CHAPTER IX.

Very often, in planning his trips to examine the children's school gardens, Billy arranged an itinerary touching the neighborhood of the Evison home, and took Marjorie with him. Very gay little picnics they had. A bank of violets or a nest of young robins never failed to move the girl to ecstasies. They generally stripped the bank of its flowers and she carried them away, withering, laced through her hair and knotted about her dress; and it took a great deal of moral support to keep her from taking the young robins out in her hand to feel the softness of their feathers.

"That's the way I love things," she pouted when Billy had warned her of the subsequent fate of the birds if she touched them. "If I want a thing I _want_ it. Life must be very easy for you cool, slow-feeling people who can sort of stop and calculate before you know whether you really care about a thing or not."

If the picnicking did claim undue importance and time in the garden examining, it did not save her from getting a few glimpses of the sterner phases of country life. In the middle of one hot July afternoon they drove up to a farm home and found the woman bringing in lines and lines of fresh-smelling clothes. She had done the washing herself that morning and judging from the shine and order of her kitchen she had done several other things besides. She wasn't dressed in any regulation afternoon costume; her gingham dress was turned in low at the neck and the sleeves rolled back at the elbows.

A few little damp tendrils of hair cropped out from under her sun hat. She was thin and tanned and a little tired looking, but something about her gave a wholesome impression of health, happiness and usefulness. A perfect little Sandow of a boy a year or so old slept on the porch in a crib canopied over with mosquito netting, and two others in blue overalls hung shyly in the background.

Marjorie was surprised at the dignified kindness of the woman's greeting. She wasn't at all embarra.s.sed to be found taking in her washing, but she put her basket down and gave her attention entirely to her visitors.

"I'll take Miss Evison in where it's cooler," she said to Billy, "and when the boys have taken you over their garden they have something to show you in the house."

The feature of interest in the house was a big velvety cyclopia moth, clinging sleepily to the curtain--one of the rarest of Nature's beautiful creations.

"Their father found the coc.o.o.n on a peach tree," the mother explained, "and we have all been watching it ever since. They're learning a lot from their gardens and chickens and explorations of the fields, that will give them a clearer view of things when the time comes for them to need it. Never a day goes now but I thank G.o.d that I am allowed to have my boys grow up on a farm."

"I didn't expect to find her like that," Marjorie remarked when they left her, "so perfectly at ease and so sure of herself. She isn't the average type of farm woman is she?"

"There isn't any average type of farm woman," Billy exclaimed. "They have the most individuality, are the least run in a conventional mould, of any cla.s.s of women I know. This Mrs. Burns was a trained nurse before she was married. There are a dozen others just as fine and capable scattered through the neighborhood. The community doesn't know much about them because they're so everlastingly busy they can't get away from home much."

"Can't they get help, or don't they want to spend the money?"

"Some of them could afford help, but you can't get a girl to work in the country. The city offers them good wages, and most of them have an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience of a farm house from a woman's standpoint. Naturally a girl prefers to work in a house where the water comes hot or cold from a faucet in an enamel sink, instead of where it has to be carried from a pump in the yard, where the washing is done with a power machine or sent to the laundry instead of being scrubbed out on a little zinc washboard, and a hundred other details that make the farm undesirable for a city girl."

"And the lonesomeness of it! A girl who had lived in town would find it maddening."

"But women like Mrs. Burns don't find it lonely. They have grown up with country ideas, and they have a great deal in themselves--they can make their own entertainment; then they have a live interest in their homes and families, and the men in this community are generally a pretty fine lot."

"Then why don't they make things different for their wives?"

"Naturally that's the first question a person would ask. Some of them don't seem to care much, I'll admit. A lot of them, though, are ambitious to have the very best things for their homes, but there are two hard rocks in the way. In the first place most farms don't pay well enough to install big improvements and not many farmers know how to put in a low-cost equipment. Practically every farm that pays its way at all could afford the essential conveniences, and with labor as it is now, it looks as though power of some kind would soon become an economic necessity. Then, we may see lots of improvements. There's enough water-power going to waste in this country to supply every farm with electricity, but I guess we farmers will always have to fight the sin of conservatism."

Marjorie settled back in her corner of the seat. She was ready to drop the subject for something more interesting.

"And yet," she said, laughing at him through half closed eyes, "you want to be a farmer. Your poor wife!"

Billy looked hard at the road ahead. "It wouldn't be a very alluring prospect, would it?" he agreed.

For several nights after this the light burned late in the Agricultural Office, and curious sentinels of neighborhood affairs speculated on reasons for the strange behaviour of "the agricultural fellow" during the day. On several occasions he had been seen patrolling the creeks which wound like threads of a spider's web through the hollows of the rolling land. He always carried an armful of boards and a saw and appeared to be measuring the width of the streams.

