Chapter XII

—Rupert Brooke.

There was no sense of loss for Billy in the days that followed Miss Evison’s leaving the neighborhood—you can’t lose a thing you never had. Removed from the fascination of her presence, and reviewing one incident after another, there was only one theory to accept. It had been the affair of a moment for her, a diversion acceptable for the want of something better; now it was over, and she wanted to be free from any further obligation. Still, it was disconcerting to an agricultural expert, holding forth late in some village hall, while the fire in the boxstove burned low and the frost patterns crept over the steamy window panes, to have his efforts to inspire a sleepy audience with the need of greater production, suddenly sidetracked by a vision of a regal little figure in some palm-bordered ballroom, brilliant and excited and restless as a beautiful moth that has found the light.

He had now considerable free time in the evenings

But it was not the blow of Miss Evison’s dismissal, nor dissatisfaction with his work, which turned his affairs in another direction where things like these don’t count for much. It was the first winter of the war and like many another young man absorbed in the peaceful industries of the green country, the Representative had had some serious debates with himself. The men who directed his work, peering through the chaos of the country’s general unpreparedness to probable starvation ahead, kept the wires from head quarters hot, suggesting plans for growing bigger crops in the district, leaving it with the Representative to put the plans before the people. This they considered his best service just then. At the same time newspapers were bringing home reports that made it hard for men to go on tilling their fields, even to feed the men who were fighting, or the people whose homes had been outraged by an invading army.

Most of these steady, thinking young men with

It was when he returned from the ceremony of putting on his uniform that this reproach seemed verified. The mail had brought a note from Ruth Macdonald saying “Jean has just been sent home for a nerve rest. I believe the trouble is mostly loneliness. If you could be with her for a while you might tide it over.”

The stenographer covertly sizing up the Representative, with the popular feminine admiration for a uniform, wondered if his courage had suddenly failed him that he went so white. The idea wasn’t convincing, however. The afternoon mail offered a more interesting explanation. With amazing constructive genius she reported

Even Ruth became a victim to circumstantial evidence. The next day she found Jean alone, and troubled.

“Billy’s enlisted,” she shuddered.

Ruth experienced all the cold terror that the news has given women the world over when the men they cared about joined the army. She didn’t say anything—people are so sick of the glib platitudes about the glory of sacrifice when they can’t drive from their imaginations the actual torture of soul and body. Besides it never mattered whether Ruth put her sympathy into words or not. It came to you from the understanding kindness in her eyes, the quick, warm pressure of her hands, and a thousand little thoughtfulnesses which anticipated your needs. Her concern was perhaps too evident, for Jean hurried on to explain.

“Oh, it isn’t just that he’s going. I was expecting that, but everyone is saying he’s going broken-hearted. Look—”

She indicated a paragraph in the morning paper which stated that Mr. and Mrs. Evison announced the marriage of their daughter, Marjorie Angela, to Dr. Knight.

Then Billy came in. He didn’t look broken-hearted. In fact, for a man who had just lost the love of a life time he seemed in a much too healthy frame of mind to have any sentiment at all. As a matter of fact, of course, he hadn’t seen the little announcement; he had some time ago stopped reading the social columns where Miss Evison’s name figured, but with sisterly consideration Jean left the paper in his room where he could read it and have his battle out by himself. Ruth shared this consideration. When the evening papers, crowded with the latest draught of casualties, found space to describe at length the flowers and dresses at some tea given in honor of “the popular Miss Evison,” the girls so obviously avoided any comment that Billy rather wondered if he shouldn’t draw their attention to the fact that Miss Evison would be charming indeed in the gown of some imported-sounding stuff with pearls and lilies of the valley. Such wooden creatures men can be, where a little tragedy would seem the appropriate thing.

Jean’s nerves were soon restored to smooth running order, for which the doctor gave no small share of credit to Ruth’s efforts to keep her out of doors. The county battalion was training near the city, and every evening Billy could get off, the three of them would tramp out in moccasins and general Indian accoutrements to the edge of the city, to toboggan down a snow-crusted

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

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

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

Then his mother called quietly:

“There’s nothing wrong, Jim?”

“No. Did I wake you coming in?”

“I was awake. I guess thinking about the boys, lying out, made me anxious. It’s good to know you’re in.”

She left a good opening for the argument that he couldn’t rest at home while the others were “lying out,” but knowing her anxiety he hadn’t the heart. He would tell her in the morning, and she would accept it as other mothers had done, as motherhood has always accepted things that paid little for its sacrifice. Maybe she would even be proud to be the mother of this man-child who was willing to suffer the inquisition of warfare, with a motive as chivalrous as those

It remained with people less personally concerned to express the fitting public appreciation of the county battalion. Mrs. Evison became the leader of a very popular suburban “khaki club,” which had neither the time nor the skill to do much sewing or knitting, but by giving a series of fetes and teas and musicales, the ladies raised funds to present the battalion with a set of colors. The presentation was to be made at a garden party on the Evison grounds as soon as the shrubbery bloomed, and it was to be a rather elaborate affair. Some half-dozen more or less prominent men were invited up from the city to speak. The battalion would be there in full strength. A number of Marjorie’s dearest girl friends would come out from town to supply the beauty and charm appropriate to the occasion, crosses on the sleeves and a nurse’s head kerchief.

