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--”
“Yes,” said the minister, coming to her relief, “I once worked in a
cotton-mill. Then,” he continued, dismissing the personal concern, “it
seems to me that I saw things in their right light, as I have never been
able to see them since--”
“And how brutal,” she broke in, “how cruel and vulgar, what I said must
have seemed to you!”
“I fancied,” he continued evasively, “that I had authority to set myself
apart from my fellow-workmen, to be a teacher and guide to the true life.
But it was a great error. The true life was the life of work, and no one
ever had authority to turn from it. Christ Himself came as a labouring
man.”
“That is true,” said Annie; and his words transfigured the man who spoke
them, so that her heart turned reverently toward him. “But if you had been
meant to work in a mill all your life,” she pursued, “would you have been
given the powers you have, and that you have just used to save me from
despair?”
The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: “No one was meant to work in a
mill all his life. Good night.”
She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not think how,
at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons' part of the house,
“Won't you go out through my door?” she asked, with a helpless effort at
hospitality.
“Oh, if you wish,” he answered submissively.
When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak with Mrs. Bolton.
She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make bread, and Annie traced
her by following the lamp-light through the open door. It discovered
Bolton sitting in the outer doorway, his back against one jamb and his
stocking-feet resting against the base of the other.
“Mrs. Bolton,” Annie began at once, making herself free of one of the hard
kitchen chairs, “how is Mr. Peck getting on in Hatboro'?”
“I d'know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton, on
the defensive.
“I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he unpopular?”
Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-board; then she
lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before her, and let it sink
softly upon the board.
“I d'know as you can say he's unpoplah. He ain't poplah with some. Yes,
there's a party--the Gerrish party.”
“Is it a strong one?”
“It's pretty strong.”
“Do you think it will prevail?”
“Well, most o' folks don't know _what_ they want; and if there's some
folks that know what they _don't_ want, they can generally keep from
havin' it.”
Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his throat, which
seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite assertion, and she cut in
before he could speak--
“_I_ should say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck's friends first
off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his enemies wa'n't goin'
to take up his cause.”
Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent abstraction.
“Oh, now, you'll see it'll all come out right in the end, Pauliny,” he
mildly opposed. “There ain't any such great feelin' about Mr. Peck; nothin'
but what'll work itself off perfec'ly natural, give it time. It's goin' to
come out all right.”
“Yes, at the day o' jedgment,” Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging her fists
into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for her husband's optimism
into it.
“Yes, an' a good deal before,” he returned. “There's always somethin' to
objec' to every minister; we ain't any of us perfect, and Mr. Peck's got
his failin's; he hain't built up the church quite so much as some on 'em
expected but what he would; and there's some that don't like his prayers;
and some of 'em thinks he ain't doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all
round, he suits pretty well. It'll come out all right, Pauliny. You'll
see.”
A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed to her that
Mrs. Bolton's impatience with this intolerable hopefulness must burst
violently. She hastened to interpose. “I think the trouble is that people
don't fully understand Mr. Peck at first. But they do finally.”
“Yes; take time,” said Bolton.
“Take eternity, I guess, for some,” retorted his wife. “If you think
William B. Gerrish is goin' to work round with time--” She stopped for want
of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and did not go on.
“The way I look at it,” said Bolton, with incorrigible courage, “is like
this: When it comes to anything like askin' Mr. Peck to resign, it'll
develop his strength. You can't tell how strong he is without you try to
git red of him. I 'most wish it would come, once, fair and square.”
“I'm sure you're right, Mr. Bolton,” said Annie. “I don't believe that your
church would let such a man go when it really came to it. Don't they all
feel that he has great ability?”
“Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes. Some on 'em
complains that he's a little _too_ intellectial, if anything. But I
tell 'em it's a good fault; it's a thing that can be got over in time.”
Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She finished
kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two baking-pans and dusted it
with flour, she laid a clean towel over both. But when Annie rose she took
the lamp from the mantel-shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to
find her way back to her own door.
Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened, and
kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast hold of the
consolation they had given her. They humbled her with, a sense of his
wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept her awake. She remembered the
tonic that Dr. Morrell had left with her, and after questioning whether she
really needed it now, she made sure by getting up and taking it.