Annie Kilburn by W. D. Howells

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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. She 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."

"Ah!" cried Annie. "There's some hope in _that_! What do they do when
the work stops?"

"Oh, they go back to their country-seats."

"All?"

"Perhaps not all."

"I _thought_ so!"

"Well, you'd better look round among those that stay."

Even among these she looked in vain for destitution; she could find that in
satisfactory degree only in straggling veterans of the great army of tramps
which once overran country places in the summer.

She would have preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity, and
because she preferred this she forced herself to face their distasteful
misery. Mrs. Bolton had orders to send no one from the door who asked for
food or work, but to call Annie and let her judge the case. She knew that
it was folly, and she was afraid it was worse, but she could not send the
homeless creatures away as hungry or poor as they came. They filled her
gentlewoman's soul with loathing; but if she kept beyond the range of the
powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them, she could experience the
luxury of pity for them. The filthy rags that caricatured them, their sick
or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week's beard, represented typical
poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast;
and she consoled herself as far as she could with the superstition that in
meeting them she was fulfilling a duty sacred in proportion to the disgust
she felt in the encounter.

The work at the hat-shops fell off after the spring orders, and did not
revive till the beginning of August. If there was less money among the
hands and their families who remained than there was in time of full work,
the weather made less demand upon their resources. The children lived
mostly out-of-doors, and seemed to have always what they wanted of the
season's fruit and vegetables. They got these too late from the decaying
lots at the provision stores, and too early from the nearest orchards; and
Dr. Morrell admitted that there was a good deal of sickness, especially
among the little ones, from this diet. Annie wondered whether she ought not
to offer herself as a nurse among them; she asked him whether she could not
be of use in that way, and had to confess that she knew nothing about the
prevailing disease.

"Then, I don't think you'd better undertake it," he said. "There are too
many nurses there already, such as they are. It's the dull time in most of
the shops, you know, and the women have plenty of leisure. There are about
five volunteer nurses for every patient, not counting the grandmothers on
both sides. I think they would resent any outside aid."

"Ah, I'm always on the outside! But can't I send--I mean carry--them
anything nourishing, any little dishes--"

"Arrowroot is about all the convalescents can manage." She made a note of
it. "But jelly and chicken broth are always relished by their friends."

"Dr. Morrell, I must ask you not to turn me into ridicule, if you please. I
cannot permit it."

"I beg your pardon--I do indeed, Miss Kilburn. I didn't mean to ridicule
you. I began seriously, but I was led astray by remembering what becomes of
most of the good things sent to sick people."

"I know," she said, breaking into a laugh. "I have eaten lots of them for
my father. And is arrowroot the only thing?"

The doctor reflected gravely. "Why, no. There's a poor little life now and
then that might be saved by the sea-air. Yes, if you care to send some of
my patients, with a mother and a grandmother apiece, to the seaside--"

"Don't say another word, doctor," cried Annie. "You make me _so_
happy! I will--I will send their whole families. And you won't, you
_won't_ let a case escape, will you, doctor?" It was a break in the
iron wall of uselessness which had closed her in; she behaved like a young
girl with an invitation to a ball.

When the first patient came back well from the seaside her rejoicing
overflowed in exultation before the friends to whom she confessed her
agency in the affair. Putney pretended that he could not see what pleasure
she could reasonably take in restoring the child to the sort of life it had
been born to; but that was a matter she would not consider, theoretically
or practically.

She began to go outside of Dr. Morrell's authority; she looked up two cases
herself, and, upon advising with their grandmothers, sent them to the
seaside, and she was at the station when the train came in with the young
mother and the still younger aunt of one of the sick children. She did
not see the baby, and the mother passed her with a stare of impassioned
reproach, and fell sobbing on the neck of her husband, waiting for her on
the platform. Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at
the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest
which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.

"Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?"

"Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I'm _ril_ sorry to tell you, but I guess
the sea-air didn't do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she'll
see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can't, first
off. Well, there! _Somebody's_ got to look after it. You'll excuse
_me_, Miss Kilburn."

Annie saw her run off to the baggage-car, from which the baggage-man was
handing out a narrow box. The ground reeled under her feet; she got the
public depot carriage and drove home.

She sent for Dr. Morrell, and poured out the confession of her error upon
him before he could speak. "I am a murderess," she ended hysterically.
"Don't deny it!"

"I think you can be got off on the ground of insanity, Miss Kilburn, if you
go on in this way," he answered.

Her desperation broke in tears. "Oh, what shall I do--what shall I do? I've
killed the child!"

"Oh no, you haven't," he retorted. "I know the case. The only hope for it
was the sea-air; I was going to ask you to send it--"

She took down her handkerchief and gave him a piercing look. "Dr. Morrell,
if you are lying to me--"

"I'm not lying, Miss Kilburn," he answered. "You've done a very
unwarrantable thing in both of the cases that you sent to the seaside on
your own responsibility. One of them I certainly shouldn't have advised
sending, but it's turned out well. You've no more credit for it, though,
than for this that died; and you won't think I'm lying, perhaps, when I say
you're equally to blame in both instances."

"I--I beg your pardon," she faltered, with dawning comfort in his severity.
"I didn't mean--I didn't intend to say--"

"I know it," said Dr. Morrell, allowing himself to smile. "Just remember
that you blundered into doing the only thing left to be done for Mrs.
Savor's child; and--don't try it again. That's all."

He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began
even to laugh.

"You--you're horrible!"

"Oh no, I'm not," he gasped. "All the tears in the world wouldn't help; and
my laughing hurts nobody. I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for the mother;
but I've told you the truth--I have indeed; and you _must_ believe
me."

