“I’ve heard a lot about what you’re doing. Perhaps you don’t know that even back here you’re rather famous. It’s a sort of glorified social service, isn’t it—running a community institute, bringing cultural advantages to those who have missed them, seeing that lonely young people have a good time, finding sweethearts for those who haven’t them? I wish someone would start something like that out here. Our need, I can tell you, is as desperate as any down-town settlement’s, with its abundance of people and playhouses, and gathering places of a dozen different kinds not two blocks away from anywhere. And that reminds me that when I dropped into the Agricultural Office the other day, the representative told me they were trying to persuade you to come out and open a four-square developing centre for the young people of this county—to carry out among the young people of the farmsthe same physical, intellectual, social and spiritual programme that has made such progress in town. And I couldn’t enthuse over it at all. I want someone to do it, of course. I think it’s the best movement that has ever been suggested for the country yet; but there are going to be a lot of ‘movements’ in the country during the next few years, and the thing they’ll need more than anything else is more people living here to help them along, to make them permanent, something more than a passing demonstration.
“I’ve been thinking what a glorious ‘four-square’ plan we could work out in our own little house up here. I’ve never heard of anyone trying the idea on a home, but that’s really where it should begin. Of course, it’s the easiest part to square up a house physically, if you know how to use tools, but every day I see houses along the road with constitutions absolutely broken down, and a family still struggling to keep a pulse of life within—weather-boards off, chimneys sagging, summer kitchens straggling off drunkenly at the back. Sometimes there is a solid, square, stone structure, ruggedly upright, but with signs of something wrong inside—windows frozen over like disease-dulled eyes, because there is no warmth within; the whole front presenting a forbidding countenance, when it could be made to smile invitingly by putting on a front porch, lifting the parlor blinds, adding a bay-window atthe side, where the sun could catch it. Our own little house will be small enough, dear knows, but it will be tight against the weather; it will have a stone chimney running up one side—a pillar without and an altar within—and because we don’t want to compromise with what we call our ‘standards of living,’ it will have waterworks before we think of any other luxury.
“In your little pamphlet on intellectual training, I see you have outlined a course of reading. I wonder how much time you get for reading now. Just when you’ve planned a quiet evening for yourself, do your friends ever call you out to a tea or a show or a bridge party? I can tell you, you have to come to the quiet of a place like this to really enjoy books. I think we even might be able to start a reading circle among our neighbors. I left some magazines with a neighbor’s wife the other day, and she quite embarrassed me with her gratitude.
“‘Do you know I haven’t seen a woman’s magazine since I was married,’ she said. ‘Joe’s the best man in the world’—what confidences have been prefaced by safeguards like this—‘but he isn’t much for luxuries, and he isn’t much company. He’ll sit for hours smoking or figuring and when he does talk it’s mostly the crops or the taxes. It isn’t his fault; he was like that when he used to come to see me. I’ve known him to sit for a whole evening without saying much more than to askif we’d noticed the cows failing since they went on the grass. You don’t notice that so much for an evening once or twice a week, but when you have to live with it day in and day out it’s terrible. The doctor says my nerves are bad and that I’ve got to go away for a change, but with three small children one can’t pick up and go away. Anyway, I wouldn’t leave Joe alone with no one to do for him. I’ll tell the doctor to prescribe some good reading and I’ll get my change at home.’
“But what a shame it is that you couldn’t have had a chance at four-squaring Joe when he was younger and more plastic. There are other boys here with the same need. Just now the church is getting up a concert to help ‘raise the stipend,’ and it is the custom to have a two or three act play, usually a comedy, which necessitates the entertainment being taken from the church to the Orange Hall. I wish you were here to help them create a pantomime from ‘The Hanging of the Crane.’ I want to go over it with you myself to see again just how wonderful some of the pictures are.
“I know about the social work you’re doing—keeping open house with a grate fire on snowy, dusky Sunday afternoons, and bringing lonely young people in for supper. We would have a grate fire here too, and we could find people just as lonely.
“Our neighbor down the road has a daughter, very bright, and actually suffering for young friends and a ‘good time.’ He won’t let her go to the dances in the Orange Hall, in which his judgment may be sound enough, only he doesn’t try to find a substitute for this diversion, and the neighborhood provides nothing else. Some miles in the other direction we have another neighbor, a young man just starting to farm for himself. Whether Angus goes to the hall or not, I don’t know, but if he does he must have some trouble supplying conversation in the intervals between dances. He gets on much better talking about Sir Walter Scott and politics and the habits of bees, ... If we could bring them home here some Sunday afternoon I don’t suppose they would speak ten words to each other, but he would take her home afterwards and a few nights later we would see a light in her parlor window, an entirely new occurrence, and considered quite an omen in the neighborhood.
“And how the neighbors here would welcome you. You would find the social life very different; but there’s something very genuine about it. They would not drop in for a formal call after they were sure you were completely settled. You would possibly find a woman climbing the hills in a snowstorm the first day after you arrived, bringing a jar of black currants and wanting to know if she couldn’t help you hook a mat orquilt a quilt. I think we could give our house a social squaring here that it might miss anywhere else.
“A few years ago I would have been frightened and embarrassed at the responsibility of trying to establish a spiritual corner in my house or in myself. The square idea makes it seem the most practical, natural thing in the world, and then there is some inspiration in seeing the lack of it. In the mountains skirting off from the farmlands here there is a settlement that is a little kingdom of heathenism such as one might find in a country where no churches exist. I am told that almost every county has such a nest somewhere within its boundaries and that it seldom appeals to anyone as a home mission field. The people just naturally run to wickedness and break every commandment shamelessly. This is one extreme. The other is not much less serious. In a lot of the ‘solid old farm homes’ there is a rigid dominance of a thing called religion which is not beautiful nor compassionate nor consistent. Children suffer under it and grow up to hate the name it stands for. Old Jonas Birchfield had a tractor cutting wood at his place last week, and his son, in some way, broke a delicate part of the engine. They worked at it until noon with the old man’s wrath growing hotter every minute. I dropped in with the mail just as they were sitting down to dinner and overheard Jonas shouting: ‘It justseems you’ve been sent to aggravate me. I’ve tried every way to teach ye and ye get stupider every year. I’ll be glad when the day comes that ye’re old enough to turn on the road, and I’ll never see yer cursed face again. Now after dinner ye can walk the six miles to town and get a new bolt—Bless, we pray Thee, Lord, a portion of this food, etc., etc.—Maybe that’ll get some of the gum out o’ your brain. And mark ye, ye don’t get to school another day till ye’ve cut enough wood with the axe to pay for the bolt, often enough to teach ye a lesson.’
“I suppose Jonas thought he was giving his family something of a Christian environment by repeating that blessing at every meal, regardless of the spirit pervading the house at the time. But they won’t know much about such promises as ‘Like as a father pitieth his children,’ will they? I don’t know much about it myself, but it would be wonderful to help keep other children from missing it. I’m glad you’ve made it so clear how the Christ way of living can be such a practical thing, even in a little farm house.
