Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Do you mean it?”

  “What was that notion of his” — they usually spoke of the minister pronominally— “about getting the Savors going in a co-operative boarding-house at Fall River? Putney said something about it.”

  Annie explained, as she had heard it from him, and from the Savors since his death, the minister’s scheme for a club, in which the members should contribute the labour and the provisions, and should live cheaply and wholesomely under the management of the Savors at first, and afterward should continue them in charge, or not, as they chose. “He seemed to have thought it out very carefully. But I supposed, of course, it was unpractical.”

  “Was that why you were going in for it?” asked the doctor; and then he spared her confusion in adding: “I don’t see why it was unpractical. It seems to me a very good notion for a Social Union. Why not try it here? There isn’t the same pressing necessity that there is in a big factory town; but you have the money, and you have the Savors to make a beginning.”

  His tone was still half bantering; but it had become more and more serious, so that she could say in earnest: “But the money is one of the drawbacks. It was Mr. Peck’s idea that the working people ought to do it all themselves.”

  “Well, I should say that two-thirds of that money in the bank had come from them. They turned out in great force to Mr. Brandreth’s theatricals. And wouldn’t it be rather high-handed to use their money for anything but the Union?”

  “You don’t suppose,” said Annie hotly, “that I would spend a cent of it on the grounds of that idiotic monument? I would pay for having it blown up with dynamite! No, I can’t have anything more to do with the wretched affair. My touch is fatal.” The doctor laughed, and she added: “Besides, I believe most heartily with Mr. Peck that no person of means and leisure can meet working people except in the odious character of a patron, and if I didn’t respect them, I respect myself too much for that. If I were ready to go in with them and start the Social Union on his basis, by helping do house-work — scullion-work — for it, and eating and living with them, I might try; but I know from experience I’m not. I haven’t the need, and to pretend that I have, to forego my comforts and luxuries in a make-believe that I haven’t them, would be too ghastly a farce, and I won’t.”

  “Well, then, don’t,” said the doctor, bent more perhaps on carrying his point in argument than on promoting the actual establishment of the Social Union. “But my idea is this: Take two-thirds or one-half of that money, and go to Savor, and say: ‘Here! This is what Mr. Brandreth’s theatricals swindled the shop-hands out of. It’s honestly theirs, at least to control; and if you want to try that experiment of Mr. Peck’s here in Hatboro’, it’s yours. We people of leisure, or comparative leisure, have really nothing in common with you people who work with your hands for a living; and as we really can’t be friends with you, we won’t patronise you. We won’t advise you, and we won’t help you; but here’s the money. If you fail, you fail; and if you succeed, you won’t succeed by our aid and comfort.’”

  The plan that Annie and Doctor Morrell talked over half in joke took a more and more serious character in her sense of duty to the minister’s memory and the wish to be of use, which was not extinct in her, however she mocked and defied it. It was part of the irony of her fate that the people who were best able to counsel with her in regard to it were Lyra, whom she could not approve, and Jack Wilmington, whom she had always disliked. He was able to contribute some facts about the working of the Thayer Club at the Harvard Memorial Hall in Cambridge, and Lyra because she had been herself a hand, and would not forget it, was of use in bringing the scheme into favour with the hands. They felt easy with her, as they did with Putney, and for much the same reason: it is one of the pleasing facts of our conditions that people who are socially inferior like best those above them who are morally anomalous. It was really through Lyra that Annie got at the working people, and when it came to a formal conference, there was no one who could command their confidence like Putney, whom they saw mad-drunk two or three times a year, but always pulling up and fighting back to sanity against the enemy whose power some of them had felt too.

  No theory is so perfect as not to be subject to exceptions in the experiment, and in spite of her conviction of the truth of Mr. Peck’s social philosophy, Annie is aware, through her simple and frank relations with the hands in a business matter, of mutual kindness which it does not account for. But perhaps the philosophy and the experiment were not contradictory; perhaps it was intended to cover only the cases in which they had no common interest. At anyrate, when the Peck Social Union, as its members voted to call it, at the suggestion of one of their own number, got in working order, she was as cordially welcomed to the charge of its funds and accounts as if she had been a hat-shop hand or a shoe-binder. She is really of use, for its working is by no means ideal, and with her wider knowledge she has suggested improvements and expedients for making both ends meet which were sometimes so reluctant to meet. She has kept a conscience against subsidising the Union from her own means; and she even accepts for her services a small salary, which its members think they ought to pay her. She owns this ridiculous, like all the make-believe work of rich people; a travesty which has no reality except the little sum it added to the greater sum of her superabundance. She is aware that she is a pensioner upon the real members of the Social Union for a chance to be useful, and that the work they let her do is the right of some one who needs it. She has thought of doing the work and giving the pay to another; but she sees that this would be pauperising and degrading another. So she dwells in a vicious circle, and waits, and mostly forgets, and is mostly happy.

  The Social Union itself, though not a brilliant success in all points, is still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it continues to have a present. The people of Hatboro’ are rather proud of it, and strangers visit it as one of the possible solutions of one of the social problems. It is predicted that it cannot go on; that it must either do better or do worse; but it goes on the same.

  Putney studies its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great as those of Mr. Gerrish and his store.

