CHAPTER XVIII.
“I stand where the cooling breeze from the hills
Meets the draught from the furnace heat,
And lonely eyes from the cabins far
Trace the lights of the city street.“I hear the throb and the laugh of life,
While violets bloom at my feet,
For, oh, there is much to gain and to give
Where the town and the country meet.”
It was on a journey in another direction, one cool spring evening at sundown, that they met another surprise. Rounding a curve in a level, wooded road they met a party of some dozen boys dressed in the briefest of gym. suits and running shoes, trotting along with the easy poise of practised runners. They might have been a group of college athletes out training for their annual meet, but one would scarcely expect to find them twenty miles out from town. Meeting a native of the locality jogging along with a heavy farm horse and sulky, Billy stopped to ask if he knew where the boys came from.
“Oh, I know where they come from, all right”, was the grim response. “I know where they’re goin’, too, if this sort of thing keeps up. They’re boys raised within three miles of here, every one of them, though we never aimed to start a circus of our own till Sam Brown’s boy come home from college. Old enough to know better, too.”
“What did he do?”
“What did he do! Got it into his head that he was Longboat, apparently, and every night about dusk he’d come out half stripped, and he’d run around the block. He got away with it all right, too, till one night I was drivin’ through Dead Man’s Swamp and all at once this long, white shape of a man come lopin’ along. The horse gave one snort and bolted, and was all but away when he caught the bridle, ‘whoah’-in’ and ‘steady’-in’, and speakin’ as natural as if he was after the plough instead of leapin’ over the roads at night like a tame kangaroo. But I gave him a piece of my mind that I guess he won’t forget. I gave him fair warning that if I ever caught him at such pranks again, I’d see him in the asylum where he belonged. He acted ashamed enough about it at the time, but they say he still goes out just the same. I haven’t been down that way at night since. Worse still, he’s got all the younger fellows at it now, and the whole neighborhood’s got so callous to it that even the horses don’t shy at them no more.”
They called and asked the Representative about it on their way home.
“They’re young Brown’s Tuxis boys,” he told them. “The neighborhood has needed such a man for a long time. I tried to organize a class in agriculture up there two years ago, and I couldn’t get any response at all. There was a
little store and ‘stopping house,’ that was about the worst hang-out for boys that I have ever seen. In the winter a run-down, semi-professional hockey player came in on the pretext of coaching a team, and supplied about every undesirable influence that they hadn’t had up to that time. The boys from the farms around were getting in just about as deep as the village crowd. No person going in occasionally could hope to do much, but when Brown came home he went right after it, and the boys follow him like sheep. They asked for a course themselves this year, and I couldn’t have had a better class of boys if I had hand-picked them. I believe Brown has a very live Bible class composed largely of boys who used to spend most of their Sunday afternoons smoking behind the barn.... It just demonstrates the same old truth over again, that no good movement will ever get anywhere in a community, unless there are some people who care about it right on the ground. As we’ve agreed before, what the country needs is more people—of the right kind.”
“How about the city people who come out?” Billy inquired casually. He was brazenly proud of what he would do for his own community in this regard.
“Wonderful,” the Representative replied; “wonderful. They must sometimes find the people they have to live with very trying, though.”
“Which remark quite justifies the criticism I have heard of some Agricultural Representatives—that they have no sympathy with farm people. What were you going to say about your commuters?”