The child's father came to see her the next night. "Rebecca she seemed to
think that you felt kind of bad, may be, because Maria wouldn't speak to
you when she first got off the cars yesterday, and I don't say she done
exactly right, myself. The way I look at it, and the way I tell Maria
_she'd_ ought to, is like this: You done what you done for the best,
and we wa'n't _obliged_ to take your advice anyway. But of course
Maria she'd kind of set her heart on savin' it, and she can't seem to get
over it right away." He talked on much longer to the same effect, tilted
back in his chair, and looking down, while he covered and uncovered one of
his knees with his straw hat. He had the usual rustic difficulty in getting
away, but Annie was glad to keep him, in her gratitude for his kindness.
Besides, she could not let him go without satisfying a suspicion she had.

"And Dr. Morrell--have you seen him for Mrs. Savor--have you--" She
stopped, for shame of her hypocrisy.

"No, 'm. We hain't seen him _sence_. I guess she'll get along."

It needed this stroke to complete her humiliation before the single-hearted
fellow.

"I--I suppose," she stammered out, "that you--your wife, wouldn't like me
to come to the--I can understand that; but oh! if there is anything I can
do for you--flowers--or my carriage--or helping anyway--"

Mr. Savor stood up. "I'm much obliged to _you_, Miss Kilburn; but we
thought we hadn't better wait, well not a great while, and--the funeral was
this afternoon. Well, I wish you good evening."

She met the mother, a few days after, in the street; with an impulse to
cross over to the other side she advanced straight upon her.

"Mrs. Savor! What can I say to you?"

"Oh, I don't presume but what you meant for the best, Miss Kilburn. But I
guess I shall know what to do next time. I kind of felt the whole while
that it was a resk. But it's all right now."

Annie realised, in her resentment of the poor thing's uncouth sorrow, that
she had spoken to her with the hope of getting, not giving, comfort.

"Yes, yes," she confessed. "I was to blame." The bereaved mother did not
gainsay her, and she felt that, whatever was the justice of the case, she
had met her present deserts.

She had to bear the discredit into which the seaside fell with the mothers
of all the other sick children. She tried to bring Dr. Morrell once to the
consideration of her culpability in the case of those who might have lived
if the case of Mrs. Savor's baby had not frightened their mothers from
sending them to the seaside; but he refused to grapple with the problem.
She was obliged to believe him when he said he should not have advised
sending any of the recent cases there; that the disease was changing its
character, and such a course could have done no good.

"Look here, Miss Kilburn," he said, after scanning her face sharply, "I'm
going to leave you a little tonic. I think you're rather run down."

"Well," she said passively.

XIV.

It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so
dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests
of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for
it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose
co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the
other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised
her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still
more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called
herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered
what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of
our democracy--an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings
of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another
civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for
Miss Kilburn; but the mother's bereavement was regarded as something those
people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.

Annie's mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and
she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals
by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not
prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the
Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister
himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who
volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and
help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of
narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to
others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own
tolerance.

But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach
in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with
the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him,
and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own
position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the
best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw
him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance
and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her
fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of
the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but
she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had
none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her;
but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed
characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange
pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own
people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him,
but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and
even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added
to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon
as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the
mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care
for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of
having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she
added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them
apart.

Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she learned casually
from the people themselves, she could not have believed he ever did
anything for them. He came and went so elusively, as far as Annie was
concerned, that she knew of his presence in the houses of sickness and
death usually by his little girl, whom she found playing about in the
street before the door with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold
her own among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried
to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached, and
Annie's heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless goodwill as
toward the minister himself.

She used to hear his voice through the summer-open windows when he called
upon the Boltons, and wondered if some accident would not bring them
together, but she had to send for Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr.
Peck that she would like to see him before he went away, one night. He
came, and then she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before
she could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on with their
scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he admitted vaguely that
he had heard something to that effect, and she added that the invited dance
and supper had been given up.

He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried on: "And I
ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one--every one whose opinion you
would value--agreed with you that it would have been extremely ill-advised,
and--and shocking. And I'm quite ashamed that I should not have seen it
from the beginning; and I hope--I hope you will forgive me if I said things
in my--my excitement that must have--I mean not only what I said to you,
but what I said to others; and I assure you that I regret them, and--"

She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened patiently, but
as if the matter had not really concerned either of them personally. She
had to conclude that what she had said of him had not reached him, and she
ended by confessing that she had clung to the Social Union project because
it seemed the only thing in which her attempts to do good were not
mischievous.

Mr. Peck's thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it had shown
while the question at all related to himself, and a light of something that
she took for humorous compassion came into his large, pale blue eyes. At
least it was intelligence; and perhaps the woman nature craves this as much
as it is supposed to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.

"I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck--an experience of mine," she said
abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone
before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors.
He listened intently, and at the end he said: "I understand. But that is
sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not
rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the
moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You
might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it."

"Oh, I _thank_ you!" she gasped. "You don't know what a load you have
lifted from me!"

Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her
heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from
some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the
truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.

"If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it, is, what a
responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so
simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for
doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any
harm, but if _I_ try it--"

"Yes," said the minister, "it is difficult to help others when we cease
to need help ourselves. A" man begins poor, or his father or grandfather
before him--it doesn't matter how far back he begins--and then he is in
accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as
he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when
he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron,
an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his
help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but
a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to
his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong."

"Yes," said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to
question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. "And I
assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I
first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that
I had no idea then that--that--you were speaking from your own experience
when you--you said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that
you had been--that is, that--"

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