CHAPTER XIV.
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.