Ethel M. Chapman

“ In the orchard a flock of her turkeys were getting ready for the Thanksgiving market. Overhead was coming the soft thud of her baby’s bare feet on the stairs. On a hill off among the pines a red maple flamed at the door of a crumbling house—an ideal site for a Swiss chalet, Billy had called it one day when his enthusiasm had run away with his reserve—and she thought wretchedly of her office with its soft red rug, and its one gloomy window, and of her uncle’s luxurious house where hired experts held the sole privilege of ministering to the family comfort. ”

“ She reached out and almost touched him, but he folded his arms with a cruelty of aloofness and contempt that was almost dramatic. Then a hard glitter came into his eyes, and in a steely voice, too low to carry into the house, he said:
“Keep away, will you. ‘Tain’t only the boy, there, but I can’t trust you. You’ve deceived me. I seen Harding yesterday.”
And Billy, watching and listening with a child’s intuition, saw his mother stagger against the door as she went into the house. The old smouldering hate possessed him wickedly; he had never wanted so much to be a man. ”

“ A long stretch of road through woods and pastures, a white frost glittering on the fields and fences, a golden moonlight filtering through the branches of wind-swept trees and yellowing the dead leaves on the moist, black roadway, a cold white mist lying in the valley and never a sound but the steady purring of the engine. Presently a little cabin stood out alone in a clearing, its lights out, a faint white plume of smoke arising slowly from its chimney.
“Always seems a sort of lonely little house,” Billy remarked. “It must be a jolt to come out of the heart of a city to a spot like this. ”

“ Somehow the picture remained strangely in his mind when Marjorie came. There was something dazzling about her, just as there had been when she played a local magnet in the college ballroom, and it seemed to outshine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his own ideals and his lover’s interpretation of a few of her passing moods had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the assured graciousness cultivated of constant social experience that he knew nothing about. ”

“ Ruth had looked ahead to the day not without foreboding. Why, in the name of all that was sane, she wondered, should a man want to go and uncover the grave of his dreams at a time when he should be fighting to forget them? If he wanted her to witness the agony, of course she would be there—he would need someone—but to see him staring into the ruins of an old house at the ghost picture of the future he had visioned, to know that he was still aching for the nearness of an ethereal bit of thistledown of a girl, and to be unable to tell him just where he had been blind! ”

“ In the second year, partly by accident, partly through the insight of a few semi-professionals, it was discovered that he had some unusual athletic possibilities, and Billy loosened up from his grind sufficiently to learn the hard, clean strain of rugby and hockey, and to warm up daily in the gymnasium. It opened up a new world for him. In his whole life he had never before learned to play, and as it put a new spring in his muscles, a new physical joy of living in his existence, it began to clear away the cloud that had sobered and darkened his outlook. ”

“ Even the town was half asleep and lazy after the winter’s dissipation; to-night it will be as gay as a debutantes’ ball. In the country it was muddy and the fields and barns and fences stood out ugly and unashamed of themselves, like some old scrub-woman. Now the snow comes and gives her a new dress, you see, and here she is, a lady in white fox and diamonds. Wonderful, isn’t it, what clothes will do? But underneath she’s still the same old scrub-woman, the work-driven, squalid country. How I pity the people who have to stay here all their lives. Where are we going? ”

“ Dan Withers came out to the little sagging wooden porch and lit his pipe. Judging from his physique he might have managed the tillable acres of his Swamp Farm with one hand. Also he was not the caricatured work-driven, grasping type of farmer, bent and wooden-jointed and prematurely old, as a result of his struggle to wrest a living from the elements. He had the build of an athlete without the bearing—a laziness of movement and a slouch of the shoulders that was almost insolent, except when he walked before a crowd. He could command a military spine the instant it seemed worth the effort. ”

“ He had noticed the stolid, stoop-shouldered girl from the Home, whose pride, almost her self-respect, had been crushed out of existence, curving her spine and lifting her head in admirable imitation of Miss Macdonald’s poise. He didn’t wonder at this at all. If ever a school of physical culture turned out a model it must be this girl, with her slim, perfect physique, her quiet, supple carriage, her entire absence of self-consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Billy looked at the square, curly little beasts as a cripple stares at an athlete’s cup. Then he found all his wandering ambitions coming to a point. Some day he would have a herd of such cattle. He could see their perfect black shapes moving over a sunny field when the autumn frosts had turned the trees and pastures to a glorious gold and crimson background. ”

“ He found her in the kitchen helping the farmer’s wife with the supper. It was a repast fitting a day’s strenuous work out of doors—a great iron kettle of sizzling fried potatoes, a cold roast chicken reserved from the weekly market supply, a platter piled with steaming ears of corn, and deep, brown-skinned pumpkin pies. The doors were open and a crackling wood fire warmed the frost-edged air of the October evening. He found an old instinct stirred strangely by something in the genuine home atmosphere of the place. ”

