CHAPTER XVI.
“God’s outposts are the little homes.”
So much can happen between the kindling of fires in hearts and on the hearth of a new household. It is such a shy, questioning, never-to-be-repeated time, filled with the anxiety to understand, and the keener anxiety of holding the mirror to one’s own soul to better see its appalling unworthiness.
“The house must be ready by fall,” Billy said. “I’ll have the men at it in the morning.”
“But they’ll want boards and plans and stones, and lots of things,” his wife-to-be protested. “They’ll know you’re going to get married, and if they aren’t too sorry for you, I’m afraid they’ll laugh at you.”
“They can start digging the cellar, anyway. Surely they’ll have sense enough to know that any house has to have a cellar. Could—couldn’t we make some kind of plan to-night—something for them to begin on? From March to October is a long time to wait. It might make it seem a little nearer just to get it on paper.”
Ruth had always wanted to plan a house. She had always been planning them, theoretically, in her dream castles, and technically in her
profession—but there was something very different about this one.
“This is the one thing we’re sure of—the chimney,” Billy was saying, blocking it out awkwardly on the back of an envelope. “Now what do you want?”
“Why, really, nothing much at all,” she stammered. “I—I’m afraid this is a bad time to plan a house. It’s all so new—so wonderful, somehow—it seems it wouldn’t ever make any difference where we live.”
“You think that wouldn’t stand in the way so much after a while?”
“No, but—you remember all those houses you passed on the road? The ones with frost over the windows, and the kitchen straggling off at the back, and no porches? After all I’ve believed a house should be, it seems we could just move into any of those and the things that were wrong wouldn’t matter at all.”
And then she saw something in his eyes that even she had never discovered before—a look incredible with wonder and gratitude and tenderness, and a smile back of it like the warmth of a fire that would always be there to reach out to. It was the only way Billy had of saying certain things.
“But since Nature doesn’t make any concession to such a sentiment, lovely as it is,” he reminded her, “we might find pneumonia lurking in the
house with frosty windows, and a worn-out shred of a woman, crying, in a heap at the foot of the straggling kitchen steps some day. We want our house—what is it you call it?—‘physically sound.’ ... We still have nothing but a chimney. Where do you want the living room, and all the other things I’ve heard you talk about? We can spread out all over the lot, you know. That’s the beauty of a home in the country; you don’t have to worry about the limitations of frontage or the proximity of your neighbors’ walls shutting out the light. Only, the two old pines will be here, and here. They’ll just naturally stand like pillars at each corner. They’ve been waiting for the house for a long time, and when the wind comes up at night I’ve heard them start with a low, cooing little shiver and work up to a perfect wail about it. I hope you won’t mind the noise they make. I think it’s about the knowingest sound I ever hear when I’m very lonely or very happy. I remember hearing someone say that it was like a lost soul crying, or something like that; but I imagine you’d like it. Why, I believe you first taught me to listen to it—the night we drove past the place after our ‘power demonstration.’ Do you remember?”
He remembered it now, very happily, himself, but events between had not quite blotted out other details of the time, and he added, shamedly,
“Heaven must have a special company of angels whose sole duty is to take care of fools.”
They weren’t making much progress with the plan. He had watched her draft house plans and remodel them for her classes, shifting rooms here and there with the ease and interest of a child playing with blocks. For some reason she seemed afraid of this one.
“We won’t want it very big,” she said.
“Because you’re fearful of the mortgage? But a farm house has to be built for permanence, you know. It generally stands for years and years. You don’t move out every first of May. That’s why it should be so much better planned than a town house—you have to look farther ahead.”
Then he took from his pocket a yellow, much-folded sketch copied from one of her blackboard drafts for the classes years ago—just after he had first become interested in houses.
“How would this do?” he asked.
She recognized it, happily.
“You liked that? I’m so glad. I believe I was drawing that house for you even then.”
“You knew—then?”
“No, no. I didn’t think of it ever being my house. I think I couldn’t have drawn it if I had. But I knew what a house would mean to you, and I was building it for you. It was the very best I could do. Why, I never could have thought of a
house, with everything in it like that, if I hadn’t been planning it for someone, could I?”
He didn’t just get it all at once. She “knew how much a house would mean to him”—a house “with everything in it, like that.” Well he knew every detail of it, from the great stone fireplace in the living-room and the little bookcases under the windows—a thought for all the precious intimacies of family life—to the den looking out over the valley and the sun-porch for a baby. He considered them gravely now while she drew meaningless squares and circles about the chimney and the two pine trees on the back of the torn envelope. Then he took the distracting jumble away and gathered her close.
“That was too wonderful of you,” he said. “Shall we leave it just as it is?”
She nodded without looking up. Then she smiled into his eyes, the same old, comrady smile. After all he was just Billy—the same delightful directness, the same steady eyes, clear to the depths, the same unfailing dependableness, the same infinite understanding.
But he did a strange thing when he went home that night. It was long past midnight when his car climbed the hill and turned in at the road gate. The moon was high and the shadows of the pine trees lay like black pools on the grass. He was not a sentimentalist, but he brought a spade and turned the first earth for the foundation of
the new house himself. Then he sat down on the fallen timbers of the old house and looked off across the country to where the ruins of another old house lay rotting in the marshes of the Swamp Farm.
It had been such a pitiful venture, the founding of that house. It wouldn’t have mattered that it had failed economically; many of the happiest families in the world had come through poverty together. But that there should be no trust, no confidence, no hope—nothing but a brooding fear where there should have been a fortress of refuge!
“We could not love the world so much if we had had no childhood in it,” he had read and questioned. He could still feel the warmth of the sun on his back as he sat for a brief half-hour on the bank of a creek, fishing; the coolness of the earth under his bare feet when he first shed his shoes in the spring. He remembered vividly the poignant elation at the discovery of a bush of ripe blackberries in a hidden fence corner. Yet his childhood was something which he would always be trying to forget. It came back to startle him in his dreams sometimes, even yet. It wasn’t fair—a person had only one childhood—but his mother had lived her whole married life in this atmosphere, and had gone out bravely trying to keep a stream of sunshine about the place for the rest of them, self-forgetful to the last.
Perhaps she didn’t know how prevailing the
effort would be—not by what she taught them, but by what she was. By the uncounted sacrifices she had made to give them a chance, their ways had been cast in safe and pleasant places. Here was a heaven on earth opening for him. Jean was happy and interested in a career of her own, and recently, just as happy when the county Agricultural Representative craved her interest in another direction. The mother who had made it all possible had done it single-handed, working desperately to construct a sailing craft for them out of the wreckage of her own life.
He wondered, dreamily, what it would mean to a boy to have a father who cared as much as that.
“Of course, everything will be as happy here as wanting-to can make it,” he reasoned. “It would need to be. We’re generally so stupid with the people we love. But it ought to go farther than that. Perhaps out here, where we have no settlement houses as centres of things that should exist for everyone, there may be a mission for a few more real homes.”
“Bury herself in the country, when the world needs her so much,” the mayor had said. “So far as the need goes,” he soliloquized, “I needn’t have worried over bringing her here.”