"_We are so often ashamed of the earth--the soil of it, the sweat
of it, the good common coarseness. To us in our fine raiment and soft
manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They
will fail, they will fail every one until each man has his feet
somewhere upon the soil._"--_David Grayson._
How pitifully the compass of our lives is played with by the most
wanton little winds. When Billy finished college he did not have to
grope through the indecision of finding his work; he knew he was a
farmer. The conviction was verified one day when, rounding a bend in
a drive through a pine-woods country, he felt his pulses bound at the
sudden picture of a beautiful stretch of tilled land. It was in the
first intoxicating days of spring when the promise of the year is
likely to play tricks with our optimism, but the spring never elated
him any more. With the breath of the first white thorn blossoms came
the memory of another year when their perfume had blown in through
the open window of the little Swamp Farm house where his mother
waited; and a wonderful quiet possessed him; the old hardness had
almost gone. On the day when he had fought his first hard battle with
himself, and sobbed out the agony at last, the breaking up had
started, and when his father turned to the road after selling the
farm and nailing up the empty house Billy felt a genuine pity for
him. Jean had been sent back to school and would soon be ready to
teach, but he regretted seriously the loss of a home for her. This
was another pressing argument for getting a farm of his own.
It was a beautiful stretch of land at the end of a timbered road, a
lonely place, generally considered, but Billy went over it acre by
acre with glowing anticipation. Here he would start a permanent
pasture for the long dreamed of Aberdeen-Angus herd. Down where the
broad creek took such a precipitous leap in its course, he would
build a dam and drive the water to the buildings--perhaps install a
dynamo later on. The glinting blue stones from the rough little rise
back of the barn would make the foundation and fireplace and chimneys
for a low Swiss chalet among the trees. He could already see its
light blinking down on the highway like a beacon, the welcome to a
shelter and resting place where he could dream and hope, blessed with
the happy content of having paid his debt to existence through the
day.
Billy confided to a classmate, the Jimmy Wood who had piloted him to
the brink of his first college social adventure, his plan to buy the
place and work it, and Jimmy was disappointed.
"Have you stopped to think what you're letting yourself in for?" he
asked. "You've done farm work at home, and I'll warrant you've hated
it, but after four years away from it you'll find it a sight
worse--the dirt and the drudgery and the eternal monotony. Of course,
you'd get used to it. At the end of a year I dare say you'd be
content to wear overalls and a six days' beard from Sunday to Sunday.
I know we've all said we wanted to farm eventually, but not the
grubbing, driving, scraping kind of a job that goes with paying for a
place. Better make your money at something else and end up with
farming as a hobby, when you can afford to be merely business manager
yourself. If you start in now with nothing ahead, and have to save
every cent, you'll get so absorbed in yourself, so haunted by the
bogey of your mortgage, that by the time you should be some force in
the community philanthropically, you'll be sealed like a clam in the
money-getting idea."
"You mean, then, that the only public-spirited agriculturist is the
man who makes his money some easier, faster way, and comes back to
donate it here and there for rural uplift, who cultivates a hobby of
making speeches on the calamity of rural depopulation?"
"Oh, I know my view of it seems sordid enough," Jimmy admitted, "but
you're an idealist. And I can tell you there's no way you'll lose
your vision more surely than in a mill with poverty. Besides, if I'm
not uncommonly dense you've set your heart on that place because you
want to build a home on it; you know as well as I do, that a farm's
the lonesomest place on earth to go to alone. A man can navigate
fairly easily on a single craft anywhere else; he can stop to think
whether he can afford a wife and a home or not, and he can wait until
he can afford them, but a wife and a home are almost an absolute
necessity for a man who owns and works a farm, poor or not. Being an
idealist you don't want anything but the best, and I've observed that
the best is generally expensive."
Billy still seemed absorbed in the skyline and his adviser feared
that he might have gone too far. He knew that if Billy's decision had
been made, it had no doubt stood arguments quite as enduring as any
he could advance, and it wasn't likely to help things, to remind him
of the disadvantages.
"Of course," Jimmy continued. "I haven't any fear that you'd make a
mess of things, and I know there are compensations, but suppose you
do go back and bury yourself there now, you cut yourself off from
everything social at least, and I'm afraid you'll just wall yourself
in alone for the rest of your life. On the other hand, you have your
choice of two of the best counties in the province for Rep. work. The
job has a few allurements apart from the salary, and that reminds
me----"
From a collection of letters of various post marks and hand-writing,
and sundry photographs, Jimmy produced a snapshot and handed it to
Billy. It gave him a wicked satisfaction to see the dull red slowly
cover the sober face, for the picture showed nothing more disturbing
than Marjorie Evison perched nymph-like on the limb of a blossoming
apple-tree. Billy looked for a long time with the same unconscious
worship that had followed the airy little figure through the college
dance; then he handed the picture back.
