“Isn’t it in a fair way to become so?” asked the doctor; and he turned to
the lawyer: “What should you say was the logic of events among us for the
last ten or twenty years?”
“There’s nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It’s like a woman’s
reasoning--you can’t tell what it’s aimed at, or where it’s going to fetch
up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come
to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith
of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of
happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may
again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we
are doing now.”
“But come, now,” said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the
Altrurian’s shoulder, “you don’t mean to say honestly that everybody works
with his hands in Altruria?”
“Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law--‘In
the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.’”
“But the capitalists? I’m anxious about Number One, you see.”
“We have none.”
“I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the
novelists?”
“They all do their share of hand-work.”
The lawyer said: “That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man
in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds?
When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do
their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if
they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper classes?”
The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which
persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of
Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: “You mustn’t imagine that work
in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that
each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that
every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the
higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them
to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and
arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of
livelihood--”
“No,” said the lawyer, smiling, “I’m afraid we can’t conceive of that. We
consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have.
If our gifted friend here,” he said, indicating me, “were not kept like a
toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse
staring him in the face--”
“For Heaven’s sake,” I cried out, “don’t mix your metaphors so, anyway!”
“If it were not for that and all the other hardships that literary men
undergo--
‘Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail’--
his novels probably wouldn’t be worth reading.”
“Ah!” said the Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this joking; and,
to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in very good taste.
“You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to
imagine a condition of things like yours--although I have it under my very
eyes--where the money consideration is the first consideration.”
“Oh, excuse me,” urged the minister; “I don’t think that’s quite the
case.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian, sweetly; “you can see how easily
I go astray.”
“Why, I don’t know,” the banker interposed, “that you are so far out in
what you say. If you had said that money was always the first motive, I
should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that money
is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man
secures his financial basis for his work, he can’t do his work. It’s
nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first
consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they
must have money. Of course, we all recognize a difference in the
qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may
be roughly defined as the necessity of his life; the work of the business
man as the means, and the work of the artist and scientist as the end.
We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they
will serve for illustration as they are. I don’t think there can be
any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some truths are
self-evident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every
business man sees this, and owns it to himself, at least when he meets
some man of an aesthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this
luckier fellow has a joy in his work which he can never feel in business;
that his success in it can never be embittered by the thought that it is
the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that
there cannot be any competition in it--there can be only a noble
emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned. He can always look up
to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has
to look down upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is
a pretty low fellow.”
I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a
cultivated man, a man of university training, and that he was a reader and
a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he
now seemed to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because
the subject had a charm that lured him out of himself. “Well, now,” he
continued, “the question is of the money consideration, which is the first
consideration with us all: does it, or doesn’t it degrade the work, which
is the life, of those among us whose work is the highest? I understand
that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?”
The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker’s innate
delicacy that he did not refer the matter, so far as it concerned the
aesthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he
courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to
consider it himself: “Well, I don’t suppose any one can satisfy you fully.
But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and perhaps
that is the reason why so many of them break down in a calling that is
certainly far less exhausting than business. On one side, the artist is
kept to the level of the working-man, of the animal, of the creature whose
sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is
through his necessity. On the other side, he is exalted to the height of
beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which
they were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose.
Between the two, I should say that he got mixed, and that his work shows
it.”
None of the others said anything, and, since I had not been personally
appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. “If you will suppose me to be
speaking from observation rather than experience--” I began.
“By all means,” said the banker, “go on;” and the rest made haste in
various forms to yield me the word.
“I should say that such a man certainly got mixed, but that his work kept
itself pure from the money consideration, as it were, in spite of him. A
painter or actor, or even a novelist, is glad to get all he can for his
work, and, such is our fallen nature, he does get all he knows how to get:
but, when he has once fairly passed into his work, he loses himself in it.
He does not think whether it will pay or not, whether it will be popular
or not, but whether he can make it good or not.”
“Well, that is conceivable,” said the banker. “But wouldn’t he rather do
something he would get less for, if he could afford it, than the thing he
knows he will get more for? Doesn’t the money consideration influence his
choice of subject?”
