The farmers' carry-alls filled the long shed beside the church, and their leathern faces looked up, with their wives' and children's, at Mr. Peck where he sat high behind the pulpit; a patient expectance suggested itself in the men's bald or grizzled crowns, and in the fantastic hats and bonnets of their women folks. The village ladies were all in the perfection of their street costumes, and they compared well with three or four of the ladies from South Hatboro', but the men with them spoiled all by the inadequacy of their fashion. Mrs. Gates, the second of her name, was very stylish, but the provision-man had honestly the effect of having got for the day only into the black coat which he had bought ready-made for his first wife's funeral. Mr. Wilmington, who appeared much shorter than his wife as he sat beside her, was as much inferior to her in dress; he wore, with the carelessness of a rich man who could afford simplicity, a loose alpaca coat and a cambric neckcloth, over which he twisted his shrivelled neck to catch sight of Annie, as she rustled up the aisle. Mrs. Gerrish—so much as could be seen of her—was a mound of bugled velvet, topped by a small bonnet, which seemed to have gone much to a fat black pompon; she sat far within her pew, and their children stretched in a row from her side to that of Mr. Gerrish, next the door. He did not look round at Annie, but kept an attitude of fixed self-concentration, in harmony with the severe old-school respectability of his dress; his wife leaned well forward to see, and let all her censure appear in her eyes.
Colonel Marvin, of the largest shoe-shop, showed the side of his large florid face, with the kindly smile that seemed to hang loosely upon it; and there was a good number of the hat-shop and shoe-shop hands of different ages and sexes scattered about. The gallery, commonly empty or almost so, showed groups and single figures dropped about here and there on its seats.
The Putneys were in their pew, the little lame boy between the father and mother, as their custom was. They each looked up at her as she passed, and smiled in the slight measure of recognition which people permit themselves in church. Putney was sitting with his head hanging forward in pathetic dejection; his face, when he first lifted it to look at Annie in passing, was haggard, but otherwise there was no consciousness in it of what had passed since they had sat there the Sunday before. When his glance took in Idella too, in her sudden finery, a light of friendly mocking came into it, and seemed to comment the relation Annie had assumed to the child.
Annie's pew was just in front of Lyra's, and Lyra pursed her mouth in burlesque surprise as Annie got into it with Idella and turned round to lift the child to the seat. While Mr. Peck was giving out the hymn, Lyra leaned forward and whispered—
“Don't imagine that this turnout isallon your account, Annie. He's going to preach against the Social Union and the social glass.”
The banter echoed a mechanical expectation in Annie's heart, which was probably present in many others there. It was some time before she could cast it out, even after he had taken his text, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and she followed him with a mechanical disappointment at his failure to meet it.
He began by saying that he wished to dissociate his text in his hearers' minds from the scent of the upturned earth, and the fall of clods upon the coffin lid, and he asked them to join him in attempting to find in it another meaning beside that which it usually carried. He believed that those words of Christ ought to speak to us of this world as well as the next, and enjoin upon us the example which we might all find in Him, as well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a mystical, almost a fantastical, quality of his thought.
“There is an evolution,” he continued, “in the moral as well as in the material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once best ceases to be in that which is better. In the political world we have striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality; or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty. Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood, rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow and cease, and that isjustice. Not the justice of our Christless codes, with their penalties, but the instinct of righteous shame which, however dumbly, however obscurely, stirs in every honest man's heart when his superfluity is confronted with another's destitution, and which is destined to increase in power till it becomes the social as well as the individual conscience. Then, in the truly Christian state, there shall be no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease together.
“It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone, and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition;they eliminateone element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be. Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it. If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from contemplating the disparity between the Church's profession and her performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life.”
The minister paused and seemed about to resume, when a scuffling and knocking noise drew all eyes toward the pew of the Gerrish family. Mr. Gerrish had risen and flung open the door so sharply that it struck against the frame-work of the pew, and he stood pulling his children, whom Mrs. Gerrish urged from behind, one after another, into the aisle beside him. One of them had been asleep, and he now gave way to the alarm which seizes a small boy suddenly awakened. His mother tried to still him, stooping over him and twitching him by the hand, with repeated “Sh! 'sh's!” as mothers do, till her husband got her before him, and marched his family down the aisle and out of the door. The noise of their feet over the floor of the vestibule died away upon the stone steps outside. The minister allowed the pause he had made to prolong itself painfully. He wavered, after clearing his throat, as if to go on with his sermon, and then he said sadly, “Let us pray!”
