies raised funds to present the battalion with a set of colors. The presentation was to be made at a garden party on the Evison grounds as soon as the shrubbery bloomed, and it was to be a rather elaborate affair. Some half-dozen more or less prominent men were invited up from the city to speak. The battalion would be there in full strength. A number of Marjorie’s dearest girl friends would come out from town to supply the beauty and charm appropriate to the occasion, crosses on the sleeves and a nurse’s head kerchief.There would be a military band and pavilion for dancing. The speakers’ platform would be bright with flags and bunting and Chinese lantern footlights, with reserved seats in front for the mothers, and as president of the khaki club, Mrs. Evison would say a few words to them herself.
When the time arrived she did not fail them. People had come in crowds, the presentation had passed off with due ceremony and applause, and her soul was so filled with the perfection of her plans that she wanted to pour out the balm of her appreciation on those women who were “so gloriously sending their sons to fight for the empire and liberty.” She was very charming as she stood surrounded by the flags of the allies and a few hot house palms. To make herself beautiful for them she had even risked wearing her loveliest and lowest evening gown, with just the sheerest scarf falling from a bare shoulder, as a protection from the night air. And standing there like a goddess of liberty, she told them that she wished she had a dozen sons to give. She said further that she knew these women who were so splendidly giving their boys would do still more. The food situation was serious, but what women in other countries had done the splendid women on Canadian farms would do. Belgian and French and German and even English women were sowing the seed and gathering the harvest this year; she knew that the dearmothers from the farms who had so unselfishly given their sons would not see them starve in the trenches, that they would put their shoulders to the wheel as their pioneer foremothers had done, and go into the fields if necessary, to the last one of them.
When she had finished, people from somewhere applauded, the band added its contribution to the clamour, but the mothers sitting down in the shadows, with their boys back in the lines standing rigid and weary at attention, were strangely silent. The speaker gathered her draperies about her, a little elf of a girl handed her a sheaf of roses, and in the general stir which followed, a few of the women from the farms got up a bit stiffly—they were not used to sitting so long at a time—and looked about for their men to go home. It was in the press of the spring work and they hadn’t had time to do the milking before they came.
Billy was there, and he had listened with all his logical faculties active. When she finished he began to move towards the gate; it was his last leave and he had plans for the next day which meant a great deal to him. There was more than enough time to catch the car to the city, but he just naturally found himself going. The band had taken a stand close to the pavilion and was starting up a waltz, and, well—it was too much like pouring honey into a cup of hemlock.At the edge of the crowd he suddenly found Marjorie right in his path, but looking the other way.
“Oh,” she gasped, “you frightened me.”
He didn’t apologize, because he knew he hadn’t frightened her. “I was just getting off to catch the car,” he explained.
Miss Evison was disappointed. She had pointed out the good-looking soldier to a few of her girl friends, with a mysterious half-promise of a story, later. She had counted on this evening for days, and had rehearsed several delicate little speeches and a touching, but very proper, farewell. She hadn’t anticipated being confronted with a new man. It would have been highly satisfactory if he had shown a sign of the end-of-everything bitterness, generally supposed to be appropriate under the circumstances, but this cool, friendly indifference was more than any girl could stand from a man who had proposed to her not six months before. He was holding out his hand and saying:
“I may not see you again before I go.”
She softened at once.
“You’re not going yet,” she coaxed. “I simply can’t let you go yet,” and when he showed no sign of staying, she added rather sharply, “I don’t believe I ever knew you to be in such a hurry before.”
He smiled kindly and happily as one might over an episode of childhood.
“I have to get back to the city,” he explained patiently, “We’re going out to the country to-morrow.”
Miss Evison wasn’t used to disappointments and they made her temper very uncertain.
“Are you taking Miss Macdonald with you?” she inquired.
“Yes.” He seemed modestly proud that she should guess it.
She was ashamed the minute the question was out, but that he should fail to resent it was maddening, and when she was angry she forgot to be elegant.She was smiling in a way that was not beautiful, and she said:
“You know I wouldn’t have thought from the exalted opinion of her you used to have, that she’d have fallen for the soldier stuff.”