“Perhaps I should hesitate to even want you out here. There are a lot of ‘advantages’ in town, I suppose. I remember in our college days, we used to make a great deal of the cultural value of higher life, operas, travel, books and the like. Seems to me we were far too content to take our thrills at second hand. There are no operas here,but there’s an abundance of material to start a community theatre. I’m not an acting man myself, but a girl who has conducted a dramatic campaign in a down-town settlement could set a powerful leaven working. Anyway there’s a mine of unexplored dramatic interest up here. In lieu of the social tangles ravelled out in the shows, you can see how the Great Author planned the miracle of life with the creatures of the woods. There’s a red-crested bird just arrived with his mate from the South last week, and they seem to be in trouble. I went to sleep last night listening to him calling low in the bushes and she never answering. But I know it’s going to come out all right—there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, because there are only the two of them concerned. Nature doesn’t mix up in triangular affairs. If you could come out right away you might be in time for the last act. I whittled out a house from a piece of log last night and set it on the gatepost, and I think at the rate they’re getting on, they’ll be moving in about the day after this reaches you.
“To-morrow I want to commence work on the bungalow fireplace. It’s to be a great stone cavern with boulders broken from the side of our own hill and a heavy oak timber hewn from a log in our own woods. And on the edge of the mantel I want to whittle out the words, ‘Chop Your Own Wood and It Will Warm You Twice.’That much I’ve learned from experience—the glow that comes from earning a thing before you take it. You feel it when you build your own house, or plant your own trees and wait for them to grow, or when you work in some community move to help your neighbors—most of all I think in the last; there are so few of us out here and we need each other so badly. I can’t help thinking what a stupendous lot a girl with your experience and—and everything, could do for the place.
“We’re beginning to make plans for our spring operations, deciding whether to plant one hundred or two hundred acres of wheat, whether the price of corn is going to make it worth while to raise hogs. It’s as full of adventure as a gamble in stocks, the chance a farmer takes with blight and drought and flood and uncertain markets, but there’s always the promise of the year ahead, of seed-time and harvest, and the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that agriculture is one of the few industries the world couldn’t do without.
“But after all, important as it is to produce food for the world’s need, instinctively a man plans for other things. Early this morning I started up the mountain to get out some stone for the house foundation. The sun was just coming up, and when I stood for a few minutes, sort of at the top of the world, wondering at the distance and stillness and the unexplored beauty of it all, a bird, possibly a descendant of the one thatstartled me at my ploughing fifteen years ago, flew over my head, called a few times and flew away. And I wanted you. At night I came back to the house and the emptiness was awful, and things troubled me, but through the smoke of my pipe I could see you sitting there, with the fire making lights in your hair, and your eyes starry and thoughtful in the dusk, and I wanted to take your hands in mine and hold them out to the blaze,and I wanted to ask you what you thought about the things that worried me. That’s the worst of it with you women who have other interests—you would make such ripping companions for a man. There it is, you see—the man’s old primitive hunger for his mate and his home. It’s more urgent out here than in town. Suppose we had lots of money and went into an uptown house. I’d pay people to do things for you, and you’d direct them to do things for me, and a lot of the personal communication would be cut off. Out here, a man and a woman need each other more.
“So, very humble, but unashamed—if you get the difference—I’m coming down for you. Try to be waiting for me.”
His first, swift look told him she was waiting. There would be no more wondering and questions and misunderstandings.
“Just what was the trouble the other day?” he asked. “If you’re not sure in any way, we’ll get it cleared up now.”
And very frankly, with no vein of coquetry, she told him:
“I was afraid of you.”
This was incredible. Whatever feeling anyone might have had regarding him, he was sure no one had ever been afraid of him. And she, of all people! Why, the truth was, he was appallingly afraid of her, himself, only he would have called it by another name. It was the thing that made his touch fearful of crushing her feathers, that a poet would say “kept the soul of him kneeling” in her presence. Then the wonder of it dawned on him. Surely she didn’t care that way!
He hadn’t learned that there was no other way.
“God’s outposts are the little homes.”
“God’s outposts are the little homes.”
So much can happen between the kindling of fires in hearts and on the hearth of a new household. It is such a shy, questioning, never-to-be-repeated time, filled with the anxiety to understand, and the keener anxiety of holding the mirror to one’s own soul to better see its appalling unworthiness.
“The house must be ready by fall,” Billy said. “I’ll have the men at it in the morning.”
“But they’ll want boards and plans and stones, and lots of things,” his wife-to-be protested. “They’ll know you’re going to get married, and if they aren’t too sorry for you, I’m afraid they’ll laugh at you.”
“They can start digging the cellar, anyway. Surely they’ll have sense enough to know that any house has to have a cellar. Could—couldn’t we make some kind of plan to-night—something for them to begin on? From March to October is a long time to wait. It might make it seem a little nearer just to get it on paper.”
Ruth had always wanted to plan a house. She had always been planning them, theoretically, in her dream castles, and technically in herprofession—but there was something very different about this one.
“This is the one thing we’re sure of—the chimney,” Billy was saying, blocking it out awkwardly on the back of an envelope. “Now what do you want?”
“Why, really, nothing much at all,” she stammered. “I—I’m afraid this is a bad time to plan a house. It’s all so new—so wonderful, somehow—it seems it wouldn’t ever make any difference where we live.”
“You think that wouldn’t stand in the way so much after a while?”
“No, but—you remember all those houses you passed on the road? The ones with frost over the windows, and the kitchen straggling off at the back, and no porches? After all I’ve believed a house should be, it seems we could just move into any of those and the things that were wrong wouldn’t matter at all.”
And then she saw something in his eyes that even she had never discovered before—a look incredible with wonder and gratitude and tenderness, and a smile back of it like the warmth of a fire that would always be there to reach out to. It was the only way Billy had of saying certain things.
“But since Nature doesn’t make any concession to such a sentiment, lovely as it is,” he reminded her, “we might find pneumonia lurking in thehouse with frosty windows, and a worn-out shred of a woman, crying, in a heap at the foot of the straggling kitchen steps some day. We want our house—what is it you call it?—‘physically sound.’ ... We still have nothing but a chimney. Where do you want the living room, and all the other things I’ve heard you talk about? We can spread out all over the lot, you know. That’s the beauty of a home in the country; you don’t have to worry about the limitations of frontage or the proximity of your neighbors’ walls shutting out the light. Only, the two old pines will be here, and here. They’ll just naturally stand like pillars at each corner. They’ve been waiting for the house for a long time, and when the wind comes up at night I’ve heard them start with a low, cooing little shiver and work up to a perfect wail about it. I hope you won’t mind the noise they make. I think it’s about the knowingest sound I ever hear when I’m very lonely or very happy. I remember hearing someone say that it was like a lost soul crying, or something like that; but I imagine you’d like it. Why, I believe you first taught me to listen to it—the night we drove past the place after our ‘power demonstration.’ Do you remember?”
