Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

  XIII

  Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for thosepeople, and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for thetwo men, and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call LadyMoors, but addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of theAmerican party in his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer toRebecca. They were all rather bewildered, and so were the butler andthe 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 anawe-stricken way trying to get some light from me on the situation. Hecontributed as much as any one to bring about a peaceful submission tothe inevitable, for he had been a near witness of what had happened tothe crew when they attempted their rebellion to the authorities; but hedid not profess to understand the matter, and from time to time he seemedto question the reality of it.

  The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both tookan attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it withinterest 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 intothe world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his firsttask by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurianstyle of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, heliked it better, and during the three hours of the first morning'sObligatoires, his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to berestrained rather than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take fiveminutes for rest out of every twenty, and he could not get over hislife-long habit of working against time. The Altrurians tried to makehim understand that here people must not work _against_ time, but mustalways work _with_ it, so as to have enough work to do each day;otherwise they must remain idle during the Obligatoires and tend todemoralize the workers. It seemed that Lady Moors had a passion forgardening, and she was set to work with her father on the border offlowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was hoeing. She knew aboutflowers, and from her childhood had amused herself by growing them, andso far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to dig, she was delightedto 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 doanything for them, we heard them laughing and talking gayly togetherbefore we reached them. They said they had looked their job (as Mr.Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the Voluntaries, andhad decided how they would manage, and they had set to work that morningas soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her mother get thebreakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a picnic, thoughfrom the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on me, when I sawher coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in her hand, Idecided 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 abouthim which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to ourquarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a partyof Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. Theywere having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understandeach other in their want of a common language. It appeared that theAltrurians were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and weredoing something which he had indicated to them by signs. We offeredour services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence ofhis suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band ofenthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr.Ruskin's direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as ratheramateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out ofpure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushedupon 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 theywould not feel it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a verysimple matter like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they hadbeen 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 liketo join them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stoneout of a neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. Weexplained to him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time hewas looking at them admirably, and he said, "It's really very good," andwe understood that he meant their classic working-dress, and when headded, "I should really fancy trying it myself one day," and we told themthey wanted to go and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But wepersuaded them not to urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for hiswork in his yachting flannels.

  I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his pointof view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage andhigh breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an Americanmillionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself anyfurther by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that hismerely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this wasonly speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working fora 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 foran Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regardidleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, sofar as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they wouldmake 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 inmaking them understand that they were to go to work in the fields andshops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refusedoutright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electricianrescued them with the sort of net and electric filament which had beenemployed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a bettermind by withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for itby working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of therebels were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought notto have required the application of the net and filament; but they hadnot such appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving somuch. However, in a very short time they were at work, too, and more orless resigned, though they did not profess to understand it.

  You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made thepersonal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's _chef,_ Anatole, I found myaffections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquilineman, with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held anexalted position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, hecould easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented withmisgivings, not for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall.It became my pleasing office to explain the situation to MonsieurAnatole, who, when he imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, whathe had never liked to tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions ofAmericans on the subject, that he had belonged in France to a party ofwhich the political and social ideal was almost identical with thatof the Altrurians. He asked for an early opportunity of addressing thevillage Assembly and explaining this delightful circumstance in public,and he profited by the occasion to embrace the first Altrurian we met andkiss him on both cheeks.

  His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquirewhether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should beassigned 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 hisconcitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful instudying the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and thesubstitution of the more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the useof which, he understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In thecourse of his preparation for the role of _chef_, which he had playedboth in France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi;and the result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and u
p to thismoment he has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to theAltrurian table. This has added to their dietary in several importantparticulars, the fungi he has discovered being among those highlydecorative and extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in thedeep woods and offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near theruins of the old capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods willgrow. Anatole is very proud of his success, and at more than one CommunalAssembly has lectured upon his discoveries and treated of theirpreparation for the table, with sketches of them as he found themgrowing, colored after nature by his own hand. He has himself become afanatical vegetarian, having, he confesses, always had a secret loathingfor the meats he stooped to direct the cooking of among the French andAmerican bourgeoisie in the days which he already looks back upon asamong the most benighted of his history.