“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.
CHAPTER XV.
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.”
It was all a mistake, somehow, the reception. In his letters to Ruth, Billy had been the same unassuming young Canadian who could find an interest in working every night for a week on so common a thing as a water-wheel; he scarcely seemed a soldier at all. He wrote little of the war, and much about the country, repeating in a hundred ways between the lines his need of her. Now that he was here he was an officer, apparently an inch or two taller than ever—a very military-looking officer, much as he hated it—with women crowding around to pour tea for him, ushering their daughters along to meet him. His eyes were just as honest; he was altogether just as fine. The war had not changed him, but it had changed things for him. One couldn’t just imagine him shedding all the smartness of such a uniform and trappings to put on overalls and go to digging a living out of the earth.
“How the army makes them over,” Ruth overheard one old lady remark to another. “I fear the girls at home haven’t kept up to them. It will be fortunate for some of them if they made no entanglements before they went away.”