By the end of May most of the summer folk had come to their cottages in
South Hatboro'. One after another the ladies called upon Annie. They all
talked to her of the Social Union, and it seemed to be agreed that it was
fully in train, though what was really in train was the entertainment to
be given at Mrs. Munger's for the benefit of the Union; the Union always
dropped out of the talk as soon as the theatricals were mentioned.
When Annie went to return these visits she scarcely recognised even
the shape of the country, once so familiar to her, of which the summer
settlement had possessed itself. She found herself in a strange world--a
world of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, where conscious lines and
insistent colours contributed to an effect of posing which she had never
seen off the stage. But it was not a very large world, and after the young
trees and hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure
that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but
the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries,
loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to
palliate.
Mrs. Munger was at home, and wanted her to spend the day, to drive out with
her, to stay to lunch. When Annie would not do any of these things, she
invited herself to go with her to call at the Brandreths'. But first she
ordered her to go out with her to see the place where they intended to have
the theatricals: a pretty bit of natural boscage--white birches, pines, and
oaks--faced by a stretch of smooth turf, where a young man in a flannel
blazer was painting a tennis-court in the grass. Mrs. Munger introduced him
as her Jim, and the young fellow paused from his work long enough to bow to
her: his nose now seemed in perfect repair.
Mr. Brandreth met them at the door of his mother's cottage. It was a very
small cottage on the outside, with a good deal of stained glass _en
évidence_ in leaded sashes; where the sashes were not leaded and the
glass not stained, the panes were cut up into very large ones, with little
ones round them. Everything was very old-fashioned inside. The door opened
directly into a wainscoted square hall, which had a large fireplace with
gleaming brass andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was
both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of
imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side
of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to
be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together
with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the
panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things to Annie, and to tell how
little they cost, as soon as the ladies entered. His mother's voice called
from above, “Now, Percy, you stop till _I_ get there!” and in a moment
or two she appeared from behind a _portière_ in one corner. Before she
shook hands with the ladies, or allowed any kind of greeting, she pulled
the _portière_ aside, and made Annie admire the snug concealment of
the staircase. Then she made her go upstairs and see the chambers, and the
second-hand colonial bedsteads, and the andirons everywhere, and the old
chests of drawers and their brasses; and she told her some story about
each, and how Percy picked it up and had it repaired. When they came down,
the son took Annie in hand again and walked her over the ground-floor,
ending with the kitchen, which was in the taste of an old New England
kitchen, with hard-seated high-backed chairs, and a kitchen table with
curiously turned legs, which he had picked up in the hen-house of a
neighbouring farmer for a song. There was an authentic crane in the
dining-room fireplace, which he had found in a heap of scrap-iron at a
blacksmith's shop, and had got for next to nothing. The sideboard he had
got at an old second-hand shop in the North End; and he believed it was
an heirloom from the house of one of the old ministers of the North End
Church. Everything, nearly, in the Brandreth cottage was an heirloom,
though Annie could not remember afterward any object that had been an
heirloom in the Brandreth family.
When she went back with Mr. Brandreth to the hall, which seemed to be also
the drawing-room, she found that Mrs. Brandreth had lighted the fire on
the hearth, though it was rather a warm day without, for the sake of the
effect. She was sitting in the chimney-seat, and shielding her face from
the blaze with an old-fashioned feather hand-screen.
“Now don't you think we have a lovely little home?” she demanded.
Mrs. Munger began to break out in its praise, but she shook the screen
silencingly at her.
“No, no! I want Miss Kilburn's unbiassed opinion. Don't you speak, Mrs.
Munger! Now haven't we?”
Mrs. Brandreth made Annie assent to the superiority of her cottage in
detail. She recapitulated the different facts of the architecture and
furnishing, from each of which she seemed to acquire personal merit, and
she insisted that Percy should show some of them again. “We think it's a
little picture,” she concluded, and once more Annie felt obliged to murmur
her acquiescence.
At last Mrs. Munger said that she must go to lunch, and was going to take
Annie with her; Annie said she must lunch at home; and then Mrs. Brandreth
pressed them both to stay to lunch with her. “You shall have a cup of tea
out of a piece of real Satsuma,” she said; but they resisted. “I don't
believe,” she added, apparently relieved by their persistence, and losing a
little anxiety of manner, “that Percy's had any chance to consult you on a
very important point about your theatricals, Miss Kilburn.”
“Oh, that will do some other time, mother,” said Mr. Brandreth.
“No, no! Now! And you can have Mrs. Munger's opinion too. You know Miss Sue
Northwick is going to be Juliet?”
“No!” shouted Mrs. Munger. “I thought she had refused positively. When did
she change her mind?”
“She's just sent Percy a note. We were talking it over when you came, and
Percy was going over to tell you.”
“Then it is _sure_ to be a success,” said Mrs. Munger, with a
solemnity of triumph.
“Yes, but Percy feels that it complicates one point more than ever--”
“It's a question that always comes up in amateur dramatics,” said Mr.
