Annie Kilburn by W. D. Howells

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"Did you understand that? Then I failed to make myself clear. I wished
merely to argue that the well-meaning ladies who suggested it were not
intending a social union at all. In fact, such a union in our present
condition of things, with its division of classes, is impossible--as Mrs.
Munger's experiment showed--with the best will on both sides. But, as I
said, the experiment was interesting, though unimportant, except as it
resulted in heart-burning and offence."

They were on the same ground, but they had reached it from starting-points
so opposite that Annie felt it very unsafe. In her fear of getting into
some controversy with Mr. Peck that might interfere with her designs
regarding Idella, she had a little insincerity in saying: "Mrs. Munger's
bad faith in that was certainly unimportant compared with her part in poor
Mr. Putney's misfortune. That was the worst thing; that's what I
_can't_ forgive."

Mr. Peck said nothing to this, and Annie, somewhat daunted by his silence,
proceeded. "I've had the satisfaction of telling her what I thought on both
points. But Ralph--Mr. Putney--I hear, has escaped this time with less than
his usual--"

She did not know what lady-like word to use for spree, and so she stopped.

Mr. Peck merely said, "He has shown great self-control;" and she perceived
that he was not going to say more. He listened patiently to the reasons she
gave for not having offered Mrs. Putney anything more than passive sympathy
at a time when help could only have cumbered and kindness wounded her, but
he made no sign of thinking them either necessary or sufficient. In the
meantime he had not formally consented to Idella's remaining with her, and
Annie prepared to lead back to that affair as artfully as she could.

"I really want you to believe, Mr. Peck, that I think very differently on
_some_ points from what I did when we first talked about the Social
Union, and I have you to thank for seeing things in a new light. And you
needn't," she added lightly, "be afraid of my contaminating Idella's mind
with any wicked ideas. I'll do my best to keep her from coveting kittens
or property of any kind; though I've always heard my father say that
civilisation was founded upon the instinct of ownership, and that it was
the only thing that had advanced the world. And if you dread the danger
of giving her advantages, as you say, or bettering her worldly lot," she
continued, with a smile for his quixotic scruples, "why, I'll do my best to
reduce her blessings to a minimum; though I don't see why the poor little
thing shouldn't get some good from the inequalities that there always must
be in the world."

"I am not sure there always must be inequalities in the world," answered
the minister.

"There always have been," cried Annie.

"There always had been slavery, up to a certain time," he replied.

"Oh, but surely you don't compare the two!" Annie pleaded with what she
really regarded as a kind of lunacy in the good man. "In the freest
society, I've heard my father say, there is naturally an upward and
downward tendency; a perfect level is impossible. Some must rise, and some
must sink."

"But what do you mean by rising? If you mean in material things, in wealth
and the power over others that it gives--"

"I don't mean that altogether. But there are other ways--in cultivation,
refinement, higher tastes and aims than the great mass of people can have.
You have risen yourself, Mr. Peck."

"I have risen, as you call it," he said, with a meek sufferance of the
application of the point to himself. "Those who rise above the necessity of
work for daily bread are in great danger of losing their right relation to
other men, as I said when we talked of this before."

A point had remained in Annie's mind from her first talk with Dr. Morrell.
"Yes; and you said once that there could be no sympathy between the rich
and the poor--no real love--because they had not had the same experience of
life. But how is it about the poor who become rich? They have had the same
experience."

"Too often they make haste to forget that they were poor; they become hard
masters to those they have left behind them. They are eager to identify
themselves with those who have been rich longer than they. Some working-men
who now see this clearly have the courage to refuse to rise. Miss Kilburn,
why should I let you take my child out of the conditions of self-denial and
self-help to which she was born?"

