CHAPTER XVII.
“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.