He remembered it now, very happily, himself, but events between had not quite blotted out other details of the time, and he added, shamedly,
“Heaven must have a special company of angels whose sole duty is to take care of fools.”
They weren’t making much progress with the plan. He had watched her draft house plans and remodel them for her classes, shifting rooms here and there with the ease and interest of a child playing with blocks. For some reason she seemed afraid of this one.
“We won’t want it very big,” she said.
“Because you’re fearful of the mortgage? But a farm house has to be built for permanence, you know. It generally stands for years and years. You don’t move out every first of May. That’s why it should be so much better planned than a town house—you have to look farther ahead.”
Then he took from his pocket a yellow, much-folded sketch copied from one of her blackboard drafts for the classes years ago—just after he had first become interested in houses.
“How would this do?” he asked.
She recognized it, happily.
“You liked that? I’m so glad. I believe I was drawing that house for you even then.”
“You knew—then?”
“No, no. I didn’t think of it ever beingmyhouse. I think I couldn’t have drawn it if I had. But I knew what a house would mean to you, and I was building it for you. It was the very best I could do. Why, I never could have thought of ahouse, with everything in it like that, if I hadn’t been planning it for someone, could I?”
He didn’t just get it all at once. She “knew how much a house would mean to him”—a house “with everything in it, like that.” Well he knew every detail of it, from the great stone fireplace in the living-room and the little bookcases under the windows—a thought for all the precious intimacies of family life—to the den looking out over the valley and the sun-porch for a baby. He considered them gravely now while she drew meaningless squares and circles about the chimney and the two pine trees on the back of the torn envelope. Then he took the distracting jumble away and gathered her close.
“That was too wonderful of you,” he said. “Shall we leave it just as it is?”
She nodded without looking up. Then she smiled into his eyes, the same old, comrady smile. After all he was just Billy—the same delightful directness, the same steady eyes, clear to the depths, the same unfailing dependableness, the same infinite understanding.
But he did a strange thing when he went home that night. It was long past midnight when his car climbed the hill and turned in at the road gate. The moon was high and the shadows of the pine trees lay like black pools on the grass. He was not a sentimentalist, but he brought a spade and turned the first earth for the foundation ofthe new house himself. Then he sat down on the fallen timbers of the old house and looked off across the country to where the ruins of another old house lay rotting in the marshes of the Swamp Farm.
It had been such a pitiful venture, the founding of that house. It wouldn’t have mattered that it had failed economically; many of the happiest families in the world had come through poverty together. But that there should be no trust, no confidence, no hope—nothing but a brooding fear where there should have been a fortress of refuge!
“We could not love the world so much if we had had no childhood in it,” he had read and questioned. He could still feel the warmth of the sun on his back as he sat for a brief half-hour on the bank of a creek, fishing; the coolness of the earth under his bare feet when he first shed his shoes in the spring. He remembered vividly the poignant elation at the discovery of a bush of ripe blackberries in a hidden fence corner. Yet his childhood was something which he would always be trying to forget. It came back to startle him in his dreams sometimes, even yet. It wasn’t fair—a person had only one childhood—but his mother had lived her whole married life in this atmosphere, and had gone out bravely trying to keep a stream of sunshine about the place for the rest of them, self-forgetful to the last.
Perhaps she didn’t know how prevailing theeffort would be—not by what she taught them, but by what she was. By the uncounted sacrifices she had made to give them a chance, their ways had been cast in safe and pleasant places. Here was a heaven on earth opening for him. Jean was happy and interested in a career of her own, and recently, just as happy when the county Agricultural Representative craved her interest in another direction. The mother who had made it all possible had done it single-handed, working desperately to construct a sailing craft for them out of the wreckage of her own life.
He wondered, dreamily, what it would mean to a boy to have a father who cared as much as that.
“Of course, everything will be as happy here as wanting-to can make it,” he reasoned. “It would need to be. We’re generally so stupid with the people we love. But it ought to go farther than that. Perhaps out here, where we have no settlement houses as centres of things that should exist for everyone, there may be a mission for a few more real homes.”
“Bury herself in the country, when the world needs her so much,” the mayor had said. “So far as theneedgoes,” he soliloquized, “I needn’t have worried over bringing her here.”
“A tribal mind came into existence. Man had entered upon the long and tortuous and difficult path toward a life for the common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he is still treading to-day.”—H. G. Wells in The Outline of History.
“A tribal mind came into existence. Man had entered upon the long and tortuous and difficult path toward a life for the common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he is still treading to-day.”—H. G. Wells in The Outline of History.
They gipsyed about through the country a lot that summer. The task of getting the neglected farm into bearing shape was a man-size job, and often, after a day in the fields, Billy worked until the last light faded, clearing away odds and ends to hasten the speed of the builders next day, especially building in the stone fireplace with his own hands—that was a joy he had always promised himself. But there were other days when he quit work early, took a plunge in the river at the foot of the pasture, dressed in outing clothes and motored into town.
On these occasions, a cartoonist in search of a subject for his next attack on farmers in politics would not have looked a second time at the sunbrowned young man with his swinging stride and crisp hair-cut. He seemed to break every established tradition of his class, not even loitering before the bills of movie stars and jaded stock companies, but transacting his business with despatch, then driving down a shady streetin the boulevarded residential section. He always stopped very quietly before a deep, dark stone house, took the steps with a bound, and rang with the shyness of a lover making his first call. He could never quite get over this. And a girl always met him just as quietly, with eyes just as eager to tell him she had been waiting for him. In spite of all that the actresses in the social game believed of the fascination of uncertainty, it held him like a lode-star, this constant declaration. He would have been as fearful of losing it by failing an iota of what she believed of him, as he would fear to lose the trust of a child by striking it down. It was easy to understand, now, why the fabric of family life held so safely sometimes.
Toward evening they usually left the city to follow winding roads through orchards and meadow lands. They were rich with many charms, these excursions—the faint, elusive scent from raspberry bloom and uncut clover, stirring in the night air; the occasional sleepy tinkle of a cow-bell, a lamb bleating back to the flock, or a mother calling her children in for the night; here and there a lamplighted house close to the road, blinds undrawn, showing the little group within; an old man and woman sitting in a seat they had built for themselves outside their little gate that they might not miss anything of the world going by them—the simple, vitaldramas of life flashing past with every mile of film of the open country.
The Agricultural Representative, observing Billy’s nomadic habits, tore out of the office after him one day and called him back.
“It seems to me, if you have so much time for running around, as no other decent farmer in the neighborhood has,” he remarked, “you might as well be running to some purpose. I have a lot of school plots to judge at odd points through the county. By driving a few miles out of your way each trip, you might be able to make the work interesting for yourself, and it would save the time of a man who really has something to do. I thought perhaps, if you were on your way to the city, you might call for Miss Macdonald and take her along. It would give her an opportunity to do some of the research work she’ll need when she comes out to help in the office here.”
