Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “With the expropriation of the individual the whole vast catalogue of crimes against property shrank to nothing. The thief could only steal from the community; but if he stole, what was he to do with his booty? It was still possible for a depredator to destroy, but few men’s hate is so comprehensive as to include all other men, and when the individual could no longer hurt some other individual in his property destruction ceased.

  “All the many murders done from love of money, or of what money could buy, were at an end. Where there was no want, men no longer bartered their souls, or women their bodies, for the means to keep themselves alive. The vices vanished with the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. People were no longer sickened by sloth and surfeit, or deformed and depleted by overwork and famine. They were wholesomely housed in healthful places, and they were clad fitly for their labor and fitly for their leisure; the caprices of vanity were not suffered to attaint the beauty of the national dress.

  “With the stress of superfluous social and business duties, and the perpetual fear of want which all classes felt, more or less; with the tumult of the cities and the solitude of the country, insanity had increased among us till the whole land was dotted with asylums and the mad were numbered by hundreds of thousands. In every region they were an army, an awful army of anguish and despair. Now they have decreased to a number so small, and are of a type so mild, that we can hardly count insanity among our causes of unhappiness.

  “We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly. These stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance cannot befall us; but I shall not be able to tell you just how or why, or to detail the process of eliminating chance. I may say, however, that it began with the nationalization of telegraphs, expresses, railroads, mines, and all large industries operated by stock companies. This at once struck a fatal blow at the speculation in values, real and unreal, and at the stock-exchange, or bourse; we had our own name for that gambler’s paradise, or gambler’s hell, whose baleful influence penetrated every branch of business.

  “There were still business fluctuations as long as we had business, but they were on a smaller and smaller scale, and with the final lapse of business they necessarily vanished; all economic chance vanished. The founders of the commonwealth understood perfectly that business was the sterile activity of the function interposed between the demand and the supply; that it was nothing structural; and they intended its extinction, and expected it from the moment that money was abolished.”

  “This is all pretty tiresome,” said the professor to our immediate party. “I don’t see why we oblige ourselves to listen to that fellow’s stuff. As if a civilized state could exist for a day without money or business.”

  He went on to give his opinion of the Altrurian’s pretended description, in a tone so audible that it attracted the notice of the nearest group of railroad hands, who were listening closely to Homos, and one of them sang out to the professor: “Can’t you wait and let the first man finish?” and another yelled: “Put him out!” and then they all laughed with a humorous perception of the impossibility of literally executing the suggestion.

  By the time all was quiet again I heard the Altrurian saying: “As to our social life, I cannot describe it in detail, but I can give you some notion of its spirit. We make our pleasures civic and public as far as possible, and the ideal is inclusive and not exclusive. There are, of course, festivities which all cannot share, but our distribution into small communities favors the possibility of all doing so. Our daily life, however, is so largely social that we seldom meet by special invitation or engagement. When we do, it is with the perfect understanding that the assemblage confers no social distinction, but is for a momentary convenience. In fact, these occasions are rather avoided, recalling, as they do, the vapid and tedious entertainments of the competitive epoch, the receptions and balls and dinners of a semi-barbaric people striving for social prominence by shutting a certain number in and a certain number out, and overdressing, overfeeding, and overdrinking. Anything premeditated in the way of a pleasure we think stupid and mistaken; we like to meet suddenly, or on the spur of the moment, out-of-doors, if possible, and arrange a picnic or a dance or a play; and let people come and go without ceremony. No one is more host than guest; all are hosts and guests. People consort much according to their tastes — literary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechanical — but these tastes are made approaches, not barriers; and we find out that we have many more tastes in common than was formerly supposed.

  “But, after all, our life is serious, and no one among us is quite happy, in the general esteem, unless he has dedicated himself, in some special way, to the general good. Our ideal is not rights, but duties.”

  “Mazzini!” whispered the professor.

  “The greatest distinction which any one can enjoy with us is to have found out some new and signal way of serving the community; and then it is not good form for him to seek recognition. The doing any fine thing is the purest pleasure it can give; applause flatters, but it hurts, too, and our benefactors, as we call them, have learned to shun it.

  “We are still far from thinking our civilization perfect; but we are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What we have already accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual peace; to have founded an economy in which there is no possibility of want; to have killed out political and social ambition; to have disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of death.”

  The Altrurian suddenly stopped with these words and sat down. He had spoken a long time, and with a fulness which my report gives little notion of; but, though most of his cultivated listeners were weary, and a good many ladies had left their seats and gone back to the hotel, not one of the natives, or the work-people of any sort, had stirred; now they remained a moment motionless and silent before they rose from all parts of the field and shouted: “Go on! Don’t stop! Tell us all about it!”

  I saw Reuben Camp climb the shoulders of a big fellow near where the Altrurian had stood; he waved the crowd to silence with out-spread arms. “He isn’t going to say anything more; he’s tired. But if any man don’t think he’s got his dollar’s worth, let him walk up to the door and the ticket-agent will refund him his money.”

  The crowd laughed, and some one shouted: “Good for you, Reub!”