When the time arrived she did not fail them. People had come in crowds, the presentation had passed off with due ceremony and applause, and her soul was so filled with the perfection of her plans that she wanted to pour out the balm of her appreciation on those women who were “so gloriously sending their sons to fight for the empire and liberty.” She was very charming as she stood surrounded by the flags of the allies and a few hot house palms. To make herself beautiful for them she had even risked wearing her loveliest and lowest evening gown, with just the sheerest scarf falling from a bare shoulder, as a protection from the night air. And standing there like a goddess of liberty, she told them that she wished she had a dozen sons to give. She said further that she knew these women who were so splendidly giving their boys would do still more. The food situation was serious, but what women in other countries had done the splendid women on Canadian farms would do. Belgian and French and German and even English women were sowing the seed and gathering the harvest this year; she knew that the dear

When she had finished, people from somewhere applauded, the band added its contribution to the clamour, but the mothers sitting down in the shadows, with their boys back in the lines standing rigid and weary at attention, were strangely silent. The speaker gathered her draperies about her, a little elf of a girl handed her a sheaf of roses, and in the general stir which followed, a few of the women from the farms got up a bit stiffly—they were not used to sitting so long at a time—and looked about for their men to go home. It was in the press of the spring work and they hadn’t had time to do the milking before they came.

Billy was there, and he had listened with all his logical faculties active. When she finished he began to move towards the gate; it was his last leave and he had plans for the next day which meant a great deal to him. There was more than enough time to catch the car to the city, but he just naturally found himself going. The band had taken a stand close to the pavilion and was starting up a waltz, and, well—it was too much like pouring honey into a cup of hemlock.

“Oh,” she gasped, “you frightened me.”

He didn’t apologize, because he knew he hadn’t frightened her. “I was just getting off to catch the car,” he explained.

Miss Evison was disappointed. She had pointed out the good-looking soldier to a few of her girl friends, with a mysterious half-promise of a story, later. She had counted on this evening for days, and had rehearsed several delicate little speeches and a touching, but very proper, farewell. She hadn’t anticipated being confronted with a new man. It would have been highly satisfactory if he had shown a sign of the end-of-everything bitterness, generally supposed to be appropriate under the circumstances, but this cool, friendly indifference was more than any girl could stand from a man who had proposed to her not six months before. He was holding out his hand and saying:

“I may not see you again before I go.”

She softened at once.

“You’re not going yet,” she coaxed. “I simply can’t let you go yet,” and when he showed no sign of staying, she added rather sharply, “I don’t believe I ever knew you to be in such a hurry before.”

He smiled kindly and happily as one might over an episode of childhood.

“I have to get back to the city,” he explained patiently, “We’re going out to the country to-morrow.”

Miss Evison wasn’t used to disappointments and they made her temper very uncertain.

“Are you taking Miss Macdonald with you?” she inquired.

“Yes.” He seemed modestly proud that she should guess it.

She was ashamed the minute the question was out, but that he should fail to resent it was maddening, and when she was angry she forgot to be elegant. She was smiling in a way that was not beautiful, and she said:

“You know I wouldn’t have thought from the exalted opinion of her you used to have, that she’d have fallen for the soldier stuff.”

There was nothing gratifying to her vanity in the way he looked at her. He was angry, of course, but more evident was the surprise of disillusionment. It seemed as though for the first time he saw her as she was and hated to believe it.

“You don’t mean that, honest?” he said. He put his big toil-hardened hand on her shoulder, very gently. It was a rather remarkable hand, strong and capable and intelligent looking, and it had steadied many other people to be honest,

She was still in this frame of mind when she met Dr. Knight a few minutes later, but then she was beginning to know Dr. Knight pretty well by this time, and it was impossible to avoid such things constantly.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired casually.

“I had arranged to have Mr. Withers meet the girls, but he seemed to feel that he had other things more important. He’s taking Miss Macdonald out to see some farm or something to-morrow. He always did have a craze for that.”

Dr. Knight on close acquaintance dropped all his drawing-room talk and expressed some very plebeian views of things. His direct observation now was,

“She’s the kind of girl who’d make him a great wife.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “the kind of girl whom every man advises every other man to marry, but never thinks of marrying himself.”

The doctor studied his fiancee with the candid speculation of a man endeavoring to adjust himself to an engagement which somehow seems to

“What a little cat!” he said.