Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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.”

  VI

  I left my guest abruptly, with a feeling of vexation not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the possession of great gifts, of any kind of superiority, involved the sense of obligation to others, and the wish to identify one’s self with the great mass of men, rather than the ambition to distinguish one’s self from them; and that the Altrurians honored their gifted men in the measure they did this. A man reared in such a civilization must naturally find it difficult to get our point of view; with social inclusion as the ideal, he would with difficulty conceive of our ideal of social exclusion; but I think we had all been very patient with him; we should have made short work with an American who had approached us with the same inquiries. Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic founded on the notion, elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother’s keeper, the things he asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile; but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought to have been self-evident to him that when a commonwealth of sixty million Americans based itself upon the great principle of self-seeking, self-seeking was the best thing, and, whatever hardship it seemed to work, it must carry with it unseen blessings in tenfold measure. If a few hundred thousand favored Americans enjoyed the privilege of socially contemning all the rest, it was as clearly right and just that they should do so as that four thousand American millionaires should be richer than all the other Americans put together. Such a status, growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity, must evince a divine purpose to any one intimate with the designs of Providence, and it seemed a kind of impiety to doubt its perfection. I excused the misgivings which I could not help seeing in the Altrurian to his alien traditions, and I was aware that my friends had done so, too. But, if I could judge from myself, he must have left them all sensible of their effort; and this was not pleasant. I could not blink the fact that although I had openly disagreed with him on every point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had introduced a blatant American Democrat into Tory society; or, rather, as if a Southerner of the olden time had harbored a Northern Abolitionist and permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his neighbors. People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end of their patience with the tacit enmity of his sentiments and the explicit vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end came I must be attainted with him.

  I did not like the notion of this, and I meant to escape it if I could. I confess that I would have willingly disowned him, as I had already disavowed his opinions, but there was no way of doing it short of telling him to go away, and I was not ready to do that. Something in the man, I do not know what, mysteriously appealed to me. He was not contemptibly puerile without being lovably childlike, and I could only make up my mind to be more and more frank with him and to try and shield him, as well as myself, from the effects I dreaded.

  I fell asleep planning an excursion farther in
to the mountains, which should take up the rest of the week that I expected him to stay with me, and would keep him from following up his studies of American life where they would be so injurious to both of us as they must in our hotel. A knock at my door roused me, and I sent a drowsy “Come in!” toward it from the bedclothes without looking that way.

  “Good-morning!” came back in the rich, gentle voice of the Altrurian. I lifted my head with a jerk from the pillow, and saw him standing against the closed door, with my shoes in his hand. “Oh, I am sorry I waked you. I thought—”

  “Not at all, not at all,” I said. “It’s quite time, I dare say. But you oughtn’t to have taken the trouble to bring my shoes in.”

  “I wasn’t altogether disinterested in it,” he returned. “I wished you to compliment me on them. Don’t you think they are pretty well done, for an amateur?” He came toward my bed, and turned them about in his hands, so that they would catch the light, and smiled down upon me.

  “I don’t understand,” I began.

  “Why,” he said, “I blacked them, you know.”

  “You blacked them?”

  “Yes,” he returned, easily. “I thought I would go into the baggage-room, after we parted last night, to look for a piece of mine that had not been taken to my room, and I found the porter there, with his wrist bound up. He said he had strained it in handling a lady’s Saratoga — he said a Saratoga was a large trunk — and I begged him to let me relieve him at the boots he was blacking. He refused at first, but I insisted upon trying my hand at a pair, and then he let me go on with the men’s boots; he said he could varnish the ladies’ without hurting his wrist. It needed less skill than I supposed, and after I had done a few pairs he said I could black boots as well as he.”

  “Did anybody see you?” I gasped, and I felt a cold perspiration break out on me.