Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Neither Mrs. Makely nor myself was ready with a reply, and we left the word with the Altrurian, who suggested: “Still, I suppose they will be more prosperous in the West on the new land they take up?”

  The young fellow leaned his arms on the wheel by which he stood. “What do you mean by taking up new land?”

  “Why, out of the public domain—”

  “There ain’t any public domain that’s worth having. All the good land is in the hands of railroads and farm syndicates and speculators; and if you want a farm in the West you’ve got to buy it; the East is the only place where folks give them away, because they ain’t worth keeping. If you haven’t got the ready money, you can buy one on credit, and pay ten, twenty, and thirty per cent. interest, and live in a dugout on the plains — till your mortgage matures.” The young man took his arms from the wheel and moved a few steps backward, as he added: “I’ll see you over at the house later.”

  The driver touched his horses, and we started briskly off again. But I confess I had quite enough of his pessimism, and as we drove away I leaned back toward the Altrurian and said: “Now, it is all perfect nonsense to pretend that things are at that pass with us. There are more millionaires in America, probably, than there are in all the other civilized countries of the globe, and it is not possible that the farming population should be in such a hopeless condition. All wealth comes out of the earth, and you may be sure they get their full share of it.”

  “I am glad to hear you say so,” said the Altrurian. “What is the meaning of this new party in the West that seems to have held a convention lately? I read something of it in the train yesterday.”

  “Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds, who don’t want to pay back the money they have borrowed, or who find themselves unable to meet their interest. It will soon blow over. We are always having these political flurries. A good crop will make it all right with them.”

  “But is it true that they have to pay such rates of interest as our young friend mentioned?”

  “Well,” I said, seeing the thing in the humorous light which softens for us Americans so many of the hardships of others, “I suppose that man likes to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip. That’s human nature, you know.”

  “Is it?” asked the Altrurian.

  It seemed to me that he had asked something like that before when I alleged human nature in defence of some piece of every-day selfishness. But I thought best not to notice it, and I went on: “The land is so rich out there that a farm will often pay for itself with a single crop.”

  “Is it possible?” cried the Altrurian. “Then I suppose it seldom really happens that a mortgage is foreclosed, in the way our young friend insinuated?”

  “Well, I can’t say that exactly”; and, having admitted so much, I did not feel bound to impart a fact that popped perversely into my mind. I was once talking with a Western money-lender, a very good sort of fellow, frank and open as the day; I asked him whether the farmers generally paid off their mortgages, and he answered me that if the mortgage was to the value of a fourth of the land, the farmer might pay it off, but if it were to a half, or a third even, he never paid it, but slaved on and died in his debts. “You may be sure, however,” I concluded, “that our young friend takes a jaundiced view of the situation.”

  “Now, really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I must insist upon dropping this everlasting talk about money. I think it is perfectly disgusting, and I believe it was Mr. Makely’s account of his speculations that kept me awake last night. My brain got running on figures till the dark seemed to be all sown with dollar-marks, like the stars in the Milky Way. I — ugh! What in the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!”

  Mrs. Makely passed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the driver pulled up short and a group of barefooted children broke in front of his horses and scuttled out of the dust into the road-side bushes like a covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same in size, but there turned out to be only five or six; or at least no more showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush in quiet enjoyment of the lady’s alarm.

  “Don’t you know that you might have got killed?” she demanded, with that severity good women feel for people who have just escaped with their lives. “How lovely the dirty little dears are!” she added, in the next wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half-length above the bushes, and she asked: “Don’t you know that you oughtn’t to play in the road when there are so many teams passing? Are all those your brothers and sisters?”

  He ignored the first question. “One’s my cousin.” I pulled out a half-dozen coppers, and held my hand toward him. “See if there is one for each.” They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical problem except the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing. I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out at her feet and caught it up in his mouth. “Oh, good gracious!” I called out in my light, humorous way. “Do you suppose he’s going to spend it for candy?” The little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed with the gratitude that even small favors inspire. “Bring your sister here,” I said to the boldest boy, and, when he came up with the little woman, I put another copper into her hand. “Look out that the greedy dog doesn’t get it,” I said, and my gayety met with fresh applause. “Where do you live?” I asked, with some vague purpose of showing the Altrurian the kindliness that exists between our upper and lower classes.

  “Over there,” said the boy. I followed the twist of his head, and glimpsed a wooden cottage on the border of the forest, so very new that the sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down from the threshold, which still wanted a doorstep, and came slowly out to us. The children ran to her with their coppers, and then followed her back to us.

  Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us: “I hope you weren’t frightened. We didn’t drive over any of them.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t frightened,” said the young woman. “It’s a very safe place to bring up children, in the country, and I never feel uneasy about them.”

  “Yes, if they are not under the horses’ feet,” said Mrs. Makely, mingling instruction and amusement very judiciously in her reply. “Are they all yours?”

  “Only five,” said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock. “He’s my sister’s. She lives just below here.” Her children had grouped themselves about her, and she kept passing her hands caressingly over their little heads as she talked. “My sister has nine children, but she has the rest at church with her to-day.”

  “You don’t speak like an American,” Mrs. Makely suggested.

  “No, we’re English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That’s my little palace.” The woman nodded her head toward the cottage.

  “It’s going to be very nice,” said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception of her pride in it.

  “Yes, if we ever get money to finish it. Thank you for the children.”

  “Oh, it was this gentleman.” Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the merit of my good action as modestly as I could.

  “Then thank you, sir,” said the young woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely: “You’re not living about here, ma’am?”

  “Oh no, we’re staying at the hotel.”

  “At the hotel! It must be very dear, there.”

  “Yes, it is expensive,” said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction in her voice which we all feel in spending a great deal of money.

  “But I suppose you can afford it,
” said the woman, whose eye was running hungrily over Mrs. Makely’s pretty costume. “Some are poor, and some are rich. That’s the way the world has to be made up, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this point, so that the driver felt warranted in starting up his horses. When we had driven beyond earshot she said: “I knew she was not an American, as soon as she spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no self-respect. That was a pretty bold bid for a contribution to finish up her ‘little palace’! I’m glad you didn’t give her anything, Mr. Twelvemough. I was afraid your sympathies had been wrought upon.”

  “Oh, not at all,” I answered. “I saw the mischief I had done with the children.”

  The Altrurian, who has not asked anything for a long time, but had listened with eager interest to all that passed, now came up smiling with his question: “Will you kindly tell me what harm would have been done by offering the woman a little money to help finish up her cottage?”

  I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political economy. “The very greatest harm. It would have pauperized her. You have no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing. As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it, and they begin to live upon it. The sight of those coppers which I gave her children — more out of joke than charity — demoralized the woman. She took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to guard against every approach to a thing of that sort.”

  “I don’t believe,” said Mrs. Makely, “that an American would have hinted, as she did.”

  “‘No, an American would not have done that, I’m thankful to say. They take fees, but they don’t ask charity, yet.” We went on to exult in the noble independence of the American character in all classes, at some length. We talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last he asked, with a faint sigh: “Then, in your conditions, a kindly impulse to aid one who needs your help is something to be guarded against as possibly pernicious?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing with the problem of poverty. We cannot let people suffer, for that would be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them.”

  “I see,” he answered. “It is a terrible quandary.”

  “I wish,” said Mrs. Makely, “that you would tell us just how you manage with the poor in Altruria.”

  “We have none,” he replied.

  “But the comparatively poor — you have some people who are richer than others?”

  “No. We should regard that as the worst incivism.”

  “What is incivism?”

  I interpreted, “Bad citizenship.”

  “Well, then, if you will excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she said, “I think that is simply impossible. There must be rich and there must be poor. There always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as anybody. Didn’t Christ Himself say, ‘The poor ye have always with you’?”

  VII

  The Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened by the air of complacency she put on after delivering this poser: “Do you really think Christ meant that you ought always to have the poor with you?” he asked.

  “Why, of course!” she answered, triumphantly. “How else are the sympathies of the rich to be cultivated? The poverty of some and the wealth of others, isn’t that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there could not be anything like charity, and Paul said, ‘The greatest of these is charity.’ I believe it’s ‘love’ in the new version, but it comes to the same thing.”

  The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp, and then lapsed into a silence that lasted until we came in sight of the Camp farm-house. It stood on the crest of a road-side upland, and looked down the beautiful valley, bathed in Sabbath sunlight, and away to the ranges of hills, so far that it was hard to say whether it was sun or shadow that dimmed their distance. Decidedly, the place was what the country people call sightly. The old house, once painted a Brandon red, crouched low to the ground, with its lean-to in the rear, and its flat-arched wood-sheds and wagon-houses stretching away at the side of the barn, and covering the approach to it with an unbroken roof. There were flowers in the beds along the underpinning of the house, which stood close to the street, and on one side of the door was a clump of Spanish willow; an old-fashioned June rose climbed over it from the other. An aged dog got stiffly to his feet from the threshold stone and whimpered as our buckboard drew up; the poultry picking about the path and among the chips lazily made way for us, and as our wheels ceased to crunch upon the gravel we heard hasty steps, and Reuben Camp came round the corner of the house in time to give Mrs. Makely his hand and help her spring to the ground, which she did very lightly; her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity, and at thirty-five she had the gracile ease and self-command of a girl.