And he grinned the wider when he saw that the suggestion stirred only a response of pity.
“Sorry you had counted on that,” the generous one replied. He felt that he could afford to be compassionate.
Their first judging trip took them to a neighborhood far back from the town. A group of three houses banked close to a railway siding, a post office, a blacksmith shop and a farm house marked the centre of the community, with well-tilled farms all about. The school was there,too, but something that was evidently an addition to the building arrested their attention.
But the thing didn’t look like a new building. Stranger still, it was set on wheels. On closer view, it was frankly and simply, a passenger coach from the railway, apparently a derelict for travelling purposes, stranded in the centre of a grass-grown school-yard, flying a flag, and docilely bearing the inscription “Nestleville School Annex—1921.”
They climbed up and looked in at the windows. There it was—seated, blackboarded along one side, a room equipped to take care of some forty children.
“Now, I wonder how this happened. For the sake of the research work you’re supposed to be doing, wouldn’t you like to drop in on Mrs. Terryberry and get her to tell you about it?” Billy suggested.
Mrs. Terryberry was delighted to tell them about it. A busy enough farmer’s wife, she could find time to drop her work for a chat at any hour of the day, and she could always catch up with the time she had lost before the day ended. A half-hour’s gossip revived her like a refreshing sleep, strangely enough, since she did all the talking herself. She met them at “the little gate” when they drove up the lane, ushered them into the house, in spite of their protests, and settled them and herself comfortably in her cool, herb-scentedparlor. Before she launched on such a story she liked to get her feet up a little on a hassock—she had been on them all day—her white apron well spread, and her sturdy arms lying comfortably across her generous waist-line.
“You see, we had needed a bigger school for years back and the trustees always said the section couldn’t afford one. Finally it got to the place where the little ones were to be allowed to come only half a day, and the children from back on the mountain, who needed schooling the most, were to be shut out altogether. It was then the Women’s Institute got into it. When this order came up we knew the thing couldn’t wait any longer, and we called a meeting about it. Someone thought of the old car that had been standing on the siding for years, waiting for the company to haul it away for firewood, and we got right up from the meeting and went across in a body and looked it over. Some of the seats were broken but the walls were solid as a church. We got the trustees out to look at it, and we sent two of them down to see the agent in the city—we didn’t go ourselves because we’re old-fashioned women up here, and we don’t believe in women running things. The company said we could have the car for nothing; so the institute made a bee—that is, we invited the men to it, and they brought their teams and hauled the car down to the school. The women fixed it up ready for the children to move into it.
“The next thing we wanted to do was to start a hot lunch for the children. Some of us had gone down to Toronto to the Institutes’ convention, and heard how the city schools had brought ill-nourished children up to strength by giving them hot cocoa at noon. Well, we came back home and we said to ourselves, if those children needed a drink of hot cocoa at noon, surely our children, that walked a mile or two miles to school through rain and snow, and carried a cold dinner with them—surely they would be the better for it too. We hadn’t any equipment like they had in the city—no domestic science kitchen with nice little gas plates and aluminum ware, but I lent my tea-kettle and Mrs. Applegath lent her dish-pan, and every child brought its own cup and spoon; the institute bought the sugar and cocoa and the parents sent the milk, and it all worked so well that this year we’ve bought dishes and a coal-oil stove with an oven, where they can bake potatoes and such. And if the children here aren’t as well nourished as the best they have in town, it won’t be our fault.”
She told them of other equally ambitious ventures—how the cemetery had been a real disgrace to the place until the women got at it, planned a stumping-bee to clear away the brush, inviting the men with their teams and giving them a good dinner “to make it sociable,” howthey had taken flower seeds and slips from their geraniums and planted flowers on every grave they could find, and how Jim Black and Huldy Adams, who hadn’t spoken since their fathers quarrelled over their rights to water their cattle at the creek that ran between their pastures, had gone home reconciled because Jim saw Huldy down on her knees planting a border of sweet alyssum around his father’s grave-stone.
She was loath to let them go. She had many other things to tell them. And when they finally did convince her of their necessity to be away, she followed them to the gate, her bare, capable arms rolled in her apron, and she watched with interest while Billy extricated a coat, evidently his own, from the back seat of the car, and buttoned the girl into it. Such attentions had long ago slipped out of her own life, nor did she particularly miss them; but she could enjoy their observance in the lives of others just as she enjoyed the weekly instalment of breath-taking romance in the local newspaper.
“Well now!” she breathed, when the rite had been performed, “I hope, Miss Macdonald, you’ll get a man that’ll always be as kind to you as that.”
“I hope so,” Ruth acknowledged, humbly.
“Oh, she will,” Billy hastened to put in, for some reason addressing himself quite as much to Ruth as to the other woman.
“Well, now!” the inquisitive one exclaimed again, her brow clearing. She had found out what she wanted to know. “I fancied so, I’m real glad to hear it. I think you’ll get on fine.”
She watched them out of sight—a curious, kindly gossipy soul, whose interest in other people gave a color to her own life and harmed no one.
They found others like her, bringing hope and happiness to their own little corner of the world in a way that a whole army of professional socialogists could never do it. Stopping to ask for a drink at a cabin at the end of a mountain road one day, they found the woman bending over a flat, heavy box that had just come in on the stage. She glowed with excitement.
“It’s our travelling library,” she explained. “This is the third one we’ve had, and it’s the best yet.”
Oblivious to the strangers for a minute, she fingered the worn volumes caressingly.
“Here’s Carman’s ‘Making of Personality,’ I hoped they’d send that. And, Oh, Sonny,” she called to a tow-headed, blue-overalled boy hovering shyly and eagerly in the doorway, “here’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby.’ He has just finished ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’,” she remarked casually. “He should have all of Dickens read by the time he’s sixteen.”
“Where do you get them?” they inquired.
“The Institute gets them from the government. They are always left here because this is on the stage road. Some of the women have to come five miles for their books, but we try to help each other by leaving them half way whenever we can. We trade them around like our mothers used to exchange their home-made yeast.”
Finally she came to, apologetically. She made tea for her guests and talked to them about books. The living-room of her shining little house opened to the out-of-doors at the front, and at the back, with tiny bedrooms at the sides, but it was a centre of refinement, from the clean scrubbed floor to the pictures on the walls. These, too, she had acquired when the women ordered a collection from an art catalogue to decorate the school. They had cost a few cents each, and her husband had whittled out little wooden frames for them. A special place of honor above the book-shelves, was given to the famous “Hope.”
“I had seen that picture often enough, years ago,” she remarked, “but I never knew what it meant till we came up here and the frost killed our crops three years in succession, while we still had faith in good years to come. The one unbroken string and the one star in the sky were very familiar to us for a long time.... We like that picture very much.”
Another evening, coasting along a quiet road some miles from town, a section without a villagecentre anywhere, they came to a little hall with automobiles parked around it, but no light in the window. Billy went to investigate and came back a bit dumbfounded.
