IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON
THE WAY TO GROWING RICH
In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr. Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out, but there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr. Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare him except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that and the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of themselves and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could make to count against the mortgage.
They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury than opportunities, were by no means so confident as Peter could have wished if he had known them. Mr. Greenslet thought it couldn't be much worse than Peter's present situation, and the neighbours were sure it wasn't much better. The minister had a great deal to say of the temptations of a young man in the city, which was afterward invalidated by the city's turning out quite another place than he described it.
It was left for Ellen and Mrs. Jim Harvey to make the happy prognostication. "You can trust Peter," Ada was confident.
"But you got to be mighty cute to get in with those city fellows," her husband warned her, "and Peter's so dashed simple; never sees anything except what's right in front of him. Now a man"—Jim assumed this estate for himself in the right of being three months married—"has got to look on all sides of a thing."
As for Ellen, she hadn't the slightest doubt that Peter was shortly to become immensely wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for him.
"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be spared by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep house for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say so right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.
With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr. Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache who appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due, he was practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden with scrub water which never by any possible chance left them scrubbed, nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking to and fro in his young loneliness. There were men passing there with faces like Mr. Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in soft becoming wraps and bright winged hats—such hats! Peter would like to have hailed some of these as one immeasurably behind but still in the way, seized of that precious inward quality which manifests itself in competency and brightness. He would have liked to feel them looking on friendlily at his business of becoming rich; but he remained, as far as any word from them was concerned, completely invisible. He came after a while to the conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the same unregarded condition.
The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles. Sometimes in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native, but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter. The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at Siegel Brothers. And at the lodging house they seemed never to have heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate glass and polished counters. It was extraordinary, incredible, that he wasn't to have the least of them.