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.”

Billy was standing near when the mayor presented Ruth to the colonel, and he heard his eulogy of her work at the Settlement. To Billy himself the mayor observed:

“That girl has a career ahead of her. There’s been nothing like her work elsewhere on the continent. The city will need to watch her, for they’re wanting her in other places.”

“They would,” Billy agreed.

“I believe some fanatic has even had the nerve to suggest that she open some kind of similar centre in the country somewhere, and bury herself out there.”

They had just a minute together before the train left.

“It’s rotten having to go like this,” he said, too perfunctorily, she thought, as though he had said it many times before. “As soon as I can I’m coming back. It’s great, the work you’re doing. Do you like it very much?”

Very casual it seemed, very different from the high tension of his leave-taking, and she assured him with more enthusiasm than she felt that she did like it very much. And he went off like that without straightening things out. It wasn’t like him.

A week later he wrote to her:

“I’ve been up here in the hills for five days trying to think things out. I have to confess that your civic reception quite knocked me out to beginyou. I didn’t miss anything, from the shine of your hair to the tips of your velvet shoes, nor the thoroughbred poise and grace of you, and the same all-seeing kindness of your eyes, and you wore a dress that looked as though it might be wonderfully soft to touch. It would make everyone happier if the women had more of such things up here. I heard all the mayor said about you, about what he called “the future ahead of you,” and how some idiot had suggested that you give up your career in town to bury yourself in the country—and everything went blurry. I had even suggested that myself.

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But what a shame it is that you couldn’t have had a chance at four-squaring Joe when he was younger and more plastic. There are other boys here with the same need. Just now the church is getting up a concert to help ‘raise the stipend,’ and it is the custom to have a two or three act play, usually a comedy, which necessitates the entertainment being taken from the church to the Orange Hall. I wish you were here to help them create a pantomime from ‘The Hanging of the Crane.’ I want to go over it with you myself to see again just how wonderful some of the pictures are.

“I know about the social work you’re doing—keeping open house with a grate fire on snowy, dusky Sunday afternoons, and bringing lonely young people in for supper. We would have a grate fire here too, and we could find people just as lonely.

“Our neighbor down the road has a daughter, very bright, and actually suffering for young friends and a ‘good time.’ He won’t let her go to the dances in the Orange Hall, in which his judgment may be sound enough, only he doesn’t try to find a substitute for this diversion, and the neighborhood provides nothing else. Some miles in the other direction we have another neighbor, a young man just starting to farm for himself. Whether Angus goes to the hall or not, I don’t know, but if he does he must have some trouble supplying conversation in the intervals between dances. He gets on much better talking about Sir Walter Scott and politics and the habits of bees, ... If we could bring them home here some Sunday afternoon I don’t suppose they would speak ten words to each other, but he would take her home afterwards and a few nights later we would see a light in her parlor window, an entirely new occurrence, and considered quite an omen in the neighborhood.

“And how the neighbors here would welcome you. You would find the social life very different; but there’s something very genuine about it. They would not drop in for a formal call after they were sure you were completely settled. You would possibly find a woman climbing the hills in a snowstorm the first day after you arrived, bringing a jar of black currants and wanting to know if she couldn’t help you hook a mat or

“A few years ago I would have been frightened and embarrassed at the responsibility of trying to establish a spiritual corner in my house or in myself. The square idea makes it seem the most practical, natural thing in the world, and then there is some inspiration in seeing the lack of it. In the mountains skirting off from the farmlands here there is a settlement that is a little kingdom of heathenism such as one might find in a country where no churches exist. I am told that almost every county has such a nest somewhere within its boundaries and that it seldom appeals to anyone as a home mission field. The people just naturally run to wickedness and break every commandment shamelessly. This is one extreme. The other is not much less serious. In a lot of the ‘solid old farm homes’ there is a rigid dominance of a thing called religion which is not beautiful nor compassionate nor consistent. Children suffer under it and grow up to hate the name it stands for. Old Jonas Birchfield had a tractor cutting wood at his place last week, and his son, in some way, broke a delicate part of the engine. They worked at it until noon with the old man’s wrath growing hotter every minute. I dropped in with the mail just as they were sitting down to dinner and overheard Jonas shouting: ‘It just

“I suppose Jonas thought he was giving his family something of a Christian environment by repeating that blessing at every meal, regardless of the spirit pervading the house at the time. But they won’t know much about such promises as ‘Like as a father pitieth his children,’ will they? I don’t know much about it myself, but it would be wonderful to help keep other children from missing it. I’m glad you’ve made it so clear how the Christ way of living can be such a practical thing, even in a little farm house.

“Perhaps I should hesitate to even want you out here. There are a lot of ‘advantages’ in town, I suppose. I remember in our college days, we used to make a great deal of the cultural value of higher life, operas, travel, books and the like. Seems to me we were far too content to take our thrills at second hand. There are no operas here,

“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.’

“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 thatand 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.”

And very frankly, with no vein of coquetry, she told him:

“I was afraid of you.”

This was incredible. Whatever feeling anyone might have had regarding him, he was sure no one had ever been afraid of him. And she, of all people! Why, the truth was, he was appallingly afraid of her, himself, only he would have called it by another name. It was the thing that made his touch fearful of crushing her feathers, that a poet would say “kept the soul of him kneeling” in her presence. Then the wonder of it dawned on him. Surely she didn’t care that way!

He hadn’t learned that there was no other way.