“They’re having moving-pictures,” he reported. “Strictly high-class stuff. ‘Lorna Doone’ is the attraction to-night, and next week it’s to be ‘The Merchant of Venice’—a joint scheme of your ubiquitous Women’s Institute and a farmer’s club. If we would go a little farther back from town we might possibly drop in on a radiophone concert somewhere along the way. For your research observations, I would inform you that one object of the picture scheme here is to run a counter-attraction against the influence of a very depraved movie theatre in the next town. I imagine they’re getting somewhere, too. When I was coming out, a boy of about sixteen or so asked me if I knew where he could get the book ‘Lorna Doone.’ I wonder if he’ll want to start in on Shakespeare after next week.”
And with the old, recurring pain, he remembered how avidly another sixteen-year-old boy had devoured a collection of paper-backed novels left at the Swamp Farm by an itinerant hired man.
“I stand where the cooling breeze from the hillsMeets the draught from the furnace heat,And lonely eyes from the cabins farTrace the lights of the city street.“I hear the throb and the laugh of life,While violets bloom at my feet,For, oh, there is much to gain and to giveWhere the town and the country meet.”
“I stand where the cooling breeze from the hillsMeets the draught from the furnace heat,And lonely eyes from the cabins farTrace the lights of the city street.“I hear the throb and the laugh of life,While violets bloom at my feet,For, oh, there is much to gain and to giveWhere the town and the country meet.”
“I stand where the cooling breeze from the hillsMeets the draught from the furnace heat,And lonely eyes from the cabins farTrace the lights of the city street.
“I hear the throb and the laugh of life,While violets bloom at my feet,For, oh, there is much to gain and to giveWhere the town and the country meet.”
It was on a journey in another direction, one cool spring evening at sundown, that they met another surprise. Rounding a curve in a level, wooded road they met a party of some dozen boys dressed in the briefest of gym. suits and running shoes, trotting along with the easy poise of practised runners. They might have been a group of college athletes out training for their annual meet, but one would scarcely expect to find them twenty miles out from town. Meeting a native of the locality jogging along with a heavy farm horse and sulky, Billy stopped to ask if he knew where the boys came from.
“Oh, I know where they come from, all right”, was the grim response. “I know where they’re goin’, too, if this sort of thing keeps up. They’re boys raised within three miles of here, every one of them, though we never aimed to start a circus of our own till Sam Brown’s boy come home from college. Old enough to know better, too.”
“What did he do?”
“What did he do! Got it into his head that he was Longboat, apparently, and every night about dusk he’d come out half stripped, and he’d run around the block. He got away with it all right, too, till one night I was drivin’ through Dead Man’s Swamp and all at once this long, white shape of a man come lopin’ along. The horse gave one snort and bolted, and was all but away when he caught the bridle, ‘whoah’-in’ and ‘steady’-in’, and speakin’ as natural as if he was after the plough instead of leapin’ over the roads at night like a tame kangaroo. But I gave him a piece of my mind that I guess he won’t forget. I gave him fair warning that if I ever caught him at such pranks again, I’d see him in the asylum where he belonged. He acted ashamed enough about it at the time, but they say he still goes out just the same. I haven’t been down that way at night since. Worse still, he’s got all the younger fellows at it now, and the whole neighborhood’s got so callous to it that even the horses don’t shy at them no more.”
They called and asked the Representative about it on their way home.
“They’re young Brown’s Tuxis boys,” he told them. “The neighborhood has needed such a man for a long time. I tried to organize a class in agriculture up there two years ago, and I couldn’t get any response at all. There was alittle store and ‘stopping house,’ that was about the worst hang-out for boys that I have ever seen. In the winter a run-down, semi-professional hockey player came in on the pretext of coaching a team, and supplied about every undesirable influence that they hadn’t had up to that time. The boys from the farms around were getting in just about as deep as the village crowd. No person going in occasionally could hope to do much, but when Brown came home he went right after it, and the boys follow him like sheep. They asked for a course themselves this year, and I couldn’t have had a better class of boys if I had hand-picked them. I believe Brown has a very live Bible class composed largely of boys who used to spend most of their Sunday afternoons smoking behind the barn.... It just demonstrates the same old truth over again, that no good movement will ever get anywhere in a community, unless there are some people who care about it right on the ground. As we’ve agreed before, what the country needs is more people—of the right kind.”
“How about the city people who come out?” Billy inquired casually. He was brazenly proud of what he would do for his own community in this regard.
“Wonderful,” the Representative replied;“wonderful. They must sometimes find the people they have to live with very trying, though.”
“Which remark quite justifies the criticism I have heard of some Agricultural Representatives—that they have no sympathy with farm people. What were you going to say about your commuters?”
“One family I have in mind weren’t just commuters, though they weren’t actually year-round, out-and-out residents. A neighborhood loses something, of course, in the family that goes to town for the winter, but the point I want to make is that sometimes we get a certain breadth of view from experience in the city. This happened in Haven Hollow. Perhaps you don’t know the place, but to drive through and see it, with its green fields and blue sky, and a quiet broken only by sheep bells and birds and children’s voices, you would expect it to be the most safe and peaceful little cup of a world on the face of the earth. You would expect it to be filled to the brim with all the old, sterling virtues of honesty and neighborly love—and in all the outward signs and tokens it was, but the Hollow had a besetting sin of its own. It was distrustful and cruelly critical of anything it did not understand. The object of its criticism might be something new in the schools or the government or the very personal affairs of its neighbors. A typical case is reported of one woman who had knit socks for the Red Cross, and also sent boxes of clothing to the sufferers in the fires of NorthernOntario and Halifax. A few months afterwards, she explained to her friends that she had put a card with her name and address in the box that went to New Ontario and she had a nice letter back from there. She had forgotten to put her name in the box that went to Halifax, and she received no letter back from there. She supposed the Red Cross officials had gotten hold of her box and that the Halifax people never saw it at all.
“Things were going like this when the new family bought a strip of land on the river-front and built a summer home on it. They had seen the Hollow from a train window and thought it would be a nice, peaceful spot to retire to. They were very popular; they opened their house for all sorts of community gatherings and all went merry as a marriage bell till Poppy Andrews came home for a visit.
“Poppy had left the Hollow ten years before to study music—a very clever, level-headed girl, they say. A few years later she married a man who sang like a nightingale and kept his marriage vows like a beetle, and Poppy got a divorce. You can imagine the dust that would stir up in the Hollow. They took it as a public disgrace, and Poppy had been ostracized ever since. The new family took her in as they did everyone else; only the woman seemed to have a particular fondness for her. The rest of the Hollow was alarmedabout it, especially the woman who was always ready to shoulder the responsibility of going to people with painful gossip under the pretext ‘I thought you ought to know.’
“The interview, as I heard of it, was interesting. ‘Oh, yes, I know’ the woman interrupted before she had fairly started her story. ‘It was the only right thing for her to do, don’t you think? If she were your daughter, now, what would you want her to do?’
