"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 the farm, 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 to know," 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 a.s.set 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 would feel 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 slopes on 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.r 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 end kind 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 to take care of himself. I'm glad now that you have so much of interest in your career."

CHAPTER XIV.

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 ran the 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. The whole 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 had given 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 never _saw_ Andra. I'm sure he's coming back--somehow you couldn'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 never _saw_ Andra. 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 would be 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 G.o.d 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 embarra.s.sed 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't _get_ it 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 G.o.d 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 he would 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 pa.s.sed."

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. Never saw 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 repet.i.tion 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, and the young leader and favorite of his mates, who "would have made a Greek G.o.d 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, embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed through on the way home for demobilization.

CHAPTER XV.

"_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 una.s.suming 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.