“One family I have in mind weren’t just commuters, though they weren’t actually year-round, out-and-out residents. A neighborhood loses something, of course, in the family that goes to town for the winter, but the point I want to make is that sometimes we get a certain breadth of view from experience in the city. This happened in Haven Hollow. Perhaps you don’t know the place, but to drive through and see it, with its green fields and blue sky, and a quiet broken only by sheep bells and birds and children’s voices, you would expect it to be the most safe and peaceful little cup of a world on the face of the earth. You would expect it to be filled to the brim with all the old, sterling virtues of honesty and neighborly love—and in all the outward signs and tokens it was, but the Hollow had a besetting sin of its own. It was distrustful and cruelly critical of anything it did not understand. The object of its criticism might be something new in the schools or the government or the very personal affairs of its neighbors. A typical case is reported of one woman who had knit socks for the Red Cross, and also sent boxes of clothing to the sufferers in the fires of Northern
Ontario and Halifax. A few months afterwards, she explained to her friends that she had put a card with her name and address in the box that went to New Ontario and she had a nice letter back from there. She had forgotten to put her name in the box that went to Halifax, and she received no letter back from there. She supposed the Red Cross officials had gotten hold of her box and that the Halifax people never saw it at all.
“Things were going like this when the new family bought a strip of land on the river-front and built a summer home on it. They had seen the Hollow from a train window and thought it would be a nice, peaceful spot to retire to. They were very popular; they opened their house for all sorts of community gatherings and all went merry as a marriage bell till Poppy Andrews came home for a visit.
“Poppy had left the Hollow ten years before to study music—a very clever, level-headed girl, they say. A few years later she married a man who sang like a nightingale and kept his marriage vows like a beetle, and Poppy got a divorce. You can imagine the dust that would stir up in the Hollow. They took it as a public disgrace, and Poppy had been ostracized ever since. The new family took her in as they did everyone else; only the woman seemed to have a particular fondness for her. The rest of the Hollow was alarmed
about it, especially the woman who was always ready to shoulder the responsibility of going to people with painful gossip under the pretext ‘I thought you ought to know.’
“The interview, as I heard of it, was interesting. ‘Oh, yes, I know’ the woman interrupted before she had fairly started her story. ‘It was the only right thing for her to do, don’t you think? If she were your daughter, now, what would you want her to do?’
“‘But she wasn’t my daughter.’
“‘Nor mine, because unfortunately I never had a daughter, and we never know what we’d do in any experience until we find ourselves in a corner with that same experience offering us just one of two ways out. But I believe I understand something of what Poppy meant when she said: ‘You know it isn’t facts as they are that trouble me. I thought it all out before and I know it was right. And I can stand the eyes of the Hollow staring at me like a pack of ravening wolves. They have a right to look, and I can look back at them because I’ve nothing to hide. But you remember the picture of the Russian slave with the pack closing in on him? It wasn’t their smouldering yellow eyes, but their bright red tongues that were the cruelest’.... Strange such a thing should get into the child’s head, isn’t it?
“The woman still continues to be popular in the Hollow, and she has done more to create a community spirit by her breadth of view and generous, kindly judgments than all the little clubs and cliques the people had before she came.”
So it became their custom to go out and explore the surface signs of a neighborhood, and come back to have the Representative interpret them. It was in an old-settled, prosperous section, generally known as the Eden of the county, that they discovered a sinister lack of something beneath the well-ordered beauty of the farmlands. The fields bloomed with a heavy tangle of clover, because they were rich from years of good farming. The stone fences were monuments to the industry of the pioneers. Long avenues of maples, set out half a century ago, led back from the road gates to big brick houses, and lilac bushes that a grandmother had planted grew rather too thick and high at the cellar windows. Skimming over the smooth stone roads at the hour of sundown, they marvelled at the stillness, the order, the substantial, weatherworn dignity of the old farmsteads. Prosperity brooded over the land, if not like a benediction, like an absolution from any concern for the future. But there were no barefoot children rioting over the lawns, no little, new houses of the kind people build when they are “starting,” no crowds of young people chattering
in the lobbies of the churches, nothing primitive or youthful—but the lack of them seemed like a danger signal, somehow. Birchfield, unknown to itself, might be on the verge of an era of decadence.
They asked the Representative about it.