Putney stopped with his wife and boy and waited for Annie at the corner of the street where their ways parted. She had eluded Lyra Wilmington in coming down the aisle, and she had hurried to escape the sensation which broke into eager talk among the people before they got out of church, and which began with question whether one of the Gerrish children was sick, and ended in the more satisfactory conviction that Mr. Gerrish was offended at something in the sermon.
“Well, Annie,” said Putney, with a satirical smile.
“Oh, Ralph—Ellen—what does it mean?”
“It means that Brother Gerrish thought Mr. Peck was hitting at him in that talk about the large commerce, and it means business,” said Putney. “Brother Gerrish has made a beginning, and I guess it's the beginning of the end, unless we're all ready to take hold against him. What are you going to do?”
“Do? Anything! Everything! It was abominable! It was atrocious!” she shuddered out with disgust. “How could he imagine that Mr. Peck would do such a thing?”
“Well, he's imagined it. But he doesn't mean to stay out of church; he means to put Brother Peck out.”
“We mustn't let him. That would be outrageous.”
“That's the way Ellen and I feel about it,” said Putney; “but we don't know how much of a party there is with us.”
“But everybody—everybody must feel the same way about Mr. Gerrish's behaviour? I don't see how you can be so quiet about it—you and Ellen!”
Annie looked from one to another indignantly, and Putney laughed.
“We're notfeelingquietly about it,” said Mrs. Putney.
Putney took out a piece of tobacco, and bit off a large corner, and began to chew vehemently upon it. “Hello, Idella!” he said to the little girl, holding by Annie's hand and looking up intently at him, with childish interest in what he was eating. “What a pretty dress you've got on!”
“It's mine,” said the child. “To keep.”
“Is that so? Well, it's a beauty.”
“I'm going to wear it all the time.”
“Is that so? Well, now, you and Winthrop step on ahead a little; I want to see how you look in it. Splendid!” he said, as she took the boy's hand and looked back over her shoulder for Putney's applause. “Lyra tells us you've adopted her for the time being, Annie. I guess you'll have your hands full. But, as I was going to say, about feeling differently, my experience is that there's always a good-sized party for the perverse, simply because it seems to answer a need in human nature. There's a fascination in it; a man feels as if there must be something in it besides the perversity, and because it's so obviously wrong it must be right. Don't you believe but what a good half of the people in church to-day are pretty sure that Gerrish had a good reason for behaving indecently. The very fact that he did so carries conviction to some minds, and those are the minds we have got to deal with. When he gets up in the next Society meeting there's a mighty great danger that he'll have a strong party to back him.”
“I can't believe it,” Annie broke out, but she was greatly troubled. “What do you think, Ellen; that there's any danger of his carrying the day against Mr. Peck?”
“There's a great deal of dissatisfaction with Mr. Peck already, you know, and I guess Ralph's right about the rest of it.”
“Well, I'm glad I've taken a pew. I'm with you for Mr. Peck, Ralph, heart and soul.”
“As Brother Brandreth says about the Social Union. Well, that's right. I shall count upon you. And speaking of the Social Union, I haven't seen you, Annie, since that night at Mrs. Munger's. I suppose you don't expect me to say anything in self-defence?”
“No, Ralph, and you needn't;I'vedefended you sufficiently—justified you.”
“That won't do,” said Putney. “Ellen and I have thought that all out, and we find that I—or something that stood for me—was to blame, whoever else was to blame, too; we won't mention the hospitable Mrs. Munger. When Dr. Morrell had to go away Brother Peck took hold with me, and he suggested good resolutions. I told him I'd tried 'em, and they never did me the least good; but his sort really seemed to work. I don't know whether they would work again; Ellen thinks they would.Ithink we sha'n't ever need anything again; but that's what I always think when I come out of it—like a man with chills and fever.”
“It was Dr. Morrell who asked Mr. Peck to come,” said Mrs. Putney; “and it turned out for the best. Ralph got well quicker than he ever did before. Of course, Annie,” she explained, “it must seem strange to you hearing us talk of it as if it were a disease; but that's just like what it is—a raging disease; and I can't feel differently about anything that happens in it, though I do blame people for it.” Annie followed with tender interest the loving pride that exonerated and idealised Putney in the words of the woman who had suffered so much with him, and must suffer. “I couldn't help speaking as I did to Mrs. Munger.”