"You can have that," Jimmy offered magnanimously.
Billy stared in amazement. "Don't you want it?" he asked.
"Not specially."
"Where did you get it?"
"Slipped it off the mantel right under her eyes."
Billy looked at the picture again with the same quiet gravity.
"Guess it doesn't belong to either of us," he decided, and carefully
held it over the fire until the flames covered it.
Jimmy had not enjoyed such an interesting bit of drama for a long
time. He also congratulated himself as a rather successful diplomat.
"I suppose you know you have a chance of the office in her county?"
he remarked incidentally. "What are you going to do about it?"
Billy didn't say definitely what he intended to do about it. That
night he stood at his window for a long time in the dark and looked
out over the roofs of the city, massed off in dark, blurry squares
with the street lights stretching between like ropes of toy electric
globes strung along a circus midway. Very confining it seemed to his
country-bred instincts, while beyond the last flickering lamp in some
laborer's cottage, the moist brown earth stretched for miles and
miles in limitless freedom. A thin white mist rose from it now like
incense from the hearth of the god of production. It was the
wonderful season of beginnings on the farm, birth and promise
everywhere--the eternal old mother pulsing with the first life of the
bursting seed, warm, yellow beaks chipping their shells,
wobbly-legged colts blinking at the light of day, and weak, trembly,
clamorous lambs needing the tenderest care of all, and so few people
with the right human instinct to look after them.
A passionate hunger for the land possessed him. Beyond the
pine-covered hills lay the place he had set his heart on. It would
take a long time to work it into the Eldorado it promised, and his
restive young muscles ached to get at it. There would be two or three
years of the grindingest kind of work, then returns would begin to
come in. The quaint Swiss chalet with its low stone wall and chimney
would go up among the trees, and its light blink down through their
shelter on the highway at night as he had pictured it for years.
There would still be an abundance of man-size tasks to do, and
worries to handle, and debts to meet; the same fields would call him
to work every day, but there would be the cabin to come back to at
night to dream and to love.
As usual his arguments brought him back in a circle. Of course Jimmy
had been right in thinking the farm was the loneliest place in the
world to go to alone, and of course, whatever Jimmy or anyone else
thought, the dreams of the little house were all inspired by a vision
that had hovered never far from the surface of his consciousness
since it startled him out of his boyhood a few years before. As is
usual with idealistic natures, he had endowed his idol with every
grace he worshipped; it was strengthened and purified as his
experience broadened, until no one else would ever have recognized it
as belonging to the silky little kitten of a maid who handled her
playthings with such soft-pawed heartlessness. The longer he stayed
away from her the more she seemed set apart in a world of other
interests and other friends. Now the opportunity had come to live in
the same community, and while there were moments when the prospect
rather terrified him, it never occurred to him to let it pass. He
still wanted the farm, but the farm could wait; the human, jealous
fear of losing her stamped out every other ambition. So it came about
that the next few weeks found him moving into the county agricultural
office.
The work habit is a powerful saving force to tide us sanely over
periods of distracting interests. When Billy took on the robes of his
office he was not by any means indifferent. He owed enough personally
to the Representative in his home county to appreciate the bigness of
the job, and his brief experience as assistant made it easy for him
to go ahead with the general routine. Against this there was a
troublesome undercurrent of dissatisfaction working, a half-ashamed
feeling that he was making the position a means to an end. But
because he had worked all his life he began at once to dig up
something to do. The more he investigated the more he found to do,
and the more he found to do the more he became fired with the
possibilities of achievement.
For the first week he drove all day from one school to another,
distributing settings of eggs and seed potatoes, and leaving with the
children such scientific information as they might apply in directing
the increase thereof. In the evenings he talked late with
labor-harassed farmers who came to get him to negotiate for hired
men, and remained to discuss other less urgent matters. As soon as he
could see a free evening ahead, he phoned Miss Evison to ask if he
might call.
He heard a dozen receivers come down while someone went to bring her,
and when her voice did come over the wires the clear, smooth staccato
was not reassuring. It had the ring of a woman with much business to
despatch, but who hadn't yet learned the art of handling each case
whole-heartedly.
"Mr. Withers?" she repeated with doubtful inflection, then, "Oh, yes,
I do remember. I believe I had you confused with someone else."
This was less complimentary than puzzling, since the local papers had
advertised widely the coming of the new Agricultural Representative,
in one case, by some strange accident, directly following an account
of Miss Evison's card party in the "society column."
She would be glad to see him, however; the difficulty was just to
find an evening free. She counted over her engagements, beginning at
the end of the week and working back, and decided she could give him
the next evening. He came away from the interview grateful, but
unhappy. Two things troubled him. When she could be so charmingly
cordial, why did she ever assume that tantalizing aloofness which
made a man wonder how much discomfort his attention was giving her?
