It was very quiet in the neighborhood after the battalion left. Over
the whole green country always known as a retreat from the strain and
noise and gaiety of the town, there brooded a quiet that was not
restful. Canada was far removed from the areas where every home had
been broken, but in the littlest hamlet or the most secluded
community there was some home with a cloud hanging over. When Ruth's
work took her among these people now, she felt a closer touch with
their anxiety; she hadn't known what it meant before.
It was in a Scotch settlement in Eastern Ontario that the real spirit
of the war seemed to have entered. She had visited the place during
the winter before the war, and the meeting-hall had been filled with
young people. They were an interesting crowd--the young men, hardened
from summers of harvesting and winters of lumbering, every one of
them standing six feet or over, not all modelled after Adonis, but
generally bearing unmistakable marks of good breeding and
intelligence in their strong-featured faces. It had long been the
ambition of every family to turn out at least one university man, if
it ran the farm to the rocks to pay for it, and the others, the
elder brothers who stayed at home to fatten the calves that went to
buy the books and the dress suits and sundry incidentals of the
college course--they had just as active brains, were just as clear
thinkers. The houses were not all painted on the outside, but they
had libraries of the choicest things in standard literature, and most
of the houses had their bagpipes or a violin. From the time when the
long evenings set in in the fall until the spring floods broke up the
roads the young men and the girls would gather regularly in some farm
house and dance all night. The Highland fling was as well known here
as in any home in the hills of the Old Land, and when the whole floor
wound up the night in the Scotch reel, the drone of the pipes and the
whoops of the dancers seemed a very harmless and picturesque way of
keeping alive the traditions of their warrior ancestors.
But they were indeed sons of the Covenanters, and with the first
surety of war every man who could get away at all wound up his
affairs as fast as he could, or left them incomplete, got into kilts
if he could find a Highland regiment not filled up, but in any case
got into a uniform of some kind, said good-bye to his women folk or
his children, a bit roughly and unsteadily at the last, held them
painfully close for a minute, then broke away and left them without
looking back. The whole settlement had been left like that, and the
farming was now being done by the old men and the young boys and the
women and girls.
But the girls had come from the same strain of Covenanter ancestors.
They were tall, deep-bosomed, motherly young women with a strength of
will and character in their faces like their brothers--and it was
war-time. Just as their great grandmothers must have gathered in the
sheep when their war-fired men followed the bagpipes over the hills
to meet an enemy before their own hearths were dishonored, so their
daughters in Canada, with the enemy far away, but none the less
menacing if no one went to meet him, took up the tools their soldiers
had laid down, and went to farming. Many of these girls had never
lifted an axe or driven three horses on a binder before, but they
were doing it now, and doing it fairly well. Not that this was work
that any Canadian girl could do. These girls had unusually good
physiques to begin with; perhaps the canny forethought of their race
had made them judicious in what they attempted to do, and there were
usually more than one of them in the house, so they didn't have to
try to crowd a woman's work into the night after doing a man's work
in the fields all day. Anyway, it was their avowed intention to keep
it up "until the men came back."
In the winter the girls who in other years had given their evenings
entirely to the neighborhood frolics now sat late beside their lamps
at home, knitting. In one community it occurred to them that they
could work better together, so they formed a "Next o' Kin Club."
Incidentally they sent for Ruth to come and help them get their work
better organized.
It was easy to arrange a plan for the most practical kind of Red
Cross work. It was not so easy to look squarely at the problems ahead
of most of these girls, and offer any solution. But the girls
themselves had gone right to the heart of things.
"We've thought it all out," one girl explained to Ruth, a girl with
eyes as soft and blue as the heather and a wealth of bronze hair that
would have set an artist raving. She was obviously a girl who in
normal times had followed the quick, warm workings of her heart
rather than to reason out any logical line of conduct. "We've thought
it all out, and we want to be ready for whatever happens.
"Andra and I were to have been married in October. At the first word
of war he and my brother Donald, a lad just turned eighteen, left
together. Father is old and I'm trying to take Donald's place till he
comes back. If he shouldn't come I'll stay anyway and do the best
I can. Then when Andra comes he'll work the two places; it would
be easy for him--you never _saw_ Andra. I'm sure he's coming
back--somehow you couldn't think of Andra not coming back. He just
wasn't afraid of anything and the things that set other people
cowering before them, just naturally made way for him. He always
drove the logs over the gorge where every other man in the place
thought it was playing with death to go--and when something came
loose at a barn-raising and the whole framework seemed ready to come
crashing down on the men, he crawled out on a beam with the timbers
swaying under him and drove the joint together. Of course they say a
man has no chance at all over there; that it's just human life put up
against so much machinery; still I can't think Andra won't come
back--that just couldn't be," she cried, a terrified protest in her
blue eyes. "But he might come back not able to do things like when he
went away," she added quietly, "and that's why I want to keep the
farm going as well as I can. We could still make a living here; so we
could be married even if he couldn't work.
"Oh, don't tell me it wouldn't be prudent," she broke out when Ruth
tried to speak. "You never _saw_ Andra. If you'd once known the
look and the pride of him in his kilt, if you'd seem him taking the
logs from a jamb, and the river frothing around him, if you'd known
the mind and the will and the kind, true heart of him you'd know that
there aren't many men like him left in the world, and you'd know that
the greatest mistake would be that he shouldn't get married--that
there wouldn't be any children to grow up like him. So no matter what
happens, just so God sends him back to me alive. I'll be waiting.
