"If you'd just come out with me to the hill place for one day," Billy
had pleaded. "I want to have something to take away with me to
remember."
Ruth had looked ahead to the day not without foreboding. Why, in the
name of all that was sane, she wondered, should a man want to go and
uncover the grave of his dreams at a time when he should be fighting
to forget them? If he wanted her to witness the agony, of course she
would be there--he would need someone--but to see him staring into
the ruins of an old house at the ghost picture of the future he had
visioned, to know that he was still aching for the nearness of an
ethereal bit of thistledown of a girl, and to be unable to tell him
just where he had been blind! It would be well if a storm and a flood
would wash the place away in the night.
But the storm did not come. The sun shone and the birds sang; the car
purred up hills and down; Billy seemed strangely happy, except for an
occasional glance of anxiety at the white profile beside him, and the
girl was preoccupied and troubled. Something was wrong. It was their
last day, and it might have been so wonderful.
"I suppose, if we lived by centuries," Billy remarked, "we would
still leave some of the things we wanted most to be crowded into the
last day we had. There seems to be something inherently selfish in
most of us. We get an idea that we want a certain thing, and if we
can't have it we curse Fate for her heartlessness. We never think how
our self-centred ambition is hurting someone else, overlooking
something worlds better than the trifling thing our fancy has
idealized. Whatever failures I might make, Jean would still believe
in me, and I've neglected her shamefully.
"It's the same with the work I might have done. A lot of us have been
misled by our ideas of 'rural leadership.' We know that the country
needs leaders who can see clearly, and who have the courage to make
their visions materialize. We have big plans for the country, but
we're afraid to go right out to the land and take its risks and
steady, commonplace toil. Those of us who grew up there learned
something of the beauty and irrevocableness of its natural laws, and
a lot of its hardships and cruelties. When we went away to study how
to overcome the hard things, which should not be, an insidious
influence in the new environment resulted in a kindly ridicule or
patient tolerance of the simplicity of these natural laws.
"I remember one day before I ever left the farm, I was ploughing
alone in the field and a lark flew over my head, called twice and
disappeared. It was in the spring, and the scheme of things seemed
very perfect and simple to me then. That fall I went to college and
the artificial crept in. When the war brings men up against elemental
things, suffering and quick death and endurance and sacrifice
absolutely devoid of self-interest, I wonder if it will give them a
higher regard for the genuine in everything. And if it does, will it
make them so vastly more primitive, that when it comes to the old
human longing for a mate and a home, the kind of woman they want, the
woman with dreams and a sensitiveness to the finest things, will find
them changed, and be afraid to cross the gulf between them? What do
you think?"
"I don't think 'the woman with dreams' has ever been afraid of the
natural things." Then she stopped. It seemed simple enough, after his
experience, that he should want to dig into such questions for the
ease of his own soul, but it was hard to talk about them at all and
keep her own feelings covered. So she looked away and very
practically broke off. "Anyway no one can see things in generalities;
you only know how you feel yourself."
Then she found that he wasn't interested in generalities.
"I'm afraid that's really what I wanted to know," he said--"how you
would feel about it. When the war is over a lot more men will have to
go out to the land, if the country is ever to come back to normal
again. Some of these men won't be the greatest possible asset to
the country; men of all sorts go into the making of an army; but
a lot of them will be of the finest type, educated, practical,
public-spirited, the kind we need for building a community. Only men
alone can't build a community; it requires the indispensable woman,
and there's the problem. The men themselves will have learned, under
the severest discipline, to endure and cope with hard conditions.
They have slept in muddy trenches, they have suffered and survived
unthinkable physical hardships; the rigors of agriculture will have
no terrors for them. But their wives, or the girls who would be their
wives, have been living in refined homes--maybe during the war they
have gone without luxuries which they considered necessities in other
times; perhaps they have done work they would have thought impossible
before; still they have lived in an atmosphere of considerable
elegance. It's rather a good thing that they have. If these women
would come out to make homes on the land, bringing with them all
their essentials of refinement, but dropping the superficialities,
what a blessing it would be.