And why, when she must have known who he was, did she pretend to have
forgotten? To his simple standards of honesty it was disappointing.
Then he reflected that he didn't understand girls--that, of course, a
girl of her popularity must be bored to death with cases like his own
and had a right to use her own methods of defence.
It was a maid in uniform who admitted Billy to the Evison home and
ushered him into a parlor to wait for Miss Marjorie. As it was his
first experience with this formality he was a little embarrassed. The
room itself was not just fashioned to put any one at ease. He didn't
know much about house furnishings, but he judged from its fantastic
twistings and carvings that this was copied from some antique
historic period. He knew also that it must have cost about as much as
he would have to spend in equipping a whole house. A level shaft of
warm, yellow light from the sunset came through the curtain and
touched a vase of long-stemmed jonquils, but the highly cut points of
the glass caught the light and splintered it into a dazzling
spectrum, leaving the delicate beauty of the flowers pale and
lifeless.
Somehow the picture remained strangely in his mind when Marjorie
came. There was something dazzling about her, just as there had been
when she played a local magnet in the college ballroom, and it seemed
to outshine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his own
ideals and his lover's interpretation of a few of her passing moods
had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the assured
graciousness cultivated of constant social experience that he knew
nothing about. He was frankly embarrassed and he didn't care. Weighed
against her cool indifference, it seemed to save a remnant of reality
in his dream.
The April evening out of doors was inviting. The night air was sweet
with the perfume of budding orchards, the roads for miles around were
smooth and damp, and the Department of Agriculture car was at their
service. Billy considered her dress, doubtfully; very pretty it was,
sheer and white, with little blue flowers sprinkled over it; very
short, like a little girl's, showing white silk stockings dotted with
the same blue flowers.
"I just wondered," he ventured, "if you'd care to wrap up and come
for a drive?"
Her composure left her instantly. She drew in her breath in childish
anticipation.
"Down to the city?" she asked. "I haven't been there for ages.
They're playing The Follies to-night. Do you think we'd be in time if
we hurried?"
A few minutes later she ran downstairs in her motoring outfit,
followed by her mother. She was very proud of her mother, because,
impressed by the striking resemblance, people always thought, "Just
like the daughter will be twenty years from now." She was very
pretty, willowy and girlish with a youthfulness that told of
painstaking preservation, effusively gracious, in a subtly superior
way, years of social practice in the same groove having equipped her
with a supply of stock-phrases ready to be tripped off glibly to any
occasion.
"You'll take good care of our little girl?" she said. "She doesn't
make a practice of running off like this unchaperoned, but we want
her to have a good time and it's really very dull for her here. Since
Mr. Evison got the farming bug he has become a hopeless recluse. He
runs out to the farm almost every day, and I tell him he'll soon be
driving his own pigs in to the market." She laughed gaily at the
idea, a silvery little descending scale, and Billy wondered why she
should have bothered for him. "You're connected with the Farmers'
Institute or something here yourself, aren't you?" she continued.
Billy explained as briefly as he could what he was trying to do, and
received at the end of each department, the safe comment, "How
interesting!"
Of course it wasn't interesting, as he told it. There's nothing
interesting about dealing out setting eggs and potatoes to school
children all day, and trying to round up elusive and indifferent farm
laborers at night. Personally he saw something very much worth while
beneath these externals, but weighed by her standards they shrank
perceptibly. Not that he attached any importance to her judgment;
only she was Marjorie's mother, and her opinion might matter a good
deal.
Nature never intended a motorist to speed through the soft dusk of an
April night in the country. The breath of the balm of Gilead tree,
the scent of whitethorn blossoms, the rich, earthy odors from
fresh-ploughed fields, were lost in a chill, damp wind driving in
their faces; the blurry outlines of heavily tasselled willows on the
roadside, and lamplight pictures caught through the windows of farm
houses--mothers bending over children at their lessons, or a late
supper group where the day's work had been unusually long, all shot
past like dizzy films on a crazy reel; the musical roar of high,
boiling creeks, and the sleepy chirp of nesting birds were drowned in
the pounding of the engine. It wasn't the hilarious joy of speeding,
just the strained sitting-tight and making time. There was a rough,
noisy climb up a stony hill, and the city glittered in a bowl below.
They coasted down silently, and when Billy could take his eyes from
the wheel, to fairly look at the girl, he found her bright with
excitement.
"I wonder if I'll see anyone I know," she said.
