"_He was a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountains of
reserve; who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he could
have said: 'I love you.' .... I have wondered what might have been if
some one--some understanding person had recognized his gift, or if he
himself as a boy had once dared to cut free. We do not know; we do
not know the tragedy of our nearest friend._"--_David Grayson._
An atmosphere like this does not nurture the most outwardly genial
qualities in a boy. When Billy was sixteen he had encased his real
personality in a reserve which few people could penetrate. The
neighbors admitted that he was civil and steady, but they generally
agreed that he was sullen. The premature work and responsibility of
the farm may have stiffened his body and hardened his outlook, but it
had not affected his growth. In spite of everything, sixteen years
found him something of a giant with splendid physical possibilities
waiting development, but for the present leaving him awkward,
painfully conscious of his size, ashamed of his ignorance, galling
under the tyranny and hopelessness of his environment, but keeping
his reflections largely to himself. His saving force was his
inherited ambition. It never let him rest, but since all the
experience of his life had been gleaned, like the steadily decreasing
crops, from the unproductive acres of the Swamp Farm, his ambition
lacked direction. On rare occasions he confided secret plans to his
mother, but the plans were never practical and there was no prospect
of ever working them out. A few books, good and otherwise, that had
found their way into the house, were the best information he had of
the world outside; but the "good" books his mother had brought from
home years ago, and they dealt with problems of a different age
altogether, problems solved and forgotten long since; the "other"
books had mostly been left by an itinerant hired man, and they were
far too new. With it all there was a growing discontent, discontent
of the divine order really, but showing itself sometimes in very
human guise.
An unrest, a discontent like this, is like to gnaw the heart out of a
boy, leaving him a hollow reed to be played upon by any wind that
blows. Out in the great open spaces of the green country, of course,
we wouldn't expect to find any insidious influence to mar a boy's
future, yet it came in one of the commonest ways.
In need of money to meet a debt to his incubator firm, it occurred to
Dan that the swamp was full of cedar posts. It meant a lot of work to
get the posts out and he had no fondness for the task of laying roads
through a boggy stretch of woods and putting in the long hours
teaming the posts to the railroad, but Billy could do one man's work,
and for the rest he could pick up a force in town. The men were an
unsteady crowd. They didn't care to work many days at a time, and
invariably left when they were most needed. Then one day a man called
looking for a job. He was a Hercules for strength, quick and sure at
his work as a professional lumberman. At night he turned a line of
handsprings across the barn floor, and did a series of acrobatic
stunts over the brace rod, calculated to fill the spectators with awe
and amazement. Billy watched him with more amusement than admiration
in his steady brown eyes; athletics had never been given a prominent
place in his interests.
The man boarded in the house, of course. He was courteous and
considerate in ways the other men had never thought of. He never
passed the woodpile without bringing in an armful. He refused to
leave his washing to be done. He stayed out of the house as much as
possible--and Billy stayed with him. From the first time she saw him,
Mary begged Dan to send him away.
Even when he had gone, she wasn't reassured. Billy seemed different.
He seemed uneasy and secretive. Often under the questioning of her
kind eyes he would redden painfully and look away, and knowing that a
boy of sixteen is getting beyond his mother's understanding, she
never forced her inquiries further.
Then the thing she had dreaded came. One bitter February morning,
while she slept, Billy came quietly downstairs. In the kitchen the
lamp was turned low, and he peered across at the clock. It wasn't
quite three. He listened for a second to the two regular breathings
in the little bedroom, and it seemed that one of them stopped. The
thought that perhaps she suspected him made him feel like a thief,
but, he reflected, when she got the note under his pillow she would
know that he had meant it for the best, that he would come back,
sometime. The thought of what she would have to endure in the while
between almost made him give it up, but he reasoned that this was
just what he had done times before. It was just "drivelling
weakness," as Lou had said. He looked around miserably, wishing he
could do something to make her understand; that in some way he could
soften the hurt of the discovery in the morning. Standing, shivering
in the freezing kitchen, he realized that she had to endure this
atmosphere for an hour or two every morning, and at the risk of being
heard he lighted the fire. Then he picked up the tightly rolled grain
bag that contained his worldly possessions, and went out. For a long
time after, he remembered the frosty squeak of the door, the snapping
of the frost, like pistols, in the trees, and the daylight peering
cold and cheerless into the steely sky, as things following, watching
and accusing him.
It was a short, quick run to the railroad to catch the way-freight
laboring up to town, a wait of two hours or more around the sheds
there, then a ride on the local express to the Junction, where Lou
was to meet him. The ride on the freight and the waiting at the sheds
attracted no attention, and as he slid into the end seat of the
passenger coach he was glad to find that there was no one there whom
he knew. The only person in the car who seemed awake was a young man
who looked steadily out of the window and seemed so indifferent to
everything around him that Billy felt no fear of his curiosity. When
he looked up some minutes later he caught the quiet, genial,
interested gaze square on his face, and the young man rose and came
down the aisle towards him.