“She deserved it every word,” said Annie. “I wonder you didn't say more.”
“Oh, hold on!” Putney interposed. “We'll allow that the local influences were malarial, but I guess we can't excuse the invalid altogether. That's Brother Peck's view; and I must say I found it decidedly tonic; it helped to brace me up.”
“I think he was too severe with you altogether,” said his wife.
Putney laughed. “It was all I could do to keep Ellen from getting up and going out of church too, when Brother Gerrish set the example. She's a Gerrishite at heart.”
“Well, remember, Ralph,” said Annie, “that I'm with you in whatever you do to defeat that man. It's a good cause—a righteous cause—the cause of justice; and we must do everything for it,” she said fervently.
“Yes, any enormity is justifiable against injustice,” he suggested, “or the unjust; it's the same thing.”
“You know I don't mean that. I can trust you.”
“I shall keep within the law, at any rate,” said Putney.
“Well, Mrs. Bolton!” Annie called out, when she entered her house, and she pushed on into the kitchen; she had not the patience to wait for her to bring in the dinner before speaking about the exciting event at church. But Mrs. Bolton would not be led up to the subject by a tacit invitation, and after a suspense in which her zeal for Mr. Peck began to take a colour of resentment toward Mrs. Bolton, Annie demanded, “What do you think of Mr. Gerrish's scandalous behaviour?”
Mrs. Bolton gave herself time to put a stick of wood into the stove, and to punch it with the stove-lid handle before answering. “I don't know as it's anything more than I expected.”
Annie went on: “It was shameful! Do you suppose he really thought Mr. Peck was referring to him in his sermon?”
“I presume he felt the cap fit. But if it hadn't b'en one thing, 'twould b'en another. Mr. Peck was bound to roil the brook for Mr. Gerrish's drinkin', wherever he stood, up stream or down.”
“Yes. Heisa wolf! A wolf in sheep's clothing,” said Annie excitedly.
“I d'know as you can call him awolf, exactly,” returned Mrs. Bolton dryly. “He's got his good points, I presume.”
Annie was astounded. “Why, Mrs. Bolton, you're surely not going to justify him?”
Mrs. Bolton erected herself from cutting a loaf of her best bread into slices, and stood with the knife in her hand, like a figure of Justice. “Well, Iguessyou no need to ask me a question like that, Miss Kilburn. I hain't obliged to make up to Mr. Peck, though, for what I done in the beginnin' by condemnin' everybuddy else without mercy now.” Mrs. Bolton's eyes did not flash fire, but they sent out an icy gleam that went as sharply to Annie's heart.
Bolton came in from feeding the horse and cow in the barn, with a mealy tin pan in his hand, from which came a mild, subdued radiance like that of his countenance. He was not sensible of arriving upon a dramatic moment, and he said, without noticing the attitude of either lady: “I see you walkin' home with Mr. Putney, Miss Kilburn. What'dhesay?”
“You mean about Mr. Gerrish? He thinks as we all do; that it was a challenge to Mr. Peck's friends, and that we must take it up.”
A light of melancholy satisfaction shone from Bolton's deeply shaded eyes. “Well, he ain't one to lose time, not a great deal. I presume he's goin' to work?”
“At once,” said Annie. “He says Mr. Gerrish will be sure to bring his grievance up at the next Society meeting, and we must be ready to meet him, and out-talk him and out-vote him.” She reported these phrases from Putney's lips.
“Well, I guess if it was out-talkin', Mr. Putney wouldn't have much trouble about it. And as far forth as votin' goes, I don't believe but what we can carry the day.”
“We couldn't,” said Mrs. Bolton from the pantry, where she had gone to put the bread away in its stone jar, “if it was left to the church.” She accented the last word with the click of the jar lid, and came out.
“Well, it ain't a church question. It's a Society question.”
Mrs. Bolton replied, on her passage to the dining-room with the plate of sliced bread: “I can't make it seem right to have the minister a Society question. Seems to me that the church members'd ought have the say.”
“Well, you can't make the discipline over to suit everybody,” said Bolton. “I presume it was ordered for a wise purpose.”
“Why, land alive, Oliver Bolton,” his wife shouted back from the remoteness to which his words had followed her, “the statute provisions and rules of the Society wa'n't ordered by Providence.”
“Well, not directly, as you may say,” said Bolton, beginning high, and lowering his voice as she rejoined them, “but I presume the hearts of them that made them was moved.”
