Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Ah, that’s no reason,” he returned. “Why don’t they want it?”

  “Really,” I said, out of all patience, “I think I must let you ask the ladies themselves,” and I turned and moved again toward the hotel, but the Altrurian gently detained me.

  “Excuse me,” he began.

  “No, no,” I said.

  “‘The feast is set, the guests are met,

  May’st hear the merry din.’

  Come in and see the young people dance.”

  “Wait,” he entreated; “tell me a little more about the old people first. This digression about the ladies has been very interesting, but I thought you were going to speak of the men here. Who are they, or, rather, what are they?”

  “Why, as I said before, they are all business men and professional men; people who spend their lives in studies and counting-rooms and offices, and have come up here for a few weeks or a few days of well-earned repose. They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors, and clergymen and merchants, and brokers and bankers. There’s hardly any calling you Won’t find represented among them. As I was thinking just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic.”

  “I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your intelligence in making my observations of your life under such advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your national joke, without stirring beyond the piazza of your hospitable hotel,” said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a compliment like that to one’s intelligence, and I said I should be very happy to be of use to him. He thanked me, and said: “Then, to begin with, I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all overworked.”

  “Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and our professional men work. I suppose there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that we cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one end out for a little while every summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind and body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the tremendous strain, and every country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics.” I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we Americans are proud of overworking ourselves; Heaven knows why.

  The Altrurian murmured: “Awful! Shocking!” But I thought somehow he had not really followed me very attentively in my celebration of our national violation of the laws of life and its consequences. “I am glad,” he went on, “that your business men and professional men are beginning to realize the folly and wickedness of overwork. Shall I find some of your other weary workers here, too?”

  “What other weary workers?” I asked in turn, for I imagined I had gone over pretty much the whole list.

  “Why,” said the Altrurian, “your mechanics and day laborers, your iron-moulders and glass-blowers, your miners and farmers, your printers and mill-operatives, your trainmen and quarry-hands. Or do they prefer to go to resorts of their own?”

  III

  It was not easy to make sure of such innocence as prompted this inquiry of my Altrurian friend. The doubt whether he could really be in earnest was something that I had already felt; and it was destined to beset me, as it did now, again and again. My first thought was that, of course, he was trying a bit of cheap irony on me, a mixture of the feeble sarcasm and false sentiment that makes us smile when we find it in the philippics of the industrial agitators. For a moment I did not know but I had fallen victim to a walking delegate on his vacation, who was employing his summer leisure in going about the country in the guise of a traveler from Altruria, and foisting himself upon people who would have had nothing to do with him in his real character. But in another moment I perceived that this was impossible. I could not suppose that the friend who had introduced him to me would be capable of seconding so poor a joke, and, besides, I could not imagine why a walking delegate should wish to address his clumsy satire to me particularly. For the present, at least, there was nothing for it but to deal with this inquiry as if it were made in good faith and in the pursuit of useful information. It struck me as grotesque; but it would not have been decent to treat it as if it were so. I was obliged to regard it seriously, and so I decided to shirk it.

  “Well,” I said, “that opens up rather a large field, which lies somewhat outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what they do with their leisure. I’m pretty certain, though, you won’t meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn’t afford it, and I fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our guests. We respect them thoroughly; every American does, and we know that the prosperity of the country rests with them; we have a theory that they are politically sovereign, but we see very little of them, and we don’t associate with them. In fact, our cultivated people have so little interest in them socially that they don’t like to meet them, even in fiction; they prefer refined and polished ladies and gentlemen, whom they can have some sympathy with; and I always go to the upper classes for my types. It won’t do to suppose, though, that we are indifferent to the working classes in their place. Their condition is being studied a good deal just now, and there are several persons here who will be able to satisfy your curiosity on the points you have made, I think. I will introduce you to them.”

  The Altrurian did not try to detain me this time. He said he should be very glad indeed to meet my friends, and I led the way toward a little group at the corner of the piazza. They were men whom I particularly liked, for one reason or another; they were intelligent and open-minded, and they were thoroughly American. One was a banker; another was a minister; there was a lawyer, and there was a doctor; there was a professor of political economy in one of our colleges; and there was a retired manufacturer — I do not know what he used to manufacture: cotton or iron, or something like that. They all rose politely as I came up with my Altrurian, and I fancied in them a sensation of expectancy created by the rumor of his eccentric behavior which must have spread through the hotel. But they controlled this if they had it, and I could see, as the light fell upon his face from a spray of electrics on the nearest pillar, that sort of liking kindle in theirs which I had felt myself at first sight of him.

  I said, “Gentlemen, I wish to introduce my friend, Mr. Homos,” and then I presented them severally to him by name. We all sat down, and I explained: “Mr. Homos is from Altruria. He is visiting our country for the first time, and is greatly interested in the working of our institutions. He has been asking me some rather hard questions about certain phases of our civilization; and the fact is that I have launched him upon you because I don’t feel quite able to cope with him.”

  They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked, with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, “What point in our polity can be obscure to the author of ‘Glove and Gauntlet’ and ‘Airs and Graces’?”

  They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked my friend: “Is it long since you left Altruria?”