"Mebby surveyin' for an irrigatin' system," one of the village store roosters suggested.

When Billy had satisfied himself as to the resources at hand, and his search for technical data had about exhausted the patience of the engineers within reach, he succeeded in getting some twenty farmers to meet in the agricultural office one evening to discuss harnessing and putting to work the water-power in the district. He pointed out how the sight of a dozen young horses running wild in his pastures would impress the average farmer as an awful example of horse-power going to waste, how he would spend a good deal of time and effort and money if necessary to capture a horse-power or two for his own use; while there may be five, ten or twenty horse-power running to waste in the brook that waters his meadows, but he is not inspired with any desire to possess and harness that.

He explained his strange conduct of the past two weeks when he had followed the streams of the district for miles, measuring their flow with a weir, and he gave the results of his prospecting. He told them that every four thousand gallons of water falling one foot in one minute, or every four hundred gallons falling ten feet in one minute meant the power of one horse going to waste; that one water horse-power would furnish light for the average farm; that five water horse-power would furnish light and power for both the barn and the house. He estimated that the cost of installing a five water horse-power would not exceed the cost of one young horse, and that it would have paid for itself in saving wages, by the time the horse was ready to die.

He didn't expect the men to be carried away by his enthusiasm, and they weren't. A power system of any kind was a novelty in the section. An itinerant gasoline engine made its rounds every winter to cut the year's wood, but no one had ventured to adapt even gasoline to any farm work. Naturally, they were skeptical of the energy stored up in their quiet little creeks. Billy knew that the only hope of converting them rested in demonstrating just what a power system could be made to do, and beyond the pine woods, neighboring with the farm he had hoped to own, was a place where a stream from the hills ran everything that had formerly turned with a crank. He could arrange an excursion to the place. He could have the engineer who had gone over the ground here come out and explain just how the same principle could be carried out at home. He could get manufacturers to bring special pieces of equipment and demonstrate their uses. And in order that the scheme might not miss its main objective--to show Miss Evison that a farm home could be made a livable place--he would arrange with the owner and his wife to let him put on a demonstration of a complete home equipment. In the last undertaking his zeal was considerably in excess of his ability to handle the case. He wrote to ask Ruth Macdonald if she would come and help him.

Ruth said she would come; somehow people always expected that when they went to her for help. Besides, it was part of her professional work. She spent some days consulting with dealers in household equipment, from bath-tubs to wash-boards, and finally got together a collection to fit the needs of any ordinary farm-house. The evening before the day of the demonstration she followed her shipment out to the farm, partly because the work ahead of her would require the thrifty precaution known in country lore as "taking the morning by the forelock," partly because she wanted to feel again the spell of the moonlight flooding into the room, and the night stirred so little by a breath among the leaves and the distant gurgle of the creek, that she could hardly sleep for the stillness.

She awakened early next morning, to the sound of carefully handled dishes in the kitchen, and the drone of a cream separator in some distant annex of the house. The early October sun was flooding the mists from the fields; a scattered drove of young cattle on the crown of a hill moved like black silhouettes against the blaze. A tingling buoyancy came from looking out over miles of open country and breathing long, dizzy breaths of autumn-scented air, while down in the city the great human herd still slept, catching whatever faint little whiffs drifted in between brick walls. Field after field bristling with yellow stubble told of a harvest gathered in, but the orchards were still heavy with apples, their bright red glowing through a glittering coat of the night's frost. Here and there a corduroy of black furrows showed where the farmer was already taking thought for next spring's sowing. Everywhere there was evidence of productive work completed and the urgent call of other work to do; to the born farmer there could be no monotony in the changing seasons.

Every morning in town she saw swarms of workers like herself return to their day labors like bees to a hive, each pa.s.sing mechanically to its own little cell, pigeon-holed somewhere in the make-up of an office building.

She had sometimes thought the lives of women in the country narrow and drab-visioned, but here in the kitchen the farm mother was singing quietly to herself as she cooked her family's breakfast. She was no mechanical cog in the machinery of the place; she planned and directed and created every day. Under the window her dahlias were blooming gloriously. In the orchard a flock of her turkeys were getting ready for the Thanksgiving market. Overhead was coming the soft thud of her baby's bare feet on the stairs. On a hill off among the pines a red maple flamed at the door of a crumbling house--an ideal site for a Swiss chalet, Billy had called it one day when his enthusiasm had run away with his reserve--and she thought wretchedly of her office with its soft red rug, and its one gloomy window, and of her uncle's luxurious house where hired experts held the sole privilege of ministering to the family comfort.

