Annie Kilburn

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Idella broke into a laugh, and took Annie's cheeks between her hands.

"Well, I declare!" said Mrs. Bolton. "You never can tell what that child
will do next."

"I never can tell what I will do next myself," said Annie. She liked the
feeling of the little, warm, soft body in her arms, against her breast,
and it was flattering to have triumphed where she had seemed to fail so
desperately. They had all been standing, and she now said, "Won't you sit
down, Mr. Peck?" She added, by an impulse which she instantly thought
ill-advised, "There is something I would like to speak to you about."

"Thank you," said Mr. Peck, seating himself beyond the stove. "We must be
getting home before a great while. It is nearly tea-time."

"I won't detain you unduly," said Annie.

Mrs. Bolton left them at her hint of something special to say to the
minister. Annie could not have had the face to speak of Mr. Brandreth's
theatricals in that grim presence; and as it was, she resolved to put
forward their serious object. She began abruptly: "Mr. Peck, I've been
asked to interest myself for a Social Union which the ladies of South
Hatboro' are trying to establish for the operatives. I suppose you haven't
heard anything of the scheme?"

"No, I hadn't," said Mr. Peck.

He was one of those people who sit very high, and he now seemed taller and
more impressive than when he stood.

"It is certainly a-very good object," Annie resumed; and she went on to
explain it at second-hand from Mr. Brandreth as well as she could. The
little girl was standing in her lap, and got between her and Mr. Peck, so
that she had to look first around one side of her and then another to see
how he was taking it.

He nodded his head, and said gravely, "Yes," and "Yes," and "Yes," at each
significant point of her statement. At the end he asked: "And are the means
forthcoming? Have they raised the money for renting and furnishing the
rooms?"

"Well, no, they haven't yet, or not quite, as I understand."

"Have they tried to interest the working people themselves in it? If they
are to value its benefits, it ought to cost them something--self-denial,
privation even."

"Yes, I know," Annie began.

"I'm not satisfied," the minister pursued, "that it is wise to provide
people with even harmless amusements that take them much away from
their homes. These things are invented by well-to-do people who have no
occupation, and think that others want pastimes as much as themselves.
But what working people want is rest, and what they need are decent homes
where they can take it. Besides, unless they help to support this union out
of their own means, the better sort among them will feel wounded by its
existence, as a sort of superfluous charity."

"Yes, I see," said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with surprise.
The minister seemed to have thought more about such matters than she had,
and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him,
and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to
play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The
minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which
she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was
tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in
spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was
a consistent and faithful person, and she said: "The ladies have a plan
for raising the money, and they've applied to me to second it--to use my
influence somehow among the villagers to get them interested; and the
working people can help too if they choose. But I'm quite a stranger
amongst those I'm expected to influence, and I don't at all know how they
will take it." The minister listened, neither prompting nor interrupting.
"The ladies' plan is to have an entertainment at one of the cottages, and
charge an admission, and devote the proceeds to the union." She paused.
Mr. Peck still remained silent, but she knew he was attentive. She pushed
on. "They intend to have a--a representation, in the open air, of one of
Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from one--"

"Do you wish me," interrupted the minister, "to promote the establishment
of this union? Is that why you speak to me of it?"

"Why, I don't know _why_ I speak to you of it," she replied with a
laugh of embarrassment, to which he was cold, apparently. "I certainly
couldn't ask you to take part in an affair that you didn't approve."

"I don't know that I disapprove of it. Properly managed, it might be a good
thing."

"Yes, of course. But I understand why you might not sympathise with that
part of it, and that is why I told you of it," said Annie.

"What part?"

"The--the--theatricals."

"Why not?" asked the minister.

"I know--Mrs. Bolton told me you were very liberal," Annie faltered on;
"but I didn't expect you as a--But of course--"

"I read Shakespeare a great deal," said Mr. Peck. "I have never been in the
theatre; but I should like to see one of his plays represented where it
could cause no one to offend."

"Yes," said Annie, "and this would be by amateurs, and there could be no
_possible_ 'offence in it.' I wished to know how the general idea
would strike you. Of course the ladies would be only too glad of your
advice and co-operation. Their plan is to sell tickets to every one for the
theatricals, and to a certain number of invited persons for a supper, and a
little dance afterward on the lawn."

"I don't know if I understand exactly," said the minister.