“ To hide the shock of the sudden contact with earth after his insane flight he turned his attention to the car, inquiring lightly:
“Shall we fly for a mile or two? There aren’t any speed laws here, nor many living things to run over. It’s one of the advantages of a place as wild as this, that you can do just as you like.”
So they raced against the wind, the girl looking ahead to catch the first glow of the city lights, and Billy staring blindly at the road and hearing the crying of the pines waiting for a house and warmth and light and life to shelter. ”

“ It’s amazing how many different cliques, castes, or strata can flourish in a small town without ever rubbing shoulders with each other; how many institutions can exist and never touch the lives of half the people! And the girl who was librarian had perhaps never spoken to the girls who worked in the factory. It wasn’t her fault. Dorothy Walton is neither a snob nor a high brow; but the social customs of Birchfield were so hedged about by habits of longstanding that there was no common meeting ground for those who happened to be once cast into separate grooves. ”

“ From the time when the long evenings set in in the fall until the spring floods broke up the roads the young men and the girls would gather regularly in some farm house and dance all night. The Highland fling was as well known here as in any home in the hills of the Old Land, and when the whole floor wound up the night in the Scotch reel, the drone of the pipes and the whoops of the dancers seemed a very harmless and picturesque way of keeping alive the traditions of their warrior ancestors. ”

“ And then she saw something in his eyes that even she had never discovered before—a look incredible with wonder and gratitude and tenderness, and a smile back of it like the warmth of a fire that would always be there to reach out to. It was the only way Billy had of saying certain things.
“But since Nature doesn’t make any concession to such a sentiment, lovely as it is,” he reminded her, “we might find pneumonia lurking in the house with frosty windows, and a worn-out shred of a woman, crying, in a heap at the foot of the straggling kitchen steps some day. ”

“ There was a great, long living-room with red curtains and a log blazing in a brick fireplace, and his wife, in a big blue apron, her cheeks red from the warmth of the kitchen stove, gave them hot biscuits and coffee. The man’s voice boomed heartily through the house, and the baby from a quilt on the floor reached up to him. It was amazing the dexterity with which he could tuck the babe away, perfectly contented, in the hollow of his arm, and use both hands in expounding the points of various Panmures and Black Megs, with the history of their ancestors from the oldest farms in Scotland. ”

“ The car swung out of the city streets on to the smooth, winding country road, a familiar road, but somehow different. At the crest of the hill they stopped and looked back at the city glittering in a cup below them.
“Sure you’re not sorry you’re leaving it?” Billy asked.
“Quite sure. But it isn’t the city’s fault. It isn’t a natural place to live; but it has a lot to give in other ways.” ”

“ Billy knew that he wanted an education, but he also wanted the fields, the steady quieting toil of seed time and harvest, the care of the cattle, the directing of life and growth with all their mysteries and miracles, and their unfailing obediences to natural laws. He was a born farmer, but he would never be content to farm blindly, mechanically, as an animal follows prey, for an existence. The best solution for his case seemed to be the agricultural college. ”

“ Potato planting had been suspended for the day. Without excuse or errand Dan had driven off to town. Straggling buggies began driving down the road—people, neighbors most of them, all dressed up like they went to church on Sundays, the sun shining pleasantly on the horses’ sleek backs and glittering over the bright parts of the harness. Billy climbed up to the vantage point of the gate post, and looked up the road eagerly, as many another boy has watched for a circus parade. ”

“ In the evenings when he drove home late and saw families still struggling with belated chores, he had a dream of a time when every farm would have regular hours, when the family would gather in the evenings not too tired to enjoy each other, when the mothers of the farms, famed in all history for giving the world its sturdiest, brainiest children, would have time to give their best to all their children, to put their best work on the black sheep, or misfits, or handicapped, or delicate ones, for whom there is little special provision in the country outside their own homes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Billy remarked, “we would still leave some of the things we wanted most to be crowded into the last day we had. There seems to be something inherently selfish in most of us. We get an idea that we want a certain thing, and if we can’t have it we curse Fate for her heartlessness. We never think how our self-centred ambition is hurting someone else, overlooking something worlds better than the trifling thing our fancy has idealized. Whatever failures I might make, Jean would still believe in me, and I’ve neglected her shamefully. ”

“ It had long been the ambition of every family to turn out at least one university man, if it ran the farm to the rocks to pay for it, and the others, the elder brothers who stayed at home to fatten the calves that went to buy the books and the dress suits and sundry incidentals of the college course—they had just as active brains, were just as clear thinkers. The houses were not all painted on the outside, but they had libraries of the choicest things in standard literature, and most of the houses had their bagpipes or a violin. ”

“ I want to build a house like a Swiss chalet, low and brown with a little corner tower for a sunroom, and a stone foundation just piling up naturally out of the ground, and a stone chimney with a fireplace as wide as a cave, where a person could dream the wildest kind of dreams and then live them. You can hear the creek roaring over the hill; there’s enough water power there to run a factory, and the house could be made pretty snug, I think; but sometimes I’m afraid I’ve just let myself be carried away with a vision—east is east, and the country will never make a good imitation of the town. ”

“ 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. ”