There was nothing gratifying to her vanity in the way he looked at her. He was angry, of course, but more evident was the surprise of disillusionment. It seemed as though for the first time he saw her as she was and hated to believe it.
“You don’t mean that, honest?” he said. He put his big toil-hardened hand on her shoulder, very gently. It was a rather remarkable hand, strong and capable and intelligent looking, and it had steadied many other people to be honest,but it was unthinkable that he should presume to take such an attitude of fatherly disappointment in her conduct. So she looked at the hand until he took it away, and she said good night with as much dignity as the situation and her temper would allow.
She was still in this frame of mind when she met Dr. Knight a few minutes later, but then she was beginning to know Dr. Knight pretty well by this time, and it was impossible to avoid such things constantly.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired casually.
“I had arranged to have Mr. Withers meet the girls, but he seemed to feel that he had other things more important. He’s taking Miss Macdonald out to see some farm or something to-morrow. He always did have a craze for that.”
Dr. Knight on close acquaintance dropped all his drawing-room talk and expressed some very plebeian views of things. His direct observation now was,
“She’s the kind of girl who’d make him a great wife.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “the kind of girl whom every man advises every other man to marry, but never thinks of marrying himself.”
The doctor studied his fiancee with the candid speculation of a man endeavoring to adjust himself to an engagement which somehow seems tohave happened without his planning. He was not ill natured, but perfectly frank.
“What a little cat!” he said.
“If you’d just come out with me to the hill place for one day,” Billy had pleaded. “I want to have something to take away with me to remember.”
Ruth had looked ahead to the day not without foreboding. Why, in the name of all that was sane, she wondered, should a man want to go and uncover the grave of his dreams at a time when he should be fighting to forget them? If he wanted her to witness the agony, of course she would be there—he would need someone—but to see him staring into the ruins of an old house at the ghost picture of the future he had visioned, to know that he was still aching for the nearness of an ethereal bit of thistledown of a girl, and to be unable to tell him just where he had been blind! It would be well if a storm and a flood would wash the place away in the night.
But the storm did not come. The sun shone and the birds sang; the car purred up hills and down; Billy seemed strangely happy, except for an occasional glance of anxiety at the white profile beside him, and the girl was preoccupied and troubled. Something was wrong. It was their last day, and it might have been so wonderful.
“I suppose, if we lived by centuries,” Billy remarked, “we would still leave some of the things we wanted most to be crowded into the last day we had. There seems to be something inherently selfish in most of us. We get an idea that we want a certain thing, and if we can’t have it we curse Fate for her heartlessness. We never think how our self-centred ambition is hurting someone else, overlooking something worlds better than the trifling thing our fancy has idealized. Whatever failures I might make, Jean would still believe in me, and I’ve neglected her shamefully.
“It’s the same with the work I might have done. A lot of us have been misled by our ideas of ‘rural leadership.’ We know that the country needs leaders who can see clearly, and who have the courage to make their visions materialize. We have big plans for the country, but we’re afraid to go right out to the land and take its risks and steady, commonplace toil. Those of us who grew up there learned something of the beauty and irrevocableness of its natural laws, and a lot of its hardships and cruelties. When we went away to study how to overcome the hard things, which should not be, an insidious influence in the new environment resulted in a kindly ridicule or patient tolerance of the simplicity of these natural laws.
“I remember one day before I ever left thefarm, I was ploughing alone in the field and a lark flew over my head, called twice and disappeared. It was in the spring, and the scheme of things seemed very perfect and simple to me then. That fall I went to college and the artificial crept in. When the war brings men up against elemental things, suffering and quick death and endurance and sacrifice absolutely devoid of self-interest, I wonder if it will give them a higher regard for the genuine in everything. And if it does, will it make them so vastly more primitive, that when it comes to the old human longing for a mate and a home, the kind of woman they want, the woman with dreams and a sensitiveness to the finest things, will find them changed, and be afraid to cross the gulf between them? What do you think?”