“‘But she wasn’t my daughter.’
“‘Nor mine, because unfortunately I never had a daughter, and we never know what we’d do in any experience until we find ourselves in a corner with that same experience offering us just one of two ways out. But I believe I understand something of what Poppy meant when she said: ‘You know it isn’t facts as they are that trouble me. I thought it all out before and I know it was right. And I can stand the eyes of the Hollow staring at me like a pack of ravening wolves. They have a right to look, and I can look back at them because I’ve nothing to hide. But you remember the picture of the Russian slave with the pack closing in on him? It wasn’t their smouldering yellow eyes, but their bright red tongues that were the cruelest’.... Strange such a thing should get into the child’s head, isn’t it?
“The woman still continues to be popular in the Hollow, and she has done more to create a community spirit by her breadth of view and generous, kindly judgments than all the little clubs and cliques the people had before she came.”
So it became their custom to go out and explore the surface signs of a neighborhood, and come back to have the Representative interpret them. It was in an old-settled, prosperous section, generally known as the Eden of the county, that they discovered a sinister lack of something beneath the well-ordered beauty of the farmlands. The fields bloomed with a heavy tangle of clover, because they were rich from years of good farming. The stone fences were monuments to the industry of the pioneers. Long avenues of maples, set out half a century ago, led back from the road gates to big brick houses, and lilac bushes that a grandmother had planted grew rather too thick and high at the cellar windows. Skimming over the smooth stone roads at the hour of sundown, they marvelled at the stillness, the order, the substantial, weatherworn dignity of the old farmsteads. Prosperity brooded over the land, if not like a benediction, like an absolution from any concern for the future. But there were no barefoot children rioting over the lawns, no little, new houses of the kind people build when they are “starting,” no crowds of young people chatteringin the lobbies of the churches, nothing primitive or youthful—but the lack of them seemed like a danger signal, somehow. Birchfield, unknown to itself, might be on the verge of an era of decadence.
They asked the Representative about it.
“Birchfield,” he said, “is not different from many another neighborhood that lives in its past. I know its story best through Peter Summers, for the community in general, as you can imagine, does not feel the need of either service or interference from the agricultural office. I’ve always liked Peter tremendously, though. The community may be like others of its kind, but Peter, even if he has lived there all his life, is different. I suppose anyone who has much in the way of character, either good or bad, is ‘different’ to those who know them. Peter lived on one of the oldest, finest farms in the section—an only son. It would all be his as soon as he was ready to take it over. Every plan his father made for the future of the estate, he would preface with the statement ‘When Peter gets married,’ as naturally as if he said ‘When the wheat comes into head’; but that was as far as it ever went. I suppose Peter had known it was spring as often as any other young man of his age, but if he did he kept it to himself.
“There was really no one to whom he could be expected to tell it. Peter’s social experience, sofar as girls were concerned, had been rather circumscribed. The young women he knew were just the grown-up little girls who had gone to school with him. He had seen them regularly ever since, at church and at every neighborhood gathering. In fact they had been in his sight so constantly that he never had a respite to see that they were grown up. Other young men had noticed it, and many of the same girls had married and left Birchfield without causing his pulses to quicken or retard for a second. He had a whole colony of cousins up country, and another branch of the connection in town. He met them all at family reunions and anniversaries, but they were—well, cousins.
“Of course, Peter hadn’t lived a starved young life. To begin with, there was the beautiful old brick house and his mother. Mrs. Summers is the gentle domesticated, motherly type of woman who looks first and always to the ways of her household and the comfort of her men folk. With her white hair, and low voice and lavender-flowered afternoon dresses, she would just naturally lull a man into contented ways about the house. And in order that Peter might have girl’s society at home, or to encourage his interests in that direction she used to invite the nicest girls she knew in to tea, but they were all old friends, the cousins and the neighbors, who seemed even more like cousins.
“Personally, Peter didn’t suffer. He had other hobbies. In his big front room upstairs he had a bookcase filled with the best standard books, from Shakespeare down, and he was familiar with all of them. Also he had a violin. He seldom brought it down to the family living-room but alone in his sanctum upstairs it was like a living companion. On summer evenings, when the windows were open, the neighbors would sit on their verandas and listen for Peter’s violin. It seldom disappointed them. And whether the violin was in any way responsible or not, Peter had another accomplishment which few people ever suspected—he was a finished dancer. He hadn’t studied it at all. Once, in his most impressionable years, he had attended a dance after a barn-raising, and he had taken to it like a puppy to the water.
“A few times afterwards he had been invited to dancing parties in homes in the neighborhood, and while he was dancing he enjoyed them, but when that stopped he was at sea. There were the interludes to be spent in cosy corners and on stair steps, when he felt as much out of his element as a buffalo at a pony show. Small talk was an accomplishment of which he knew nothing and which held a kind of terror for him—and these very informal gatherings seemed to demand an appalling amount of it.
“Every winter Peter spent a week or two withthe cousins in town. He knew as much of city ways as any other wide-awake young man who lives on a farm within easy travelling distance, and he had the same amazing faculty for getting the most out of these flying trips. He knew just what plays were showing in the theatres—the daily papers reach neighborhoods far more obscure than Birchfield—and he knew pretty well which plays were most worth seeing. He knew when Mischa Elman would be in town and timed his visits accordingly. He knew what churches he wanted to visit—a review of the sermons was one of the treats he took home to his father and mother. And he knew that he wanted to have one night’s unbroken enjoyment with the best orchestra in the best dance-hall in the city. His cousins never failed him in this. They were girls who never frequented a dance-hall on any other occasion, but Peter’s enthusiasm, and his dancing were irresistible. These annual dissipations kept him in touch with the art, as it were. With the passing seasons when Fashion ‘hesitated’ or one-stepped or fox-trotted, Peter did it too, for one night, then came home and dropped it absolutely for the rest of the year.
“Besides his violin and his library, Peter had a very businesslike looking desk in his room. He was secretary of about every agricultural organization in the district—fairs and such like. Thatwhich occupied more of his time, however, was a pile of hand-drawn maps of the neighborhood with a line dotted in to show where an electric power-line might come through if a sufficient number of farmers could be persuaded to co-operate toward that end. After every meeting of possible supporters he would come home and shift the line a little, somewhat as a general, hard pressed, shifts his line of defence. He used to drop into the office, worried to death about it. ‘There’s something wrong with Birchfield,’ he would storm. ‘We’re too satisfied with ourselves. If something isn’t done soon we won’t have enough people left to care whether it goes off the map or not. The radial and power line would bring new life—people who have something left to work for, and their effort might stir up the whole place.’