However, she had a clear field for working out her own ideas to-day.

The house was a roomy, old-fashioned, hospitable place which had made a home for two generations and might yet be the pride of a third. The family had spent a good deal of money in redecorating and refurnishing it as fashions changed or things wore out, and when the stream from the hill was harnessed to furnish power for every machine in the barn, the house was trigged out with a dazzling array of electric lights. Apart from this, the returning ghost of a great-grandfather would not have noticed anything new enough to arouse his curiosity. One look into the barn with its whirring motors, and general hum of activity--everything from the grindstone to the grain chopper turning without a crank and all going at once--would have sent the apparition scurrying back to more primitive quarters.

Some of the women excursionists at the farm that afternoon seemed to be possessed of the same instinct. They clutched at their children when they saw them getting within reach of the electric washer. A few were even afraid to touch it themselves for fear of a shock. When it was suggested that where electricity was not available any ordinary washer could be driven by a little portable gasoline engine about the size of a lawn mower, they immediately had a presentiment of being caught in the belt. The simplest arrangement demonstrated was the connecting of a water-power machine to the tap in the kitchen sink, but half of the houses in the neighborhood didn't have kitchen sinks or any water supply other than a pump in the back yard and a rain barrel under the eaves.

The women unanimously agreed that what they wanted most was running water in the house. With a set of little models the girl showed how this could begin with a soft water cistern and a pump plying into a kitchen sink. The next improvement would be a water front on the kitchen range and a hot water faucet, and these would lead directly to a complete bath-room. Even without electricity or any other form of power, a hand force-pump in the cellar could give a water supply for a bath-room.

A genuine interest was kindled when the people began to handle the equipment themselves. The men were not the least interested; those to whom a vacuum cleaner was a new piece of machinery investigated its mechanism with the enthusiasm of a boy with a new engine. They began to realize why the family doctor sometimes condemned the straining, twisting motion that goes with sweeping, even though their mothers had lived long and used brooms. Those of a mechanical bent took up the toy dumb-waiter with interest; they didn't resent being told that every time a woman took a step up in climbing a stair she had to actually lift her own weight--a waste of energy which they overcame in their own work by fitting their barns with feed-chutes and litter-carriers. They even listened with some show of interest to the fact that most of the tuberculosis in the country was due to such poor methods of heating the houses that the windows of sleeping rooms must be kept closed all winter to keep from freezing, and they discussed cost, and advantages of hot air and steam heating systems.

Women took up the electric iron, gingerly at first, then freely to test the speed and ease of pressing out clothes with an iron always hot and clean--without fires to keep up, or constant trips to and from the stove. One weary little mother had eyes for nothing but the kiddie-koop, a little screened box on wheels where her baby could play safe and happy always near her, but out of her way, while she cooked meals for a raft of hired men.

After a general discussion, they planned a simple and practical equipment for an average farm house. Then they estimated the cost, and the practicability of the whole scheme began to waver. In view of the yearly income derived from the average farm, most of the men decided that no farmer could afford to put so much money into an unproductive investment. Their wives generally agreed with them. The farm mortgage is as much a nightmare to a woman as it is to her husband; she is willing to wait for everything until the place is clear, and the most of her life has gone; then, if they still want it, they can afford a most comfortable home to die in. Many parents argued that they had to look ahead if they were going to give their boys a start on farms of their own, but those of wider vision believed that the whole scheme of family life falls down if the home suffers; that it does not pay to build the farm up into a profitable property which is despised by the very children for whom they are giving their lives. Even the most doubtful showed some amus.e.m.e.nt at the announcement that every essential convenience could be installed in an ordinary farm house for less than the cost of a farm car--and even the poorest of them owned a car.

Late in the afternoon Marjorie Evison and her mother called, as they had promised. For the sake of Mr. Evison's business they made it a matter of principle to patronize all agricultural movements. They had never known the need of things that were novelties in most farm homes, and could not grasp the significance of the array of washing machines, mops and what not strewn about the big kitchen, but they had time to talk to Ruth for a few minutes--to regret that they couldn't entertain her at tea, as they were due at a corn roast at the Country Club--and they congratulated Billy on the originality of the idea and hoped they would see more of him now.