"I don't know," said Annie rather blankly. Then she added impetuously:
"Because I love her and want her. I don't--I _won't_--pretend that
it's for her sake. It's for _my_ sake, though I can take better care
of her than you can. But I'm all alone in the world; I've neither kith nor
kin; nothing but my miserable money. I've set my heart on the child; I must
have her. At least let me keep her a while. I will be honest with you, Mr.
Peck. If I find I'm doing her harm and not good, I'll give her up. I should
wish you to feel that she is yours as much as ever, and if you _will_
feel so, and come often to see her--I--I shall--be very glad, and--" she
stopped, and Mr. Peck rose.

"Where is the child?" he asked, with a troubled air; and she silently led
the way to the kitchen, and left him at the door to Idella and the Boltons.
When she ventured back later he was gone, but the child remained.

Half exultant and half ashamed, she promised herself that she really would
be true as far as possible to the odd notions of the minister in her
treatment of his child. When she undressed Idella for bed she noticed again
the shabbiness of her poor little clothes. She went through the bureau that
held her own childish things once more, but found them all too large for
Idella, and too hopelessly antiquated. She said to herself that on this
point at least she must be a law to herself.

She went down to see Mrs. Bolton. "Isn't there some place in the village
where they have children's ready-made clothes for sale?" she asked.

"Mr. Gerrish's," said Mrs. Bolton briefly.

Annie shook her head, drawing in her breath. "I shouldn't want to go there.
Is there nowhere else?"

"There's a Jew place. They say he cheats."

"I dare say he doesn't cheat more than most Christians," said Annie,
jumping from her chair. "I'll try the Jew place. I want you to come with
me, Mrs. Bolton."

They went together, and found a dress that they both decided would fit
Idella, and a hat that matched it.

"I don't know as he'd like to have anything quite so nice," said Mrs.
Bolton coldly.

"I don't know as he has anything to say about it," said Annie, mimicking
Mrs. Bolton's accent and syntax.

They both meant Mr. Peck. Mrs. Bolton turned away to hide her pleasure in
Annie's audacity and extravagance.

"Want I should carry 'em?" she asked, when they were out of the store.

"No, I can carry them," said Annie.

She put them where Idella must see them as soon as she woke.

It was late before she slept, and Idella's voice broke upon her dreams. The
child was sitting up in her bed, gloating upon the dress and hat hung and
perched upon the chair-back in the middle of the room. "Oh, whose is it?
Whose is it? Whose is it?" she screamed; and as Annie lifted herself on her
elbow, and looked over at her: "Is it mine? Is it mine?"

Annie had thought of playing some joke; of pretending not to understand; of
delaying the child's pleasure; playing with it; teasing. But in the face of
this rapturous longing, she could only answer, "Yes."

"Mine? My very own? To have? To keep always?"

"Yes."

Idella sprang from her bed, and flew upon the things with a primitive,
greedy transport in their possession. She could scarcely be held long
enough to be washed before the dress could be put on.

"Be careful--be careful not to get it soiled now," said Annie.

"No; I won't spoil it." She went quietly downstairs, and when Annie
followed, she found her posing before the long pier-glass in the parlour,
and twisting and turning for this effect and that. All the morning she
moved about prim and anxious; the wild-wood flower was like a hot-house
blossom wired for a bouquet. At the church door she asked Idella, "Would
you rather sit with Mrs. Bolton?"

"No, no," gasped the child intensely; "with _you_!" and she pushed her
hand into Annie's, and held fast to it.

Annie's question had been suggested by a belated reluctance to appear
before so much of Hatboro' in charge of the minister's child. But now she
could not retreat, and with Idella's hand in hers she advanced blushing up
the aisle to her pew.

XXII.

