"_A tribal mind came into existence. Man had entered upon the
long and tortuous and difficult path toward a life for the common
good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he is still
treading to-day._"--_H. G. Wells in The Outline of History._
They gipsyed about through the country a lot that summer. The task of
getting the neglected farm into bearing shape was a man-size job, and
often, after a day in the fields, Billy worked until the last light
faded, clearing away odds and ends to hasten the speed of the
builders next day, especially building in the stone fireplace with
his own hands--that was a joy he had always promised himself. But
there were other days when he quit work early, took a plunge in the
river at the foot of the pasture, dressed in outing clothes and
motored into town.
On these occasions, a cartoonist in search of a subject for his next
attack on farmers in politics would not have looked a second time at
the sunbrowned young man with his swinging stride and crisp hair-cut.
He seemed to break every established tradition of his class, not even
loitering before the bills of movie stars and jaded stock companies,
but transacting his business with despatch, then driving down a shady
street in the boulevarded residential section. He always stopped
very quietly before a deep, dark stone house, took the steps with a
bound, and rang with the shyness of a lover making his first call. He
could never quite get over this. And a girl always met him just as
quietly, with eyes just as eager to tell him she had been waiting for
him. In spite of all that the actresses in the social game believed
of the fascination of uncertainty, it held him like a lode-star, this
constant declaration. He would have been as fearful of losing it by
failing an iota of what she believed of him, as he would fear to lose
the trust of a child by striking it down. It was easy to understand,
now, why the fabric of family life held so safely sometimes.
Toward evening they usually left the city to follow winding roads
through orchards and meadow lands. They were rich with many charms,
these excursions--the faint, elusive scent from raspberry bloom and
uncut clover, stirring in the night air; the occasional sleepy tinkle
of a cow-bell, a lamb bleating back to the flock, or a mother calling
her children in for the night; here and there a lamplighted house
close to the road, blinds undrawn, showing the little group within;
an old man and woman sitting in a seat they had built for themselves
outside their little gate that they might not miss anything of the
world going by them--the simple, vital dramas of life flashing past
with every mile of film of the open country.
The Agricultural Representative, observing Billy's nomadic habits,
tore out of the office after him one day and called him back.
"It seems to me, if you have so much time for running around, as no
other decent farmer in the neighborhood has," he remarked, "you might
as well be running to some purpose. I have a lot of school plots to
judge at odd points through the county. By driving a few miles out of
your way each trip, you might be able to make the work interesting
for yourself, and it would save the time of a man who really has
something to do. I thought perhaps, if you were on your way to the
city, you might call for Miss Macdonald and take her along. It would
give her an opportunity to do some of the research work she'll need
when she comes out to help in the office here."
And he grinned the wider when he saw that the suggestion stirred only
a response of pity.
"Sorry you had counted on that," the generous one replied. He felt
that he could afford to be compassionate.
Their first judging trip took them to a neighborhood far back from
the town. A group of three houses banked close to a railway siding, a
post office, a blacksmith shop and a farm house marked the centre of
the community, with well-tilled farms all about. The school was
there, too, but something that was evidently an addition to the
building arrested their attention.
But the thing didn't look like a new building. Stranger still, it was
set on wheels. On closer view, it was frankly and simply, a passenger
coach from the railway, apparently a derelict for travelling
purposes, stranded in the centre of a grass-grown school-yard, flying
a flag, and docilely bearing the inscription "Nestleville School
Annex--1921."
They climbed up and looked in at the windows. There it was--seated,
blackboarded along one side, a room equipped to take care of some
forty children.
"Now, I wonder how this happened. For the sake of the research work
you're supposed to be doing, wouldn't you like to drop in on Mrs.
Terryberry and get her to tell you about it?" Billy suggested.
Mrs. Terryberry was delighted to tell them about it. A busy enough
farmer's wife, she could find time to drop her work for a chat at any
hour of the day, and she could always catch up with the time she had
lost before the day ended. A half-hour's gossip revived her like a
refreshing sleep, strangely enough, since she did all the talking
herself. She met them at "the little gate" when they drove up the
lane, ushered them into the house, in spite of their protests, and
settled them and herself comfortably in her cool, herb-scented
parlor. Before she launched on such a story she liked to get her feet
up a little on a hassock--she had been on them all day--her white
apron well spread, and her sturdy arms lying comfortably across her
generous waist-line.
"You see, we had needed a bigger school for years back and the
trustees always said the section couldn't afford one. Finally it got
to the place where the little ones were to be allowed to come only
half a day, and the children from back on the mountain, who needed
schooling the most, were to be shut out altogether. It was then the
Women's Institute got into it. When this order came up we knew the
thing couldn't wait any longer, and we called a meeting about it.
Someone thought of the old car that had been standing on the siding
for years, waiting for the company to haul it away for firewood, and
we got right up from the meeting and went across in a body and looked
it over. Some of the seats were broken but the walls were solid as a
church. We got the trustees out to look at it, and we sent two of
them down to see the agent in the city--we didn't go ourselves
because we're old-fashioned women up here, and we don't believe in
women running things. The company said we could have the car for
nothing; so the institute made a bee--that is, we invited the men to
it, and they brought their teams and hauled the car down to the
school. The women fixed it up ready for the children to move into it.
