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 embarrassed 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 cocoon 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 God
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 class 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 passing 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 amusement 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 grass 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?"
"I wouldn't. I just wondered----. I want to build a house like a
Swiss chalet, low and brown with a little corner tower for a sunroom,
and a stone foundation just piling up naturally out of the ground,
and a stone chimney with a fireplace as wide as a cave, where a
person could dream the wildest kind of dreams and then live them. You
can hear the creek roaring over the hill; there's enough water power
there to run a factory, and the house could be made pretty snug, I
think; but sometimes I'm afraid I've just let myself be carried away
with a vision--east is east, and the country will never make a good
imitation of the town. You have lived in the city, and you know the
country pretty well. Do you think this could be made a place
where--well, where anyone not used to country life would be happy?"
"I think it could." She was looking away and the tone did not sound
at all impulsive. Desperately he tried again.
"Do you think a man would be a downright piker to ask a girl who has
always had everything she wanted to come to a place like this?"
"No." The answer was very frank, and the girl bolted directly into a
rapid, and not very comprehensive review of plans she had seen
developed in less promising places. For some reason she seemed
confused.