Billy had planned to find a spare hour during the day to take Marjorie up to the place on the hill. It was very beautiful now with the maples turning crimson and the sleepy countryside for miles below basking in the sun, making a picture blurred and softened through the purple haze. He wanted to search her face when she saw the wonder and promise of it all for the first time--to try to learn whether it would ever be possible to make her like it. But somehow things had gone wrong; he decided that this was not the right day to try to convert her to the gospel of country life. When she arrived he was standing in the middle of the stream, explaining the mechanics of the water-motor to a group of men. He was blissfully unconscious of how his muddy hip boots, and collarless shirt with here and there a smudge of machine oil, might appear to a girl who never saw men of her own social strata in any outdoor apparel less elegant than white tennis flannels. He didn't know that his unconcerned appearance as he was seemed almost like effrontery. She might have even admired it in some novel hero engineer hewing a railroad through a mountain, but there was nothing romantic about this; it was just grovelling in a muddy stream to show some two dozen farmers how a wheel went round; it was just the dirt and soil of farming and he seemed to like it.

She found herself comparing him with the leisurely, polished men of her own little _coterie_, and she decided that she liked clean men. She was also unusually indifferent to-day on account of the event at the Country Club. It was the recognized social centre for urbanites who from choice or necessity had stranded themselves on the dead sands of rural life. They frequently entertained very smart people from town, and Mrs. Evison, with a mother's ambition, and a social expert's diplomacy, looked upon it as the one chance in this isolated place, through which she could give her daughter "opportunities."

The Evisons didn't want to separate themselves literally from the neighborhood social life, of course; they would try to drop in for a few minutes at every community gathering, and they would give their grounds for garden parties and use whatever other advantage they possessed for the good of "the people," but it was not to be expected that just because they were back-to-the-landers they should be satisfied with the company of people of entirely different social interests. This agricultural young man who had filled in so nicely to give Marjorie a good time, who was so safe and unpresuming, had always seemed rather superior, probably on account of his college experience. He had always refused to be considered anything but a farmer and they had laughed at him, but to-day, dirty and dishevelled, he looked it. They must hurry on. And Billy watched the scarlet blur of a girl's motor coat until the long grey car carried it out of sight; then he returned to his water wheel. The shadows were already darkening over the dream place on the hill.

The people went away interested. An agent or two who had hovered tirelessly about the place all day, succeeded, in spite of government regulations, in taking a few orders for their goods on exhibition, and Billy was satisfied with the day's work. He knew that if one improvement came into actual use in the district others would follow.

When the last car had gone he had a scrub up at the spring, made the best of his disordered appearance and went to the house to find Ruth.

Notwithstanding the success of the day's proceedings he had a heavy sense of disappointment. After all, the whole scheme had been inspired by a personal object, and that had failed. To-morrow he would be able to think of some new tack, of course, but to-night he welcomed the buoyant philosophy and sympathetic interest that always seemed to go with Ruth.

He found her in the kitchen helping the farmer's wife with the supper. It was a repast fitting a day's strenuous work out of doors--a great iron kettle of sizzling fried potatoes, a cold roast chicken reserved from the weekly market supply, a platter piled with steaming ears of corn, and deep, brown-skinned pumpkin pies. The doors were open and a crackling wood fire warmed the frost-edged air of the October evening. He found an old instinct stirred strangely by something in the genuine home atmosphere of the place. He couldn't tell whether it was the motherly air of the woman who directed things, or the way the littlest sleepy towhead burrowed into his father's shoulder, or whether the spell was partly due to the rose-shaded light falling about the girl with her silky, dark hair and glowing eyes. They were not at all practised in magnetic arts, those eyes; they were just frank and kind and happy and rather beautiful, he thought--the light might have been responsible. He had a boyish desire to tell her what troubled him--not definitely, of course; he had a masculine, cautious dislike of personalities, but if he could give her the abstract problem, he might at least get the benefit of a woman's viewpoint. He had to take her to the station that night and he would drive around by the hill.

The mountain road was beautifully winding. For a stretch the trees arched over, leaving it cut like a black tunnel through the woods; then the rocks shot up a steep wall on one side and on the other a rain-washed slope ran down to a level of flat, tilled fields. At the crown of the hill the woods ended and a plateau of cleared land marked the beginning of the farm.

The car stopped abruptly.

"Do you know," Billy began with animation, "I've always thought I'd like to own this place. What do you think of it? I've gone over every foot of it and I know it's a good investment--that it would give a good living at least. Do you think it could ever be made a good place to live?"

Ruth looked at the crumbling house with its background of old trees.

She remembered how the maple had flamed in the sun when she saw it from her window that morning. Now with the shadows lying sharp and black on the frosted gra.s.s and the moonlight filtering through the branches, it seemed to stand waiting for something to shelter and protect--rather a curious old sentinel too; wondering just what loves and trials and heart breaks would be lived out in the house to be.

Suddenly she came to, remembering that he had asked if she thought the place could be made livable.

"Why not?" she said.

"Well--it's twelve miles from the city----"

"You'd have a car. Why would you want it nearer the city?"