"The next thing we wanted to do was to start a hot lunch for the
children. Some of us had gone down to Toronto to the Institutes'
convention, and heard how the city schools had brought ill-nourished
children up to strength by giving them hot cocoa at noon. Well, we
came back home and we said to ourselves, if those children needed a
drink of hot cocoa at noon, surely our children, that walked a mile
or two miles to school through rain and snow, and carried a cold
dinner with them--surely they would be the better for it too. We
hadn't any equipment like they had in the city--no domestic science
kitchen with nice little gas plates and aluminum ware, but I lent my
tea-kettle and Mrs. Applegath lent her dish-pan, and every child
brought its own cup and spoon; the institute bought the sugar and
cocoa and the parents sent the milk, and it all worked so well that
this year we've bought dishes and a coal-oil stove with an oven,
where they can bake potatoes and such. And if the children here
aren't as well nourished as the best they have in town, it won't be
our fault."
She told them of other equally ambitious ventures--how the cemetery
had been a real disgrace to the place until the women got at it,
planned a stumping-bee to clear away the brush, inviting the men with
their teams and giving them a good dinner "to make it sociable," how
they had taken flower seeds and slips from their geraniums and
planted flowers on every grave they could find, and how Jim Black and
Huldy Adams, who hadn't spoken since their fathers quarrelled over
their rights to water their cattle at the creek that ran between
their pastures, had gone home reconciled because Jim saw Huldy down
on her knees planting a border of sweet alyssum around his father's
grave-stone.
She was loath to let them go. She had many other things to tell them.
And when they finally did convince her of their necessity to be away,
she followed them to the gate, her bare, capable arms rolled in her
apron, and she watched with interest while Billy extricated a coat,
evidently his own, from the back seat of the car, and buttoned the
girl into it. Such attentions had long ago slipped out of her own
life, nor did she particularly miss them; but she could enjoy their
observance in the lives of others just as she enjoyed the weekly
instalment of breath-taking romance in the local newspaper.
"Well now!" she breathed, when the rite had been performed, "I hope,
Miss Macdonald, you'll get a man that'll always be as kind to you as
that."
"I hope so," Ruth acknowledged, humbly.
"Oh, she will," Billy hastened to put in, for some reason addressing
himself quite as much to Ruth as to the other woman.
"Well, now!" the inquisitive one exclaimed again, her brow clearing.
She had found out what she wanted to know. "I fancied so, I'm real
glad to hear it. I think you'll get on fine."
She watched them out of sight--a curious, kindly gossipy soul, whose
interest in other people gave a color to her own life and harmed no
one.
They found others like her, bringing hope and happiness to their own
little corner of the world in a way that a whole army of professional
socialogists could never do it. Stopping to ask for a drink at a
cabin at the end of a mountain road one day, they found the woman
bending over a flat, heavy box that had just come in on the stage.
She glowed with excitement.
"It's our travelling library," she explained. "This is the third one
we've had, and it's the best yet."
Oblivious to the strangers for a minute, she fingered the worn
volumes caressingly.
"Here's Carman's 'Making of Personality,' I hoped they'd send that.
And, Oh, Sonny," she called to a tow-headed, blue-overalled boy
hovering shyly and eagerly in the doorway, "here's 'Nicholas
Nickleby.' He has just finished 'The Old Curiosity Shop'," she
remarked casually. "He should have all of Dickens read by the time
he's sixteen."
"Where do you get them?" they inquired.
"The Institute gets them from the government. They are always left
here because this is on the stage road. Some of the women have to
come five miles for their books, but we try to help each other by
leaving them half way whenever we can. We trade them around like our
mothers used to exchange their home-made yeast."
Finally she came to, apologetically. She made tea for her guests and
talked to them about books. The living-room of her shining little
house opened to the out-of-doors at the front, and at the back, with
tiny bedrooms at the sides, but it was a centre of refinement, from
the clean scrubbed floor to the pictures on the walls. These, too,
she had acquired when the women ordered a collection from an art
catalogue to decorate the school. They had cost a few cents each, and
her husband had whittled out little wooden frames for them. A special
place of honor above the book-shelves, was given to the famous
"Hope."
"I had seen that picture often enough, years ago," she remarked, "but
I never knew what it meant till we came up here and the frost killed
our crops three years in succession, while we still had faith in good
years to come. The one unbroken string and the one star in the sky
were very familiar to us for a long time.... We like that picture
very much."
Another evening, coasting along a quiet road some miles from town, a
section without a village centre anywhere, they came to a little
hall with automobiles parked around it, but no light in the window.
Billy went to investigate and came back a bit dumbfounded.
"They're having moving-pictures," he reported. "Strictly high-class
stuff. 'Lorna Doone' is the attraction to-night, and next week it's
to be 'The Merchant of Venice'--a joint scheme of your ubiquitous
Women's Institute and a farmer's club. If we would go a little
farther back from town we might possibly drop in on a radiophone
concert somewhere along the way. For your research observations, I
would inform you that one object of the picture scheme here is to run
a counter-attraction against the influence of a very depraved movie
theatre in the next town. I imagine they're getting somewhere, too.
When I was coming out, a boy of about sixteen or so asked me if I
knew where he could get the book 'Lorna Doone.' I wonder if he'll
want to start in on Shakespeare after next week."
And with the old, recurring pain, he remembered how avidly another
sixteen-year-old boy had devoured a collection of paper-backed novels
left at the Swamp Farm by an itinerant hired man.