  Annie sometimes feels that nothing else can explain the maintenance of Lyra Wilmington’s peculiar domestic relations at the point which perpetually invites comment and never justifies scandal. The situation seems to her as lamentable as ever. She grieves over Lyra, and likes her, and laughs with her; she no longer detests Jack Wilmington so much since he showed himself so willing and helpful about the Social Union; she thinks there must be a great deal of good in him, and sometimes she is sorry for him, and longs to speak again to Lyra about the wrong she is doing him. One of the dangers of having a very definite point of view is the temptation of abusing it to read the whole riddle of the painful earth. Annie has permitted herself to think of Lyra’s position as one which would be impossible in a state of things where there was neither poverty nor riches, and there was neither luxury on one hand to allure, nor the fear of want to constrain on the other.

  When her recoil from the fulfilment of her volunteer pledge to Mr. Peck brought her face to face with her own weakness, there were two ways back to self-respect, either of which she might take. She might revert to her first opinion of him, and fortify herself in that contempt and rejection of his ideas, or she might abandon herself to them, with a vague intention of reparation to him, and accept them to the last insinuation of their logic. This was what she did, and while her life remained the same outwardly, it was inwardly all changed. She never could tell by what steps she reached her agreement with t
he minister’s philosophy; perhaps, as a woman, it was not possible she should; but she had a faith concerning it to which she bore unswerving allegiance, and it was Putney’s delight to witness its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro’ Kilburn, the daughter of a shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force of her reasons, should be content to rest in a comfortable inconclusion as to his conduct, till one day she reflected that this was what she was herself doing, and that she differed from him only in the openness with which she proclaimed her opinions. Being a woman, her opinions were treated by the magnates of Hatboro’ as a good joke, the harmless fantasies of an old maid, which she would get rid of if she could get anybody to marry her; being a lady, and very well off, they were received with deference, and she was left to their uninterrupted enjoyment. Putney amused himself by saying that she was the fiercest apostle of labour that never did a stroke of work; but no one cared half so much for all that as for the question whether her affair with Dr. Morrell was a friendship or a courtship. They saw an activity of attention on his part which would justify the most devout belief in the latter, and yet they were confronted with the fact that it so long remained eventless. The two theories, one that she was amusing herself with him, and the other that he was just playing with her, divided public opinion, but they did not molest either of the parties to the mystery; and the village, after a season of acute conjecture, quiesced into that sarcastic sufferance of the anomaly into which it may have been noticed that small communities are apt to subside from such occasions. Except for some such irreconcilable as Mrs. Gerrish, it was a good joke that if you could not find Dr. Morrell in his office after tea, you could always find him at Miss Kilburn’s. Perhaps it might have helped solve the mystery if it had been known that she could not accept the situation, whatever it really was, without satisfying herself upon two points, which resolved themselves into one in the process of the inquiry.

  She asked, apparently as preliminary to answering a question of his, “Have you heard that gossip about my — being in — caring for the poor man?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you — what did you think?”

  “That it wasn’t true. I knew if there were anything in it, you couldn’t have talked him over with me.”

  She was silent. Then she said, in a low voice: “No, there couldn’t have been. But not for that reason alone, though it’s very delicate and generous of you to think of it, very large-minded; but because it couldn’t have been. I could have worshipped him, but I couldn’t have loved him — any more,” she added, with an implication that entirely satisfied him, “than I could have worshipped you.”

  THE END

  APRIL HOPES

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII.

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII:

  XXXIV.

  XXXV.

  XXXVI.

  XXXVII.

  XXXVIII.

  XXXIX.

  XL.

  XLI.

  XLII.

  XLIII

  XLIV.

  XLV.

  XLVI.

  XLVII.

  XLVIII.

  XLIX.

  L.

  I.

  From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G. Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises between walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the crowd of stationary spectators, were very much younger than students used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves did not look so old as he remembered them in his day. There was a band playing somewhere, and the galleries were well filled with spectators seated at their ease, and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the floor, where from time to time the younger promenaders broke away from the ranks into a waltz, and after some turns drifted back, smiling and controlling their quick breath, and resumed their promenade. The place was intensely light, in the candour of a summer day which had no reserves; and the brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along between the posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the lunch tables, where a great many people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the whole rose that blended odour of viands, of flowers, of stuff’s, of toilet perfumes, which is the characteristic expression of, all social festivities, and which exhilarates or depresses — according as one is new or old to it.

  Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon. the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and saluted him with the “Hello, Mavering!” of a contemporary.

  His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition. “Why, John Munt! is that you?” he said, and he took into his large moist palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue; which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone. But they were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations by the presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt’s arm as if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

  “Oh!” he said, suddenly recurring to her; “let me introduce you to Mrs. Pasmer, Mr. Mavering,” and the latter made a bow that creased his waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer’s pretty little nose.

  His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age; and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve. His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

  Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe. Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of these old friends. They declared tha
t they had not seen each other for twenty years, or, at any rate, not since ‘59. She listened while they disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt, as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she was not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been pre-arranged, “Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you’ll let me leave you with Mr. Mavering a moment, I’ll go off and bring that unnatural child to you; no use dragging you round through this crowd longer.”

  He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble in getting in the first remark. “Isn’t all this charming, Mr. Mavering?” She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and handkerchief at her waist.

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma’am to her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer’s mind fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, “Congressman from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president? railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town? — no, Mr. Munt said Mister,” and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer; but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say, with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity, whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than we used to do in our rooms.”