IX

I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I

forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous

tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one's

preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the

artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and

libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than

other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so

little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.

The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has

numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are

the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study

in them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books

relating to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away

every noon, so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely

at your disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with

the rest of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study

should be carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify

this theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are

allowed to take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you

have is immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel

hurried and are not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.

The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are

delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible

bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand

indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever

get my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am

writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you,

but then I should have had left out a good many things that happened

during our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should

have got to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better

keep to the form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at

random, why that is very much the way I write them.

I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you

remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can

have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing

heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the

architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an

edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language

characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of

the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth

Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and

garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the

overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths

between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there

is no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from

them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under

them at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by

colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day

flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the

stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with

arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades

are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming

and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the

streets are rather deserted.

But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never

get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous

uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in

the wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can

fancy it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of

our architects projected while they were still in the fervor of

excitement from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the

White City. They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole

Altrurian continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As

we travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old

railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my

husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital

we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately

white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels,

and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could

not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were

lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was

inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his

country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some

scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal

convenience, performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or

orator, or gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral,

among them! That seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how

it was. Like everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had

been no war for so long that there were no famous soldiers to

commemorate. But he stopped our van when he came to the first of the many

arches which spanned the highway, and read out to me in English the

Altrurian record that it was erected in honor of the first President of

the Altrurian Commonwealth, who managed the negotiations when the

capitalistic oligarchies to the north and south were peacefully annexed,

and the descendants of the three nations joined in the commemoration of

an event that abolished war forever on the Altrurian continent.

Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty

and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of

the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different

highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody

a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the

idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working,

and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything

by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else's brow. The

people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways

and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands,

after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was

a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it

during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during

the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and

all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since

the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of

July or an everlasting picnic.

But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make

haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really

coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we

had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to

the one where we had left our dear mother--for Aristides claims her,

too--and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the top,

though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day, and

knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded cliff

and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At first I

could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still beyond

a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that a

large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was

crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they

were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and

jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.

I was quite bewildered, and I don't know what to say I was the next

thing, when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag

from her peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so

large, and the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused

wonder what those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her

marines and crew. I couldn't ask any coherent questions, and luckily

Aristides was answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by

wheeling our van down on the beach and making for the point nearest the

yacht. He had time to say he did not believe she was a government vessel,

and, in fact, I remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River

getting up steam to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks

covered with sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the

private yacht of some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and

coming in my mind while my husband was talking with some of the

Altrurian girls who were there helping with the men. They said that the

yacht had gone ashore the night before last in one of the sudden fogs

that come up on that coast, and that some people whom the sailors seemed

to obey were camping on the edge of the upland above the beach, under a

large tent they had brought from the yacht. They had refused to go to the

guest-house in the nearest village, and as nearly as the girls could make

out they expected the yacht to get afloat from tide to tide, and then

intended to re-embark on her. In the mean time they had provisioned

themselves from the ship, and were living in a strange way of their own.

Some of them seemed to serve the others, but these appeared to be used

with a very ungrateful indifference, as if they were of a different race.

There was one who wore a white apron and white cap who directed the

cooking for the rest, and had several assistants; and from time to time

very disagreeable odors came from the camp, like burning flesh. The

Altrurians had carried them fruits and vegetables, but the men-assistants

had refused them contemptuously and seemed suspicious of the variety of

mushrooms they offered them. They called out, “To-stoo!” and I understood

that the strangers were afraid they were bringing toad-stools. One of the

Altrurian girls had been studying English in the nearest capital, and she

had tried to talk with these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way,

but they could make nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she

wanted to say, but as she spelled it phonetically they were not able to

read her English. She asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had

heard of, and when I said yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp

of the castaways.

As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at

the largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said

to me, “What name shall I say, ma'am?” and I answered distinctly, so

that he might get the name right, “Mr. and Mrs. Homos.” Then he held

back the flap of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a

drawing-room, and called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us

pass, in the way that I remembered so well, “Mr. And Mrs. 'Omos!” and a

severe-looking, rather elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was

both anxious and forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst

out, “You don't mean to say you speak English?”