The farmers' carry-alls filled the long shed beside the church, and their
leathern faces looked up, with their wives' and children's, at Mr. Peck
where he sat high behind the pulpit; a patient expectance suggested itself
in the men's bald or grizzled crowns, and in the fantastic hats and bonnets
of their women folks. The village ladies were all in the perfection of
their street costumes, and they compared well with three or four of the
ladies from South Hatboro', but the men with them spoiled all by the
inadequacy of their fashion. Mrs. Gates, the second of her name, was very
stylish, but the provision-man had honestly the effect of having got for
the day only into the black coat which he had bought ready-made for his
first wife's funeral. Mr. Wilmington, who appeared much shorter than his
wife as he sat beside her, was as much inferior to her in dress; he wore,
with the carelessness of a rich man who could afford simplicity, a loose
alpaca coat and a cambric neckcloth, over which he twisted his shrivelled
neck to catch sight of Annie, as she rustled up the aisle. Mrs. Gerrish--so
much as could be seen of her--was a mound of bugled velvet, topped by a
small bonnet, which seemed to have gone much to a fat black pompon; she sat
far within her pew, and their children stretched in a row from her side to
that of Mr. Gerrish, next the door. He did not look round at Annie, but
kept an attitude of fixed self-concentration, in harmony with the severe
old-school respectability of his dress; his wife leaned well forward to
see, and let all her censure appear in her eyes.

Colonel Marvin, of the largest shoe-shop, showed the side of his large
florid face, with the kindly smile that seemed to hang loosely upon it; and
there was a good number of the hat-shop and shoe-shop hands of different
ages and sexes scattered about. The gallery, commonly empty or almost so,
showed groups and single figures dropped about here and there on its seats.

The Putneys were in their pew, the little lame boy between the father and
mother, as their custom was. They each looked up at her as she passed, and
smiled in the slight measure of recognition which people permit themselves
in church. Putney was sitting with his head hanging forward in pathetic
dejection; his face, when he first lifted it to look at Annie in passing,
was haggard, but otherwise there was no consciousness in it of what had
passed since they had sat there the Sunday before. When his glance took in
Idella too, in her sudden finery, a light of friendly mocking came into it,
and seemed to comment the relation Annie had assumed to the child.

Annie's pew was just in front of Lyra's, and Lyra pursed her mouth in
burlesque surprise as Annie got into it with Idella and turned round to
lift the child to the seat. While Mr. Peck was giving out the hymn, Lyra
leaned forward and whispered--

"Don't imagine that this turnout is _all_ on your account, Annie. He's
going to preach against the Social Union and the social glass."

The banter echoed a mechanical expectation in Annie's heart, which was
probably present in many others there. It was some time before she could
cast it out, even after he had taken his text, "I am the Resurrection and
the Life," and she followed him with a mechanical disappointment at his
failure to meet it.

He began by saying that he wished to dissociate his text in his hearers'
minds from the scent of the upturned earth, and the fall of clods upon
the coffin lid, and he asked them to join him in attempting to find in it
another meaning beside that which it usually carried. He believed that
those words of Christ ought to speak to us of this world as well as the
next, and enjoin upon us the example which we might all find in Him, as
well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie
followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the
words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a
mystical, almost a fantastical, quality of his thought.

"There is an evolution," he continued, "in the moral as well as in the
material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once
best ceases to be in that which is better. In the political world we have
striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we
find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse
it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality;
or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty.
Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood,
rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but
nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is
realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto
wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is
something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and
further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow
and cease, and that is _justice_. Not the justice of our Christless
codes, with their penalties, but the instinct of righteous shame which,
however dumbly, however obscurely, stirs in every honest man's heart when
his superfluity is confronted with another's destitution, and which is
destined to increase in power till it becomes the social as well as the
individual conscience. Then, in the truly Christian state, there shall be
no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no
more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and
want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease
together.

"It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to
judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to
right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The
lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on
either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast
organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are
taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone,
and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little
shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in
which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small
dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their
weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the
fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more
betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall
together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon
ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance
which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition;
_they eliminate_ one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But
woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on
to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success
is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be.
Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable
than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works
affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of
the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.
If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that
questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of
Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from
contemplating the disparity between the Church's profession and her
performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life."

