Annie Kilburn Part 32

"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 pract.i.tioner."

"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 gra.s.shoppers, 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 justice _is_ done?"

"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. _I_ don'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 that _I_ have. 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 pa.s.s that you can't do anything but harm in it--"