"How the army makes them over," Ruth overheard one old lady remark to another. "I fear the girls at home haven't kept up to them. It will be fortunate for some of them if they made no entanglements before they went away."

Billy was standing near when the mayor presented Ruth to the colonel, and he heard his eulogy of her work at the Settlement. To Billy himself the mayor observed:

"That girl has a career ahead of her. There's been nothing like her work elsewhere on the continent. The city will need to watch her, for they're wanting her in other places."

"They would," Billy agreed.

"I believe some fanatic has even had the nerve to suggest that she open some kind of similar centre in the country somewhere, and bury herself out there."

They had just a minute together before the train left.

"It's rotten having to go like this," he said, too perfunctorily, she thought, as though he had said it many times before. "As soon as I can I'm coming back. It's great, the work you're doing. Do you like it very much?"

Very casual it seemed, very different from the high tension of his leave-taking, and she a.s.sured him with more enthusiasm than she felt that she did like it very much. And he went off like that without straightening things out. It wasn't like him.

A week later he wrote to her:

"I've been up here in the hills for five days trying to think things out. I have to confess that your civic reception quite knocked me out to begin with, and I've been struggling to see clearly ever since.

It wasn't the ceremony of it--I've become quite used to standing in line through all sorts of formalities. The whole trouble was _you_.

I didn't miss anything, from the shine of your hair to the tips of your velvet shoes, nor the thoroughbred poise and grace of you, and the same all-seeing kindness of your eyes, and you wore a dress that looked as though it might be wonderfully soft to touch. It would make everyone happier if the women had more of such things up here.

I heard all the mayor said about you, about what he called "the future ahead of you," and how some idiot had suggested that you give up your career in town to bury yourself in the country--and everything went blurry. I had even suggested that myself.

"And things didn't look any better when the train dropped me right from the heart of the city on to the platform of the little flag station at Pinehill. The village houses huddled like so many white chickens close about the old grey cheese-factory; the sheds were bright with last year's circus posters, the snow stretched in patches over the muddy fields, like so much linen from a broken clothes-line.

There was none of the water-color landscape effect that we always a.s.sociate with pastoral scenes when we are away from them. This, of course, was a mere accident of time and weather, but out on the farms there is a real trouble. The farmsteads lack something of the well-groomedness of the days when their owners took a pride in them.

The hedges are a bit s.h.a.ggy; the gates sag here and there. One of the best farms is in the hands of a tenant who 'loves not his land with love far-brought,' and the owner of another lives on it for only two months a year and has no aspirations to fit it up for a permanent home. Pine Ridge, of which I have the honor to be the new owner, is the most dilapidated of all--a veritable scarecrow waiting to have the breath of life breathed into it. Still, I've come back to it like a homesick child, and I don't believe the country ever fails those who trust her.

"I have at least been encouraged in that since I came here. Yesterday I called at the littlest house in the village to get an axe-handle.

There's a man there who takes a special pride in making them, smoothing them down at the last with his bare hands like a cabinet worker on mahogany. He is an old man, bent by years of husbandry, but I found him working at his craft with the joyful concentration that an artist puts into a masterpiece. His old wife, bent by years of housewifery and making babies comfortable in the crook of her arm while she worked, bustled about showing me the blooms of her geraniums, and the photographs of her grandchildren. They are, evidently, quite a creditable and promising line of descendants, especially one lad of twenty years who seems to have inherited the best brain of the family for generations back. His grandfather says the world will hear from him some day, and I don't know why it shouldn't. They are very happy, these old people. I think I know why.

They have been a part of the simple, wonderful things that make life; they have made it a contribution that will go on long after their own lives have gone out, so it can never hold for them anything of purposelessness or boredom.

"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 inst.i.tute, 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 farms the 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 pa.s.sing 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 const.i.tutions 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 at the 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 embarra.s.sed me with her grat.i.tude.

"'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 ask if we'd noticed the cows failing since they went on the gra.s.s. 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 subst.i.tute 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 or quilt 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 embarra.s.sed 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 compa.s.sionate 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 just seems 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 that startled 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.

CHAPTER XVI.

"_G.o.d'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."