Annie repeated her statement more definitely, and explained, from Mr.
Brandreth, as before, that the invitations were to be given so as to
eliminate the shop-hand element from the supper and dance.

Mr. Peck listened quietly. "That would prevent my taking part in the
affair," he said, as quietly as he had listened.

"Of course--dancing," Annie began.

"It is not that. Many people who hold strictly to the old opinions now
allow their children to learn dancing. But I could not join at all with
those who were willing to lay the foundations of a Social Union in a social
disunion--in the exclusion of its beneficiaries from the society of their
benefactors."

He was not sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as he had
sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she had felt something
incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth exposed it, but not deeply.

The minister continued gently: "The ladies who are trying to get up this
Social Union proceed upon the assumption that working people can neither
see nor feel a slight; but it is a great mistake to do so."

Annie had the obtuseness about those she fancied below her which is one of
the consequences of being brought up in a superior station. She believed
that there was something to say on the other side, and she attempted to say
it.

"I don't know that you could call it a slight exactly. People can ask those
they prefer to a social entertainment."

"Yes--if it is for their own pleasure."

"But even in a public affair like this the work-people would feel
uncomfortable and out of place, wouldn't they, if they stayed to the supper
and the dance? They might be exposed to greater suffering among those whose
manners and breeding were different, and it might be very embarrassing all
round. Isn't there that side to be regarded?"

"You beg the question," said the minister, as unsparingly as if she were
a man. "The point is whether a Social Union beginning in social exclusion
could ever do any good. What part do these ladies expect to take in
maintaining it? Do they intend to spend their evenings there, to associate
on equal terms with the shoe-shop and straw-shop hands?"

"I don't suppose they do, but I don't know," said Annie dryly; and she
replied by helplessly quoting Mr. Brandreth: "They intend to organise a
system of lectures, concerts, and readings. They wish to get on common
ground with them."

"They can never get on common ground with them in that way," said the
minister. "No doubt they think they want to do them good; but good is from
the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose. The working people
would know that at once."

"Then you mean to say," Annie asked, half alarmed and half amused, "that
there can be no friendly intercourse with the poor and the well-to-do
unless it is based upon social equality?"

"I will answer your question by asking another. Suppose you were one of the
poor, and the well-to-do offered to be friendly with you on such terms as
you have mentioned, how should you feel toward them?"

"If you make it a personal question--"

"It makes itself a personal question," said the minister dispassionately.

"Well, then, I trust I should have the good sense to see that social
equality between people who were better dressed, better taught, and better
bred than myself was impossible, and that for me to force myself into their
company was not only bad taste, but it was foolish, I have often heard my
father say that the great superiority of the American practice of democracy
over the French ideal was that it didn't involve any assumption of social
equality. He said that equality before the law and in politics was sacred,
but that the principle could never govern society, and that Americans all
instinctively recognised it. And I believe that to try to mix the different
classes would be un-American."

Mr. Peck smiled, and this was the first break in his seriousness. "We don't
know what is or will be American yet. But we will suppose you are quite
right. The question is, how would you feel toward the people whose company
you wouldn't force yourself into?"

"Why, of course," Annie was surprised into saying, "I suppose I shouldn't
feel very kindly toward them."

"Even if you knew that they felt kindly toward you?"

"I'm afraid that would only make the matter worse," she said, with an
uneasy laugh.

The minister was silent on his side of the stove.

"But do I understand you to say," she demanded, "that there can be no love
at all, no kindness, between the rich and the poor? God tells us all to
love one another."

"Surely," said the minister. "Would you suffer such a slight as your
friends propose, to be offered to any one you loved?"

She did not answer, and he continued, thoughtfully: "I suppose that if
a poor person could do a rich person a kindness which cost him some
sacrifice, he might love him. In that case there could be love between
the rich and the poor."

"And there could be no love if a rich man did the same?"

"Oh yes," the minister said--"upon the same ground. Only, the rich man
would have to make a sacrifice first that he would really feel."

"Then you mean to say that people can't do any good at all with their
money?" Annie asked.

"Money is a palliative, but it can't cure. It can sometimes create a bond
of gratitude perhaps, but it can't create sympathy between rich and poor."

"But _why_ can't it?"

"Because sympathy--common feeling--the sense of fraternity--can spring only
from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these."

He rose, and looked a moment about him, as if trying to recall something.
Then, with a stiff obeisance, he said, "Good evening," and went out,
while she remained daunted and bewildered, with the child in her arms, as
unconscious of having kept it as he of having left it with her.