“I don’t think ‘the woman with dreams’ has ever been afraid of the natural things.” Then she stopped. It seemed simple enough, after his experience, that he should want to dig into such questions for the ease of his own soul, but it was hard to talk about them at all and keep her own feelings covered. So she looked away and very practically broke off. “Anyway no one can see things in generalities; you only know how you feel yourself.”
Then she found that he wasn’t interested in generalities.
“I’m afraid that’s really what I wanted toknow,” he said—“how you would feel about it. When the war is over a lot more men will have to go out to the land, if the country is ever to come back to normal again. Some of these men won’t be the greatest possible asset to the country; men of all sorts go into the making of an army; but a lot of them will be of the finest type, educated, practical, public-spirited, the kind we need for building a community. Only men alone can’t build a community; it requires the indispensable woman, and there’s the problem. The men themselves will have learned, under the severest discipline, to endure and cope with hard conditions. They have slept in muddy trenches, they have suffered and survived unthinkable physical hardships; the rigors of agriculture will have no terrors for them. But their wives, or the girls who would be their wives, have been living in refined homes—maybe during the war they have gone without luxuries which they considered necessities in other times; perhaps they have done work they would have thought impossible before; still they have lived in an atmosphere of considerable elegance. It’s rather a good thing that they have. If these women would come out to make homes on the land, bringing with them all their essentials of refinement, but dropping the superficialities, what a blessing it would be.
“I can imagine the horror some of them wouldfeel at the prospect of pioneering in the country, but I know that things out here can be made as safe and comfortable and I hope far more worth while than they can be in any city, if people just have the right material in themselves. We would have less money, but less would be required for the same kind of life. Think what it could be! This place will be mine then, the old house and the trees and all. We could have a bungalow to delight the heart of any architect, and we have ground enough to make a natural park around it. We could have a blazing fireplace as big as a cave with logs from our own woods, and we could make it a centre for other less happy people who needed the warmth of a real home sometimes. We would have our own horses to galavant all over the country, but, best of all, we would always have the cabin to come home to, and time to be alone, to think and talk and learn to know each other. People can’t do that where they live in crowds.”
Then a quick, troubled look shot over his face. “I had forgotten,” he apologized awkwardly, “but there’s so little time, and I get so carried away with the idea of having you here, that anything else seems impossible; so I blunder into a visioning like this.”
Three years ago she could run her hand through his crumpled hair as she would with a little boy in trouble. She couldn’t do that now.Anyway, she reasoned, it was very different comforting a man for his mother who had died, and for a sweetheart who was flippantly alive and breaking his heart from a distance. She couldn’t even look at him. But the old instinct was still there, maternal, protective. She seemed to take on new height with it, and her eyes laughed with a comradely tenderness near akin to tears.
“The whole trouble is you’re lonesome, Billy, and it’s leading you into dangerous places,” she said. “You’ve set your heart so on living here that you think just the place would make everything right. Don’t go away thinking you’re losing anything. The place will be here just the same when you come back, and I’ll be here. We can come out as often as you like and have no end of good times—but don’t you see, Billy, there are some places where you just can’t compromise?”
He reddened painfully.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know you would if you could, just like you’ve always done everything else I wanted. But you can’t, and I don’t wonder.... We came out here for a holiday. The woods are all dappled green and sunshine—pine needles under your feet deep as a Donegal carpet. There’s a trail winding around for about a mile up to a spring in the rocks. People say the Indians made it, but I think it was some wise old cow finding the easiest slopeson her way up for a drink. It’s like a view from an aeroplane to look down when you get to the top. Shall we go?”
They were not more foolish or more misunderstood than generations of lovers had been before them.
And the girl learned what a day in the woods could be—sun pouring through the parting branches and warming at every touch; brown furry things scuttling off through the dead leaves; here and there a mother partridge strutting out watchful and wary, and whirring close, broken-winged, at sight of them, to lead her brood to cover; stillness like the stillness of an abbey, broken only by the distant drumming of a woodpecker on a hollow tree. And always there was Billy—his sleeve just touching when the path was narrow, his hand so quick and steady when the rocks were slippery. And once, when at the sound of the faintest chirping in a thicket he had stolen over and reached out for her to come and look at a nest of the downiest yellow fledgelings, in the breath-holding wonder of it her fingers had somehow tightened convulsively about his. The birds had done it, of course; but they came home very quietly after that.