“One evening this spring he drove into the town to attend a meeting of the power-line committee. He opened up the council chamber, lifted the windows to let in some clean air and waited. No one else came. No doubt he was finding the whole thing very discouraging; anyway when it was too late to expect anyone else he decided to go home, and I suppose when he was putting down the windows he caught the sound of the orchestra in the dance-hall across the street. He had heard it often enough before, of course, and had paid no more attention to it than if it had been a hand organ on the corner. This night,with the defiance that has led disappointed men into more serious dissipations, he walked across the street in the face of whoever cared to look, and disappeared up the dirty stairs.
“The Birchfield dance-hall was really not so very bad, as such places go; the town fathers would have cleared it out if they could have found a case against it. There was nothing lax in the morals of Birchfield as a municipality. If it had any indirect, insidious influence, that, of course, was out of their province. As individuals they did what they could to discourage it. The better people wouldn’t let their daughters go, nor their sons if they could help it, but of course a lot of the boys drifted in. There was nothing else to do. The hall was well patronized by the factory girls from the lower part of the town—it would be no worse for that. They were mostly good-hearted, hard-working girls; this was the best the town had to offer them in the way of a good time, and they made the most of it—only there was an over-sophisticated, imported forelady in town at the time, and it happened that most of the evening she danced with Peter.
“There is a library in Birchfield not a hundred yards from the dance-hall, but it’s safe to say that ninety per cent. of the people who attended the dances didn’t know what the inside of the library looked like. It’s amazing how many different cliques, castes, or strata can flourish in asmall town without ever rubbing shoulders with each other; how many institutions can exist and never touch the lives of half the people! And the girl who was librarian had perhaps never spoken to the girls who worked in the factory. It wasn’t her fault. Dorothy Walton is neither a snob nor a high brow; but the social customs of Birchfield were so hedged about by habits of longstanding that there was no common meeting ground for those who happened to be once cast into separate grooves. It made life rather narrow for all of them, and Miss Walton was planning to leave Birchfield.
“Driving his car into town one evening Peter overtook her on the country road and gave her a ride. She told him that she had been helping to revise the library in the school on the corner of his farm, and he wasn’t interested. He says he remembered his own school days and pitied the poor little beggars who had to depend on any school library for their reading. In fact he had seen Miss Walton many times before and hadn’t been at all interested in what she was doing. He supposed a librarian was a person who kept the books straight on the shelves. And she wasn’t at all interested in him. She didn’t know about his books at home, or his violin or the power-line. She only knew that he was a young man of good family, who was becoming notoriously popularat the dance-hall. That was where he went when he left her.
“And all the time Peter’s mother talked of ‘When Peter gets married.’ And Peter went on dancing with the commonest kind of a dance-hall girl. Of course his mother wouldn’t have needed to worry over the possibility of his bringing home a bride of this type. If he had been ten years younger she might have been dangerous. The danger for Peter now was that he might develop into the gay old dog searching around for amusement anywhere, compromising with all the standards that had made him a man any woman might like. The Birchfield dances had not fascinated him—he had gone to them because there was nothing else to do. He was a student and a dreamer; he was also human. There had been no one to share his dreams, but he had found what seemed to be an outlet for his humanness.
“Two weeks ago an unprecedented thing happened in Birchfield—not in the village, but among the farms in the Summers’ neighborhood. Some woman conceived the startling idea that the people were not getting together enough—not just for the future of the power-line, but for the good of their souls. They were also missing a great deal by not being acquainted with the people in neighboring communities. The village hadn’t proved a desirable centre; so they would create a centre of their own in their own neighborhood,and make it of such a character that the best people of the village would come to them. They invited the people from neighboring communities all over the township; they asked Peter to come and state the case for the power-line; and they had Miss Walton there to talk about libraries. I was at the meeting myself and when the girl got up to speak I was heartily sorry for her. It was plain that she was frightened; she was not used to talking to crowds of people older than the children who came to her story hour at the library. It seems Peter noticed this too, and set himself to help her. I suppose he began with the idea that if giving her his undivided attention would be of any use he would see her through. She saw him and it did help. The next minute she had forgotten him—she was lost in her story; she loved books with a human affection and she was carried away with them, as any lover loses himself in the thing he loves. And there sat poor old Peter, staring. I suppose he had never dreamed that anyone else, at least any girl, ever thought of things that way. When everyone else applauded, he still sat, staring. And he had lived five miles from this girl all his life, and had known her—as a librarian.
“The rest of the night’s programme was a bigger surprise to Birchfield. The furniture was pushed to the walls and an old character who cuts wood for the farmers by day and fiddles fordances at night was tuning his violin—and Peter had the shock of his young life when he saw his own stately father and his rather portly, dignified mother lead out a set at the lancers. It was largely an old-people’s dance, and they laughed a lot, and panted a lot over it; but there was no doubt they enjoyed it. Afterwards they went off in little groups by themselves, and looked on pityingly at their young folks’ degeneracy into fox-trotting.
“There were a lot of young people from the country around who hadn’t learned to dance—the town dance hall was the only available dancing school and naturally they weren’t encouraged to go there. When the farming community started a dance of its own it was inevitable that there should be a lot of boys and girls standing around the walls, watching. So the chairwoman of the evening cut into things, pushed the dancers off to one half of the floor, and had a row of benches strung across to keep them there, then made the announcement that Miss Walton would give the others a lesson on the fox-trot. I looked about for Peter just then, and found him standing against the wall, still staring. If the girl had been embarrassed on the platform she was perfectly at home here. It seems she teaches dancing to a kindergarten class at the library on Saturday afternoons. She strung her class out in a circle and spent some time drilling themin the step of it; then, encouraging as a mother bird flying ahead, watchful as a drill sergeant, she led them swinging around the room, counting ‘one and two and three and fo-ur and two-step in and two-step out,’ like a professional dancing teacher. Properly or not, she had them all fox-trotting in ten minutes. Then she told them to try it together and when she went to demonstrate this Peter was there. As far as I can learn he hasn’t been far away ever since.
“This happened just two weeks ago. Driving through, you don’t see the effect on the neighborhood yet—but it’s already visible enough in Peter. He’s going after the power-line now in a way that can’t fail to bring it within the next year, and the Summers won’t have to sell the old homestead—a calamity that they were beginning to fear themselves. There will be many other cases that we don’t hear about, and all because several communities, including a town, pooled their social interests.”
“Rather heavy stuff, all this community investigation,” Billy remarked as they drove away. “I started out with the idea of impressing you with the freedom and restfulness of country life, and we’ve found nothing but responsibility. It would seem that every socially minded person going to the country should go with the spirit of a foreign missionary.”
“They’d be dreadful nuisances if they did,though. All the worth-while things seem to have just grown out of someone’s wanting other people to be happy. You don’t go after it like a profession. You don’t try to see the whole world at once—just your own little corner. First, your own family—you want them to be happy because you like them; then your own neighbors—you want them to be happy because you know them. It works out wonderfully in a natural little way of its own, too. When you’re very happy you want everyone else to have the same things that make you happy. That’s why it’s the best first investment a woman can make for the world to keep the fires warm in her own house. You can’t imagine a family quarrelling among themselves and wanting to take in a tramp, can you?”