“Oddly enough, I don’t believe it does,” I answered, after a moment’s
reflection. “A man makes his choice once for all when he embraces the
aesthetic life, or, rather, it is made for him; no other life seems
possible. I know there is a general belief that an artist does the kind of
thing he has made go because it pays; but this only shows the prevalence
of business ideals. If he did not love to do the thing he does, he could
not do it well, no matter how richly it paid.”
“I am glad to hear it,” said the banker, and he added to the Altrurian:
“So, you see, we are not so bad as one would think. We are illogically
better, in fact.”
“Yes,” the other assented. “I knew something of your literature as well as
your conditions before I left home, and I perceived that by some anomaly
the one was not tainted by the other. It is a miraculous proof of the
divine mission of the poet.”
“And the popular novelist,” the lawyer whispered in my ear, but loud
enough for the rest to hear, and they all testified their amusement at my
cost.
The Altrurian, with his weak sense of humor, passed the joke. “It shows no
signs of corruption from greed, but I can’t help thinking that, fine as it
is, it might have been much finer if the authors who produced it had been
absolutely freed to their work, and had never felt the spur of need.”
“Are they absolutely freed to it in Altruria?” asked the professor. “I
understood you that everybody had to work for his living in Altruria.”
“That is a mistake. Nobody works for his living in Altruria; he works for
others’ living.”
“Ah, that is precisely what our working-men object to doing here,” said
the manufacturer. “In that last interview of mine with the walking
delegate he had the impudence to ask me why my men should work for my
living as well as their own.”
“He couldn’t imagine that you were giving them the work to do--the very
means of life,” said the professor.
“Oh no, that’s the last thing those fellows want to think of.”
“Perhaps,” the Altrurian suggested, “they might not have found it such a
hardship to work for your living if their own had been assured, as it is
with us. If you will excuse my saying it, we should think it monstrous in
Altruria for any man to have another’s means of life in his power; and in
our condition it is hardly imaginable. Do you really have it in your power
to take away a man’s opportunity to earn a living?”
The manufacturer laughed uneasily. “It is in my power to take away his
life; but I don’t habitually shoot my fellow-men, and I never dismissed a
man yet without good reason.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian. “I didn’t dream of accusing
you of such inhumanity. But, you see, our whole system is so very
different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I
am very curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellow-man,
as you say, the law would punish you; but if, for some reason that you
decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually
starved to death--”
“Then the law would have nothing to do with it,” the professor replied for
the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. “But that is not the
way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness, probably,
till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up.”
“But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor,” returned the
Altrurian.
I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a
point that I felt curious about: “But in Altruria, if the literary class
is not exempt from the rule of manual labor, where do they find time and
strength to write?”
“Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or
exhausting. It is no more than is necessary to keep the body in health. I
do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary occupations.”
“Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we
row, or we ride a bicycle, or a horse, or we fence.”
“But to us,” returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness which
nothing but the sweetness of his manner would have excused, “exercise for
exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began
and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should--if you will excuse
my saying so--look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.”
V
At this moment the lady who had hailed me so gayly from the top of the
coach while I stood waiting for the Altrurian to help the porter with the
baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to
our little group and said to me: “I want to introduce my husband to you.
He adores your books.” She went on much longer to this effect, while the
other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all
true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew
perfectly well that she was using her husband’s zeal for my fiction to
make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him
to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him
off down the piazza, while her husband remained with me, and the members
of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it broken up
for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and
I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the
direction his wife had taken.
He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: “Yes, I
like to have a book where I can get at it when we’re not going out to the
theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don’t care
much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she
finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see,
business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the
reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that’s going in that
line. We haven’t got any children, and it occupies her mind. She’s up to
all sorts of things--she’s artistic, and she’s musical, and she’s
dramatic, and she’s literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny,
anyway.”
He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making
type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what
his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet
little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her
capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the
summer--but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could
have the rest, anyway; she needed it.
“By-the-way,” he asked, “who is this friend of yours? The women are all
crazy about him, and it’s been an even thing between my wife and Miss
Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I’ll bet on my wife every time,
when it comes to a thing like that. He’s a good-looking fellow--some kind
of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is
Altruria, anyway?”
