Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those
people, and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the
two men, and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady
Moors, but addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the
American party in his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to
Rebecca. They were all rather bewildered, and so were the butler and
the footmen, and the _chef_ and his helpers, and the ladies' maids.
These were even more shocked than those they considered their betters,
and I quite took to my affections Lord Moors' man Robert, who was in an
awe-stricken way trying to get some light from me on the situation. He
contributed as much as any one to bring about a peaceful submission to
the inevitable, for he had been a near witness of what had happened to
the crew when they attempted their rebellion to the authorities; but he
did not profess to understand the matter, and from time to time he seemed
to question the reality of it.
The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took
an attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with
interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr.
Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into
the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first
task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian
style of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he
liked it better, and during the three hours of the first morning's
Obligatoires, his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be
restrained rather than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five
minutes for rest out of every twenty, and he could not get over his
life-long habit of working against time. The Altrurians tried to make
him understand that here people must not work _against_ time, but must
always work _with_ it, so as to have enough work to do each day;
otherwise they must remain idle during the Obligatoires and tend to
demoralize the workers. It seemed that Lady Moors had a passion for
gardening, and she was set to work with her father on the border of
flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was hoeing. She knew about
flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself by growing them, and
so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to dig, she was delighted
to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her father were cronies,
and when I went round in the morning with Aristides to ask if we could do
anything for them, we heard them laughing and talking gayly together
before we reached them. They said they had looked their job (as Mr.
Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the Voluntaries, and
had decided how they would manage, and they had set to work that morning
as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her mother get the
breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a picnic, though
from the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on me, when I saw
her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in her hand, I
decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.
Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about
him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our
quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party
of Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They
were having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand
each other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the
Altrurians were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were
doing something which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered
our services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of
his suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of
enthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr.
Ruskin's direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather
amateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of
pure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed
upon him and shook hands with him; their affection did not go further,
and he was able to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they
would not feel it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very
simple matter like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had
been using to carry the water off. They understood what he was saying,
from his gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like
to join them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone
out of a neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We
explained to him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he
was looking at them admirably, and he said, “It's really very good,” and
we understood that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he
added, “I should really fancy trying it myself one day,” and we told them
they wanted to go and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we
persuaded them not to urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his
work in his yachting flannels.
I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point
of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and
high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American
millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any
further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his
merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was
only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for
a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it.
Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for
an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard
idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so
far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would
make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.
We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in
making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and
shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused
outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician
rescued them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been
employed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better
mind by withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it
by working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the
rebels were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not
to have required the application of the net and filament; but they had
not such appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so
much. However, in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or
less resigned, though they did not profess to understand it.
You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the
personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's _chef,_ Anatole, I found my
affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,
my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline
man, with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an
exalted position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he
could easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with
misgivings, not for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall.
It became my pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur
Anatole, who, when he imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what
he had never liked to tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of
Americans on the subject, that he had belonged in France to a party of
which the political and social ideal was almost identical with that
of the Altrurians. He asked for an early opportunity of addressing the
village Assembly and explaining this delightful circumstance in public,
and he profited by the occasion to embrace the first Altrurian we met and
kiss him on both cheeks.
His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire
whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be
assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science;
that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his
concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in
studying the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the
substitution of the more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use
of which, he understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the
course of his preparation for the rôle of _chef_, which he had played
both in France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi;
and the result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this
moment he has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the
Altrurian table. This has added to their dietary in several important
particulars, the fungi he has discovered being among those highly
decorative and extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the
deep woods and offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the
ruins of the old capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will
grow. Anatole is very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal
Assembly has lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their
preparation for the table, with sketches of them as he found them
growing, colored after nature by his own hand. He has himself become a
fanatical vegetarian, having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing
for the meats he stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and
American bourgeoisie in the days which he already looks back upon as
among the most benighted of his history.