Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 you
r 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.