Annie Kilburn
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W. D. Howells >> Annie Kilburn
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"You mean about Mr. Gerrish? He thinks as we all do; that it was a
challenge to Mr. Peck's friends, and that we must take it up."
A light of melancholy satisfaction shone from Bolton's deeply shaded eyes.
"Well, he ain't one to lose time, not a great deal. I presume he's goin' to
work?"
"At once," said Annie. "He says Mr. Gerrish will be sure to bring his
grievance up at the next Society meeting, and we must be ready to meet
him, and out-talk him and out-vote him." She reported these phrases from
Putney's lips.
"Well, I guess if it was out-talkin', Mr. Putney wouldn't have much trouble
about it. And as far forth as votin' goes, I don't believe but what we can
carry the day."
"We couldn't," said Mrs. Bolton from the pantry, where she had gone to
put the bread away in its stone jar, "if it was left to the church."
She accented the last word with the click of the jar lid, and came out.
"Well, it ain't a church question. It's a Society question."
Mrs. Bolton replied, on her passage to the dining-room with the plate of
sliced bread: "I can't make it seem right to have the minister a Society
question. Seems to me that the church members'd ought have the say."
"Well, you can't make the discipline over to suit everybody," said Bolton.
"I presume it was ordered for a wise purpose."
"Why, land alive, Oliver Bolton," his wife shouted back from the remoteness
to which his words had followed her, "the statute provisions and rules of
the Society wa'n't ordered by Providence."
"Well, not directly, as you may say," said Bolton, beginning high, and
lowering his voice as she rejoined them, "but I presume the hearts of them
that made them was moved."
Mrs. Bolton could not combat a position of such unimpregnable piety in
words, but she permitted herself a contemptuous sniff, and went on getting
the things into the dining-room.
"And I guess it's all goin' to work together for good. I ain't afraid
any but what it's goin' to come out all right. But we got to be up and
doin', as they say about 'lection times. The Lord helps them that helps
themselves," said Bolton, and then, as if he felt the weakness of this
position as compared with that of entire trust in Providence, he winked his
mild eyes, and added, "if they're on the right side, and put their faith in
His promises."
"Well, your dinner's ready now," Mrs. Bolton said to Annie.
Idella had clung fast to Annie's hand; as Annie started toward the
dining-room she got before her, and whispered vehemently.
"What?" asked Annie, bending down; she laughed, in lifting her head, "I
promised Idella you'd let us have some preserves to-day, Mrs. Bolton."
Mrs. Bolton smiled with grim pleasure. "I see all the while her mind was
set on something. She ain't one to let you forget _your_ promises.
Well, I guess if Mr. Peck had a little more of _her_ disposition there
wouldn't be much doubt about the way it would all come out."
"Well, you don't often see pairents take after their children," said
Bolton, venturing a small joke.
"No, nor husbands after their wives, either," said Mrs. Bolton sharply.
"The more's the pity."
XXIV.
Dr. Morrell came to see Annie late the next Wednesday evening.
"I didn't know you'd come back," she said. She returned to the
rocking-chair, from which she came forward to greet him, and he dropped
into an easy seat near the table piled with books and sewing.
"I didn't know it myself half an hour ago."
"Really? And is this your first visit? I must be a very interesting case."
"You are--always. How have you been?"
"I? I hardly know whether I've been at all," she answered, in mechanical
parody of his own reply. "So many other things have been of so much more
importance."
She let her eyes rest full upon his, with a sense of returning comfort and
safety in his presence, and after a deep breath of satisfaction, she asked,
"How did you leave your mother?"
"Very much better--entirely out of danger."
"It's so odd to think of any one's having a family. To me it seems the
normal condition not to have any relatives."
"Well, we can't very well dispense with mothers," said the doctor. "We have
to begin with them, at any rate."
"Oh, I don't object to them. I only wonder at them."
They fell into a cosy and mutually interesting talk about their separate
past, and he gave her glimpses of the life, simple and studious, he had
led before he went abroad. She confessed to two mistakes in which she had
mechanically persisted concerning him; one that he came from Charlestown
instead of Chelsea, and the other that his first name was Joseph instead
of James. She did not own that she had always thought it odd he should
be willing to remain in a place like Hatboro', and that it must argue a
strangely unambitious temperament in a man of his ability. She diverted the
impulse to a general satire of village life, and ended by saying that she
was getting to be a perfect villager herself.
