but there’s an abundance of material to start a community theatre. I’m not an acting man myself, but a girl who has conducted a dramatic campaign in a down-town settlement could set a powerful leaven working. Anyway there’s a mine of unexplored dramatic interest up here. In lieu of the social tangles ravelled out in the shows, you can see how the Great Author planned the miracle of life with the creatures of the woods. There’s a red-crested bird just arrived with his mate from the South last week, and they seem to be in trouble. I went to sleep last night listening to him calling low in the bushes and she never answering. But I know it’s going to come out all right—there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, because there are only the two of them concerned. Nature doesn’t mix up in triangular affairs. If you could come out right away you might be in time for the last act. I whittled out a house from a piece of log last night and set it on the gatepost, and I think at the rate they’re getting on, they’ll be moving in about the day after this reaches you.
“To-morrow I want to commence work on the bungalow fireplace. It’s to be a great stone cavern with boulders broken from the side of our own hill and a heavy oak timber hewn from a log in our own woods. And on the edge of the mantel I want to whittle out the words, ‘Chop Your Own Wood and It Will Warm You Twice.’
That much I’ve learned from experience—the glow that comes from earning a thing before you take it. You feel it when you build your own house, or plant your own trees and wait for them to grow, or when you work in some community move to help your neighbors—most of all I think in the last; there are so few of us out here and we need each other so badly. I can’t help thinking what a stupendous lot a girl with your experience and—and everything, could do for the place.
“We’re beginning to make plans for our spring operations, deciding whether to plant one hundred or two hundred acres of wheat, whether the price of corn is going to make it worth while to raise hogs. It’s as full of adventure as a gamble in stocks, the chance a farmer takes with blight and drought and flood and uncertain markets, but there’s always the promise of the year ahead, of seed-time and harvest, and the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that agriculture is one of the few industries the world couldn’t do without.
“But after all, important as it is to produce food for the world’s need, instinctively a man plans for other things. Early this morning I started up the mountain to get out some stone for the house foundation. The sun was just coming up, and when I stood for a few minutes, sort of at the top of the world, wondering at the distance and stillness and the unexplored beauty of it all, a bird, possibly a descendant of the one that
startled me at my ploughing fifteen years ago, flew over my head, called a few times and flew away. And I wanted you. At night I came back to the house and the emptiness was awful, and things troubled me, but through the smoke of my pipe I could see you sitting there, with the fire making lights in your hair, and your eyes starry and thoughtful in the dusk, and I wanted to take your hands in mine and hold them out to the blaze, and I wanted to ask you what you thought about the things that worried me. That’s the worst of it with you women who have other interests—you would make such ripping companions for a man. There it is, you see—the man’s old primitive hunger for his mate and his home. It’s more urgent out here than in town. Suppose we had lots of money and went into an uptown house. I’d pay people to do things for you, and you’d direct them to do things for me, and a lot of the personal communication would be cut off. Out here, a man and a woman need each other more.
“So, very humble, but unashamed—if you get the difference—I’m coming down for you. Try to be waiting for me.”
His first, swift look told him she was waiting. There would be no more wondering and questions and misunderstandings.
“Just what was the trouble the other day?” he asked. “If you’re not sure in any way, we’ll get it cleared up now.”