Mrs. Bolton must have reminded him of his oversight, for after being gone
so long as it would have taken him to walk to her parlour and back, he
returned, and said simply, "I forgot Idella."

He put out his hands to take her, but she turned perversely from him, and
hid her face in Annie's neck, pushing his hands away with a backward reach
of her little arm.

"Come, Idella!" he said. Idella only snuggled the closer.

Mrs. Bolton came in with the little girl's wraps; they were very common
and poor, and the thought of getting her something prettier went through
Annie's mind.

At sight of Mrs. Bolton the child turned from Annie to her older friend.

"I'm afraid you have a woman-child for your daughter, Mr. Peck," said
Annie, remotely hurt at the little one's fickleness.

Neither Mr. Peck nor Mrs. Bolton smiled, and with some vague intention
of showing him that she could meet the poor on common ground by sharing
their labours, she knelt down and helped Mrs. Bolton tie on and button on
Idella's things.

VII.

Next morning the day broke clear after the long storm, and Annie woke in
revolt against the sort of subjection in which she had parted from Mr.
Peck. She felt the need of showing Mrs. Bolton that, although she had been
civil to him, she had no sympathy with his ideas; but she could not think
of any way to formulate her opposition, and all she could say in offence
was, "Does Mr. Peck usually forget his child when he starts home?"

"I don't know as he does," answered Mrs. Bolton simply. "He's rather of an
absent-minded man, and I suppose he's like other men when he gets talking."

"The child's clothes were disgracefully shabby!" said Annie, vexed that her
attack could come to no more than this.

"I presume," said Mrs. Bolton, "that if he kept more of his money for
himself, he could dress her better."

"Oh, that's the way with these philanthropists," said Annie, thinking of
Hollingsworth, in _The Blithedale Romance_, the only philanthropist
whom she had really ever known, "They are always ready to sacrifice the
happiness and comfort of any one to the general good."

Mrs. Bolton stood a moment, and then went out without replying; but she
looked as offended as Annie could have wished. About ten o'clock the bell
rang, and she came gloomily into the study, and announced that Mrs. Munger
was in the parlour.

Annie had already heard an authoritative rustling of skirts, and she was
instinctively prepared for the large, vigorous woman who turned upon her
from the picture she had been looking at on the wall, and came toward her
with the confident air of one sure they must be friends. Mrs. Munger was
dressed in a dark, firm woollen stuff, which communicated its colour,
if not its material, to the matter-of-fact bonnet which she wore on her
plainly dressed hair. In one of her hands, which were cased in driving
gloves of somewhat insistent evidence, she carried a robust black silk
sun-umbrella, and the effect of her dress otherwise might be summarised in
the statement that where other women would have worn lace, she seemed to
wear leather. She had not only leather gloves, and a broad leather belt at
her waist, but a leather collar; her watch was secured by a leather cord,
passing round her neck, and the stubby tassel of her umbrella stick was
leather: she might be said to be in harness. She had a large, handsome
face, no longer fresh, but with an effect of exemplary cleanness, and a
pair of large grey eyes that suggested the notion of being newly washed,
and that now looked at Annie with the assumption of fully understanding
her.

"Ah, Miss Kilburn!" she said, without any of the wonted preliminaries of
introduction and greeting. "I should have come long ago to see you, but
I've been dispersed over the four quarters of the globe ever since you
came, my dear. I got home last night on the nine o'clock train, in the last
agonies of that howling tempest. Did you ever know anything like it? I see
your trees have escaped. I wonder they weren't torn to shreds."

Annie took her on her own ground of ignoring their past non-acquaintance.
"Yes, it was awful. And your son--how did you leave him? Mr. Brandreth--"

"Oh yes, poor little man! I found him waiting for me at home last night,
and he told me he had been here. He was blowing about in the storm all day.
Such a spirit! There was nothing serious the matter; the bridge of the nose
was all right; merely the cartilage pushed aside by the ball."

She had passed so lightly from Mr. Brandreth's heroic spirit to her son's
nose that Annie, woman as she was, and born to these bold bounds over
sequence, was not sure where they had arrived, till Mrs. Munger added:
"Jim's used to these things. I'm thankful it wasn't a finger, or an eye.
What is _that_?" She jumped from her chair, and swooped upon the
Spanish-Roman water-colour Annie had stood against some books on the table,
pending its final disposition.

