“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.