Brandreth, with reluctance, “and it always will; and of course it's
particularly embarrassing in _Romeo and Juliet_. If they don't show
any affection--it's very awkward and stiff; and if--”
“I never approved of those liberties on the stage,” said Mrs. Brandreth.
“I tell Percy that it's my principal objection to it. I can't make it
seem nice. But he says that it's essential to the effect. Now _I_
say that they might just incline their heads toward each other without
_actually_, you know. But Percy is afraid that it won't do, especially
in the parting scene on the balcony--so passionate, you know--it won't do
simply to--They must _act_ like lovers. And it's such a great point to
get Miss Sue Northwick to take the part, that he mustn't risk losing her by
anything that might seem--”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep concern.
Mr. Brandreth looked very unhappy. “It's an embarrassing point. We can't
change the play, and so the difficulty must be met and disposed of at
once.”
He did not look at either of the ladies, but Mrs. Munger referred the
matter to Annie with a glance of impartiality. His mother also turned her
eyes upon Annie. “Percy thought that you must have seen so much of amateur
dramatics in Europe that you could tell him just how to do.”
“Perhaps you could consult Miss Northwick herself,” said Annie dryly, after
a moment of indignation, and another of amusement.
“I thought of that,” said Mrs. Brandreth; “but as Percy's to be Romeo--You
see he wishes the play to be a success artistically; but if it's to succeed
socially, he must have Miss Northwick, and she might resign at the first
suggestion of--”
“Bessie Chapley would certainly have been better. She's so outspoken you
could have put the case right to her,” said Mrs. Munger.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth gloomily.
“But we shall find out a way. Why, you can settle it at rehearsal!”
“Perhaps at rehearsal,” said Mr. Brandreth, with a pensive absence of mind.
Mrs. Munger crushed his hand and his mother's in her leathern grasp, and
took Annie away with her. “It isn't lunch-time yet,” she explained, when
they were out of earshot, “but I saw she was simply killing you, and so I
made the excuse. She has no mercy. There's time enough for you to make your
calls before lunch, and then you can come home with me.”
Annie suggested that this would not do after refusing Mrs. Brandreth.
“Why, it would never have done to _accept_!” Mrs. Munger cried. “They
didn't dream of it!” At the next place she said: “This is the Clevingers'.
_They're_ some of our all-the-year-round people too.” She opened the
door without ringing, and let herself noisily in. “This is the way we run
in, without ceremony, everywhere. It's quite one family. That's the charm
of the place. We expect to take each other as we find them.”
Her freedom did not find the ladies off their guard anywhere. At all the
houses there was a skurrying of feet and a flashing of skirts out of the
room or up the stairs, and there was an interval for a thorough study of
the features of the room before the hostess came in, with the effect of
coming in just as she was. She had naturally always made some change in
her dress, and Annie felt that she had not really liked being run in upon.
Everywhere they talked to her about the theatricals; and they talked across
her to Mrs. Munger, about one another, pretty freely.
“Well, that's all there is of us at present,” said Mrs. Munger, coming down
the main road with her from the last place, “and you see just what we are.
It's a neighbourhood where everybody's just adapted to everybody else.
It's not a mere mush of concession, as Emerson says; people are perfectly
outspoken; but there's the greatest good feeling, and no vulgar display, or
lavish expenditure, or--anything.”
Annie walked slowly homeward. She was tired, and she was now aware of
having been extremely bored by the South Hatboro' people. She was very
censorious of them, as we are of other people when we have reason to be
discontented with ourselves. They were making a pretence of simplicity
and unconventionality; but they had brought each her full complement of
servants with her, and each was apparently giving herself in the summer
to the unrealities that occupied her during the winter. Everywhere Annie
had found the affectation of intellectual interests, and the assumption
that these were the highest interests of life: there could be no doubt
that culture was the ideal of South Hatboro', and several of the ladies
complained that in the summer they got behind with their reading, or their
art, or their music. They said it was even more trouble to keep house in
the country than it was in town; sometimes your servants would not come
with you; or, if they did, they were always discontented, and you did not
know what moment they would leave you.
Annie asked herself how her own life was in any wise different from that of
these people. It had received a little more light into it, but as yet it
had not conformed itself to any ideal of duty. She too was idle and vapid,
like the society of which her whole past had made her a part, and she owned
to herself, groaning in spirit, that it was no easier to escape from her
tradition at Hatboro' than it was at Rome.
When she reached her own house again, Mrs. Bolton called to her from the
kitchen threshold as she was passing the corner on her way to the front
door: “Mis' Putney's b'en here. I guess you'll find a note from her on the
parlour table.”
Annie fired in resentment of the uncouthness. It was Mrs. Bolton's business
to come into the parlour and give her the note, with a respectful statement
of the facts. But she did not tell her so; it would have been useless.
Mrs. Putney's note was an invitation to a family tea for the next evening.