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.