He laughed, and then, "How has Hatboro' been getting along?" he asked.
"Simply seething with excitement," she answered. "But I should hardly know
where to begin if I tried to tell you," she added. "It seems such an age
since I saw you."
"Thank you," said the doctor.
"I didn't mean to be _quite_ so flattering; but you have certainly
marked an epoch. Really, I _don't_ know where to begin. I wish you'd
seen somebody else first--Ralph and Ellen, or Mrs. Wilmington."
"I might go and see them now."
"No; stay, now you're here, though I know I shall not do justice to the
situation." But she was able to possess him of it with impartiality, even
with a little humour, all the more because she was at heart intensely
partisan and serious. "No one knows what Mr. Gerrish intends to do next.
He has kept quietly about his business; and he told some of the ladies who
tried to interview him that he was not prepared to talk about the course
he had taken. He doesn't seem to be ashamed of his behaviour; and Ralph
thinks that he's either satisfied with it, and intends to let it stand as
a protest, or else he's going to strike another blow on the next business
meeting. But he's even kept Mrs. Gerrish quiet, and all we can do is to
unite Mr. Peck's friends provisionally. Ralph's devoted himself to that,
and he says he has talked forty-eight hours to the day ever since."
Is he--"
"Yes; perfectly! I could hardly believe it when I saw him at church on
Sunday. It was like seeing one risen from the dead. What he must have
gone through, and Ellen! She told me how Mr. Peck had helped him in the
struggle. She attributes everything to him. But of course you think he had
nothing to do with it."
"What makes you think that?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know. Wouldn't that naturally be the attitude of Science?"
"Toward religion? Perhaps. But I'm not Science--with a large S. May be
that's the reason why I left the case with Mr. Peck," said the doctor,
smiling. "Putney didn't leave off my medicine, did he?"
"He never got well so soon before. They both say that. I didn't think you
could be so narrow-minded, Dr. Morrell. But of course your scientific
bigotry couldn't admit the effect of the moral influence. It would be too
much like a miracle; you would have to allow for a mystery."
"I have to allow for a good many," said the doctor. "The world is full of
mysteries for me, if you mean things that science hasn't explored yet. But
I hope that they'll all yield to the light, and that somewhere there'll be
light enough to clear up even the spiritual mysteries."
"Do you really?" she demanded eagerly. "Then you believe in a life
hereafter? You believe in a moral government of the--"
He retreated, laughing, from her ardent pursuit. "Oh, I'm not going to
commit myself. But I'll go so far as to say that I like to hear Mr. Peck
preach, and that I want him to stay. I don't say he had nothing to do with
Putney's straightening up. Putney had a great deal to do with it himself.
What does he think Mr. Peck's chances are?"
"If Mr. Gerrish tries to get him dismissed? He doesn't know; he's quite
in the dark. He says the party of the perverse--the people who think Mr.
Gerrish must have had some good reason for his behaviour, simply because
they can't see any--is unexpectedly large; and it doesn't help matters with
the more respectable people that the most respectable, like Mr. Wilmington
and Colonel Marvin, are Mr. Peck's friends. They think there must be
something wrong if such good men are opposed to Mr. Gerrish."
"And I suspect," said Dr. Morrell soberly, "that Putney's championship
isn't altogether an advantage. The people all concede his brilliancy, and
they are prouder of him on account of his infirmity; but I guess they like
to feel their superiority to him in practical matters. They admire him, but
they don't want to follow him."
"Oh, I suppose so," said Annie disconsolately. "And I imagine that Mr.
Wilmington's course is attributed to Lyra, and that doesn't help Mr. Peck
much with the husbands of the ladies who don't approve of her."
The doctor tacitly declined to touch this delicate point. He asked, after a
pause, "You'll be at the meeting?"
"I couldn't keep away. But I've no vote, that's the worst. I can only
suffer in the cause." The doctor smiled. "You must go, too," she added
eagerly.
"Oh, I shall go; I couldn't keep away either. Besides, I can vote. How are
you getting on with your little _protegee_?
"Idella? Well, it isn't such a simple matter as I supposed, quite. Did you
ever hear anything about her mother?"
"Nothing more than what every one has. Why?" asked the doctor, with
scientific curiosity. "Do you find traits that the father doesn't account
for?"
"Yes. She is very vain and greedy and quick-tempered."
