“And things didn’t look any better when the train dropped me right from the heart of the city on to the platform of the little flag station at Pinehill. The village houses huddled like so many white chickens close about the old grey cheese-factory; the sheds were bright with last year’s circus posters, the snow stretched in patches over the muddy fields, like so much linen from a broken clothes-line. There was none of the water-color landscape effect that we always associate with pastoral scenes when we are away from them. This, of course, was a mere accident of time and weather, but out on the farms there
is a real trouble. The farmsteads lack something of the well-groomedness of the days when their owners took a pride in them. The hedges are a bit shaggy; the gates sag here and there. One of the best farms is in the hands of a tenant who ‘loves not his land with love far-brought,’ and the owner of another lives on it for only two months a year and has no aspirations to fit it up for a permanent home. Pine Ridge, of which I have the honor to be the new owner, is the most dilapidated of all—a veritable scarecrow waiting to have the breath of life breathed into it. Still, I’ve come back to it like a homesick child, and I don’t believe the country ever fails those who trust her.
“I have at least been encouraged in that since I came here. Yesterday I called at the littlest house in the village to get an axe-handle. There’s a man there who takes a special pride in making them, smoothing them down at the last with his bare hands like a cabinet worker on mahogany. He is an old man, bent by years of husbandry, but I found him working at his craft with the joyful concentration that an artist puts into a masterpiece. His old wife, bent by years of housewifery and making babies comfortable in the crook of her arm while she worked, bustled about showing me the blooms of her geraniums, and the photographs of her grandchildren. They are, evidently, quite a creditable and promising line of
descendants, especially one lad of twenty years who seems to have inherited the best brain of the family for generations back. His grandfather says the world will hear from him some day, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t. They are very happy, these old people. I think I know why. They have been a part of the simple, wonderful things that make life; they have made it a contribution that will go on long after their own lives have gone out, so it can never hold for them anything of purposelessness or boredom.
“I’ve heard a lot about what you’re doing. Perhaps you don’t know that even back here you’re rather famous. It’s a sort of glorified social service, isn’t it—running a community institute, bringing cultural advantages to those who have missed them, seeing that lonely young people have a good time, finding sweethearts for those who haven’t them? I wish someone would start something like that out here. Our need, I can tell you, is as desperate as any down-town settlement’s, with its abundance of people and playhouses, and gathering places of a dozen different kinds not two blocks away from anywhere. And that reminds me that when I dropped into the Agricultural Office the other day, the representative told me they were trying to persuade you to come out and open a four-square developing centre for the young people of this county—to carry out among the young people of the farms
the same physical, intellectual, social and spiritual programme that has made such progress in town. And I couldn’t enthuse over it at all. I want someone to do it, of course. I think it’s the best movement that has ever been suggested for the country yet; but there are going to be a lot of ‘movements’ in the country during the next few years, and the thing they’ll need more than anything else is more people living here to help them along, to make them permanent, something more than a passing demonstration.
“I’ve been thinking what a glorious ‘four-square’ plan we could work out in our own little house up here. I’ve never heard of anyone trying the idea on a home, but that’s really where it should begin. Of course, it’s the easiest part to square up a house physically, if you know how to use tools, but every day I see houses along the road with constitutions absolutely broken down, and a family still struggling to keep a pulse of life within—weather-boards off, chimneys sagging, summer kitchens straggling off drunkenly at the back. Sometimes there is a solid, square, stone structure, ruggedly upright, but with signs of something wrong inside—windows frozen over like disease-dulled eyes, because there is no warmth within; the whole front presenting a forbidding countenance, when it could be made to smile invitingly by putting on a front porch, lifting the parlor blinds, adding a bay-window at
the side, where the sun could catch it. Our own little house will be small enough, dear knows, but it will be tight against the weather; it will have a stone chimney running up one side—a pillar without and an altar within—and because we don’t want to compromise with what we call our ‘standards of living,’ it will have waterworks before we think of any other luxury.
“In your little pamphlet on intellectual training, I see you have outlined a course of reading. I wonder how much time you get for reading now. Just when you’ve planned a quiet evening for yourself, do your friends ever call you out to a tea or a show or a bridge party? I can tell you, you have to come to the quiet of a place like this to really enjoy books. I think we even might be able to start a reading circle among our neighbors. I left some magazines with a neighbor’s wife the other day, and she quite embarrassed me with her gratitude.
“‘Do you know I haven’t seen a woman’s magazine since I was married,’ she said. ‘Joe’s the best man in the world’—what confidences have been prefaced by safeguards like this—‘but he isn’t much for luxuries, and he isn’t much company. He’ll sit for hours smoking or figuring and when he does talk it’s mostly the crops or the taxes. It isn’t his fault; he was like that when he used to come to see me. I’ve known him to sit for a whole evening without saying much more than to ask