I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather

poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, “Have you

been cast away on this outlandish place, too?”

I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I

could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian

accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in

the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their

misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind.

But she merely said, “Oh!” and then she seemed to recollect herself, and

frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my

husband in presenting me. “Mr. Thrall, Mrs. ----”

She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, “Homos,” and as the old man

had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.

“And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian,” I said, and

then, as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign

of liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she

hadn't in all the time I have been away from New York. “I am glad you are

so comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won't need us, I see. The people

about will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear,” and I was

sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent

millionaire's wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would

have been altogether mistaken.

I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should

have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous

pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after

they came on to New York.

He was beginning, “Oh no, oh no,” but I cut in. “My husband and I are on

our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You

will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we

are rather in your housekeeper's way.”

It _was_ nasty, Dolly, and I won't deny it; it was _vulgar_. But what

would _you_ have done? I could feel Aristides' mild eye sadly on me, and

I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them, till that

old man spoke again, so timidly: “It isn't my--it's my wife, Mrs. Homos.

Let me introduce her. But haven't we met before?”

“Perhaps during my first husband's lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington

Strange.”

“Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when

we were both young--a good man, if ever there was one; the best in the

world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah--my dear, you remember my

speaking of Mrs. Strange?”

He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating

whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may

think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead

husband that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the

affection for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a

father. Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I

should forget him.

Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, “I

think I have met Mr. Strange,” and now I saw in the background, sitting

on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a

very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it

at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social

Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for

she rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded

himself from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he

rather liked what had happened.

Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, “Do stop and have

some breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter,

Lady Moors and--and Lord Moors?” The girl took my hand, and the young man

bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not

to be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall

and myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the

weather, and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide,

and my husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did

not sit down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the

door of the tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law,

and as she now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped

out, “But you are not _leaving_ us? What shall we _do_ with all these

natives?”

This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. “_Natives_! They are

cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure you

you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only

Altrurian by marriage!”

She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in,

and she came back with, “But we don't speak the language, and they don't

speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?”

“Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just

left. But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the

natives in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very

sensitive, and if you fail in any point of consideration, they will

understand that you do not want their hospitality.”

“I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,” she answered

quite as nastily. “We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay

our way here as we do elsewhere.”

“The experiment will be worth trying,” I said. “Come, Aristides!” and I

took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some

hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look

back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power,

and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him

because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It

must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the

shoulder and said, “Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,” till I thought I should

scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was

horrid, and what did he want me to do?

After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought

we had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving

them to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the

neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the

shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one

chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would

have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in

their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me,

but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not

anticipate the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in

fact, I wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I

could, for the thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the

rest of our tour.

I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it,

and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had

first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in

her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she

had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one

person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest

people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with

one lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had

taught another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch

which she had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired.

These two ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in

Altrurian, but there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her

vocabulary more than either, in helping her about her housework, the

mother having lent her for the purpose. My mother said she was not

ashamed to make blunders before a child, and the little witch had taken

the greatest delight in telling her the names of things in the house and

the streets and the fields outside the town, where they went long walks

together.

X

Well, my dear Dorothea, I had been hoping to go more into detail about my

mother and about our life in the Maritime Capital, which is to be our

home for a year, but I had hardly got down the last words when Aristides

came in with a despatch from the Seventh Regionic, summoning us there on

important public business: I haven't got over the feeling yet of being

especially distinguished and flattered at sharing in public business; but

the Altrurian women are so used to it that they do not think anything of

it. The despatch was signed by an old friend of my husband's, Cyril

Chrysostom, who had once been Emissary in England, and to whom my husband

wrote his letters when he was in America. I hated to leave my mother so

soon, but it could not be helped, and we took the first electric express

for the Seventh Regionic, where we arrived in about an hour and forty

minutes, making the three hundred miles in that time easily. I couldn't

help regretting our comfortable van, but there was evidently haste in the

summons, and I confess that I was curious to know what the matter was,

though I had made a shrewd guess the first instant, and it turned out

that I was not mistaken.