"It's only a Guerra," said Annie. "My things are all scattered about still;
I have scarcely tried to get into shape yet."

Mrs. Munger would not let her interpose any idea of there being a past
between them. She merely said: "You knew the Herricks at Rome, of course.
I'm in hopes I shall get them here when they come back. I want you to help
me colonise Hatboro' with the right sort of people: it's so easy to get the
wrong sort! But, so far, I think we've succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
It's easy enough to get nice people together at the seaside; but inland!
No; it's only a very few nice people who will come into the country for the
summer; and we propose to make Hatboro' a winter colony too; that gives us
agreeable invalids, you know; it gave us the Brandreths. He told you of our
projected theatricals, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Annie non-committally, "he did."

"I know just how you feel about it, my dear," said Mrs. Munger. "'Been
there myself,' as Jim says. But it grows upon you. I'm glad you didn't
refuse outright;" and Mrs. Munger looked at her with eyes of large
expectance.

"No, I didn't," said Annie, obliged by this expectance to say something.
"But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Munger, I don't see how I'm to be of any
use to you or to Mr. Brandreth."

"Oh, take a cab and go about, like Boots and Brewer, you know, for the
Veneerings." She said this as if she knew about the humour rather than felt
it. "We are placing all our hopes of bringing round the Old Hatborians in
you."

"I'm afraid you're mistaken about my influence," said Annie. "Mr. Brandreth
spoke of it, and I had an opportunity of trying it last night, and seeing
just what it amounted to."

"Yes?" Mrs. Munger prompted, with an increase of expectance in her large
clear eyes, and of impartiality in her whole face.

"Mr. Peck was here," said Annie reluctantly, "and I tried it on him."

"Yes?" repeated Mrs. Munger, as immutably as if she were sitting for her
photograph and keeping the expression.

Annie broke from her reluctance with a sort of violence which carried
her further than she would have gone otherwise. She ridiculed Mr. Peck's
appearance and manner, and laughed at his ideas to Mrs. Munger. She had not
a good conscience in it, but the perverse impulse persisted in her. There
seemed no other way in which she could assert herself against him.

Mrs. Munger listened judicially, but she seemed to take in only what Mr.
Peck had thought of the dance and supper; at the end she said, rather
vacantly, "What nonsense!"

"Yes; but I'm afraid he thinks it's wisdom, and for all practical purposes
it amounts to that. You see what my 'influence' has done at the outset,
Mrs. Munger. He'll never give way on such a point."

"Oh, very well, then," said Mrs. Munger, with the utmost lightness and
indifference, "we'll drop the idea of the invited supper and dance."

"Do you think that would be well?" asked Annie.

"Yes; why not? It's only an idea. I don't think you've made at all a bad
beginning. It was very well to try the idea on some one who would be frank
about it, and wouldn't go away and talk against it," said Mrs. Munger,
rising. "I want you to come with me, my dear."

"To see Mr. Peck? Excuse me. I don't think I could," said Annie.

"No; to see some of his parishioners," said Mrs. Munger. "His deacons, to
begin with, or his deacons' wives."

This seemed so much less than calling on Mr. Peck that Annie looked out at
Mrs. Munger's basket-phaeton at her gate, and knew that she would go with
very little more urgence.

"After all, you know, you're not one of his congregation; he may yield to
them," said Mrs. Munger. "We must _have_ him--if only because he's
hard to get. It'll give us an idea of what we've got to contend with."

It had a very practical sound; it was really like meeting the difficulties
on their own ground, and it overcame the question of taste which was
rising in Annie's mind. She demurred a little more upon the theory of her
uselessness; but Mrs. Munger insisted, and carried her off down the village
street.

The air sparkled full of sun, and a breeze from the south-west frolicked
with the twinkling leaves of the overarching elms, and made their shadows
dance on the crisp roadway, packed hard by the rain, and faced with clean
sand, which crackled pleasantly under Mrs. Munger's phaeton wheels. She
talked incessantly. "I think we'll go first to Mrs. Gerrish's, and then to
Mrs. Wilmington's. You know them?"

"Oh yes; they were old girl friends."

"Then you know why I go to Mrs. Gerrish's first. She'll care a great deal,
and Mrs. Wilmington won't care at all. She's a delicious creature, Mrs.
Wilmington--don't you think? That large, indolent nature; Mr. Brandreth
says she makes him think of 'the land in which it seemed always
afternoon.'"

