hill, or to skate for miles down some winding creek straggling through spooky cedar swamps and open, moonlit fields. It was an invigorating change from the theatres and cafes that had been Billy’s late amusement haunts—not that he had buried all these in the ashes of the past, but they seemed to have their purpose in catering to the needs of people who wanted their pleasures ready-made for them. His sister, by chance or design, frequently added other friends to their party, and he found himself, either by chance or design, taking Ruth farther up the ice than anyone else cared to go.
Of course it was natural enough; no other girl could skate so far without tiring; no other girl could abandon herself so wholly to the joy of a sport and still keep about her a sort of reverence for it. And when he watched her from a distance, slim, buoyant, wholly alive, taking the ice like a sail before a breeze, and remembered the unconscious glow in her friendly eyes as he had skated with her, he realized that it was rather gratifying to a man’s pride to know that, while he was so unnecessary to her in a material way, she still cared to have him around. That there was something strained underneath her casual friendliness he knew, and wondered; he was beginning to find it hard to be perfectly natural himself. But when he took her home one night, and very
soberly asked if he might come in and talk to her, she said “It’s pretty late.”
He wasn’t surprised. He felt that it was pretty late. He had been a long time awakening. No woman would value very highly the interest of a man supposedly trying to gather himself together from the blow of his ideal woman’s engagement to another man, and she was not the type of girl likely to accept a compromise. The next day the battalion moved to a farther camp.
A few people, dependent entirely upon statistics for their information, have believed that the farming districts were not touched by the war, that the great, green country smiled peacefully through it all, hoping only that the allies might have favorable weather for their task. Investigations show few homes that have not suffered the anxiety of waiting, or the grief of loss. Many of the first to go from the cities had been nurtured in the austere discipline of some rocky farm whose meagre income did not appeal to an ambitious young man; or, if the family was large, it behooved some of them to move out and leave a delving-ground for the rest. Nor was the change to military life quite so hard for those who had rubbed against the world in many places, as for the brothers at home for whom the thought of even a training camp had a homesick apprehension.
A boy from a farm back among the hills occasionally
dropped into a back seat at the village recruiting meetings. He heard unmoved the argument that he would be handsome in khaki, and listened with cynical but well-concealed amusement to girls who sang, with more zeal for, than appreciation of, the cause, “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.” Then one night the officer made a sincere and rather strong appeal. He didn’t minimize the hardships so far as he knew them, and he described the brutalized misery of the invaded countries as graphically as a good imagination could picture it. The boy from the farm listened with little outward sign of emotion, but a battle was going on inside. He didn’t go to the platform with the few others who responded to the appeal: he had never stood before a crowd in his life. He was not used to crowds; all his life had been spent in the quiet of the fields, and the long hours of constant, necessary toil had left little time for exploring other places. He didn’t know the ways of men in companies, and it would have taken more courage than he possessed to stand up before an audience and take their approval. He waited at the door until the officer came out—and he joined the army. Then he went home.
In the kitchen the fire burned low. A few geraniums had been moved to the table, that they might not freeze against the window-panes. Beside them lay the day’s paper and his father’s
glasses; the father and mother had acquired a habit of discussing the war news long after he went to bed at night, and he had often wondered why they should be so interested; he knew now. Always on the rare occasions when he was out late, he came in quietly, took off his shoes and went directly upstairs, but to-night he sat on the wood-box, staring at the ashy fire and listening to the regular breathing in the little bedroom off the kitchen. There was only one of these comfortable, sleepy sounds to-night; his mother was awake. After all the sleepless nights she had spent over the family it was hard to think of the vigils she would keep when he had gone. It was hard to think of leaving them with the work of the farm; they were getting old and the mortgage was still hanging over them. It meant hard work and careful living to keep afloat, even with a young man’s steady work. They couldn’t afford to hire help, even if the help were available, and he could see his father, in the evenings of the next harvest, crippling over the fields, footsore and bent, to bring the cows home for milking. They would be standing at the bars, in the dusk, those cows, lowing and nervous from waiting, as though they wondered why the work was never done. And his mother would come out with the pails, and on into the dark there would be no sound but the regular flow of the milk streams, and the contented breathing of the
animals. The aching loneliness of it! And he, the last of their sons, who had hoped to make things easier, to some day fit up the other house on the place and bring home a girl who would be a daughter to them—after all they had hoped of him, where would he be while they were trying to do his work? Lying out under the sky somewhere, maybe, as powerless to ever help them again, as though he had never been. Yet the recruiting officer had said—and the arguments came back as logical and appealing as when he had placed them before an enthused audience. But to the boy trying to do the right thing, the problem was cruelly complicated.