Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

  I

  I could hardly have believed, my dear Dorothea, that I should be so latein writing to you from Altruria, but you can easily believe that I amthoroughly ashamed of myself for my neglect. It is not for want ofthinking of you, or talking of you, that I have seemed so much moreungrateful than I am. My husband and I seldom have any serious talk whichdoesn't somehow come round to you. He admires you and likes you as muchas I do, and he does his best, poor man, to understand you; but his notunderstanding you is only a part of his general failure to understand howany American can be kind and good in conditions which he considers soabominable as those of the capitalistic world. He is not nearly so severeon us as he used to be at times when he was among us. When the otherAltrurians are discussing us he often puts in a reason for us againsttheir logic; and I think he has really forgotten, a good deal, how badthings are with us, or else finds his own memory of them incredible. Buthis experience of the world outside his own country has taught him how totemper the passion of the Altrurians for justice with a tolerance of theunjust; and when they bring him to book on his own report of us he triesto explain us away, and show how we are not so bad as we ought to be.

  For weeks after we came to Altruria I was so unhistorically blest that ifI had been disposed to give you a full account of myself I should havehad no events to hang the narrative on. Life here is so subjective (ifyou don't know what that is, you poor dear, you must get Mr. Twelvemoughto explain) that there is usually nothing like news in it, and I alwaysfeel that the difference between Altruria and America is so immense thatit is altogether beyond me to describe it. But now we have had someoccurrences recently, quite in the American sense, and these havefurnished me with an incentive as well as opportunity to send you aletter. Do you remember how, one evening after dinner, in New York, youand I besieged my husband and tried to make him tell us why Altruria wasso isolated from the rest of the world, and why such a great andenlightened continent should keep itself apart? I see still his look ofhorror when Mr. Makely suggested that the United States should send anexpedition and "open" Altruria, as Commodore Perry "opened" Japan in1850, and try to enter into commercial relations with it. The best hecould do was to say what always seemed so incredible, and keep onassuring us that Altruria wished for no sort of public relations withEurope or America, but was very willing to depend for an indefinite timefor its communication with those regions on vessels putting into itsports from stress of one kind or other, or castaway on its coasts. Theyare mostly trading-ships or whalers, and they come a great deal oftenerthan you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards, because their crewsare poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their adventures are alwaysdistrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if they told thestories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband himself tookone of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us, catching theAustralasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you by the samesort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a longerletter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a week yet,because it is so hard to get her crew together.

  Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so stronglyto that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always usethe English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be livingthe tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dreamwhich I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember howfunny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the wholetruth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, withoutreally knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked noteI had written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will,but against my word. Of course I didn't put it in just that way, but in away to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had waswhen Mr. Makely said, "Then, when a woman tells a man that all is overbetween them forever, she means that she would like to discuss thebusiness with him?" I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to methat you and I had gone back in that awful moment and were two girlstogether, just as we used to be at school. I was proud of the way youstood up for me, because I thought that if you could tolerate me afterwhat I had confessed I could not be quite a fool. I knew that I deservedat least some pity, and though I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad ofyour indignation with him, and of your faith in Aristides. When it cameto the question of what I should do, I don't know which of you I owed themost to. It was a kind of comfort to have Mr. Makely acknowledge thatthough he regarded Aristides as a myth, still he believed that he was athoroughly _good_ myth, and couldn't tell a lie if he wanted to; and Iloved you, and shall love you more than any one else but him, for sayingthat Aristides was the most real man you had ever met, and that ifeverything he said was untrue you would trust him to the end of theworld.

  But, Dolly, it wasn't all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, andwhen you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where therewas nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr.Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that Iwas coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There isno use trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to myhusband. She thought there was something uncanny about him, though shefelt as we did that there was nothing uncanny _in_ him; but a manwho pretended to come from a country where there was no riches and nopoverty could not be trusted with any woman's happiness; and though shecould not help loving him, she thought I ought to tear him out of myheart, and if I could not do that I ought to have myself shut up in anasylum. We had a dreadful time when I told her what I had decided to do,and I was almost frantic. At last, when she saw that I was determined tofollow him, she yielded, not because she was convinced, but because shecould not give me up; I wouldn't have let her if she could. I believethat the only thing which reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makelybelieved in him, and thought I had better do what I wanted to, if nothingcould keep me from it. I shall never, never forget Mr. Makely's goodnessin coming to talk with her, and how skillfully he managed, withoutcommitting himself to Altruria, to declare his faith in my Altrurian.Even then she was troubled about what she thought the indelicacy of mybehavior in following him across the sea, and she had all sorts of doubtsas to how he would receive me when we met in Liverpool. It wasn't veryreasonable of me to say that if he cast me off I should still love himmore than any other human being, and his censure would be more preciousto me than the praise of the rest of the world.

  I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded tomy love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left mymother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, andI should somehow have _forced_ her to go if she had not yielded. When shedid yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far fromhindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I couldhave got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was heridea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely's hands, andto trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did notcare for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stoodbetween me and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wildimpossibility he should reject me when we met, I should need it for thelife I must go back to in New York. She behaved like a martyr as well asa heroine, for till we reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice tome. She stubbornly doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her thejustice to say that she has been convinced by the fact. The best she cansay of it is that it is like the world of her girlhood; and she has goneback to the simple life here from the artificial life in New York, withthe joy of a child. She works the whole day, and she would play if shehad ever learned how. She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there couldbe a bigoted Altrurian my mother would be one.