I told him, and he said: “Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict
immigration, I suppose we sha’n’t see many more Altrurians, and we’d
better make the most of this one. Heigh?”
I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: “If I
understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to
emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very
much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos.”
“Is that so?” asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. “Why?”
“Really, I can’t say, and I don’t know that I’ve explicit authority for my
statement.”
“They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. “I didn’t know
that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I
thought the war settled all that.”
I sighed. “There are a good many things that the war didn’t settle so
definitely as we’ve been used to thinking, I’m afraid. But, for that
matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in
the scale of savagery than ourselves even.”
“Is that so? Well, that’s pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my
companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.
“My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the
Altrurian, “I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a
little.”
“I’ll go if you’ll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, “Never
knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.”
“Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the
desk; or perhaps it’s in the rack by the dining-room door--or maybe up in
our room.”
“I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were
the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.
I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at
once: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr.
Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds
so hard to understand. He was just now,” the lady continued, “wanting to
know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our
young people in the dance, and I’ve been trying to tell him that we
consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the
piazza and look in at the windows.”
She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in
the direction of the young country girls and country fellows who were
thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well
enough looking, and, as it was Saturday night, they were in their best. I
suppose their dress could have been criticised; the young fellows were
clothed by the ready-made clothing-store, and the young girls after their
own devices from the fashion papers; but their general effect was good,
and their behavior was irreproachable; they were very quiet--if anything,
too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was yielded them by
common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I
thought, as wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that
they should have no part in the gayety. I had often seen them there
before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had
always seemed quite normal, but now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it
seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had been having about the
working-men in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian
must have seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having
asked such a question, after he had been so fully instructed upon the
point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart, and
answered: “You might have told him, for one thing, that they were not
dancing because they had not paid the piper.”
“Then the money consideration enters even into your social pleasures?”
asked the Altrurian.
“Very much. Doesn’t it with you?”
He evaded this question, as he evaded all straightforward questions
concerning his country: “We have no money consideration, you know. But do
I understand that all your social entertainments are paid for by the
guests?”
“Oh no, not so bad as that, quite. There are a great many that the host
pays for. Even here, in a hotel, the host furnishes the music and the room
free to the guests of the house.”
“And none are admitted from the outside?”
“Oh yes, people are welcome from all the other hotels and boarding-houses
and the private cottages. The young men are especially welcome; there are
not enough young men in the hotel to go round, you see.” In fact, we could
see that some of the pretty girls within were dancing with other girls;
half-grown boys were dangling from the waists of tall young ladies and
waltzing on tiptoe.
“Isn’t that rather droll?” asked the Altrurian.
“It’s grotesque!” I said, and I felt ashamed of it. “But what are you to
do? The young men are hard at work in the cities, as many as can get work
there, and the rest are out West, growing up with the country. There are
twenty young girls for every young man at all the summer resorts in the
East.”
“But what would happen if these young farmers--I suppose they are
farmers--were invited in to take part in the dance?” asked my friend.
“But that is impossible.”
“Why?”
“Really, Mrs. Makely, I think I shall have to give him back to you,” I
said.
The lady laughed. “I am not sure that I want him back.”
“Oh yes,” the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor.
“I know that I must be very trying with my questions; but do not abandon
me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!”
“Well, I won’t,” said the lady, with another laugh. “And I will try to
tell you what would happen if those farmers, or farm-hands, or whatever
they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the young
ladies would be scared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance
would stop.”
“Then the young ladies prefer to dance with one another and with little
boys--”
“No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would
rather not dance at all than dance with people beneath them. I don’t say
anything against these natives here; they are very civil and decent. But
they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would
be out of place with them, and they would feel it.”
“Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them,” said the
Altrurian, with a gleam of commonsense that surprised me, “and that as
long as your present conditions endure they never can be. You must excuse
the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your
economic ideals constantly creates in me. I always think of you
politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these
other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the
aristocratic countries of Europe in theory, or practice. It is very
puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to
establish insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of
the brotherhood which your policy proclaims?”