  “It seems a great while ago,” the Altrurian answered, “but it is really only a few weeks.”

  “You came by way of England, I suppose?”

  “Yes; there is no direct line to America,” said the Altrurian.

  “That seems rather odd,” I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.

  “Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere,” the banker instructed me.

  “The tariff has killed our shipbuilding,” said the professor. No one took up this firebrand, and the p
rofessor added: “Your name is Greek, isn’t it, Mr. Homos?”

  “Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families,” said the Altrurian.

  “And do you think,” asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, “that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled Atlantis’?”

  “No, I can’t say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to Britain.”

  “Yes, we know that,” the minister intervened, “but it is perfectly astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean’s surface a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since Columbus sailed westward.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. And I wish,” the doctor suggested in his turn, “that Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us about ours.”

  “Yes,” I coincided, “I’m sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At least I should; but I brought our friend up in the hope that the professor would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a defenceless stranger.” Since the professor had given me that little stab, I was rather anxious to see how he would handle the desire for information in the Altrurian which I had found so prickly.

  This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious about Altruria as the rest, and said he would rather hear of it. But the Altrurian said: “I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to talk of Altruria as long as you like; or, if you will come to us, I shall be still happier to show you many things that I couldn’t make you understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and I hope you will have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have fancied in my friend here,” he went on, with a smile toward me, “a suspicion that I was not entirely single in some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize.”

  “Oh, not at all,” I protested, for it was not polite to admit a conjecture so accurate. “We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the foreigner, though we believe in it fully: we are used to the English tourist.”

  My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: “I am very glad to hear it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the apparent contradictions were so colossal—”

  “We have everything on a large scale here,” said the banker, breaking off the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, “and we rather pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I said, I don’t believe in you, but I respect you.” I thought this charming, myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly and in terms so just and generous.

  “Pretty good,” said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear, “for a bloated bond-holder.”

  “Yes,” I whispered back, “I wish I had said it. What an American way of putting it! Emerson would have liked it himself. After all, he was our prophet.”

  “He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him,” said the doctor, with a soft laugh.

  “Which of our contradictions,” asked the banker, in the same tone of gentle bonhomie, “has given you and our friend pause just now?”

  The Altrurian answered, after a moment: “I am not sure that it is a contradiction, for as yet I have not ascertained the facts I was seeking. Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place in regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people are now allowing themselves; and I was asking him where your working-men spent their leisure.”

  He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality. But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh; they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made answer for us all:

  “Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter on snakes: those people have no leisure to spend.”

  “Except when they go out on a strike,” said the manufacturer, with a certain grim humor of his own; I never heard anything more dramatic than the account he once gave of the way he broke up a labor union. “I have seen a good many of them at leisure then.”

  “Yes,” the doctor chimed in, “and in my younger days, when I necessarily had a good deal of charity practice, I used to find them at leisure when they were ‘laid off.’ It always struck me as such a pretty euphemism. It seemed to minify the harm of the thing so. It seemed to take all the hunger and cold and sickness out of the fact. To be simply ‘laid off’ was so different from losing your work and having to face beggary or starvation.”

  “Those people,” said the professor, “never put anything by. They are wasteful and improvident, almost to a man; and they learn nothing by experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question of demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come, when their work must stop unless the men that give them work are willing to lose money.”

  “And I’ve seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down,” the manufacturer remarked; “lose it hand over hand, to keep the men at work; and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher wages. You have no idea of the ingratitude of those people.” He said this toward the minister, as if he did not wish to be thought hard; and, in fact, he was a very kindly man.

  “Yes,” replied the minister, “that is one of the most sinister features of the situation. They seem really to regard their employers as their enemies. I don’t know how it will end.”

  “I know how it would end if I had my way,” said the professor. “There wouldn’t be any labor unions, and there wouldn’t be any strikes.”

  “That is all very well,” said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I always liked in him, “as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don’t understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal process of ‘laying off.’ The law of demand and supply I respect as much as any one — it’s something like the constitution; but, all the same, I should object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I’m probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven’t laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income went on or not. Perhaps the professor has.” The professor did not say, and we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: “I don’t see how those fellows stand it.”

  “They don’t, all of them,” said the doctor. “Or their wives and children don’t. Some of them die.”

  “I wonder,” the lawyer pursued, “what has become of the goo
d old American fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five thousand men to take their places in the afternoon — and not men who are turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the very thing the strikers have done.”

  “That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes,” the professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. “If there were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter.”

  “Yes, but that isn’t the point, quite,” said the lawyer.

  “By-the-way, what is the point?” I asked, with my humorous lightness.

  “Why, I supposed,” said the banker, “it was the question how the working classes amused their elegant leisure. But it seems to be almost anything else.”

  We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated: “No, no; never mind that now. That is a matter of comparatively little interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the working-man among you.”

  “Do you mean his political status? It’s that of every other citizen.”

  “I don’t mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have in Altruria, that equal political rights are only means to an end, and as an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the working-man, and his social status.”

  I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple question. I myself could not have hopefully undertaken to answer it; but the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had devoted a great deal of thought to them, and ought to have been qualified to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge, as if it were uncomfortable or discreditable. The banker continued to smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar away.