The play was not inspiring, to make the best of it. This didn't
matter much to Marjorie, because she had not forgotten her opera
glasses, and seemed to find a wonderful interest in searching the
audience. Suddenly she brought the glasses down, and directed her
attention solely to Billy and the stage. Billy didn't look near the
stage much; his knowledge of plays was limited, but critical, and on
the night when the hope of four years had its first gift of reality,
it would have seemed a prodigal waste to give his attention to stage
fiction. He found quite heaven enough for the present in her
nearness, the beauty of her white, regular profile, and her adorable
way of leaning the merest trifle over the arm-rest between them.
When it was over, and the car was gliding quietly over the road home,
she slid down snugly in the seat like a satisfied child, and he
thought, with large plans for the future, how little it took to make
her happy. He didn't know, of course, that the satisfaction of her
evening had begun when her glasses caught the attention of a very
desirable acquaintance whose interest of late seemed to require some
stimulation. If she had had all gifts of the gods at her command,
nothing, she reflected, could be more effective than to be seen with
Billy with his good looks and the unaccountable impression he gave of
"being somebody." None of her friends would know who he was, of
course, and she didn't intend that they ever should know. Altogether
she had spent a very profitable evening. Then there was something
very gratifying about Billy's company; he gave so much and asked so
little. She was accustomed to lavish attention from other men, but
none of them ever offered her the deference of a saint and the
indulgence of an irresponsible child. It was an understood part of
their social code that she work her resources to the limit to be
entertaining, that she make the most of her beauty, that she play the
game for what it was worth. With this she had an easier trick of her
own--to set them off against each other through the gentle art of
inviting opposition.
The balmy softness of the evening had gone and the air held the chill
of midnight. The lights were out in the houses except an occasional
night-burning lamp turned low in a kitchen. They saw one bent,
white-bearded old man with a lantern coming from the barn, presumably
making his anxious nightly rounds to the sheep-fold during lambing
time. Marjorie roused from her reverie and shivered a little.
"How terribly lonesome," she said. "I don't know how they stand it to
live here all the time, but I suppose some people are made for that
sort of thing."
"I suppose so. I'd rather farm than anything else."
"You would? Of course you mean to manage a farm, or to advise other
people like you're doing now. That's different."
Billy smiled.
"You don't advise people much at this job," he said. "You just try to
get the community in line with whatever service the Department of
Agriculture (which is their own) has to give them." And then because
he didn't want her to have any illusions as to the dignity of his
work he outlined in detail some of its humblest phases.
"How very funny," she laughed. "You must be very much amused
sometimes, but it must be an awful bore, too, dealing with that class
of people day after day. Someone's generally at home at our house. I
know you'd like Dad and I hope we'll see heaps of you."
"That's very kind," he said, genuinely grateful, "but I didn't mean
that I find it tiresome at all. You see it's different when you've
always been a farmer yourself, and I'd like to go back to real
practical farming on a place of my own."
"Yes?" she inquired, beginning to get his viewpoint. "I know a girl
friend of mine--and they're very nice people--they have a farm that
they live on the year round, and all summer her father wears a white
suit and goes right out among the men."
Then Billy must have touched something, for the car shot out
suddenly, and they didn't discuss things agricultural any more. He
had about decided that the case was hopeless.
The lights were still bright in the house when they drove up, but she
led him around to a side door opening into her own little
sitting-room. Someone had just kindled a fire on the hearth, and
slipping out of her coat she dropped down on a stool. Billy looked
down at her with a tenderness that he wouldn't have dared to let her
see, then his eyes wandered to a few of the room's features that
clamored for attention.
It was decidedly a girl's sanctum. The one soft-shaded light was
turned low, but the flickering blaze from the fire showed the walls
gay with pennants. On the mantel, the little French writing-desk, and
here and there in odd spaces on the walls were photographs; she
seemed to have a preference for college graduates in gown and
sheep-skin and the smiling assurance that usually goes with a degree
before experience has tested its infallibility as a talisman. On a
table in the centre of the room, a vase of tall American Beauties
served, no doubt, to keep green the memory of some very ardent or
wealthy admirer.
A less prejudiced person might have seen in the collection of
trophies something in common with the scalps decorating the walls of
an Indian tepee, but to Billy it only emphasized his infinitesimal
place in her world. There was something very sober and kind in his
eyes when they came back again to the thoughtful face with its starry
eyes and childish, pursed-up mouth and the mysterious touch that
comes from the glow and shadows of the firelight. He thought how
sweet and becoming this seriousness was, compared with her lighter,
irresponsible moods, and he looked ahead to the time when life would
have taught her more of its meaning. Then the little Swiss clock
chimed out twelve and he came to apologetically.
"When may I see you again?" he asked.
She drew her brows together and counted on her fingers a list of
engagements for a week.
"You'd better call me up," she said. "I'm never sure of what I want
to do for a day ahead."
It was the beginning of many such evenings, distracting, uncertain,
alluring but promising nothing, and the agricultural office suffered
accordingly.