But when he left her he said: “There’s just one thing more. Will you try to forget me as you must think of me now, and let me try all over again when I come back? You’ve been no endkind always—I won’t presume on it—but when I come back, if you can stand to have me around at all, I’m going to try to make you love me. And I’m going to keep on trying. And if you ever find you can marry me I’ll keep right on after that—and if you can’t—it’ll be all right. Until I come back, we’ll just go right on being pals like we have been? So I can write to you and know you’re here, like a warm fire to reach out to when there seems to be no warmth anywhere else. Talk about men protecting women! We’re as left as deserted children, when things go wrong, without a woman we can trust, somewhere.”
Ruth’s aunt came in to comfort her when he had gone.
“You’re going to miss Mr. Withers,” she said. “He is a flower of a man. But I’m going to tell you something. You’ve never had much to do with men; you seem to have always been too busy with your work, and I’ve been sorry about it; but as things are turning out now it may be as well. Some of our men won’t come back; many of those who do come back will be changed. Mr. Withers is naturally likeable; he will be made much of socially, and there’s the question of how much of it he can stand. I believe he was a great admirer of that pretty Miss Evison, which is really not a strong argument for his ability totake care of himself. I’m glad now that you have so much of interest in your career.”
It was very quiet in the neighborhood after the battalion left. Over the whole green country always known as a retreat from the strain and noise and gaiety of the town, there brooded a quiet that was not restful. Canada was far removed from the areas where every home had been broken, but in the littlest hamlet or the most secluded community there was some home with a cloud hanging over. When Ruth’s work took her among these people now, she felt a closer touch with their anxiety; she hadn’t known what it meant before.
It was in a Scotch settlement in Eastern Ontario that the real spirit of the war seemed to have entered. She had visited the place during the winter before the war, and the meeting-hall had been filled with young people. They were an interesting crowd—the young men, hardened from summers of harvesting and winters of lumbering, every one of them standing six feet or over, not all modelled after Adonis, but generally bearing unmistakable marks of good breeding and intelligence in their strong-featured faces. It had long been the ambition of every family to turn out at least one university man, if it ranthe farm to the rocks to pay for it, and the others, the elder brothers who stayed at home to fatten the calves that went to buy the books and the dress suits and sundry incidentals of the college course—they had just as active brains, were just as clear thinkers. The houses were not all painted on the outside, but they had libraries of the choicest things in standard literature, and most of the houses had their bagpipes or a violin. From the time when the long evenings set in in the fall until the spring floods broke up the roads the young men and the girls would gather regularly in some farm house and dance all night. The Highland fling was as well known here as in any home in the hills of the Old Land, and when the whole floor wound up the night in the Scotch reel, the drone of the pipes and the whoops of the dancers seemed a very harmless and picturesque way of keeping alive the traditions of their warrior ancestors.
But they were indeed sons of the Covenanters, and with the first surety of war every man who could get away at all wound up his affairs as fast as he could, or left them incomplete, got into kilts if he could find a Highland regiment not filled up, but in any case got into a uniform of some kind, said good-bye to his women folk or his children, a bit roughly and unsteadily at the last, held them painfully close for a minute, then broke away and left them without looking back. Thewhole settlement had been left like that, and the farming was now being done by the old men and the young boys and the women and girls.
But the girls had come from the same strain of Covenanter ancestors. They were tall, deep-bosomed, motherly young women with a strength of will and character in their faces like their brothers—and it was war-time. Just as their great grandmothers must have gathered in the sheep when their war-fired men followed the bagpipes over the hills to meet an enemy before their own hearths were dishonored, so their daughters in Canada, with the enemy far away, but none the less menacing if no one went to meet him, took up the tools their soldiers had laid down, and went to farming. Many of these girls had never lifted an axe or driven three horses on a binder before, but they were doing it now, and doing it fairly well. Not that this was work that any Canadian girl could do. These girls had unusually good physiques to begin with; perhaps the canny forethought of their race had made them judicious in what they attempted to do, and there were usually more than one of them in the house, so they didn’t have to try to crowd a woman’s work into the night after doing a man’s work in the fields all day. Anyway, it was their avowed intention to keep it up “until the men came back.”