The minister paused and seemed about to resume, when a scuffling and
knocking noise drew all eyes toward the pew of the Gerrish family. Mr.
Gerrish had risen and flung open the door so sharply that it struck against
the frame-work of the pew, and he stood pulling his children, whom Mrs.
Gerrish urged from behind, one after another, into the aisle beside him.
One of them had been asleep, and he now gave way to the alarm which seizes
a small boy suddenly awakened. His mother tried to still him, stooping over
him and twitching him by the hand, with repeated "Sh! 'sh's!" as mothers
do, till her husband got her before him, and marched his family down the
aisle and out of the door. The noise of their feet over the floor of the
vestibule died away upon the stone steps outside. The minister allowed the
pause he had made to prolong itself painfully. He wavered, after clearing
his throat, as if to go on with his sermon, and then he said sadly, "Let us
pray!"

XXIII.

Putney stopped with his wife and boy and waited for Annie at the corner
of the street where their ways parted. She had eluded Lyra Wilmington in
coming down the aisle, and she had hurried to escape the sensation which
broke into eager talk among the people before they got out of church, and
which began with question whether one of the Gerrish children was sick, and
ended in the more satisfactory conviction that Mr. Gerrish was offended at
something in the sermon.

"Well, Annie," said Putney, with a satirical smile.

"Oh, Ralph--Ellen--what does it mean?"

"It means that Brother Gerrish thought Mr. Peck was hitting at him in
that talk about the large commerce, and it means business," said Putney.
"Brother Gerrish has made a beginning, and I guess it's the beginning of
the end, unless we're all ready to take hold against him. What are you
going to do?"

"Do? Anything! Everything! It was abominable! It was atrocious!" she
shuddered out with disgust. "How could he imagine that Mr. Peck would do
such a thing?"

"Well, he's imagined it. But he doesn't mean to stay out of church; he
means to put Brother Peck out."

"We mustn't let him. That would be outrageous."

"That's the way Ellen and I feel about it," said Putney; "but we don't know
how much of a party there is with us."

"But everybody--everybody must feel the same way about Mr. Gerrish's
behaviour? I don't see how you can be so quiet about it--you and Ellen!"

Annie looked from one to another indignantly, and Putney laughed.

"We're not _feeling_ quietly about it," said Mrs. Putney.

Putney took out a piece of tobacco, and bit off a large corner, and began
to chew vehemently upon it. "Hello, Idella!" he said to the little girl,
holding by Annie's hand and looking up intently at him, with childish
interest in what he was eating. "What a pretty dress you've got on!"

"It's mine," said the child. To keep."

"Is that so? Well, it's a beauty."

"I'm going to wear it all the time."

"Is that so? Well, now, you and Winthrop step on ahead a little; I want to
see how you look in it. Splendid!" he said, as she took the boy's hand and
looked back over her shoulder for Putney's applause. "Lyra tells us you've
adopted her for the time being, Annie. I guess you'll have your hands full.
But, as I was going to say, about feeling differently, my experience is
that there's always a good-sized party for the perverse, simply because
it seems to answer a need in human nature. There's a fascination in it;
a man feels as if there must be something in it besides the perversity,
and because it's so obviously wrong it must be right. Don't you believe
but what a good half of the people in church to-day are pretty sure that
Gerrish had a good reason for behaving indecently. The very fact that he
did so carries conviction to some minds, and those are the minds we have
got to deal with. When he gets up in the next Society meeting there's a
mighty great danger that he'll have a strong party to back him."

"I can't believe it," Annie broke out, but she was greatly troubled. "What
do you think, Ellen; that there's any danger of his carrying the day
against Mr. Peck?"

"There's a great deal of dissatisfaction with Mr. Peck already, you know,
and I guess Ralph's right about the rest of it."

"Well, I'm glad I've taken a pew. I'm with you for Mr. Peck, Ralph, heart
and soul."

"As Brother Brandreth says about the Social Union. Well, that's right. I
shall count upon you. And speaking of the Social Union, I haven't seen you,
Annie, since that night at Mrs. Munger's. I suppose you don't expect me to
say anything in self-defence?"

"No, Ralph, and you needn't; _I've_ defended you
sufficiently--justified you."