Mrs. Bolton could not combat a position of such unimpregnable piety in words, but she permitted herself a contemptuous sniff, and went on getting the things into the dining-room.
“And I guess it's all goin' to work together for good. I ain't afraid any but what it's goin' to come out all right. But we got to be up and doin', as they say about 'lection times. The Lord helps them that helps themselves,” said Bolton, and then, as if he felt the weakness of this position as compared with that of entire trust in Providence, he winked his mild eyes, and added, “if they're on the right side, and put their faith in His promises.”
“Well, your dinner's ready now,” Mrs. Bolton said to Annie.
Idella had clung fast to Annie's hand; as Annie started toward the dining-room she got before her, and whispered vehemently.
“What?” asked Annie, bending down; she laughed, in lifting her head, “I promised Idella you'd let us have some preserves to-day, Mrs. Bolton.”
Mrs. Bolton smiled with grim pleasure. “I see all the while her mind was set on something. She ain't one to let you forgetyourpromises. Well, I guess if Mr. Peck had a little more ofherdisposition there wouldn't be much doubt about the way it would all come out.”
“Well, you don't often see pairents take after their children,” said Bolton, venturing a small joke.
“No, nor husbands after their wives, either,” said Mrs. Bolton sharply. “The more's the pity.”
Dr. Morrell came to see Annie late the next Wednesday evening.
“I didn't know you'd come back,” she said. She returned to the rocking-chair, from which she came forward to greet him, and he dropped into an easy seat near the table piled with books and sewing.
“I didn't know it myself half an hour ago.”
“Really? And is this your first visit? I must be a very interesting case.”
“You are—always. How have you been?”
“I? I hardly know whether I've been at all,” she answered, in mechanical parody of his own reply. “So many other things have been of so much more importance.”
She let her eyes rest full upon his, with a sense of returning comfort and safety in his presence, and after a deep breath of satisfaction, she asked, “How did you leave your mother?”
“Very much better—entirely out of danger.”
“It's so odd to think of any one's having a family. To me it seems the normal condition not to have any relatives.”
“Well, we can't very well dispense with mothers,” said the doctor. “We have to begin with them, at any rate.”
“Oh, I don't object to them. I only wonder at them.”
They fell into a cosy and mutually interesting talk about their separate past, and he gave her glimpses of the life, simple and studious, he had led before he went abroad. She confessed to two mistakes in which she had mechanically persisted concerning him; one that he came from Charlestown instead of Chelsea, and the other that his first name was Joseph instead of James. She did not own that she had always thought it odd he should be willing to remain in a place like Hatboro', and that it must argue a strangely unambitious temperament in a man of his ability. She diverted the impulse to a general satire of village life, and ended by saying that she was getting to be a perfect villager herself.
He laughed, and then, “How has Hatboro' been getting along?” he asked.
“Simply seething with excitement,” she answered. “But I should hardly know where to begin if I tried to tell you,” she added. “It seems such an age since I saw you.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor.
“I didn't mean to bequiteso flattering; but you have certainly marked an epoch. Really, Idon'tknow where to begin. I wish you'd seen somebody else first—Ralph and Ellen, or Mrs. Wilmington.”
“I might go and see them now.”
“No; stay, now you're here, though I know I shall not do justice to the situation.” But she was able to possess him of it with impartiality, even with a little humour, all the more because she was at heart intensely partisan and serious. “No one knows what Mr. Gerrish intends to do next. He has kept quietly about his business; and he told some of the ladies who tried to interview him that he was not prepared to talk about the course he had taken. He doesn't seem to be ashamed of his behaviour; and Ralph thinks that he's either satisfied with it, and intends to let it stand as a protest, or else he's going to strike another blow on the next business meeting. But he's even kept Mrs. Gerrish quiet, and all we can do is to unite Mr. Peck's friends provisionally. Ralph's devoted himself to that, and he says he has talked forty-eight hours to the day ever since.”
Is he—”
“Yes; perfectly! I could hardly believe it when I saw him at church on Sunday. It was like seeing one risen from the dead. What he must have gone through, and Ellen! She told me how Mr. Peck had helped him in the struggle. She attributes everything to him. But of course you think he had nothing to do with it.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“Oh, I don't know. Wouldn't that naturally be the attitude of Science?”