Mrs. Makely looked at me as if she were helpless to grapple with his
meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: “I
don’t believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used
to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are
a very good thing.”
Mrs. Makely now came to my support. “The Americans are very high-spirited,
in every class, and I don’t believe one of those nice farm-boys would like
being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can’t imagine how
proud some of them are.”
“So that they suffer from being excluded as inferiors?”
“Oh, I assure you they don’t feel themselves inferior! They consider
themselves as good as anybody. There are some very interesting characters
among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with
her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to.
That’s her brother, standing there with her--that tall, gaunt young man
with a Roman face; it’s such a common type here in the mountains. Their
father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last
battles that he was promoted. He was badly wounded, but he never took a
pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now the
son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The
daughter takes in sewing, and in that way they manage to make both ends
meet. The girl is really a first-rate seamstress, and so cheap! I give her
a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She’s very
fond of reading; the mother is an invalid, but she reads aloud while the
daughter sews, and you’ve no idea how many books they get through. When
she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have
her sit down; it’s hard to realize that she isn’t a lady. I’m a good deal
criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts notions
into such people’s heads, if you meet them in that way; they’re pretty
free and independent as it is. But when I’m with Lizzie I forget that
there is any difference between us; I can’t help loving the child. You
must take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They’ve got the father’s
sword hung up over the head of the mother’s bed; it’s very touching. But
the poor little place is so bare!”
Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a
question she had the effect of having kept back.
“There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true
that everybody in Altruria does some kind of manual labor?”
“Why, certainly,” he answered, quite as if he had been an American.
“Ladies, too? Or perhaps you have none.”
I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian
had taken it ill. “Perhaps we had better try to understand each other
clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as
they have in England--”
“No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions,” said Mrs.
Makely, with a republican fervor that did my heart good. “It is a word
that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person.”
“But you said just now that you sometimes forgot that your seamstress was
not a lady. Just what did you mean by that?”
Mrs. Makely hesitated. “I meant--I suppose I meant--that she had not the
surroundings of a lady; the social traditions.”
“Then it has something to do with social as well as moral qualities--with
ranks and classes?”
“Classes, yes; but, as you know, we have no ranks in America.” The
Altrurian took off his hat and rubbed an imaginable perspiration from his
forehead. He sighed deeply. “It is all very difficult.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Makely assented, “I suppose it is. All foreigners find it so.
In fact, it is something that you have to live into the notion of; it
can’t be explained.”
“Well, then, my dear madam, will you tell me without further question what
you understand by a lady, and let me live into the notion of it at my
leisure?”
“I will do my best,” said Mrs. Makely. “But it would be so much easier to
tell you _who_ was or who was not a lady. However, your acquaintance is so
limited yet that I must try to do something in the abstract and impersonal
for you. In the first place, a lady must be above the sordid anxieties in
every way. She need not be very rich, but she must have enough, so that
she need not be harassed about making both ends meet, when she ought to be
devoting herself to her social duties. The time is past with us when a
lady could look after the dinner, and perhaps cook part of it herself, and
then rush in to receive her guests and do the amenities. She must have a
certain kind of house, so that her entourage won’t seem cramped and mean,
and she must have nice frocks, of course, and plenty of them. She needn’t
be of the smart set; that isn’t at all necessary; but she can’t afford to
be out of the fashion. Of course, she must have a certain training. She
must have cultivated tastes; she must know about art and literature and
music, and all those kind of things, and, though it isn’t necessary to go
in for anything in particular, it won’t hurt her to have a fad or two. The
nicest kind of fad is charity; and people go in for that a great deal. I
think sometimes they use it to work up with, and there are some who use
religion in the same way; I think it’s horrid; but it’s perfectly safe;
you can’t accuse them of doing it. I’m happy to say, though, that mere
church association doesn’t count socially so much as it used to. Charity
is a great deal more insidious. But you see how hard it is to define
a lady. So much has to be left to the nerves, in all these things. And
then it’s changing all the time; Europe’s coming in, and the old American
ideals are passing away. Things that people did ten years ago would be
impossible now, or at least ridiculous. You wouldn’t be considered vulgar,
quite, but you would certainly be considered a back number, and that’s
almost as bad. Really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I don’t believe I can tell you
what a lady is.”