The long and the short of it was that there was trouble with the people

who had come ashore in that yacht, and were destined never to go to sea

in her. She was hopelessly bedded in the sand, and the waves that were

breaking over her were burying her deeper and deeper. The owners were

living in their tent as we had left them, and her crew were camped in

smaller tents and any shelter they could get, along the beach. They had

brought her stores away, but many of the provisions had been damaged, and

it had become a pressing question what should be done about the people.

We had been asked to consult with Cyril and his wife, and the other

Regionic chiefs and their wives, and we threshed the question out nearly

the whole night.

I am afraid it will appear rather comical in some aspects to you and Mr.

Makely, but I can assure you that it was a very serious matter with the

Altrurian authorities. If there had been any hope of a vessel from the

capitalistic world touching at Altruria within a definite time, they

could have managed, for they would have gladly kept the yacht's people

and owners till they could embark them for Australia or New Zealand, and

would have made as little of the trouble they were giving as they could.

But until the trader that brought us should return with the crew, as the

captain had promised, there was no ship expected, and any other wreck in

the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised,

though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners,

and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the

authorities to reduce what they considered the disorder of their life.

With the crew it was a different matter. As soon as they had got drunk on

the wines and spirits they had brought from the wreck, and then had got

sober because they had drunk all the liquors up, they began to be more

manageable; when their provisions ran short, and they were made to

understand that they would not be allowed to plunder the fields and

woods, or loot the villages for something to eat, they became almost

exemplarily docile. At first they were disposed to show fight, and

the principles of the Altrurians did not allow them to use violence in

bringing them to subjection; but the men had counted without their hosts

in supposing that they could therefore do as they pleased, unless they

pleased to do right. After they had made their first foray they were

warned by Cyril, who came from the capital to speak English with them,

that another raid would not be suffered. They therefore attempted it

by night, but the Altrurians were prepared for them with the flexible

steel nets which are their only means of defence, and half a dozen

sailors were taken in one. When they attempted to break out, and their

shipmates attempted to break in to free them, a light current of

electricity was sent through the wires and the thing was done. Those

who were rescued--the Altrurians will not say captured--had hoes put into

their hands the next morning, and were led into the fields and set to

work, after a generous breakfast of coffee, bread, and mushrooms. The

chickens they had killed in their midnight expedition were buried, and

those which they had not killed lost no time in beginning to lay eggs for

the sustenance of the reformed castaways. As an extra precaution with the

“rescued,” when they were put to work, each of them with a kind of shirt

of mail, worn over his coat, which could easily be electrized by a

metallic filament connecting with the communal dynamo, and under these

conditions they each did a full day's work during the Obligatories.

As the short commons grew shorter and shorter, both meat and drink, at

Camp Famine, and the campers found it was useless to attempt thieving

from the Altrurians, they had tried begging from the owners in their

large tent, but they were told that the provisions were giving out there,

too, and there was nothing for them. When they insisted the servants of

the owners had threatened them with revolvers, and the sailors, who had

nothing but their knives, preferred to attempt living on the country.

Within a week the whole crew had been put to work in the woods and fields

and quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were,

on the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly

satisfied, and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the

Voluntaries and helped secure the yacht's boats and pieces of wreckage

that came ashore. Until they became accustomed or resigned to the

Altrurian diet, they were allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that

swarmed along the sand and cook them, but on condition that they built

their fires on the beach, and cooked only during an offshore wind, so

that the fumes of the roasting should not offend the villagers.

Cyril acknowledged, therefore, that the question of the crew was for the

present practically settled, but Mr. and Mrs. Thrall, and their daughter

and son-in-law, with their servants, still presented a formidable

problem. As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living

in their marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after

their yacht went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in

the same sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in

the spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired

service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable

provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several

interviews with them, in which he had at first delicately intimated, and

then explicitly declared, that the situation could not be prolonged.

The two men had been able to get the Altrurian point of view in some

measure, and so had Lady Moors, but Mrs. Thrall had remained stiffly

obtuse and obstinate, and it was in despair of bringing her to terms

without resorting to rescue that he had summoned us to help him.

It was not a pleasant job, but of course we could not refuse, and we

agreed that as soon as we had caught a nap, and had a bite of breakfast

we would go over to their camp with Cyril and his wife, and see what we

could do with the obnoxious woman. I confess that I had some little

consolation in the hope that I should see her properly humbled.