"Are those traits uncommon in children?"
"In such a degree I should think they were. But she's very affectionate,
too, and you can do anything with her through her love of praise. She
puzzles me a good deal. I wish I knew something about her mother. But Mr.
Peck himself is a puzzle. With all my respect for him and regard and
admiration, I can't help seeing that he's a very imperfect character."
Doctor Morrell laughed. "There's a great deal of human nature in man."
"There isn't enough in Mr. Peck," Annie retorted. "From the very first
he has said things that have stirred me up and put me in a fever; but he
always seems to be cold and passive himself."
"Perhaps he _is_ cold," said the doctor.
"But has he any _right_ to be so?" retorted Annie, with certainly no
coldness of her own.
"Well, I don't know. I never thought of the right or wrong of a man's being
what he was born. Perhaps we might justly blame his ancestors."
Annie broke into a laugh at herself: "Of course. But don't you think that
a man who is able to put things as he does--who can make you see, for
example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and
proper before--don't you think that he's guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if
he doesn't _feel_ as well as see?"
"No, I can't say that I do," said the doctor, with pleasure in the feminine
excess of her demand. "And there are so many ways of feeling. We're apt to
think that our own way is the only way, of course; but I suppose that most
philanthropists--men who have done the most to better conditions--have been
people of cold temperaments; and yet you can't say they are unfeeling."
"No, certainly. Do you think Mr. Peck is a real philanthropist?"
"How you do get back to the personal always!" said Dr. Morrell. "What makes
you ask?"
"Because I can't understand his indifference to his child. It seems to me
that real philanthropy would begin at home. But twice he has distinctly
forgotten her existence, and he always seems bored with it. Or not that
quite; but she seems no more to him than any other child."
"There's something very curious about all that," said the doctor. "In most
things the greater includes the less, but in philanthropy it seems to
exclude it. If a man's heart is open to the whole world, to all men, it's
shut sometimes against the individual, even the nearest and dearest. You
see I'm willing to admit all you can say against a rival practitioner."
"Oh, I understand," said Annie. "But I'm not going to gratify your spite."
At the same time she tacitly consented to the slight for Mr. Peck which
their joking about him involved. In such cases we excuse our disloyalty as
merely temporary, and intend to turn serious again and make full amends for
it. "He made very short work," she continued, "of that notion of yours that
there could be any good feeling between the poor and the rich who had once
been poor themselves."
"Did I have any such notion as that?"
She recalled the time and place of its expression to him, and he said, "Oh
yes! Well?"
"He says that rich people like that are apt to be the hardest masters, and
are eager to forget they ever were poor, and are only anxious to identify
themselves with the rich."
Dr. Morrell seemed to enjoy this immensely. "That does rather settle it,"
he said recreantly.
She tried to be severe with him, but she only kept on laughing and joking;
she was aware that he was luring her away from her seriousness.
Mrs. Bolton brought in the lamp, and set it on the library table, showing
her gaunt outline a moment against it before she left it to throw its
softened light into the parlour where they sat. The autumn moonshine,
almost as mellow, fell in through the open windows, which let in the
shrilling of the crickets and grasshoppers, and wafts of the warm night
wind.
"Does life," Annie was asking, at the end of half an hour, "seem more
simple or more complicated as you live on? That sounds awfully abstruse,
doesn't it? And I don't know why I'm always asking you abstruse things, but
I am."
"Oh, I don't mind it," said the doctor. "Perhaps I haven't lived on long
enough to answer this particular question; I'm only thirty-six, you know."
"_Only_? I'm thirty-one, and I feel a hundred!" she broke in.
"You don't look it. But I believe I rather like abstruse questions. You
know Putney and I have discussed a great many. But just what do you mean by
this particular abstraction?"
He took from the table a large ivory paper-knife which he was in the habit
of playing with in his visits, and laid first one side and then the other
side of its smooth cool blade in the palm of his left hand, as he leaned
forward, with his elbows on his knees, and bent his smiling eyes keenly
upon her.
She stopped rocking herself, and said imperatively, "Will you please put
that back, Dr. Morrell?"
"This paper-knife?"
"Yes. And not look at me just in that way? When you get that knife and that
look, I feel a little too much as if you were diagnosing me."
"Diagnosticating," suggested the doctor.