“Birchfield,” he said, “is not different from many another neighborhood that lives in its past. I know its story best through Peter Summers, for the community in general, as you can imagine, does not feel the need of either service or interference from the agricultural office. I’ve always liked Peter tremendously, though. The community may be like others of its kind, but Peter, even if he has lived there all his life, is different. I suppose anyone who has much in the way of character, either good or bad, is ‘different’ to those who know them. Peter lived on one of the oldest, finest farms in the section—an only son. It would all be his as soon as he was ready to take it over. Every plan his father made for the future of the estate, he would preface with the statement ‘When Peter gets married,’ as naturally as if he said ‘When the wheat comes into head’; but that was as far as it ever went. I suppose Peter had known it was spring as often as any other young man of his age, but if he did he kept it to himself.
“There was really no one to whom he could be expected to tell it. Peter’s social experience, so
far as girls were concerned, had been rather circumscribed. The young women he knew were just the grown-up little girls who had gone to school with him. He had seen them regularly ever since, at church and at every neighborhood gathering. In fact they had been in his sight so constantly that he never had a respite to see that they were grown up. Other young men had noticed it, and many of the same girls had married and left Birchfield without causing his pulses to quicken or retard for a second. He had a whole colony of cousins up country, and another branch of the connection in town. He met them all at family reunions and anniversaries, but they were—well, cousins.
“Of course, Peter hadn’t lived a starved young life. To begin with, there was the beautiful old brick house and his mother. Mrs. Summers is the gentle domesticated, motherly type of woman who looks first and always to the ways of her household and the comfort of her men folk. With her white hair, and low voice and lavender-flowered afternoon dresses, she would just naturally lull a man into contented ways about the house. And in order that Peter might have girl’s society at home, or to encourage his interests in that direction she used to invite the nicest girls she knew in to tea, but they were all old friends, the cousins and the neighbors, who seemed even more like cousins.
“Personally, Peter didn’t suffer. He had other hobbies. In his big front room upstairs he had a bookcase filled with the best standard books, from Shakespeare down, and he was familiar with all of them. Also he had a violin. He seldom brought it down to the family living-room but alone in his sanctum upstairs it was like a living companion. On summer evenings, when the windows were open, the neighbors would sit on their verandas and listen for Peter’s violin. It seldom disappointed them. And whether the violin was in any way responsible or not, Peter had another accomplishment which few people ever suspected—he was a finished dancer. He hadn’t studied it at all. Once, in his most impressionable years, he had attended a dance after a barn-raising, and he had taken to it like a puppy to the water.
“A few times afterwards he had been invited to dancing parties in homes in the neighborhood, and while he was dancing he enjoyed them, but when that stopped he was at sea. There were the interludes to be spent in cosy corners and on stair steps, when he felt as much out of his element as a buffalo at a pony show. Small talk was an accomplishment of which he knew nothing and which held a kind of terror for him—and these very informal gatherings seemed to demand an appalling amount of it.
“Every winter Peter spent a week or two with
the cousins in town. He knew as much of city ways as any other wide-awake young man who lives on a farm within easy travelling distance, and he had the same amazing faculty for getting the most out of these flying trips. He knew just what plays were showing in the theatres—the daily papers reach neighborhoods far more obscure than Birchfield—and he knew pretty well which plays were most worth seeing. He knew when Mischa Elman would be in town and timed his visits accordingly. He knew what churches he wanted to visit—a review of the sermons was one of the treats he took home to his father and mother. And he knew that he wanted to have one night’s unbroken enjoyment with the best orchestra in the best dance-hall in the city. His cousins never failed him in this. They were girls who never frequented a dance-hall on any other occasion, but Peter’s enthusiasm, and his dancing were irresistible. These annual dissipations kept him in touch with the art, as it were. With the passing seasons when Fashion ‘hesitated’ or one-stepped or fox-trotted, Peter did it too, for one night, then came home and dropped it absolutely for the rest of the year.