In the winter the girls who in other years hadgiven their evenings entirely to the neighborhood frolics now sat late beside their lamps at home, knitting. In one community it occurred to them that they could work better together, so they formed a “Next o’ Kin Club.” Incidentally they sent for Ruth to come and help them get their work better organized.
It was easy to arrange a plan for the most practical kind of Red Cross work. It was not so easy to look squarely at the problems ahead of most of these girls, and offer any solution. But the girls themselves had gone right to the heart of things.
“We’ve thought it all out,” one girl explained to Ruth, a girl with eyes as soft and blue as the heather and a wealth of bronze hair that would have set an artist raving. She was obviously a girl who in normal times had followed the quick, warm workings of her heart rather than to reason out any logical line of conduct. “We’ve thought it all out, and we want to be ready for whatever happens.
“Andra and I were to have been married in October. At the first word of war he and my brother Donald, a lad just turned eighteen, left together. Father is old and I’m trying to take Donald’s place till he comes back. If he shouldn’t come I’ll stay anyway and do the best I can. Then when Andra comes he’ll work the two places; it would be easy for him—you neversawAndra. I’m sure he’s coming back—somehow youcouldn’t think of Andra not coming back. He just wasn’t afraid of anything and the things that set other people cowering before them, just naturally made way for him. He always drove the logs over the gorge where every other man in the place thought it was playing with death to go—and when something came loose at a barn-raising and the whole framework seemed ready to come crashing down on the men, he crawled out on a beam with the timbers swaying under him and drove the joint together. Of course they say a man has no chance at all over there; that it’s just human life put up against so much machinery; still I can’t think Andra won’t come back—that just couldn’t be,” she cried, a terrified protest in her blue eyes. “But he might come back not able to do things like when he went away,” she added quietly, “and that’s why I want to keep the farm going as well as I can. We could still make a living here; so we could be married even if he couldn’t work.
“Oh, don’t tell me it wouldn’t be prudent,” she broke out when Ruth tried to speak. “You neversawAndra. If you’d once known the look and the pride of him in his kilt, if you’d seem him taking the logs from a jamb, and the river frothing around him, if you’d known the mind and the will and the kind, true heart of him you’d know that there aren’t many men like him left in the world, and you’d know that the greatest mistake wouldbe that he shouldn’t get married—that there wouldn’t be any children to grow up like him. So no matter what happens, just so God sends him back to me alive. I’ll be waiting.
“That’s how most of the girls here feel, but a lot of their lads have been killed. The only hope for them is to have something to do that will make it seem worth while to live. A few of them want to train for nurses, thinking that by trying to ease other people’s suffering they can forget their own, but they wouldn’t all make nurses, and the life will soon go out of the place here if they all go. If you could plan something worth while for girls to do right here at home, and help the others who feel that they must get away, to find their right place when they do go, it would be worth everything.”
It happened when the “Next o’ Kin” club were making shirts and bandages at a farm house one day that a pedlar called selling lavender. The people had little use for lavender, but in the warmth of their hospitality they asked the stranger to stay for supper. He was embarrassed by the situation; evidently itinerant selling was new to him, and not congenial. It was also discovered that he was trying painfully to conceal the fact that his right arm hung limp and useless. Then someone noticed that he wore the badge of a discharged soldier, and if Prince Charlie had suddenly appeared in their midst his welcome could not have been more cordial.
He was the first person they had seen who had actually been “there,” and the young people, especially, pressed him with questions. Their imaginations had created thrilling pictures of kilted regiments charging over level fields with the sun flashing on their trappings and somewhere, always, the pipes playing; and those who fell would go down smiling. Was it like that, they begged, and had he seen any of their men?
The soldier considered and decided that they deserved to know the truth.