"Is it? I always supposed it was diagnosing. But it doesn't matter. It
wasn't the name I was objecting to."
He put the knife back and changed his posture, with a smile that left
nothing of professional scrutiny in his look. "Very well, then; you shall
diagnose yourself."
"Diagnosticate, please."
"Oh, I thought you preferred the other."
"No, it sounds undignified, now that I know there's a larger word. Where
was I?"
"The personal bearing of the question whether life isn't more and more
complicated?"
"How did you know it had a personal bearing?"
"I suspected as much."
"Yes, it has. I mean that within the last four or five months--since I've
been in Hatboro'--I seem to have lost my old point of view; or, rather, I
don't find it satisfactory any more. I'm ashamed to think of the simple
plans, or dreams, that I came home with. I hardly remember what they were;
but I must have expected to be a sort of Lady Bountiful here; and now I
think a Lady Bountiful one of the most mischievous persons that could
infest any community."
"You don't mean that charity is played out?" asked the doctor.
"In the old-fashioned way, yes."
"But they say poverty is on the increase. What is to be done?"
"Justice," said Annie. "Those who do most of the work in the world ought to
share in its comforts as a right, and not be put off with what we idlers
have a mind to give them from our superfluity as a grace."
"Yes, that's all very true. But what till justice _is_ done?"
"Oh, we must continue to do charity," cried Annie, with self-contempt that
amused him. "But don't you see how much more complicated it is? That's what
I meant by life not being simple any more. It was easy enough to do charity
when it used to seem the right and proper remedy for suffering; but now,
when I can't make it appear a finality, but only something provisional,
temporary--Don't you see?"
"Yes, I see. But I don't see how you're going to help it At the same time,
I'll allow that it makes life more difficult."
For a moment they were both serious and silent. Then she said: "Sometimes I
think the fault is all in myself, and that if I were not so sophisticated
and--and--selfish, I should find the old way of doing good just as
effective and natural as ever. Then again, I think the conditions are all
wrong, and that we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn't be so
good to them. I should prefer that. I hate being good to people I don't
like, and I can't like people who don't interest me. I think I must be very
hard-hearted."
The doctor laughed at this.
"Oh, I know," said Annie, "I know the fraudulent reputation I've got for
good works."
"Your charity to tramps is the opprobrium of Hatboro'," the doctor
consented.
"Oh, I don't mind that. It's easy when people ask you for food or money,
but the horrible thing is when they ask you for work. Think of me, who
never did anything to earn a cent in my life, being humbly asked by a
fellow-creature to let him work for something to eat and drink! It's
hideous! It's abominable! At first I used to be flattered by it, and try
to conjure up something for them to do, and to believe that I was helping
the deserving poor. Now I give all of them money, and tell them that they
needn't even pretend to work for it. _I_ don't work for my money, and
I don't see why they should."
"They'd find that an unanswerable argument if you put it to them," said the
doctor. He reached out his hand for the paper-cutter, and then withdrew it
in a way that made her laugh.
"But the worst of it is," she resumed, "that I don't love any of the people
that I help, or hurt, whichever it is. I did feel remorseful toward Mrs.
Savor for a while, but I didn't love her, and I knew that I only pitied
myself through her. Don't you see?"
"No, I don't," said the doctor.
"You don't, because you're too polite. The only kind of creature that I can
have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly
selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her, and a
reprobate like Lyra, or some broken creature like poor Ralph. I think
there's something in the air, the atmosphere, that won't allow you to live
in the old way if you've got a grain of conscience or humanity. I don't
mean that _I_ have. But it seems to me as if the world couldn't go on
as it has been doing. Even here in America, where I used to think we had
the millennium because slavery was abolished, people have more liberty, but
they seem just as far off as ever from justice. That is what paralyses me
and mocks me and laughs in my face when I remember how I used to dream of
doing good after I came home. I had better stayed at Rome."
The doctor said vaguely, "I'm glad you didn't," and he let his eyes dwell
on her with a return of the professional interest which she was too lost in
her self reproach to be able to resent.
"I blame myself for trying to excuse my own failure on the plea that things
generally have gone wrong. At times it seems to me that I'm responsible for
having lost my faith in what I used to think was the right thing to do; and
then again it seems as if the world were all so bad that no real good could
be done in the old way, and that my faith is gone because there's nothing
for it to rest on any longer. I feel that something must be done; but I
don't know what."