  “Ah, Reuben,” she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first name, with the emotion which expressed itself more definitely in the words that followed, “how I envy you all this dear, old, homelike place! I never come here without thinking of my grandfather’s farm in Massachusetts, where I used to go every summer when I was a little girl. If I had a place like this, I should never leave it.”

  “Well, Mrs. Makely,” said young Camp, “you can have this place cheap, if you really want it. Or almost any other place in the neighborhood.”

  “Don’t say such a thing!” she returned. “It makes one feel as if the foundations of the great deep were giving way. I don’t know what that means exactly, but I suppose it’s equivalent to mislaying George’s hatchet and going back on the Declaration generally; and I don’t like to hear you talk so.”

  Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered, pleasantly: “The Declaration is all right, as far as it goes, but it don’t help us to compete with the Western farm operations.”

  “Why, you believe every one was born free and equal, don’t you?” Mrs. Makely asked.

  “Oh yes, I believe that; but—”

  “Then why do you object to free and equal competition?”

  The young fellow laughed, and said, as he opened the door for us: “Walk right into the parlor, please. Mother will be ready for you in a minute.” He added: “I guess she’s putting on her best cap for you, Mr. Homos. It’s a great event for her, your coming here. It is for all of us. We’re glad to have you.”

  “And I’m glad to be here,” said the Altrurian, as simply as the other. He looked about the best room of a farm-house that had never adapted itself to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellent in its upholstery and as severe in its decoration as hair-cloth chairs and dark-brown wall-paper of a trellis pattern, with drab roses, could make it. The windows were shut tight, and our host did not offer to open them. A fly or two crossed the doorway into the hall, but made no attempt to penetrate the interior, where we sat in an obscurity that left the high-hung family photographs on the walls vague and uncertain. I made a mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have a rustic funeral take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: “I hope your mother is as well as usual this morning?” I perceived that this murmur was produced by the sepulchral influence of the room.

  “Oh yes,” said Camp, and at that moment a door opened from the room across the hall, and his sister seemed to bring in some of the light from it to us where we sat. She shook hands with Mrs. Makely, who introduced me to her, and then presented the Altrurian. She bowed very civilly to me, but with a touch of severity, such as country people find necessary for the assertion of their self-respect with strangers. I thought it very pretty, and instantly saw that I could work it into some picture of character; and I was not at all sorry that she made a difference in favor of the Altrurian.

  “Mother wi
ll be so glad to see you,” she said to him, and, “Won’t you come right in?” she added to us all.

  We followed her and found ourselves in a large, low, sunny room on the southeast corner of the house, which had no doubt once been the living-room, but which was now given up to the bedridden invalid; a door opened into the kitchen behind, where the table was already laid for the midday meal, with the plates turned down in the country fashion, and some netting drawn over the dishes to keep the flies away.

  Mrs. Makely bustled up to the bedside with her energetic, patronizing cheerfulness. “Ah, Mrs. Camp, I am glad to see you looking so well this morning. I’ve been meaning to run over for several days past, but I couldn’t find a moment till this morning, and I knew you didn’t object to Sunday visits.” She took the invalid’s hand in hers, and, with the air of showing how little she felt any inequality between them, she leaned over and kissed her, where Mrs. Camp sat propped against her pillows. She had a large, nobly moulded face of rather masculine contour, and at the same time the most motherly look in the world. Mrs. Makely bubbled and babbled on, and every one waited patiently till she had done, and turned and said, toward the Altrurian: “I have ventured to bring my friend, Mr. Homos, with me. He is from Altruria.” Then she turned to me and said: “Mr. Twelvemough you know already through his delightful books”; but, although she paid me this perfunctory compliment it was perfectly apparent to me that in the esteem of this disingenuous woman the distinguished stranger was a far more important person than the distinguished author. Whether Mrs. Camp read my perception of this fact in my face or not I cannot say, but she was evidently determined that I should not feel a difference in her. She held out her hand to me first, and said that I never could know how many heavy hours I had helped to lighten for her, and then she turned to the Altrurian and took his hand. “Oh!” she said, with a long, deep-drawn sigh, as if that were the supreme moment of her life. “And are you really from Altruria? It seems too good to be true!” Her devout look and her earnest tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not inhere in them, but Mrs. Makely took them on their surface.