It was a beautiful stretch of land at the end of a timbered road, a lonely place, generally considered, but Billy went over it acre by acre with glowing anticipation. Here he would start a permanent pasture for the long dreamed of Aberdeen-Angus herd. Down where the broad creek took such a precipitous leap in its course, he would build a dam and drive the water to the buildings—perhaps install a dynamo later on. The glinting blue stones from the rough little rise back of the barn would make the foundation and fireplace and chimneys for a low Swiss chalet among the trees. He could already see its light blinking down on the highway like a beacon, the welcome to a shelter and resting place where he could dream and hope, blessed with the happy content of having paid his debt to existence through the day.
Billy confided to a classmate, the Jimmy Wood who had piloted him to the brink of his first college social adventure, his plan to buy the place and work it, and Jimmy was disappointed.
“Have you stopped to think what you’re letting yourself in for?” he asked. “You’ve done
farm work at home, and I’ll warrant you’ve hated it, but after four years away from it you’ll find it a sight worse—the dirt and the drudgery and the eternal monotony. Of course, you’d get used to it. At the end of a year I dare say you’d be content to wear overalls and a six days’ beard from Sunday to Sunday. I know we’ve all said we wanted to farm eventually, but not the grubbing, driving, scraping kind of a job that goes with paying for a place. Better make your money at something else and end up with farming as a hobby, when you can afford to be merely business manager yourself. If you start in now with nothing ahead, and have to save every cent, you’ll get so absorbed in yourself, so haunted by the bogey of your mortgage, that by the time you should be some force in the community philanthropically, you’ll be sealed like a clam in the money-getting idea.”
“You mean, then, that the only public-spirited agriculturist is the man who makes his money some easier, faster way, and comes back to donate it here and there for rural uplift, who cultivates a hobby of making speeches on the calamity of rural depopulation?”
“Oh, I know my view of it seems sordid enough,” Jimmy admitted, “but you’re an idealist. And I can tell you there’s no way you’ll lose your vision more surely than in a mill with poverty. Besides, if I’m not uncommonly dense
you’ve set your heart on that place because you want to build a home on it; you know as well as I do, that a farm’s the lonesomest place on earth to go to alone. A man can navigate fairly easily on a single craft anywhere else; he can stop to think whether he can afford a wife and a home or not, and he can wait until he can afford them, but a wife and a home are almost an absolute necessity for a man who owns and works a farm, poor or not. Being an idealist you don’t want anything but the best, and I’ve observed that the best is generally expensive.”
Billy still seemed absorbed in the skyline and his adviser feared that he might have gone too far. He knew that if Billy’s decision had been made, it had no doubt stood arguments quite as enduring as any he could advance, and it wasn’t likely to help things, to remind him of the disadvantages.
“Of course,” Jimmy continued. “I haven’t any fear that you’d make a mess of things, and I know there are compensations, but suppose you do go back and bury yourself there now, you cut yourself off from everything social at least, and I’m afraid you’ll just wall yourself in alone for the rest of your life. On the other hand, you have your choice of two of the best counties in the province for Rep. work. The job has a few allurements apart from the salary, and that reminds me——”
From a collection of letters of various post marks and hand-writing, and sundry photographs, Jimmy produced a snapshot and handed it to Billy. It gave him a wicked satisfaction to see the dull red slowly cover the sober face, for the picture showed nothing more disturbing than Marjorie Evison perched nymph-like on the limb of a blossoming apple-tree. Billy looked for a long time with the same unconscious worship that had followed the airy little figure through the college dance; then he handed the picture back.