“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.