Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “But you want them to get well?”

  “Oh, certainly. I’m bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Yes; I’m sorry for them — for their families, if it seems to be going badly with them.”

  “And — and as — as — Don’t you care at all for your work as a part of what every one ought to do for others — as humanity, philan—” She stopped the offensive word.

  “Well, I can’t say that I’ve looked at it in that light exactly,” he answered. “I suspect I’m not very good at generalising my own relations to others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don’t you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans have? They have the same experiences, and why can’t they sympathise with those who have remained poor?”

  “I never thought of that. Why didn’t I ask him that?” She lamented so sincerely that the doctor laughed again. “I think that Mr. Peck—”

  “Oh no! oh no!” said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant self-question, she joined him.

  “Isn’t that delicious?” he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace with his.

  The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.

  They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the perplexities he had suggested.

  She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her, and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.

  XII.

  Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite; but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on to talk of her sister’s part in them. The relation of the Northwick family to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was the main effect of Miss Northwick’s visit.

  When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great beauty. She seemed very cold, and of a hauteur which she subdued with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister, and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion, the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.

  A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie’s door when she got home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.

  “How d’ye do, Annie?” she drawled, in her tender voice. “Won’t you come in? You see I’m in possession. I’ve just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at once to crush you with it. Isn’t it a beauty?”

  “You’re too late, Lyra,” said Annie. “I’ve just come from the Northwicks, and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton.”

  “Oh, poor Annie!” Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence. “Do come in and tell me about it!”

  “Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn’t care to please any one, does she?”

  “I didn’t know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others. I do. But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr. Brandreth.”

  “Do you mean it, Lyra?” demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the charm of this improbability.

  “Well, I don’t know; they’re opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you needn’t come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new phaeton,” said Lyra, coming out.

  Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded: “Get right in. We’ll go down to the Works. You’ve never met my husband yet; have you, Annie?”

  “No, I haven’t, Lyra. I’ve always just missed him somehow. He seems to have been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”

  “Well, he’s really at home now. And I don’t mean at the house, which isn’t home to him, but the Works. You’ve never seen the Works either, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, then, we’ll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone. I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”

  “I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.

  Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century, anyway.”

  They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in front of her husband’s factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs. Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as ugly as the shoe shops.

  The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy air. “Of course it doesn’t smell very nice,” said Lyra.

  She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat writing at a table.

  “George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the cream. “I’ve been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects; but I’ve been away a great deal this season, and — and — We’re all very happy to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I’ve often heard my wife speak of your old days together at Hatboro’.”

  They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand upon it.

  Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we’d better not let her get away without showing her the Works.”

  “Oh — oh — decidedly! I’ll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office door they encountered Jack Wilmington.

  “I’ll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the old man assented with, “Well, perhaps you’d better, Jack,” and went back to his room.

  The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room
was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to time, at Lyra’s bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different numbers. “Here’s where I used to work,” said Lyra, “and here’s where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is full of romantic associations. The stockings are all one size, Annie; but people like to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do you wear? Or don’t you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? I don’t. Well, they’re not dreams exactly, Annie, when all’s said and done for them.”

  When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her, saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that Jack was going to Boston.

  They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was. She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because she never went anywhere.

  Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside somewhere during the summer, but “No,” Lyra said; “it would be too much trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hate trouble. I don’t want the care of a cottage, and I don’t want to be poked into a hotel, so I stay in Hatboro’.” She said that she had always been a village girl, and did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them in South Hatboro’, or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.

  At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air. Yet she knew that Lyra was kind to many of the poor people about her, and did a great deal of good, as the phrase is, with the superfluity which it involved no self-denial to give from. But Mr. Peck had given her a point of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not escape from it.

  Lyra told her much about people in Hatboro’, and characterised them all so humorously, and she seemed so good-natured, in her ridicule which spared nobody.

  She shrieked with laughter about Mr. Brandreth when Annie told her of his mother’s doubt whether his love-making with Miss Northwick ought to be tacit or explicit in the kissing and embracing between Romeo and Juliet.

  “Don’t you think, Annie, we’d better refer him to Mr. Peck? I should like to hear Mr. Brandreth and Mr. Peek discussing it. I must tell Jack about it. I might get him to ask Sue Northwick, and get her ideas.”

  “Has Mr. Wilmington known the Northwicks long?” Annie asked.

  “He used to go to their Boston house when he was at Harvard.”

  “Oh, then,” said Annie, “perhaps he accounts for her playing Juliet; though, as Tybalt, I don’t see exactly how he—”

  “Oh, it’s at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don’t matter what part you have.”

  Annie lay awake a long time that night. She was sure that she ought not to like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully respected her. But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and enjoyed hearing her soft drawl. She tried to think how Jack Wilmington’s having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her. As she drowsed, this became perfectly clear.

  XIII.

  In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro’ had suffered one kind of deterioration which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro’. The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer the leading people.

  It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not; but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready convertibility in the materials of each.

  The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys’, and he fell into the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at his office where he was to be found.

  He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro’, gave her a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing to live in Hatboro’ at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours to turn him to account. S
he did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about Hatboro’, and tell her how she could be of use among the working people. She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one ought to have a conscience about doing good.

  She let the chance of proposing this impossibility go by; and after a little silence Dr. Morrell seemed to revert, in her interest, to the economical situation in Hatboro’.

  “You know that most of the hands in the hat-shops are from the farms around; and some of them own property here in the village. I know the owner of three small houses who’s always worked in the shops. You couldn’t very well offer help to a landed proprietor like that?”

  “No,” said Annie, abashed in view of him.

  “I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor.”

  “I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing anywhere,” she said desperately.

  The doctor’s eyes twinkled sympathetically. “I don’t know whether Benson earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops. He ‘likes a good horse,’ as he says; and he likes to trade it for a better; I know that from experience. But he’s a great friend of mine. Well, then, there are more women than men in the shops, and they earn more. I suppose that’s rather disappointing too.”

  “It is, rather.”

  “But, on the other hand, the work only lasts eight months of the year, and that cuts wages down to an average of a dollar a day.”