“Toward religion? Perhaps. But I'm not Science—with a large S. May be that's the reason why I left the case with Mr. Peck,” said the doctor, smiling. “Putney didn't leave off my medicine, did he?”
“He never got well so soon before. They both say that. I didn't think you could be so narrow-minded, Dr. Morrell. But of course your scientific bigotry couldn't admit the effect of the moral influence. It would be too much like a miracle; you would have to allow for a mystery.”
“I have to allow for a good many,” said the doctor. “The world is full of mysteries for me, if you mean things that science hasn't explored yet. But I hope that they'll all yield to the light, and that somewhere there'll be light enough to clear up even the spiritual mysteries.”
“Do you really?” she demanded eagerly. “Then you believe in a life hereafter? You believe in a moral government of the—”
He retreated, laughing, from her ardent pursuit. “Oh, I'm not going to commit myself. But I'll go so far as to say that I like to hear Mr. Peck preach, and that I want him to stay. I don't say he had nothing to do with Putney's straightening up. Putney had a great deal to do with it himself. What does he think Mr. Peck's chances are?”
“If Mr. Gerrish tries to get him dismissed? He doesn't know; he's quite in the dark. He says the party of the perverse—the people who think Mr. Gerrish must have had some good reason for his behaviour, simply because they can't see any—is unexpectedly large; and it doesn't help matters with the more respectable people that the most respectable, like Mr. Wilmington and Colonel Marvin, are Mr. Peck's friends. They think there must be something wrong if such good men are opposed to Mr. Gerrish.”
“And I suspect,” said Dr. Morrell soberly, “that Putney's championship isn't altogether an advantage. The people all concede his brilliancy, and they are prouder of him on account of his infirmity; but I guess they like to feel their superiority to him in practical matters. They admire him, but they don't want to follow him.”
“Oh, I suppose so,” said Annie disconsolately. “And I imagine that Mr. Wilmington's course is attributed to Lyra, and that doesn't help Mr. Peck much with the husbands of the ladies who don't approve of her.”
The doctor tacitly declined to touch this delicate point. He asked, after a pause, “You'll be at the meeting?”
“I couldn't keep away. But I've no vote, that's the worst. I can only suffer in the cause.” The doctor smiled. “You must go, too,” she added eagerly.
“Oh, I shall go; I couldn't keep away either. Besides, I can vote. How are you getting on with your littleprotégée?
“Idella? Well, it isn't such a simple matter as I supposed, quite. Did you ever hear anything about her mother?”
“Nothing more than what every one has. Why?” asked the doctor, with scientific curiosity. “Do you find traits that the father doesn't account for?”
“Yes. She is very vain and greedy and quick-tempered.”
“Are those traits uncommon in children?”
“In such a degree I should think they were. But she's very affectionate, too, and you can do anything with her through her love of praise. She puzzles me a good deal. I wish I knew something about her mother. But Mr. Peck himself is a puzzle. With all my respect for him and regard and admiration, I can't help seeing that he's a very imperfect character.”
Doctor Morrell laughed. “There's a great deal of human nature in man.”
“There isn't enough in Mr. Peck,” Annie retorted. “From the very first he has said things that have stirred me up and put me in a fever; but he always seems to be cold and passive himself.”
“Perhaps heiscold,” said the doctor.
“But has he anyrightto be so?” retorted Annie, with certainly no coldness of her own.
“Well, I don't know. I never thought of the right or wrong of a man's being what he was born. Perhaps we might justly blame his ancestors.”
Annie broke into a laugh at herself: “Of course. But don't you think that a man who is able to put things as he does—who can make you see, for example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and proper before—don't you think that he's guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if he doesn'tfeelas well as see?”
“No, I can't say that I do,” said the doctor, with pleasure in the feminine excess of her demand. “And there are so many ways of feeling. We're apt to think that our own way is the only way, of course; but I suppose that most philanthropists—men who have done the most to better conditions—have been people of cold temperaments; and yet you can't say they are unfeeling.”
“No, certainly. Do you think Mr. Peck is a real philanthropist?”
“How you do get back to the personal always!” said Dr. Morrell. “What makes you ask?”
“Because I can't understand his indifference to his child. It seems to me that real philanthropy would begin at home. But twice he has distinctly forgotten her existence, and he always seems bored with it. Or not that quite; but she seems no more to him than any other child.”
