Chapter 4

This inspiration seemed to decide the little girl against crying. The cat was equipped with a doily, and actually provided with dinner at a small table apart; the child did not look at it as Annie had expected she would, but remained with her eyes fastened on Annie herself: She did not stir from the spot where Mrs. Bolton had put her down, but she let Annie take her up and arrange her in a chair, with large books graduated to the desired height under her, and made no sign of satisfaction or disapproval. Once she looked round, when Mrs. Bolton finally went out after bringing in the last dish for dinner, and then fastened her eyes on Annie again, twisting her head shyly round to follow her in every gesture and expression as Annie fitted on a napkin under her chin, cut up her meat, poured her milk, and buttered her bread. She answered nothing to the chatter which Annie tried to make lively and entertaining, and made no sound but that of a broken and suppressed breathing. Annie had forgotten to ask her name of Mrs. Bolton, and she asked it in vain of the child herself, with a great variety of circumlocution; she was so unused to children that she was ashamed to invent any pet name for her; she called her, in what she felt to be a stiff and school-mistressly fashion, “Little Girl,” and talked on at her, growing more and more nervous herself without perceiving that the child's condition was approaching a climax. She had taken off her glasses, from the notion that they embarrassed her guest, and she did not see the pretty lips beginning to curl, nor the searching eyes clouding with tears; the storm of sobs that suddenly burst upon her astounded her.

“Mrs. Bolton! Mrs. Bolton!” she screamed, in hysterical helplessness. Mrs. Bolton rushed in, and with an instant perception of the situation, caught the child to her bony breast, and fled with it to her own room, where Annie heard its wails die gradually away amid murmurs of comfort and reassurance from Mrs. Bolton.

She felt like a great criminal and a great fool; at the same time she was vexed with the stupid child which she had meant so well by, and indignant with Mrs. Bolton, whose flight with it had somehow implied a reproach of her behaviour. When she could govern herself, she went out to Mrs. Bolton's room, where she found the little one quiet enough, and Mrs. Bolton tying on the long apron in which she cleared up the dinner and washed the dishes.

“I guess she'll get along now,” she said, without the critical tone which Annie was prepared to resent. “She was scared some, and she felt kind of strange, I presume.”

“Yes, and I behaved like a simpleton, dressing up the cat, I suppose,” answered Annie. “But I thought it would amuse her.”

“You can't tell how children will take a thing. I don't believe they like anything that's out of the common--well, not a great deal.”

There was a leniency in Mrs. Bolton's manner which encouraged Annie to go on and accuse herself more and more, and then an unresponsive blankness that silenced her. She went back to her own rooms; and to get away from her shame, she began to write a letter.

It was to a friend in Rome, and from the sense we all have that a letter which is to go such a great distance ought to be a long letter, and from finding that she had really a good deal to say, she let it grow so that she began apologising for its length half a dozen pages before the end. It took her nearly the whole afternoon, and she regained a little of her self-respect by ridiculing the people she had met.

VI.

Toward five o'clock Annie was interrupted by a knock at her door, which ought to have prepared her for something unusual, for it was Mrs. Bolton's habit to come and go without knocking. But she called “Come in!” without rising from her letter, and Mrs. Bolton entered with a stranger. The little girl clung to his forefinger, pressing her head against his leg, and glancing shyly up at Annie. She sprang up, and, “This is Mr. Peck, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“How do you do?” said Mr. Peck, taking the hand she gave him.

He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him, as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell from his cheeks and chin; his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the slight frown of challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the type, his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under a smooth forehead, extending itself well up toward the crown, where his dry hair dropped over it.

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Peck,” said Annie; “I've wanted to tell you how pleased I am that you found shelter in my old home when you first came to Hatboro'.”

Mr. Peck's trousers were short and badly kneed, and his long coat hung formlessly from his shoulders; she involuntarily took a patronising tone toward him which was not habitual with her.

“Thank you,” he said, with the dry, serious voice which seemed the fit vocal expression of his presence; “I have been afraid that it seemed like an intrusion to you.”

“Oh, not the least,” retorted Annie. “You were very welcome. I hope you're comfortably placed where you are now?”

“Quite so,” said the minister.

“I'd heard so much of your little girl from Mrs. Bolton, and her attachment to the house, that I ventured to send for her to-day. But I believe I gave her rather a bad quarter of an hour, and that she liked the place better under Mrs. Bolton's _régime_.”

She expected some deprecatory expression of gratitude from him, which would relieve her of the lingering shame she felt for having managed so badly, but he made none.

“It was my fault. I'm not used to children, and I hadn't taken the precaution to ask her name--”

“Her name is Idella,” said the minister.

Annie thought it very ugly, but, with the intention of saying something kind, she said, “What a quaint name!”

“It was her mother's choice,” returned the minister. “Her own name was Ella, and my mother's name was Ida; she combined the two.”

“Oh!” said Annie. She abhorred those made-up names in which the New England country people sometimes indulge their fancy, and Idella struck her as a particularly repulsive invention; but she felt that she must not visit the fault upon the little creature. “Don't you think you could give me another trial some time, Idella?” She stooped down and took the child's unoccupied hand, which she let her keep, only twisting her face away to hide it in her father's pantaloon leg. “Come now, won't you give me a forgiving little kiss?” Idella looked round, and Annie made bold to gather her up.

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.”