We all laughed together at her frank confession. The Altrurian asked: “But
do I understand that one of her conditions is that she shall have nothing
whatever to do?”
“Nothing to _do_!” cried Mrs. Makely. “A lady is busy from morning till
night. She always goes to bed perfectly worn out.”
“But with what?” asked the Altrurian.
“With making herself agreeable and her house attractive, with going to
lunches and teas and dinners and concerts and theatres and art
exhibitions, and charity meetings and receptions, and with writing a
thousand and one notes about them, and accepting and declining, and giving
lunches and dinners, and making calls and receiving them, and I don’t know
what all. It’s the most hideous slavery!” Her voice rose into something
like a shriek; one could see that her nerves were going at the mere
thought of it all. “You don’t have a moment to yourself; your life isn’t
your own.”
“But the lady isn’t allowed to do any useful kind of work?”
“_Work_! Don’t you call all that work, and _useful_? I’m sure I envy the
cook in my kitchen at times; I envy the woman that scrubs my floors. Stop!
Don’t ask why I don’t go into my kitchen, or get down on my knees with the
mop. It isn’t possible. You simply can’t. Perhaps you could if you were
very _grande dame_, but if you’re anywhere near the line of necessity, or
ever have been, you can’t. Besides, if we did do our own household work,
as I understand your Altrurian ladies do, what would become of the servant
class? We should be taking away their living, and that would be wicked.”
“It would certainly be wrong to take away the living of a
fellow-creature,” the Altrurian gravely admitted, “and I see the obstacle
in your way.”
“It’s a mountain,” said the lady, with exhaustion in her voice, but a
returning amiability; his forbearance must have placated her.
“May I ask what the use of your society life is?” he ventured, after a
moment.
“Use? Why should it have any? It kills time.”
“Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill
time, and you cannot escape from it without taking away the living of
those dependent on you?”
“Yes,” I put in, “and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It
is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on
that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need
the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The
question is unanswerable.”
“That is true; in your conditions, it is unanswerable,” said the
Altrurian.
“I think,” said Mrs. Makely, “that, under the circumstances, we do pretty
well.”
“Oh, I don’t presume to censure you. And if you believe that your
conditions are the best--”
“We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds,” I said,
devoutly; and it struck me that, if ever we came to have a national
church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions
ought to be in the confession of faith.
The Altrurian’s mind had not followed mine so far. “And your young girls,”
he asked of Mrs. Makely--“how is their time occupied?”
“You mean after they come out in society?”
“I suppose so.”
She seemed to reflect. “I don’t know that it is very differently occupied.
Of course, they have their own amusements; they have their dances, and
little clubs, and their sewing-societies. I suppose that even an Altrurian
would applaud their sewing for the poor?” Mrs. Makely asked, rather
satirically.
“Yes,” he answered; and then he asked: “Isn’t it taking work away from
some needy seamstress, though? But I suppose you excuse it to the
thoughtlessness of youth.”
Mrs. Makely did not say, and he went on: “What I find it so hard to
understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion,
such as you have been describing to me. I don’t see how you keep well.”
“We _don’t_ keep well,” said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amusement. “I
don’t suppose that when you get above the working classes, till you reach
the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America.”
“Isn’t that rather extreme?” I ventured to ask.
“No,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s shamefully moderate,” and she seemed to
delight in having made out such a bad case for her sex. You can’t stop a
woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better left it alone.
“But,” said the Altrurian, “if you are forbidden by motives of humanity
from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who
live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, “we prefer to take
medicine.”
“You must approve of that,” I said to the Altrurian, “as you consider
exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely,” I
entreated, “you’re giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been
telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your
summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as
intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don’t take that consolation
from me.”
“I won’t, altogether,” she said. “I couldn’t have the heart to, after the
pretty way you’ve put it. I don’t call it very athletic, sitting around on
hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I
don’t deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do
go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing.” She
paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: “And you ought to see what
wrecks they get home in the fall!”
