I was one of the earliest of the guests, for I cannot yet believe that
people do not want me to come exactly when they say they do. I perceived,
however, that one other gentleman had come before me, and I was both
surprised and delighted to find that this was my acquaintance Mr.
Bullion, the Boston banker. He professed as much pleasure at our meeting
as I certainly felt; but after a few words he went on talking with Mrs.
Strange, while I was left to her mother, an elderly woman of quiet and
even timid bearing, who affected me at once as born and bred in a wholly
different environment. In fact, every American of the former generation
is almost as strange to it in tradition, though not in principle, as I
am; and I found myself singularly at home with this sweet lady, who
seemed glad of my interest in her. I was taken from her side to be
introduced to a lady, on the opposite side of the room, who said she had
been promised my acquaintance by a friend of hers, whom I had met in the
mountains--Mr. Twelvemough; did I remember him? She gave a little
cry while still speaking, and dramatically stretched her hand towards a
gentleman who entered at the moment, and whom I saw to be no other than
Mr. Twelvemough himself. As soon as he had greeted our hostess he
hastened up to us, and, barely giving himself time to press the still
outstretched hand of my companion, shook mine warmly, and expressed the
greatest joy at seeing me. He said that he had just got back to town, in
a manner, and had not known I was here, till Mrs. Strange had asked him
to meet me. There were not a great many other guests, when they all
arrived, and we sat down, a party not much larger than at Mrs. Makely's.
I found that I was again to take out my hostess, but I was put next the
lady with whom I had been talking; she had come without her husband, who
was, apparently, of a different social taste from herself, and had an
engagement of his own; there was an artist and his wife, whose looks I
liked; some others whom I need not specify were there, I fancied, because
they had heard of Altruria and were curious to see me. As Mr. Twelvemough
sat quite at the other end of the table, the lady on my right could
easily ask me whether I liked his books. She said, tentatively, people
liked them because they felt sure when they took up one of his novels
they had not got hold of a tract on political economy in disguise.
It was this complimentary close of a remark, which scarcely began with
praise, that made itself heard across the table, and was echoed with a
heartfelt sigh from the lips of another lady.
“Yes,” she said, “that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough's
books.”
“We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough's books,” the first lady triumphed,
and several began to extol them for being fiction pure and simple, and
not dealing with anything but loves of young people.
Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and
one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a
description of a surgical operation that made her feel as if she had
been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that
passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but
it was not art.
The painter asked, Why was it not art?
The author answered, Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything
that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.
“Precisely,” said the painter--“art _is_ choice.”
“On that ground,” the banker interposed, “you could say that political
economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.”
“It would have its difficulties,” the painter admitted, “but there
are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human
moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who
would object to Mr. Twelvemough's describing an eviction from an East
Side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her
children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the
household furniture?”
“_I_ should object very much, for one,” said the lady who had
objected to the account of the surgical operation. “It would be too
creepy. Art should give pleasure.”
“Then you think a tragedy is not art?” asked the painter.
“I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too
much,” said the lady. “There are enough of them in real life, without
filling all the novels with them. It's terrible the number of beggars
you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr.
Twelvemough's novels, too?”
“Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give.”
“You oughtn't to give money in real life,” said the lady. “You ought to
give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are
impostors.”
“It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active,” said the
elderly young lady, “even if half the letters one gets _do_ turn out
to be appeals from them.”
“It's very disappointing to have them do it, though,” said the artist,
lightly. “I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn't
seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they've
found it a failure?”
“Well,” said Mr. Bullion, “perhaps they have suspended during the hard
times.”
They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have,
and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people
become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence
of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and
surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, “Who goes there?”
the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
street below, “Despair!”
“I had an amusing experience,” Mr. Twelvemough began, “when I was doing a
little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.”
“For the sake of the literary material?” the artist suggested.
“Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look
for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor's son, who had
got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and
could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper
any more.”
“A checkered employ,” the banker mused aloud.
“It was not of a simultaneous nature,” the novelist explained. “So he
came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little,
and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would
undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work
for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a
manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of
work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job
copying parts for a new play he had written.”
The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.
“It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than
amusing,” said the banker. “It shows that something can be done, if you
try.”
“Well,” said Mr. Twelvemough, “I thought that was the moral, myself, till
the fellow came afterwards to thank me. He said that he considered
himself very lucky, for the manager had told him that there were six
other men had wanted that job.”
Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little
bewilderment. She murmured, “I suppose the joke is that he had befriended
one man at the expense of six others.”
“Oh,” I returned, “is that a joke?”
No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, “How do you manage with
poverty in Altruria?”
I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, “In Altruria
we have no poverty.”
“Ah, I knew you would say that!” he cried out. “That's what he always
does,” he explained to the lady. “Bring up any one of our little
difficulties, and ask how they get over it in Altruria, and he says they
have nothing like it. It's very simple.”
They all began to ask me questions, but with a courteous incredulity
which I could feel well enough, and some of my answers made them laugh,
all but my hostess, who received them with a gravity that finally
prevailed. But I was not disposed to go on talking of Altruria then,
though they all protested a real interest, and murmured against the
hardship of being cut off with so brief an account of our country as I
had given them.
“Well,” said the banker at last, “if there is no cure for our poverty, we
might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.”
“Yes,” said our hostess, with a sad little smile, “we might as well enjoy
ourselves.”