“You’ll be gettin’ some of them back one of these days,” he said, “and you wouldn’t want to be expectin’ too much of them for a while. I may not have seen any of your men, but I’ve seen men of the best picked regiments in the army, men who had been there long enough to be hardened to it if that were possible, and I’ve seen them loaded on to the stretchers cryin’ like children. You see it’s all so different, you just don’tgetit here at all.
“There was one chap, a sort of leader and general favorite in our crowd. He had been a champion athlete at college and his face would have made a painting of a young Greek god look like a poor copy. They carried him back to the dressing-station one day and sent home a telegram saying that he was wounded in the face. The little girl from home wrote back that hewould be all the more handsome to her with a scar that told of sacrifice and bravery, and the dear knows what else, but she didn’t know just what it was. For the rest of his life he’ll keep the lower part of his face covered with a black cloth. The question is just how the girl will feel about it after the first shock or the first romantic phase of the incident has passed.”
The next day Ruth went into another community. It was a land flowing with milk and honey and humming with automobiles, and except as a live topic of conversation, the war was something apart.
“We’ve done very well in patriotic work around here,” one prosperous citizen explained. “The young people have a patriotic dance every month, and we’ve raised a lot at entertainments because everyone for miles around has a car and there’s sure to be a good turnout if it’s for anything patriotic. Then we send donations regularly to the military hospital in the next town; we feel that we owe something to the men there. But the returned soldier is going to be a serious problem. They’re going to feel that they’ve done everything for the country and that the country should take care of them for the rest of their lives. One called here last summer looking for work, but he was all crippled up and couldn’t stand anything. A few days ago he went through here again selling perfume or something. Neversaw one yet that could stick at anything. You see they’ve been idle for so long they’ll never settle down again to hard, steady work.”
Of one thing he was sure, however—the war must be won. “We’ve sent a lot of men, but we’ll send more,” he declared, swelling with pride of his determined patriotism. “We don’t want our children and our children’s children to have to live under the terror of a repetition of this.” What did he think of conscription? Conscription would be a fine thing. There were lots of young men who could be spared, but the government must see that men were not drafted from the farms; the farms were already undermanned. Incidentally, though he didn’t express it, with this provision conscription wouldn’t touch his own son. It was a strange, but not uncommon, line of human reasoning, and to the girl, pure and strong in contrast, a sentence in Billy’s last letter kept recurring: “One virtue stands out through the worst of it; however big a piece of blundering the whole thing may be, so far as the men are concerned the spirit of selfishness is entirely absent.” Perhaps it was true that the peaceful little country communities, confined in the shelter of their own hills, sometimes missed the vision of a world-wide public spirit.
And “there were lots of young men who could be spared,” the generous one had declared. She thought of the blue-eyed Scotch girl’s Andra, andthe young leader and favorite of his mates, who “would have made a Greek god look like a poor copy,” and who, for the rest of his life, would keep his face half covered with a black cloth; and she thought of Billy and everything else seemed to end there.
In her settlement work in town when a soldier wandered into the club, homesick on his way to the war, or broken in health returning, it might have been Billy, and she swept him into the warmth of her understanding sympathy almost as his mother might have done. When the doctor said “We might have another mother and baby clinic here every week, if you have time for it,” she thought of Billy’s mother and the baby who died, and she always had time for it. When the young people’s club met on Wednesday evenings and she found some serious-eyed, embarrassed boy isolated by his shyness or falling a prey to an unscrupulous little huntress, she thought of another chapter of Billy’s career, and she spared no trouble to align his interests with a real girl. Two years of such personal social service could scarcely fail to be heard of, and by the time the war was over her House and her methods were becoming rather famous. It was one of the city’s little recognitions that she should be a member of the delegation to meet Billy’s battalion at a formal reception, as it passed through on the way home for demobilization.
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.”
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.”