"That won't do," said Putney. "Ellen and I have thought that all out, and
we find that I--or something that stood for me--was to blame, whoever else
was to blame, too; we won't mention the hospitable Mrs. Munger. When Dr.
Morrell had to go away Brother Peck took hold with me, and he suggested
good resolutions. I told him I'd tried 'em, and they never did me the least
good; but his sort really seemed to work. I don't know whether they would
work again; Ellen thinks they would. _I_think we sha'n't ever need
anything again; but that's what I always think when I come out of it--like
a man with chills and fever."

"It was Dr. Morrell who asked Mr. Peck to come," said Mrs. Putney; "and it
turned out for the best. Ralph got well quicker than he ever did before. Of
course, Annie," she explained, "it must seem strange to you hearing us talk
of it as if it were a disease; but that's just like what it is--a raging
disease; and I can't feel differently about anything that happens in it,
though I do blame people for it." Annie followed with tender interest the
loving pride that exonerated and idealised Putney in the words of the
woman who had suffered so much with him, and must suffer. "I couldn't help
speaking as I did to Mrs. Munger."

"She deserved it every word," said Annie. "I wonder you didn't say more."

"Oh, hold on!" Putney interposed. "We'll allow that the local influences
were malarial, but I guess we can't excuse the invalid altogether. That's
Brother Peck's view; and I must say I found it decidedly tonic; it helped
to brace me up."

"I think he was too severe with you altogether," said his wife.

Putney laughed. "It was all I could do to keep Ellen from getting up and
going out of church too, when Brother Gerrish set the example. She's a
Gerrishite at heart."

"Well, remember, Ralph," said Annie, "that I'm with you in whatever you
do to defeat that man. It's a good cause--a righteous cause--the cause of
justice; and we must do everything for it," she said fervently.

"Yes, any enormity is justifiable against injustice," he suggested, "or the
unjust; it's the same thing."

"You know I don't mean that. I can trust you."

"I shall keep within the law, at any rate," said Putney.

"Well, Mrs. Bolton!" Annie called out, when she entered her house, and she
pushed on into the kitchen; she had not the patience to wait for her to
bring in the dinner before speaking about the exciting event at church. But
Mrs. Bolton would not be led up to the subject by a tacit invitation, and
after a suspense in which her zeal for Mr. Peck began to take a colour of
resentment toward Mrs. Bolton, Annie demanded, "What do you think of Mr.
Gerrish's scandalous behaviour?"

Mrs. Bolton gave herself time to put a stick of wood into the stove, and to
punch it with the stove-lid handle before answering. "I don't know as it's
anything more than I expected."

Annie went on: "It was shameful! Do you suppose he really thought Mr. Peck
was referring to him in his sermon?"

"I presume he felt the cap fit. But if it hadn't b'en one thing, 'twould
b'en another. Mr. Peck was bound to roil the brook for Mr. Gerrish's
drinkin', wherever he stood, up stream or down."

"Yes. He _is_ a wolf! A wolf in sheep's clothing," said Annie
excitedly.

"I d'know as you can call him a _wolf_, exactly," returned Mrs. Bolton
dryly. "He's got his good points, I presume."

Annie was astounded. "Why, Mrs. Bolton, you're surely not going to justify
him?"

Mrs. Bolton erected herself from cutting a loaf of her best bread into
slices, and stood with the knife in her hand, like a figure of Justice.
"Well, I _guess_ you no need to ask me a question like that, Miss
Kilburn. I hain't obliged to make up to Mr. Peck, though, for what I done
in the beginnin' by condemnin' everybuddy else without mercy now." Mrs.
Bolton's eyes did not flash fire, but they sent out an icy gleam that went
as sharply to Annie's heart.

Bolton came in from feeding the horse and cow in the barn, with a mealy tin
pan in his hand, from which came a mild, subdued radiance like that of his
countenance. He was not sensible of arriving upon a dramatic moment, and he
said, without noticing the attitude of either lady: "I see you walkin' home
with Mr. Putney, Miss Kilburn. What'd _he_ say?"

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