Annie remembered Lyra Goodman as a long, lazy, red-haired girl who laughed
easily; and she could not readily realise her in the character of a
Titian-esque beauty with a gift for humorous dramatics, which she had
filled out into during the years of her absence from Hatboro'; but she said
"Oh yes," in the necessity of polite acquiescence, and Mrs. Munger went on
talking--

"She's the only one of the Old Hatboro' people, so far as I know them, who
has any breadth of view. Whoa!" She pulled up suddenly beside a stout,
short lady in a fashionable walking dress, who was pushing an elegant
perambulator with one hand, and shielding her complexion with a crimson
sun-umbrella in the other.

"Mrs. Gerrish!" Mrs. Munger called; and Mrs. Gerrish, who had already
looked around at the approaching phaeton, and then looked away, so as not
to have seemed to look, stopped abruptly, and after some exploration of the
vicinity, discovered where the voice came from.

"Oh, Mrs. Munger!" she called back, bridling with pleasure at being greeted
in that way by the chief lady of South Hatboro', and struggling to keep up
a dignified indifference at the same time. "Why, Annie!" she added.

"Good morning, Emmeline," said Annie; she annexed some irrelevancies about
the weather, which Mrs. Munger swept away with business-like robustness.

"We were driving down to your house to find you. I want to see the
principal ladies of your church, and talk with them about our Social Union.
You've heard about it?"

"Well, nothing very particular," said Mrs. Gerrish; she had probably heard
nothing at all. After a moment she asked, "Have you seen Mrs. Wilmington
yet?"

"No, I haven't," cried Mrs. Munger. "The fact is, I wanted to talk it over
with you and Mr. Gerrish first."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Gerrish, brightening. "Well, I was just going right there.
I guess he's in."

"Well, we shall meet there, then. Sorry I can't offer you a _seat_.
But there's nothing but the rumble, and that wouldn't hold you _all_."

Mrs. Munger called this back after starting her pony. Mrs. Gerrish did not
understand, and screamed, "_What_?"

Mrs. Munger repeated her joke at the top of her voice.

"Oh, I can walk!" Mrs. Gerrish yelled at the top of hers. Both the ladies
laughed at their repartee.

"She's as jealous of Mrs. Wilmington as a cat," Mrs. Munger confided to
Annie as they drove away; "and she's just as pleased as Punch that I've
spoken to her first. Mrs. Wilmington won't mind. She's so delightfully
indifferent, it really renders her almost superior; you might forget that
she was a village person. But this has been an immense stroke. I don't
know," she mused, "whether I'd better let her get there first and prepare
her husband, or do it myself. No; I'll let _her_. I'll stop here at
Gates's."

She stopped at the pavement in front of a provision store, and a pale,
stout man, in the long over-shirt of his business, came out to receive her
orders. He stood, passing his hand through the top of a barrel of beans,
and listened to Mrs. Munger with a humorous, patient smile.

"Mr. Gates, I want you to send me up a leg of lamb for dinner--a large
one."

"Last year's, then," suggested Gates.

"No; _this_ year's," insisted Mrs. Munger; and Gates gave way with the
air of pacifying a wilful child, which would get, after all, only what he
chose to allow it.

"All right, ma'am; a large leg of this year's lamb--grown to order. Any
peas, spinnage, cucumbers, sparrowgrass?"

"Southern, I suppose?" said Mrs. Munger.

"Well, not if you want to call 'em native," said Gates.

"Yes, I'll take two bunches of asparagus, and some peas."

"Any strawberries?--natives?" suggested Gates.

"Nonsense!"

"Same thing; natives of Norfolk."

"You had better be honest with _me_, Mr. Gates," said Mrs. Munger.
"Yes, I'll take a couple of boxes."

"All right! Want 'em nice, and the biggest ones at the bottom of the box?"

"Yes, I do."

"That's what I thought. Some customers wants the big ones on top; but I
tell 'em it's all foolishness; just vanity." Gates laughed a dry, hacking
little laugh at his drollery, and kept his eyes on Annie. She smiled at
last, with permissive recognition, and Gates came forward. "Used to know
your father pretty well; but I can't keep up with the young folks any
more." He was really not many years older than Annie; he rubbed his right
hand on the inside of his long shirt, and gave it her to shake. "Well, you
haven't been about much for the last nine or ten years, that's a fact."

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