"That's how most of the girls here feel, but a lot of their lads have
been killed. The only hope for them is to have something to do that
will make it seem worth while to live. A few of them want to train
for nurses, thinking that by trying to ease other people's suffering
they can forget their own, but they wouldn't all make nurses, and the
life will soon go out of the place here if they all go. If you could
plan something worth while for girls to do right here at home, and
help the others who feel that they must get away, to find their right
place when they do go, it would be worth everything."
It happened when the "Next o' Kin" club were making shirts and
bandages at a farm house one day that a pedlar called selling
lavender. The people had little use for lavender, but in the warmth
of their hospitality they asked the stranger to stay for supper. He
was embarrassed by the situation; evidently itinerant selling was new
to him, and not congenial. It was also discovered that he was trying
painfully to conceal the fact that his right arm hung limp and
useless. Then someone noticed that he wore the badge of a discharged
soldier, and if Prince Charlie had suddenly appeared in their midst
his welcome could not have been more cordial.
He was the first person they had seen who had actually been "there,"
and the young people, especially, pressed him with questions. Their
imaginations had created thrilling pictures of kilted regiments
charging over level fields with the sun flashing on their trappings
and somewhere, always, the pipes playing; and those who fell would go
down smiling. Was it like that, they begged, and had he seen any of
their men?
The soldier considered and decided that they deserved to know the
truth.
"You'll be gettin' some of them back one of these days," he said,
"and you wouldn't want to be expectin' too much of them for a while.
I may not have seen any of your men, but I've seen men of the best
picked regiments in the army, men who had been there long enough to
be hardened to it if that were possible, and I've seen them loaded on
to the stretchers cryin' like children. You see it's all so
different, you just don't _get_ it here at all.
"There was one chap, a sort of leader and general favorite in our
crowd. He had been a champion athlete at college and his face would
have made a painting of a young Greek god look like a poor copy. They
carried him back to the dressing-station one day and sent home a
telegram saying that he was wounded in the face. The little girl from
home wrote back that he would be all the more handsome to her with a
scar that told of sacrifice and bravery, and the dear knows what
else, but she didn't know just what it was. For the rest of his life
he'll keep the lower part of his face covered with a black cloth. The
question is just how the girl will feel about it after the first
shock or the first romantic phase of the incident has passed."
The next day Ruth went into another community. It was a land flowing
with milk and honey and humming with automobiles, and except as a
live topic of conversation, the war was something apart.
"We've done very well in patriotic work around here," one prosperous
citizen explained. "The young people have a patriotic dance every
month, and we've raised a lot at entertainments because everyone for
miles around has a car and there's sure to be a good turnout if it's
for anything patriotic. Then we send donations regularly to the
military hospital in the next town; we feel that we owe something to
the men there. But the returned soldier is going to be a serious
problem. They're going to feel that they've done everything for the
country and that the country should take care of them for the rest of
their lives. One called here last summer looking for work, but he was
all crippled up and couldn't stand anything. A few days ago he went
through here again selling perfume or something. Never saw one yet
that could stick at anything. You see they've been idle for so long
they'll never settle down again to hard, steady work."
Of one thing he was sure, however--the war must be won. "We've sent a
lot of men, but we'll send more," he declared, swelling with pride of
his determined patriotism. "We don't want our children and our
children's children to have to live under the terror of a repetition
of this." What did he think of conscription? Conscription would be a
fine thing. There were lots of young men who could be spared, but the
government must see that men were not drafted from the farms; the
farms were already undermanned. Incidentally, though he didn't
express it, with this provision conscription wouldn't touch his own
son. It was a strange, but not uncommon, line of human reasoning, and
to the girl, pure and strong in contrast, a sentence in Billy's last
letter kept recurring: "One virtue stands out through the worst of
it; however big a piece of blundering the whole thing may be, so far
as the men are concerned the spirit of selfishness is entirely
absent." Perhaps it was true that the peaceful little country
communities, confined in the shelter of their own hills, sometimes
missed the vision of a world-wide public spirit.
And "there were lots of young men who could be spared," the generous
one had declared. She thought of the blue-eyed Scotch girl's Andra,
and the young leader and favorite of his mates, who "would have made
a Greek god look like a poor copy," and who, for the rest of his
life, would keep his face half covered with a black cloth; and she
thought of Billy and everything else seemed to end there.
In her settlement work in town when a soldier wandered into the club,
homesick on his way to the war, or broken in health returning, it
might have been Billy, and she swept him into the warmth of her
understanding sympathy almost as his mother might have done. When the
doctor said "We might have another mother and baby clinic here every
week, if you have time for it," she thought of Billy's mother and the
baby who died, and she always had time for it. When the young
people's club met on Wednesday evenings and she found some
serious-eyed, embarrassed boy isolated by his shyness or falling a
prey to an unscrupulous little huntress, she thought of another
chapter of Billy's career, and she spared no trouble to align his
interests with a real girl. Two years of such personal social service
could scarcely fail to be heard of, and by the time the war was over
her House and her methods were becoming rather famous. It was one of
the city's little recognitions that she should be a member of the
delegation to meet Billy's battalion at a formal reception, as it
passed through on the way home for demobilization.