CHAPTER XIII.
“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.”