"_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."