It wasn't just that the young man wanted a diversion. He may have
looked bored enough while he stared out of the window at the light
breaking over the frozen fields, but that was because he was a little
discouraged with his job. He had been trying to figure out
approximately how many bushels of grain his formalin solution had
saved for the county that year, and whether all this extension work
of the Department of Agriculture was worth while. He was on his way
now to begin a short course with the young men farther up the county,
in the intervals of which he might be required to test the milk from
a few dairy herds, secure a few hired men for the neighborhood, or
talk about revenues from chickens, or strawberries to a gathering of
women. It occurred to him that the boy who had just come in might be
going up to join the class, and because he liked boys as individuals,
and because there was something unusually promising in the keen,
serious face and striking physique of this young man, he came to talk
to him.
Billy had never heard of an agricultural short course. He had seen
the agricultural office in town, but he had a very vague idea of what
the "district representative" was doing there. He listened to the
explanation of the short course with interest; then, as man to man,
told candidly what he thought of farming and, naturally enough, why
he was leaving it.
The Representative didn't ask any questions, but he gathered that
Billy was leaving home for the first time, to begin his independent
career in a lumber-camp somewhere. He also saw that under the
retiring, self-conscious exterior, was a live fuse of ambition, and
an unmistakable pride.
"It won't get you anywhere," he said, when Billy asked what he
thought of the lumber camp as a beginning, "and if you stay long
enough, you won't care whether it does or not. We're having a course
next month not so far from your place; come to that and see if you
can't find something worth while around home. Come to the office on
Saturday and I'll tell you of a dozen fellows who have made good with
a worse start than you have."
The train was stopping at the Junction. "Sorry," Billy replied,
rising. "I have to meet a friend here."
He took up his grain-bag, reddening. He had a momentary idea of
leaving it under the seat, but it contained everything he had left.
"You can get a train back home in ten minutes," the Representative
suggested, with a friendly grip. "I'll look for you Saturday."
"I'm sorry I didn't meet you sooner," Billy replied calmly. "As it
is, I've promised to go north. Anyway I think perhaps you don't
understand just how things are at our place."
The Representative looked away and frowned with sympathy. "I know
it's rotten enough," he said, "but if you want to play fair, why
don't you go back and put it right up to your father? You know this
is pretty rough on the mother."
And Billy, standing alone on the platform, wished the Representative
had kept that last argument to himself. That was what had been his
undoing every time before, and Lou had shown him quite clearly that
he could never do anything for his mother by staying on the wretched
farm where they could scarcely make enough to keep alive. Now this
young man said he could show him how to make money out of the place.
He said that boys with a worse beginning had gone ahead right at home
and made good, even realized their ambitions for themselves and made
the right kind of homes for their families. Family considerations
weren't troubling Billy. He was just sixteen years old, and the
social side of his nature had been sadly neglected. What he wanted
was freedom to do something. Then, while Lou had persuaded him that
he was not only a fool, but a weak one to stay at home, this
agricultural fellow had somehow made him feel like a coward for
running away.
The train for home was whistling nearer while Billy argued wildly.
When it came around the bend he had about made his decision. He
picked up his grain bag and sauntered coolly across to meet it, then
he saw Lou coming, and waited.
It was not easy to dispose of Lou--he had met cases like this before;
but Billy's struggles from childhood, with a man's work, crop
failures, an unjust government and himself, had not been for nothing.
Also, a certain dogged will-power, bred of these struggles, and their
achievements, and more than ever dominant in the teen age, gave him
an aversion to being "talked into" anything. The Representative
hadn't shown any effort at trying to persuade him. He had told him
just what he thought without reserve and quite forcibly enough, it
seemed; then he had left him to make his own decision, and it gave
Billy no little pride in himself to know that he was planning his
own course. He felt, suddenly, above the wheedling, anxious tone of
his former leader, who, he decided, didn't have enough brains to keep
his personal concern out of his argument. Exasperated at last, Lou
swore openly at all "young milk-fed Rubes who would keep a man
hanging around for weeks, not knowing their own minds, and then fail
to come across at the last."
And Billy laughed--laughed right into the threatening face with its
hardened cunning, laughed for pure joy at the new spirit that had
just awakened in him, laughed also because he had measured carefully
the distance to the last car of the moving train. He caught it just
in time to leave Lou clutching foolishly at the place where he had
been.
Miles away the Representative had again relapsed into speculation as
to whether his work was worth while.
It was only a few hours from the time Billy left the Swamp Farm until
he walked up the lane again, but it seemed as though he had been in a
new, bigger country for a long time. He saw the limits of his
environment in a new perspective and they looked less binding. The
feel of the familiar, worn little door-latch under his hand carried a
distinct sense of being back in the right place. Mary, with a way
women have of watching the road while they work, had seen him
coming. It wasn't in her nature to cry out, or to take him in her
arms. She just stood immovable, her breath coming fast, but in the
glad welcome illuminating the drawn lines of her patient face the boy
saw all the wonder of a mother's unquestioning love, and he knew it
would have been the same, however, or whenever he had come back--if
she were still there. She didn't ask him where he had been; she
didn't mention the note he had left; she only said:
"You haven't had your breakfast."