"It would be hard to say," said the doctor.
She perceived that her exaltation amused him, but she was too much in
earnest to care. "Then we are guilty--all guilty--till we find out and
begin to do it. If the world has come to such a pass that you can't do
anything but harm in it--"
"Oh, is it so bad as that?" he protested.
"It's _quite_ as bad," she insisted. "Just see what mischief I've done
since I came back to Hatboro'. I took hold of that miserable Social Union
because I was outside of all the life about me, and it seemed my only
chance of getting into it; and I've done more harm by it in one summer than
I could undo in a lifetime. Just think of poor Mr. Brandreth's love affair
with Miss Chapley broken off, and Lyra's lamentable triumph over Miss
Northwick, and Mrs. Munger's duplicity, and Ralph's escapade--all because I
wanted to do good!"
A note of exaggeration had begun to prevail in her self-upbraiding, which
was real enough, and the time came for him to suggest, "I think you're a
little morbid, Miss Kilburn."
"Morbid! Of course I am! But that doesn't alter the fact that everything is
wrong, does it?"
"Everything!"
"Why, you don't pretend yourself, do you, that everything is right?"
"A true American ought to do so, oughtn't he?" teased the doctor. "One
mustn't be a bad citizen."
"But if you _were_ a bad citizen?" she persisted.
"Oh, then I might agree with you on some points. But I shouldn't say such
things to my patients, Miss Kilburn."
"It would be a great comfort to them if you did," she sighed.
The doctor broke out in a laugh of delight at her perfervid concentration.
"Oh, no, no! They're mostly nervous women, and it would be the death of
them--if they understood me. In fact, what's the use of brooding upon such
ideas? We can't hurry any change, but we can make ourselves uncomfortable."
"Why should I be comfortable?" she asked, with a solemnity that made him
laugh again.
"Why shouldn't you be?"
"Yes, that's what I often ask myself. But I can't be," she said sadly.
They had risen, and he looked at her with his professional interest now
openly dominant, as he stood holding her hand. "I'm going to send you a
little more of that tonic, Miss Kilburn."
She pulled her hand away. "No, I shall not take any more medicine. You
think everything is physical. Why don't you ask at once to see my tongue?"
He went out laughing, and she stood looking wistfully at the door he had
passed through.
XXV.
The bell on the orthodox church called the members of Mr. Peck's society
together for the business meeting with the same plangent, lacerant note
that summoned them to worship on Sundays. Among those who crowded the house
were many who had not been there before, and seldom in any place of the
kind. There were admirers of Putney: workmen of rebellious repute and of
advanced opinions on social and religious questions; nonsuited plaintiffs
and defendants of shady record, for whom he had at one time or another done
what he could. A good number of the summer folk from South Hatboro' were
present, with the expectation of something dramatic, which every one felt,
and every one hid with the discipline that subdues the outside of life in a
New England town to a decorous passivity.
At the appointed time Mr. Peck rose to open the meeting with prayer; then,
as if nothing unusual were likely to come before it, he declared it ready
to proceed to business. Some people who had been gathering in the vestibule
during his prayer came in; and the electric globes, which had been recently
hung above the pulpit and on the front of the gallery in substitution of
the old gas chandelier, shed their moony glare upon a house in which few
places were vacant. Mr. Gerrish, sitting erect and solemn beside his wife
in their pew, shared with the minister and Putney the tacit interest of the
audience.
He permitted the transaction of several minor affairs, and Mr. Peck, as
Moderator, conducted the business with his habitual exactness and effect
of far-off impersonality. The people waited with exemplary patience,
and Putney, who lounged in one corner of his pew, gave no more sign of
excitement, with his chin sunk in his rumpled shirt-front, than his
sad-faced wife at the other end of the seat.
Mr. Gerrish rose, with the air of rising in his own good time, and said,
with dry pomp, "Mr. Moderator, I have prepared a resolution, which I will
ask you to read to this meeting."
He held up a paper as he spoke, and then passed it to the minister, who
opened and read it--
"_Whereas_, It is indispensable to the prosperity and well-being of
any and every organisation, and especially of a Christian church, that the
teachings of its minister be in accord with the convictions of a majority
of its members upon vital questions of eternal interest, with the end and
aim of securing the greatest efficiency of that body in the community, as
an example and a shining light before men to guide their steps in the
strait and narrow path; therefore
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