“There's something very curious about all that,” said the doctor. “In most things the greater includes the less, but in philanthropy it seems to exclude it. If a man's heart is open to the whole world, to all men, it's shut sometimes against the individual, even the nearest and dearest. You see I'm willing to admit all you can say against a rival practitioner.”
“Oh, I understand,” said Annie. “But I'm not going to gratify your spite.” At the same time she tacitly consented to the slight for Mr. Peck which their joking about him involved. In such cases we excuse our disloyalty as merely temporary, and intend to turn serious again and make full amends for it. “He made very short work,” she continued, “of that notion of yours that there could be any good feeling between the poor and the rich who had once been poor themselves.”
“Did I have any such notion as that?”
She recalled the time and place of its expression to him, and he said, “Oh yes! Well?”
“He says that rich people like that are apt to be the hardest masters, and are eager to forget they ever were poor, and are only anxious to identify themselves with the rich.”
Dr. Morrell seemed to enjoy this immensely. “That does rather settle it,” he said recreantly.
She tried to be severe with him, but she only kept on laughing and joking; she was aware that he was luring her away from her seriousness.
Mrs. Bolton brought in the lamp, and set it on the library table, showing her gaunt outline a moment against it before she left it to throw its softened light into the parlour where they sat. The autumn moonshine, almost as mellow, fell in through the open windows, which let in the shrilling of the crickets and grasshoppers, and wafts of the warm night wind.
“Does life,” Annie was asking, at the end of half an hour, “seem more simple or more complicated as you live on? That sounds awfully abstruse, doesn't it? And I don't know why I'm always asking you abstruse things, but I am.”
“Oh, I don't mind it,” said the doctor. “Perhaps I haven't lived on long enough to answer this particular question; I'm only thirty-six, you know.”
“Only? I'm thirty-one, and I feel a hundred!” she broke in.
“You don't look it. But I believe I rather like abstruse questions. You know Putney and I have discussed a great many. But just what do you mean by this particular abstraction?”
He took from the table a large ivory paper-knife which he was in the habit of playing with in his visits, and laid first one side and then the other side of its smooth cool blade in the palm of his left hand, as he leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and bent his smiling eyes keenly upon her.
She stopped rocking herself, and said imperatively, “Will you please put that back, Dr. Morrell?”
“This paper-knife?”
“Yes. And not look at me just in that way? When you get that knife and that look, I feel a little too much as if you were diagnosing me.”
“Diagnosticating,” suggested the doctor.
“Is it? I always supposed it was diagnosing. But it doesn't matter. It wasn't the name I was objecting to.”
He put the knife back and changed his posture, with a smile that left nothing of professional scrutiny in his look. “Very well, then; you shall diagnose yourself.”
“Diagnosticate, please.”
“Oh, I thought you preferred the other.”
“No, it sounds undignified, now that I know there's a larger word. Where was I?”
“The personal bearing of the question whether life isn't more and more complicated?”
“How did you know it had a personal bearing?”
“I suspected as much.”
“Yes, it has. I mean that within the last four or five months—since I've been in Hatboro'—I seem to have lost my old point of view; or, rather, I don't find it satisfactory any more. I'm ashamed to think of the simple plans, or dreams, that I came home with. I hardly remember what they were; but I must have expected to be a sort of Lady Bountiful here; and now I think a Lady Bountiful one of the most mischievous persons that could infest any community.”
“You don't mean that charity is played out?” asked the doctor.
“In the old-fashioned way, yes.”
“But they say poverty is on the increase. What is to be done?”
“Justice,” said Annie. “Those who do most of the work in the world ought to share in its comforts as a right, and not be put off with what we idlers have a mind to give them from our superfluity as a grace.”
“Yes, that's all very true. But what till justiceisdone?”
“Oh, we must continue to do charity,” cried Annie, with self-contempt that amused him. “But don't you see how much more complicated it is? That's what I meant by life not being simple any more. It was easy enough to do charity when it used to seem the right and proper remedy for suffering; but now, when I can't make it appear a finality, but only something provisional, temporary—Don't you see?”
“Yes, I see. But I don't see how you're going to help it At the same time, I'll allow that it makes life more difficult.”
For a moment they were both serious and silent. Then she said: “Sometimes I think the fault is all in myself, and that if I were not so sophisticated and—and—selfish, I should find the old way of doing good just as effective and natural as ever. Then again, I think the conditions are all wrong, and that we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn't be so good to them. I should prefer that. I hate being good to people I don't like, and I can't like people who don't interest me. I think I must be very hard-hearted.”