The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather
sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry;
his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.
“But your ladies,” he asked, “they have the summer for rest, however they
use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say
so,” he added, with a deferential glance at me.
“Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the class that can afford
it,” said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded as if she felt a tacit censure in his
question. “It wouldn’t be the least use for us to stay and fry through our
summers in the city simply because our fathers and brothers had to.
Besides, we are worn out, at the end of the season, and they want us to
come away as much as we want to come.”
“Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their
attitude toward women.”
“They are perfect dears,” said Mrs. Makely, “and here comes one of the
best of them.”
At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her
shoulders. “Whose character is it you’re blasting?” he asked, jocosely.
“Where in the world did you find it?” she asked, meaning the shawl.
“It was where you left it--on the sofa, in the side parlor. I had to take
my life in my hand when I crossed among all those waltzers in there. There
must have been as many as three couples on the floor. Poor girls! I pity
them, off at these places. The fellows in town have a good deal better
time. They’ve got their clubs, and they’ve got the theatre, and when the
weather gets too much for them they can run off down to the shore for the
night. The places anywhere within an hour’s ride are full of fellows. The
girls don’t have to dance with one another there, or with little boys. Of
course, that’s all right if they like it better.” He laughed at his wife,
and winked at me, and smoked swiftly, in emphasis of his irony.
“Then the young gentlemen whom the young ladies here usually meet in
society are all at work in the cities?” the Altrurian asked him, rather
needlessly, as I had already said so.
“Yes, those who are not out West, growing up with the country, except, of
course, the fellows who have inherited a fortune. They’re mostly off on
yachts.”
“But why do your young men go West to grow up with the country?” pursued
my friend.
“Because the East is _grown_ up. They have got to hustle, and the West is
the place to hustle. To make money,” added Makely, in response to a
puzzled glance of the Altrurian.
“Sometimes,” said his wife, “I almost hate the name of money.”
“Well, so long as you don’t hate the thing, Peggy.”
“Oh, we must have it, I suppose,” she sighed. “They used to say about the
girls who grew into old maids just after the Rebellion that they had lost
their chance in the war for the Union. I think quite as many lose their
chance now in the war for the dollar.”
“Mars hath slain his thousands, but Mammon hath slain his tens of
thousands,” I suggested, lightly; we all like to recognize the facts, so
long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.
“Yes, quite as bad as that,” said Mrs. Makely.
“Well, my dear, you are expensive, you know,” said her husband, “and if we
want to have you--why, we’ve got to hustle first.”
“Oh, I don’t blame you, you poor things! There’s nothing to be done about
it; it’s just got to go on and on; I don’t see how it’s ever to end.”
The Altrurian had been following us with that air of polite mystification
which I had begun to dread in him. “Then, in your good society you
postpone, and even forego, the happiness of life in the struggle to be
rich?”
“Well, you see,” said Makely, “a fellow don’t like to ask a girl to share
a home that isn’t as nice as the home she has left.”
“Sometimes,” his wife put in, rather sadly, “I think that it’s all a
mistake, and that we’d be willing to share the privations of the man we
loved.”
“Well,” said Makely, with a laugh, “we wouldn’t like to risk it.”
I laughed with him, but his wife did not, and in the silence that ensued
there was nothing to prevent the Altrurian from coming in with another of
his questions: “How far does this state of things extend downward? Does it
include the working classes, too?”
“Oh no!” we all answered together, and Mrs. Makely said: “With your
Altrurian ideas, I suppose you would naturally sympathize a great deal
more with the lower classes, and think they had to endure all the
hardships in our system; but if you could realize how the struggle goes on
in the best society, and how we all have to fight for what we get, or
don’t get, you would be disposed to pity our upper classes, too.”
“I am sure I should,” said the Altrurian.
Makely remarked: “I used to hear my father say that slavery was harder on
the whites than it was on the blacks, and that he wanted it done away with
for the sake of the masters.”
Makely rather faltered in conclusion, as if he were not quite satisfied
with his remark, and I distinctly felt a want of proportion in it; but I
did not wish to say anything. His wife had no reluctance.