"I can imagine the horror some of them would feel at the prospect of
pioneering in the country, but I know that things out here can be
made as safe and comfortable and I hope far more worth while than
they can be in any city, if people just have the right material in
themselves. We would have less money, but less would be required for
the same kind of life. Think what it could be! This place will be
mine then, the old house and the trees and all. We could have a
bungalow to delight the heart of any architect, and we have ground
enough to make a natural park around it. We could have a blazing
fireplace as big as a cave with logs from our own woods, and we could
make it a centre for other less happy people who needed the warmth of
a real home sometimes. We would have our own horses to galavant all
over the country, but, best of all, we would always have the cabin to
come home to, and time to be alone, to think and talk and learn to
know each other. People can't do that where they live in crowds."
Then a quick, troubled look shot over his face. "I had forgotten," he
apologized awkwardly, "but there's so little time, and I get so
carried away with the idea of having you here, that anything else
seems impossible; so I blunder into a visioning like this."
Three years ago she could run her hand through his crumpled hair as
she would with a little boy in trouble. She couldn't do that now.
Anyway, she reasoned, it was very different comforting a man for his
mother who had died, and for a sweetheart who was flippantly alive
and breaking his heart from a distance. She couldn't even look at
him. But the old instinct was still there, maternal, protective. She
seemed to take on new height with it, and her eyes laughed with a
comradely tenderness near akin to tears.
"The whole trouble is you're lonesome, Billy, and it's leading you
into dangerous places," she said. "You've set your heart so on living
here that you think just the place would make everything right. Don't
go away thinking you're losing anything. The place will be here just
the same when you come back, and I'll be here. We can come out as
often as you like and have no end of good times--but don't you see,
Billy, there are some places where you just can't compromise?"
He reddened painfully.
"It's all right," he said. "I know you would if you could, just like
you've always done everything else I wanted. But you can't, and I
don't wonder.... We came out here for a holiday. The woods are all
dappled green and sunshine--pine needles under your feet deep as a
Donegal carpet. There's a trail winding around for about a mile up to
a spring in the rocks. People say the Indians made it, but I think it
was some wise old cow finding the easiest slopes on her way up for a
drink. It's like a view from an aeroplane to look down when you get
to the top. Shall we go?"
They were not more foolish or more misunderstood than generations of
lovers had been before them.
And the girl learned what a day in the woods could be--sun pouring
through the parting branches and warming at every touch; brown furry
things scuttling off through the dead leaves; here and there a mother
partridge strutting out watchful and wary, and whirring close,
broken-winged, at sight of them, to lead her brood to cover;
stillness like the stillness of an abbey, broken only by the distant
drumming of a woodpecker on a hollow tree. And always there was
Billy--his sleeve just touching when the path was narrow, his hand so
quick and steady when the rocks were slippery. And once, when at the
sound of the faintest chirping in a thicket he had stolen over and
reached out for her to come and look at a nest of the downiest yellow
fledgelings, in the breath-holding wonder of it her fingers had
somehow tightened convulsively about his. The birds had done it, of
course; but they came home very quietly after that.
But when he left her he said: "There's just one thing more. Will you
try to forget me as you must think of me now, and let me try all over
again when I come back? You've been no end kind always--I won't
presume on it--but when I come back, if you can stand to have me
around at all, I'm going to try to make you love me. And I'm going to
keep on trying. And if you ever find you can marry me I'll keep right
on after that--and if you can't--it'll be all right. Until I come
back, we'll just go right on being pals like we have been? So I can
write to you and know you're here, like a warm fire to reach out to
when there seems to be no warmth anywhere else. Talk about men
protecting women! We're as left as deserted children, when things go
wrong, without a woman we can trust, somewhere."
* * * * *
Ruth's aunt came in to comfort her when he had gone.
"You're going to miss Mr. Withers," she said. "He is a flower of a
man. But I'm going to tell you something. You've never had much to do
with men; you seem to have always been too busy with your work, and
I've been sorry about it; but as things are turning out now it may be
as well. Some of our men won't come back; many of those who do come
back will be changed. Mr. Withers is naturally likeable; he will be
made much of socially, and there's the question of how much of it he
can stand. I believe he was a great admirer of that pretty Miss
Evison, which is really not a strong argument for his ability to
take care of himself. I'm glad now that you have so much of interest
in your career."