It was all a mistake, somehow, the reception. In his letters to Ruth, Billy had been the same unassuming young Canadian who could find an interest in working every night for a week on so common a thing as a water-wheel; he scarcely seemed a soldier at all. He wrote little of the war, and much about the country, repeating in a hundred ways between the lines his need of her. Now that he was here he was an officer, apparently an inch or two taller than ever—a very military-looking officer, much as he hated it—with women crowding around to pour tea for him, ushering their daughters along to meet him. His eyes were just as honest; he was altogether just as fine. The war had not changed him, but it had changed things for him. One couldn’t just imagine him shedding all the smartness of such a uniform and trappings to put on overalls and go to digging a living out of the earth.
“How the army makes them over,” Ruth overheard one old lady remark to another. “I fear the girls at home haven’t kept up to them. It will be fortunate for some of them if they made no entanglements before they went away.”
Billy was standing near when the mayor presented Ruth to the colonel, and he heard his eulogy of her work at the Settlement. To Billy himself the mayor observed:
“That girl has a career ahead of her. There’s been nothing like her work elsewhere on the continent. The city will need to watch her, for they’re wanting her in other places.”
“They would,” Billy agreed.
“I believe some fanatic has even had the nerve to suggest that she open some kind of similar centre in the country somewhere, and bury herself out there.”
They had just a minute together before the train left.
“It’s rotten having to go like this,” he said, too perfunctorily, she thought, as though he had said it many times before. “As soon as I can I’m coming back. It’s great, the work you’re doing. Do you like it very much?”
Very casual it seemed, very different from the high tension of his leave-taking, and she assured him with more enthusiasm than she felt that she did like it very much. And he went off like that without straightening things out. It wasn’t like him.
A week later he wrote to her:
“I’ve been up here in the hills for five days trying to think things out. I have to confess that your civic reception quite knocked me out to beginwith, and I’ve been struggling to see clearly ever since. It wasn’t the ceremony of it—I’ve become quite used to standing in line through all sorts of formalities. The whole trouble wasyou. I didn’t miss anything, from the shine of your hair to the tips of your velvet shoes, nor the thoroughbred poise and grace of you, and the same all-seeing kindness of your eyes, and you wore a dress that looked as though it might be wonderfully soft to touch. It would make everyone happier if the women had more of such things up here. I heard all the mayor said about you, about what he called “the future ahead of you,” and how some idiot had suggested that you give up your career in town to bury yourself in the country—and everything went blurry. I had even suggested that myself.
“And things didn’t look any better when the train dropped me right from the heart of the city on to the platform of the little flag station at Pinehill. The village houses huddled like so many white chickens close about the old grey cheese-factory; the sheds were bright with last year’s circus posters, the snow stretched in patches over the muddy fields, like so much linen from a broken clothes-line. There was none of the water-color landscape effect that we always associate with pastoral scenes when we are away from them. This, of course, was a mere accident of time and weather, but out on the farms thereis a real trouble. The farmsteads lack something of the well-groomedness of the days when their owners took a pride in them. The hedges are a bit shaggy; the gates sag here and there. One of the best farms is in the hands of a tenant who ‘loves not his land with love far-brought,’ and the owner of another lives on it for only two months a year and has no aspirations to fit it up for a permanent home. Pine Ridge, of which I have the honor to be the new owner, is the most dilapidated of all—a veritable scarecrow waiting to have the breath of life breathed into it. Still, I’ve come back to it like a homesick child, and I don’t believe the country ever fails those who trust her.
“I have at least been encouraged in that since I came here. Yesterday I called at the littlest house in the village to get an axe-handle. There’s a man there who takes a special pride in making them, smoothing them down at the last with his bare hands like a cabinet worker on mahogany. He is an old man, bent by years of husbandry, but I found him working at his craft with the joyful concentration that an artist puts into a masterpiece. His old wife, bent by years of housewifery and making babies comfortable in the crook of her arm while she worked, bustled about showing me the blooms of her geraniums, and the photographs of her grandchildren. They are, evidently, quite a creditable and promising line ofdescendants, especially one lad of twenty years who seems to have inherited the best brain of the family for generations back. His grandfather says the world will hear from him some day, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t. They are very happy, these old people. I think I know why. They have been a part of the simple, wonderful things that make life; they have made it a contribution that will go on long after their own lives have gone out, so it can never hold for them anything of purposelessness or boredom.