Annie Kilburn by W. D. Howells
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W. D. Howells >> Annie Kilburn
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"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 the 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.
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