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 ap.r.o.n, and she watched with interest while Billy extricated a coat, evidently his own, from the back seat of the car, and b.u.t.toned 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 d.i.c.kens read by the time he's sixteen."

"Where do you get them?" they inquired.

"The Inst.i.tute 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 village centre 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-cla.s.s 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 Inst.i.tute 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.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"_I stand where the cooling breeze from the hills Meets the draught from the furnace heat, And lonely eyes from the cabins far Trace 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 give Where 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 cla.s.s in agriculture up there two years ago, and I couldn't get any response at all. There was a little 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 cla.s.s of boys if I had hand-picked them. I believe Brown has a very live Bible cla.s.s 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 Northern Ontario 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 alarmed about 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 chattering in 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, so far as girls were concerned, had been rather circ.u.mscribed. 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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.