“Well, there’s no comparison between the two things, but the struggle
certainly doesn’t affect the working classes as it does us. They go on
marrying and giving in marriage in the old way. They have nothing to lose,
and so they can afford it.”
“Blessed am dem what don’t expect nuffin! Oh, I tell you, it’s a
working-man’s country,” said Makely, through his cigar-smoke. “You ought
to see them in town, these summer nights, in the parks and squares and
cheap theatres. Their girls are not off for their health, anywhere, and
their fellows are not off growing up with the country. Their day’s work is
over, and they’re going in for a good time. And, then, walk through the
streets where they live, and see them out on the stoops with their wives
and children! I tell you, it’s enough to make a fellow wish he was poor
himself.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s astonishing how strong and well those women
keep, with their great families and their hard work. Sometimes I really
envy them.”
“Do you suppose,” said the Altrurian, “that they are aware of the
sacrifices which the ladies of the upper classes make in leaving all the
work to them, and suffering from the nervous debility which seems to be
the outcome of your society life?”
“They have not the remotest idea of it. They have no conception of what a
society woman goes through with. They think we do nothing. They envy us,
too, and sometimes they’re so ungrateful and indifferent, if you try to
help them, or get on terms with them, that I believe they hate us.”
“But that comes from ignorance?”
“Yes, though I don’t know that they are really any more ignorant of us
than we are of them. It’s the other half on both sides.”
“Isn’t that a pity, rather?”
“Of course it’s a pity, but what can you do? You can’t know what people
are like unless you live like them, and then the question is whether the
game is worth the candle. I should like to know how you manage in
Altruria.”
“Why, we have solved the problem in the only way, as you say, that it can
be solved. We all live alike.”
“Isn’t that a little, just a very trifling little bit, monotonous?” Mrs.
Makely asked, with a smile. “But there is everything, of course, in being
used to it. To an unregenerate spirit--like mine, for example--it seems
intolerable.”
“But why? When you were younger, before you were married, you all lived at
home together--or, perhaps, you were an only child?”
“Oh, no indeed! There were ten of us.”
“Then you all lived alike, and shared equally?”
“Yes, but we were a family.”
“We do not conceive of the human race except as a family.”
“Now, excuse me, Mr. Homos, that is all nonsense. You cannot have the
family feeling without love, and it is impossible to love other people.
That talk about the neighbor, and all that, is all well enough--” She
stopped herself, as if she dimly remembered who began that talk, and then
went on: “Of course, I accept it as a matter of faith, and the spirit of
it, nobody denies that; but what I mean is, that you must have frightful
quarrels all the time.” She tried to look as if this were where she really
meant to bring up, and he took her on the ground she had chosen.
“Yes, we have quarrels. Hadn’t you at home?”
“We fought like little cats and dogs, at times.”
Makely and I burst into a laugh at her magnanimous frankness. The
Altrurian remained serious. “But, because you lived alike, you knew each
other, and so you easily made up your quarrels. It is quite as simple with
us, in our life as a human family.”
This notion of a human family seemed to amuse Mrs. Makely more and more;
she laughed and laughed again. “You must excuse me,” she panted, at last,
“but I cannot imagine it! No, it is too ludicrous. Just fancy the jars of
an ordinary family multiplied by the population of a whole continent! Why,
you must be in a perpetual squabble. You can’t have any peace of your
lives. It’s worse, far worse, than our way.”
“But, madam,” he began, “you are supposing our family to be made up of
people with all the antagonistic interests of your civilization. As a
matter of fact--”
“No, no! _I know human nature_, Mr. Homos!” She suddenly jumped up and
gave him her hand. “Good-night,” she said, sweetly, and as she drifted off
on her husband’s arm she looked back at us and nodded in gay triumph.
The Altrurian turned upon me with unabated interest. “And have you no
provision in your system for finally making the lower classes understand
the sufferings and sacrifices of the upper classes in their behalf? Do you
expect to do nothing to bring them together in mutual kindness?”
“Well, not this evening,” I said, throwing the end of my cigar away. “I’m
going to bed--aren’t you?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, good-night. Are you sure you can find your room?”
“Oh yes. Good-night.”