Ruth had always wanted to plan a house. She had always been planning them, theoretically, in her dream castles, and technically in her profession--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 pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude 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 the house 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses 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 being _my_ house. 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 a house, 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 gra.s.s. He was not a sentimentalist, but he brought a spade and turned the first earth for the foundation of the 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 the effort 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 the _need_ goes," he soliloquized, "I needn't have worried over bringing her here."

CHAPTER XVII.

"_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 cla.s.s, not even loitering before the bills of movie stars and jaded stock companies, but transacting his business with despatch, then driving down a shady street in 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, vital dramas 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 compa.s.sionate.

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 pa.s.senger coach from the railway, apparently a derelict for travelling purposes, stranded in the centre of a gra.s.s-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-scented parlor. Before she launched on such a story she liked to get her feet up a little on a ha.s.sock--she had been on them all day--her white ap.r.o.n well spread, and her st.u.r.dy 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 Inst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tutes'

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 inst.i.tute 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," how they 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.