And Billy, because he was sixteen years old and practised in curbing
his emotions, could not go to her. He just looked back as eloquently
as he could, and asked:
"Where's Jean?"
Jean was crumbled up on the bed in her little cold room upstairs,
crying her heart out. Billy could manage with her more easily. He
gathered her up and patted her back and smoothed her hair so
awkwardly that it tangled about his fingers. He said he shouldn't
have done it, and then told her quite firmly to stop now right away;
that he was back and he was going to stay. He was fast becoming a
man.
Even Dan realized this when Billy met him in the stable for an
interview. The plans he had been designing began to lose shape in the
fearlessness of the new individual whom he had always considered his
child to mould as he liked. Billy's experience had not given him much
of the quality called business sense, so he didn't ask much--a
percentage of whatever profits he could show from the place above an
estimate for previous years, and a chance to run a few sidelines of
his own. Since this would not interfere with his own interests and
would mean still having free labor on the farm, Dan was willing to
grant it.
And Billy was happy. He couldn't have told why. Practically, he was
just where he had been before; only he had something to hope for. In
the house the ham sizzling in the pan, the smell of turnips cooking
for dinner and a spicy apple pie bubbling on the back of the stove,
filled him with a very tangible comfort. The world had never seemed
so near to heaven.
The agricultural course was full of promise. For some time Billy had
been painfully reminded of his scant education. The few brief seasons
in the local school, following the cramped and theoretical course of
prescribed text-books, and his ill chosen reading afterwards, had not
given him much that a young man would need. A class of twenty young
farmers leaving their work to meet every day in a room above the
local store was different; it had some purpose. The informal lectures
and discussions were practical from the beginning. The taking of
notes, the preparation of a speech, was new and hard for every one
of them, but they were all at the same disadvantage, which carried
some encouragement.
On the second day of the course they went to a farm for a class in
stock-judging. Boys who would have wormed through a barbed-wire
entanglement to get within touching distance of the prize animals at
the provincial fair, but who might as well have hoped to enter a
sacred temple as a show ring, could examine to their hearts' content
the most aristocratic specimens of Aberdeen-Angus lineage in the
country. Added to their instruction in rules and principles they had
the unstinted and practical advice of the man himself who had built
up the herd, whose name was known to stockmen in every province of
the Dominion.
When they had finished he took them to the house. There was a great,
long living-room with red curtains and a log blazing in a brick
fireplace, and his wife, in a big blue apron, her cheeks red from the
warmth of the kitchen stove, gave them hot biscuits and coffee. The
man's voice boomed heartily through the house, and the baby from a
quilt on the floor reached up to him. It was amazing the dexterity
with which he could tuck the babe away, perfectly contented, in the
hollow of his arm, and use both hands in expounding the points of
various Panmures and Black Megs, with the history of their ancestors
from the oldest farms in Scotland. He made no effort to keep his
business affairs out of his home, this man; the two were so
intimately connected that their interests were common. Either would
have failed long ago without the support of the other. His wife knew
exactly what he was talking about. Her pride in the herd was about as
great as his own; she had made little sacrifices and taken with him
the risks involved in buying new, expensive stock. It was a fine kind
of co-operation.
The warmth and peace and genuineness of it all filled Billy with a
happy wonder. He forgot to be embarrassed, but he sat in a corner as
much out of sight as possible, watching the restful air of content
about the woman, and listening to the man's enthusiastic forecast of
the future of the breed in Canada. The stockman noticed his interest,
and when they were ready to go he kept the rest waiting while he took
him back to go more fully into the peculiar traits of a certain
family. Then he asked:
"What do you keep at home?"
"Most anything," Billy answered, with a grim little smile.
"You ought to get on with stock," the expert remarked, sincerely.
"Come to me when you start for yourself and I'll give you a bargain
on some better than these, if nothing happens."
Billy looked at the square, curly little beasts as a cripple stares
at an athlete's cup. Then he found all his wandering ambitions coming
to a point. Some day he would have a herd of such cattle. He could
see their perfect black shapes moving over a sunny field when the
autumn frosts had turned the trees and pastures to a glorious gold
and crimson background. They would be _his_, and when he had some
of them graded up to a show standard, he himself would groom their
curly hides till they shone; he could almost feel the shaking
muscles of their broad, level backs as they stood under the hands of
the judges. And there would be a house with red curtains and an open
fire, where his mother would be safe and comfortable as long as she
lived. He fervently hoped his father's business would continue to
take him away from home a lot.
At night he sat up late over a borrowed Aberdeen-Angus history. He
sketched over all the paper in the house to show how certain
individuals he had seen that day compared with types illustrated. He
estimated with reckless optimism what it would cost to start a herd,
and how long it would take them to pay for a house with a fireplace
and red curtains. At intervals he would get up and walk around the
table to work off his enthusiasm. There was nothing reserved about
his plans now. His mother felt that her cup was full. She was sure
her prayers for his direction had been answered and she blessed
"that agricultural young man" as an agent sent by Heaven.