“Besides his violin and his library, Peter had a very businesslike looking desk in his room. He was secretary of about every agricultural organization in the district—fairs and such like. That
which occupied more of his time, however, was a pile of hand-drawn maps of the neighborhood with a line dotted in to show where an electric power-line might come through if a sufficient number of farmers could be persuaded to co-operate toward that end. After every meeting of possible supporters he would come home and shift the line a little, somewhat as a general, hard pressed, shifts his line of defence. He used to drop into the office, worried to death about it. ‘There’s something wrong with Birchfield,’ he would storm. ‘We’re too satisfied with ourselves. If something isn’t done soon we won’t have enough people left to care whether it goes off the map or not. The radial and power line would bring new life—people who have something left to work for, and their effort might stir up the whole place.’
“One evening this spring he drove into the town to attend a meeting of the power-line committee. He opened up the council chamber, lifted the windows to let in some clean air and waited. No one else came. No doubt he was finding the whole thing very discouraging; anyway when it was too late to expect anyone else he decided to go home, and I suppose when he was putting down the windows he caught the sound of the orchestra in the dance-hall across the street. He had heard it often enough before, of course, and had paid no more attention to it than if it had been a hand organ on the corner. This night,
with the defiance that has led disappointed men into more serious dissipations, he walked across the street in the face of whoever cared to look, and disappeared up the dirty stairs.
“The Birchfield dance-hall was really not so very bad, as such places go; the town fathers would have cleared it out if they could have found a case against it. There was nothing lax in the morals of Birchfield as a municipality. If it had any indirect, insidious influence, that, of course, was out of their province. As individuals they did what they could to discourage it. The better people wouldn’t let their daughters go, nor their sons if they could help it, but of course a lot of the boys drifted in. There was nothing else to do. The hall was well patronized by the factory girls from the lower part of the town—it would be no worse for that. They were mostly good-hearted, hard-working girls; this was the best the town had to offer them in the way of a good time, and they made the most of it—only there was an over-sophisticated, imported forelady in town at the time, and it happened that most of the evening she danced with Peter.
“There is a library in Birchfield not a hundred yards from the dance-hall, but it’s safe to say that ninety per cent. of the people who attended the dances didn’t know what the inside of the library looked like. 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. It made life rather narrow for all of them, and Miss Walton was planning to leave Birchfield.
“Driving his car into town one evening Peter overtook her on the country road and gave her a ride. She told him that she had been helping to revise the library in the school on the corner of his farm, and he wasn’t interested. He says he remembered his own school days and pitied the poor little beggars who had to depend on any school library for their reading. In fact he had seen Miss Walton many times before and hadn’t been at all interested in what she was doing. He supposed a librarian was a person who kept the books straight on the shelves. And she wasn’t at all interested in him. She didn’t know about his books at home, or his violin or the power-line. She only knew that he was a young man of good family, who was becoming notoriously popular
at the dance-hall. That was where he went when he left her.
“And all the time Peter’s mother talked of ‘When Peter gets married.’ And Peter went on dancing with the commonest kind of a dance-hall girl. Of course his mother wouldn’t have needed to worry over the possibility of his bringing home a bride of this type. If he had been ten years younger she might have been dangerous. The danger for Peter now was that he might develop into the gay old dog searching around for amusement anywhere, compromising with all the standards that had made him a man any woman might like. The Birchfield dances had not fascinated him—he had gone to them because there was nothing else to do. He was a student and a dreamer; he was also human. There had been no one to share his dreams, but he had found what seemed to be an outlet for his humanness.