“And I suppose a family self-centred is almost as bad as an individual self-centred. But next week let’s let our friend judge his own plots while we do some of this linking up with city advantages which he says is so important to a broadened outlook. Let’s see ‘Dear Brutus.’ After all this researching into the whereforeness of failures in a community we ought to be prepared for the theme. How is it it goes? ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’ Sounds like some more sermonizing, but if it is it will be fairly subtle.”
“One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-class staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other hand, one may know marriage as Kipling’s Mowgli knew the forest, because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy ground.”—Dr. Richard Cabot, in “What Men Live By.”
“One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-class staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other hand, one may know marriage as Kipling’s Mowgli knew the forest, because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy ground.”—Dr. Richard Cabot, in “What Men Live By.”
With “Dear Brutus” there was the usual surprised delight when the curtain rose, at the birds and sunshine in the English garden, the piquant fascination of the dwarf magician, then the unfolding of the tragedy of the failure-lives begging a second chance, and the whimsical fairy tale of the enchanted garden—the land of “Might Have Been.”
Billy was accustomed to the impulsive touch of a hand on his sleeve, at the high spots in plays, not a nervous, bothersome little hand, but a warm electric contact as quickly withdrawn while the girl kept her eyes fast on the stage. Sometimes he lost the effect of half the best acting in his amusement at watching her, like a child actually living for the moment in the drama going on before her. He was accustomed also to the tears that welled up at emotional parts, tears usuallywith a smile shining through them. But he was not prepared for the deluge that swept her when the impenetrable darkness came down over the enchanted garden and the little dream daughter, who might have set things right for the misunderstood artist, cried in the hopelessness of a child’s terrified loneliness “I don’t want to be a ‘Might Have Been.’”
He had seen her weep in poetic enjoyment of pathetic parts before, but this was different and offered no explanation for itself. Sitting as close as the arm of the chair and the formality due in a public place would allow, he got the impact of each fresh shock. He was genuinely concerned. It was a most helpless situation. There were ways of meeting it, of course, which he knew—but not in a public theatre.... If only the lights would go out! Still it troubled him a little. And when it was over her sole comment was “Wasn’t it wonderful!”
“You liked it!”
“It was the most beautiful thing—”
“Even the garden? Just what was the trouble?”
“I hardly know myself. Sometime I’ll try to tell you.”
There would always be something left to tell—a new world dawning every morning, new mysteries unfolding every evening—a wonderful blessing on a long journey together.
When he left her he stood bareheaded, boyish in his humility, and spoke, as thousands of lovers had done before him, of the time when she would go all the way home with him.
It came in October. The painters had fairly crowded the carpenters out of the house, and before the last varnish was dry on the woodwork Billy had cleared away the wreckage of mortar, boxes and discarded scaffolds and left the house standing trim and solid between the sentinel pines, unmistakably new, but looking as though it had grown there. The next day Ruth’s aunt, accompanied by a capable charwoman and a truck load of boxes, known in the housewife’s vernacular as chests, decorously chaperoned her niece to her future home to arrange furniture and hang curtains and give the last touches toward making it sufficiently habitable to begin with. The aunt wasn’t just sure that it was the proper thing for a girl to visit her fiancee’s house before she was married. She didn’t know that Ruth had rope-walked the naked joists in the moonlight with Billy many times while the building was in progress; that they had measured the windows for curtains by the gleam of a flashlight a month before, else how could they have planned every last chair and hanging. The next night they came home to the house together.
The girl had protested at the idea of a weddingtrip. “We both like that hill farm better than anywhere else in the world,” she said. “Why should we go racing off to some place we don’t care about?”
“And defy an old custom like that?” he argued; but he knew that she knew how much he had wanted exactly that.
So they had gone to the church in the afternoon and had come back to a reception at the aunt’s afterwards—a very nice affair with the luxurious old rooms candle-lighted and hung with autumn leaves. And their best friends had come to wish them well, with all the noise and chatter common to such occasions, even among very well bred people; and as soon as they could, they kissed the aunt and slipped away, getting a last glimpse of Jean and the Agricultural Representative, apparently completely lost in some panorama unfolding itself before them in the open fire.
The car swung out of the city streets on to the smooth, winding country road, a familiar road, but somehow different. At the crest of the hill they stopped and looked back at the city glittering in a cup below them.
“Sure you’re not sorry you’re leaving it?” Billy asked.
“Quite sure. But it isn’t the city’s fault. It isn’t a natural place to live; but it has a lot to give in other ways.”
“Things we must try to keep in touch with.”
“Only there are times when neither city nor country, nor anything else, matters. It’s only people that count—”
But Billy was very appreciative and that sentence was never quite finished.
They were miles from the lights of the city now. A long stretch of road through woods and pastures, a white frost glittering on the fields and fences, a golden moonlight filtering through the branches of wind-swept trees and yellowing the dead leaves on the moist, black roadway, a cold white mist lying in the valley and never a sound but the steady purring of the engine. Presently a little cabin stood out alone in a clearing, its lights out, a faint white plume of smoke arising slowly from its chimney.
“Always seems a sort of lonely little house,” Billy remarked. “It must be a jolt to come out of the heart of a city to a spot like this. The compensation, of course, is that people have to love each other harder—sometimes there isn’t much else. When they don’t, the result is terrible.”
It was late when they turned in at their own gate. Earlier in the evening a neighbor had come in and lighted the fire and gone away again; the red light glowed warmly in the living-room windows. They went in together. It was the same room where they had hung curtains and adjusted furniture the day before, the same room Billyhad looked back upon happily before he left the house that afternoon, but it seemed to have come alive, somehow. The firelight played over the brown walls, the rich red and brown and gold bindings of the books, the warm autumn tints in the curtains.... A new, strange shyness held them. She slipped out of her coat and he took it from her with his best drawing-room adeptness; she waited while he found a place for it. Then they turned their attention to the fire—there was always something that might be done to a fire.
But standing there in the fresh warmth of the blazing logs, with Billy’s eyes upon her, serious and friendly, she realized suddenly how appealingly boyish he was in his anxiety to make her feel at home. And just as suddenly it dawned on Billy that she was, after all, just a wisp of a girl, such a rare, whimsical, comrady bit of a girl, who had staked everything so sportingly to come with him. And his arm went about her with the quick, reassuring pressure of a guide to be trusted.
“We’re going to be awfully happy here,” he said, just as though he hadn’t said it a thousand times before.
And the girl pressed closer to the good, rough sleeve of his coat and let it go at that.
The lights went out in the little house. The smoke still rose from the chimney like incense from an altar. Somewhere in the distance an owlhooted, a far off lonely cry—one of the calls of the wild places which seldom fails to stir the human soul with kindred desolation, or a throb of security in the nearness of its mate. And the old pines dozed in dreamy retrospection. They had watched other lovers come and go. They were at the happy beginning of a new story.