The doctor laughed at this.
“Oh, I know,” said Annie, “I know the fraudulent reputation I've got for good works.”
“Your charity to tramps is the opprobrium of Hatboro',” the doctor consented.
“Oh, I don't mind that. It's easy when people ask you for food or money, but the horrible thing is when they ask you for work. Think of me, who never did anything to earn a cent in my life, being humbly asked by a fellow-creature to let him work for something to eat and drink! It's hideous! It's abominable! At first I used to be flattered by it, and try to conjure up something for them to do, and to believe that I was helping the deserving poor. Now I give all of them money, and tell them that they needn't even pretend to work for it.Idon't work for my money, and I don't see why they should.”
“They'd find that an unanswerable argument if you put it to them,” said the doctor. He reached out his hand for the paper-cutter, and then withdrew it in a way that made her laugh.
“But the worst of it is,” she resumed, “that I don't love any of the people that I help, or hurt, whichever it is. I did feel remorseful toward Mrs. Savor for a while, but I didn't love her, and I knew that I only pitied myself through her. Don't you see?”
“No, I don't,” said the doctor.
“You don't, because you're too polite. The only kind of creature that I can have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her, and a reprobate like Lyra, or some broken creature like poor Ralph. I think there's something in the air, the atmosphere, that won't allow you to live in the old way if you've got a grain of conscience or humanity. I don't mean thatIhave. But it seems to me as if the world couldn't go on as it has been doing. Even here in America, where I used to think we had the millennium because slavery was abolished, people have more liberty, but they seem just as far off as ever from justice. That is what paralyses me and mocks me and laughs in my face when I remember how I used to dream of doing good after I came home. I had better stayed at Rome.”
The doctor said vaguely, “I'm glad you didn't,” and he let his eyes dwell on her with a return of the professional interest which she was too lost in her self reproach to be able to resent.
“I blame myself for trying to excuse my own failure on the plea that things generally have gone wrong. At times it seems to me that I'm responsible for having lost my faith in what I used to think was the right thing to do; and then again it seems as if the world were all so bad that no real good could be done in the old way, and that my faith is gone because there's nothing for it to rest on any longer. I feel that something must be done; but I don't know what.”
“It would be hard to say,” said the doctor.
She perceived that her exaltation amused him, but she was too much in earnest to care. “Then we are guilty—all guilty—till we find out and begin to do it. If the world has come to such a pass that you can't do anything but harm in it—”
“Oh, is it so bad as that?” he protested.
“It'squiteas bad,” she insisted. “Just see what mischief I've done since I came back to Hatboro'. I took hold of that miserable Social Union because I was outside of all the life about me, and it seemed my only chance of getting into it; and I've done more harm by it in one summer than I could undo in a lifetime. Just think of poor Mr. Brandreth's love affair with Miss Chapley broken off, and Lyra's lamentable triumph over Miss Northwick, and Mrs. Munger's duplicity, and Ralph's escapade—all because I wanted to do good!”
A note of exaggeration had begun to prevail in her self-upbraiding, which was real enough, and the time came for him to suggest, “I think you're a little morbid, Miss Kilburn.”
“Morbid! Of course I am! But that doesn't alter the fact that everything is wrong, does it?”
“Everything!”
“Why, you don't pretend yourself, do you, that everything is right?”
“A true American ought to do so, oughtn't he?” teased the doctor. “One mustn't be a bad citizen.”
“But if youwerea bad citizen?” she persisted.
“Oh, then I might agree with you on some points. But I shouldn't say such things to my patients, Miss Kilburn.”
“It would be a great comfort to them if you did,” she sighed.
The doctor broke out in a laugh of delight at her perfervid concentration. “Oh, no, no! They're mostly nervous women, and it would be the death of them—if they understood me. In fact, what's the use of brooding upon such ideas? We can't hurry any change, but we can make ourselves uncomfortable.”
“Why should I be comfortable?” she asked, with a solemnity that made him laugh again.
“Why shouldn't you be?”
“Yes, that's what I often ask myself. But I can't be,” she said sadly.
They had risen, and he looked at her with his professional interest now openly dominant, as he stood holding her hand. “I'm going to send you a little more of that tonic, Miss Kilburn.”
She pulled her hand away. “No, I shall not take any more medicine. You think everything is physical. Why don't you ask at once to see my tongue?”
He went out laughing, and she stood looking wistfully at the door he had passed through.