“Two weeks ago an unprecedented thing happened in Birchfield—not in the village, but among the farms in the Summers’ neighborhood. Some woman conceived the startling idea that the people were not getting together enough—not just for the future of the power-line, but for the good of their souls. They were also missing a great deal by not being acquainted with the people in neighboring communities. The village hadn’t proved a desirable centre; so they would create a centre of their own in their own neighborhood,
and make it of such a character that the best people of the village would come to them. They invited the people from neighboring communities all over the township; they asked Peter to come and state the case for the power-line; and they had Miss Walton there to talk about libraries. I was at the meeting myself and when the girl got up to speak I was heartily sorry for her. It was plain that she was frightened; she was not used to talking to crowds of people older than the children who came to her story hour at the library. It seems Peter noticed this too, and set himself to help her. I suppose he began with the idea that if giving her his undivided attention would be of any use he would see her through. She saw him and it did help. The next minute she had forgotten him—she was lost in her story; she loved books with a human affection and she was carried away with them, as any lover loses himself in the thing he loves. And there sat poor old Peter, staring. I suppose he had never dreamed that anyone else, at least any girl, ever thought of things that way. When everyone else applauded, he still sat, staring. And he had lived five miles from this girl all his life, and had known her—as a librarian.
“The rest of the night’s programme was a bigger surprise to Birchfield. The furniture was pushed to the walls and an old character who cuts wood for the farmers by day and fiddles for
dances at night was tuning his violin—and Peter had the shock of his young life when he saw his own stately father and his rather portly, dignified mother lead out a set at the lancers. It was largely an old-people’s dance, and they laughed a lot, and panted a lot over it; but there was no doubt they enjoyed it. Afterwards they went off in little groups by themselves, and looked on pityingly at their young folks’ degeneracy into fox-trotting.
“There were a lot of young people from the country around who hadn’t learned to dance—the town dance hall was the only available dancing school and naturally they weren’t encouraged to go there. When the farming community started a dance of its own it was inevitable that there should be a lot of boys and girls standing around the walls, watching. So the chairwoman of the evening cut into things, pushed the dancers off to one half of the floor, and had a row of benches strung across to keep them there, then made the announcement that Miss Walton would give the others a lesson on the fox-trot. I looked about for Peter just then, and found him standing against the wall, still staring. If the girl had been embarrassed on the platform she was perfectly at home here. It seems she teaches dancing to a kindergarten class at the library on Saturday afternoons. She strung her class out in a circle and spent some time drilling them
in the step of it; then, encouraging as a mother bird flying ahead, watchful as a drill sergeant, she led them swinging around the room, counting ‘one and two and three and fo-ur and two-step in and two-step out,’ like a professional dancing teacher. Properly or not, she had them all fox-trotting in ten minutes. Then she told them to try it together and when she went to demonstrate this Peter was there. As far as I can learn he hasn’t been far away ever since.
“This happened just two weeks ago. Driving through, you don’t see the effect on the neighborhood yet—but it’s already visible enough in Peter. He’s going after the power-line now in a way that can’t fail to bring it within the next year, and the Summers won’t have to sell the old homestead—a calamity that they were beginning to fear themselves. There will be many other cases that we don’t hear about, and all because several communities, including a town, pooled their social interests.”
“Rather heavy stuff, all this community investigation,” Billy remarked as they drove away. “I started out with the idea of impressing you with the freedom and restfulness of country life, and we’ve found nothing but responsibility. It would seem that every socially minded person going to the country should go with the spirit of a foreign missionary.”
“They’d be dreadful nuisances if they did,
though. All the worth-while things seem to have just grown out of someone’s wanting other people to be happy. You don’t go after it like a profession. You don’t try to see the whole world at once—just your own little corner. First, your own family—you want them to be happy because you like them; then your own neighbors—you want them to be happy because you know them. It works out wonderfully in a natural little way of its own, too. When you’re very happy you want everyone else to have the same things that make you happy. That’s why it’s the best first investment a woman can make for the world to keep the fires warm in her own house. You can’t imagine a family quarrelling among themselves and wanting to take in a tramp, can you?”
“And I suppose a family self-centred is almost as bad as an individual self-centred. But next week let’s let our friend judge his own plots while we do some of this linking up with city advantages which he says is so important to a broadened outlook. Let’s see ‘Dear Brutus.’ After all this researching into the whereforeness of failures in a community we ought to be prepared for the theme. How is it it goes? ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’ Sounds like some more sermonizing, but if it is it will be fairly subtle.”