  Camp continued: “But our friend here will shake the hand of any man, woman, or child that wants to speak to him; and you needn’t wipe it on the grass first, either. He’s a man! And I want to say that he’s going to spend the next week with us, at my mother’s house, and we shall be glad to have you call.”

  The crowd, the rustic and ruder part of it, cheered and cheered till the mountain echoes answered; then a railroader called for three times three, with a tiger, and got it. The guests of the hotel broke away and went toward the house over the long shadows of the meadow. The lower classes pressed forward, on Camp’s invitation.

  “Well, did you ever hear a more disgusting rigmarole?” asked Mrs. Makely, as our little group halted indecisively about her.

  “With all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon, from Plato, through More, Bacon, and Campanella, down to Bellamy and Morris, he has constructed the shakiest effigy ever made of old clothes stuffed with straw,” said the professor.

  The manufacturer was silent. The banker said: “I don’t know. He grappled pretty boldly with your insinuations. That frank declaration that Altruria was all these pretty soap-bubble worlds solidified was rather fine.”

  “It was splendid!” cried Mrs. Makely. The lawyer and the minister came toward us from where they had been sitting together. She called out to them: “Why in the world didn’t one of your gentlemen get up and propose a vote of
thanks?”

  “The difficulty with me is,” continued the banker, “that he has rendered Altruria incredible. I have no doubt that he is an Altrurian, but I doubt very much if he comes from anywhere in particular, and I find this quite a blow, for we had got Altruria nicely located on the map, and were beginning to get accounts of it in the newspapers.”

  “Yes, that is just exactly the way I feel about it,” sighed Mrs. Makely. “But still, don’t you think there ought to have been a vote of thanks, Mr. Bullion?”

  “Why, certainly. The fellow was immensely amusing, and you must have got a lot of money by him. It was an oversight not to make him a formal acknowledgment of some kind. If we offered him money, he would have to leave it all behind him here when he went home to Altruria.”

  “Just as we do when we go to heaven,” I suggested; the banker did not answer, and I instantly felt that in the presence of the minister my remark was out of taste.

  “Well, then, don’t you think,” said Mrs. Makely, who had a leathery insensibility to everything but the purpose possessing her, “that we ought at least to go and say something to him personally?”

  “Yes, I think we ought,” said the banker, and we all walked up to where the Altrurian stood, still thickly surrounded by the lower classes, who were shaking hands with him and getting in a word with him now and then.

  One of the construction gang said, carelessly: “No all-rail route to Altruria, I suppose?”

  “No,” answered Homos, “it’s a far sea voyage.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t mind working my passage, if you think they’d let me stay after I got there.”

  “Ah, you mustn’t go to Altruria. You must let Altruria come to you” returned Homos, with that confounded smile of his that always won my heart.

  “Yes,” shouted Reuben Camp, whose thin face was red with excitement, “that’s the word. Have Altruria right here, and right now.”

  The old farmer, who had several times spoken, cackled out: “I didn’t know, one while, when you was talk’n’ about not havin’ no money, but what some on us had had Altrury here for quite a spell, already. I don’t pass more’n fifty dolla’s through my hands most years.”

  A laugh went up, and then, at sight of Mrs. Makely heading our little party, the people round Homos civilly made way for us. She rushed upon him, and seized his hand in both of hers; she dropped her fan, parasol, gloves, handkerchief, and vinaigrette in the grass to do so. “Oh, Mr. Homos,” she fluted, and the tears came into her eyes, “it was beautiful, beautiful, every word of it! I sat in a perfect trance from beginning to end, and I felt that it was all as true as it was beautiful. People all around me were breathless with interest, and I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough.”

  “Yes, indeed,” the professor hastened to say, before the Altrurian could answer, and he beamed malignantly upon him through his spectacles while he spoke, “it was like some strange romance.”

  “I don’t know that I should go so far as that,” said the banker, in his turn, “but it certainly seemed too good to be true.”

  “Yes,” the Altrurian responded, simply, but a little sadly; “now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so different, I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life had not hitherto been a dream, and Altruria were not some blessed vision of the night.”

  “Then you know how to account for a feeling which I must acknowledge, too?” the lawyer asked, courteously. “But it was most interesting.”

  “The kingdom of God upon earth,” said the minister— “It ought not to be incredible; but that, more than anything else you told us of, gave me pause.”

  “You of all men?” returned the Altrurian, gently.

  “Yes,” said the minister, with a certain dejection, “when I remember what I have seen of men, when I reflect what human nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever come upon the earth?”

  “But in heaven, where He reigns, who is it does His will? The spirits of men?” pursued the Altrurian.

  “Yes, but conditioned as men are here—”

  “But if they were conditioned as men are there?”

  “Now, I can’t let you two good people get into a theological dispute,” Mrs. Makely pushed in. “Here is Mr. Twelvemough dying to shake hands with Mr. Homos and compliment his distinguished guest.”

  “Ah, Mr. Homos knows what I must have thought of his talk without my telling him,” I began, skilfully. “But I am sorry that I am to lose my distinguished guest so soon.”

  Reuben Camp broke out: “That was my blunder, Mr. Twelvemough. Mr. Homos and I had talked it over conditionally, and I was not to speak of it till he had told you; but it slipped out in the excitement of the moment.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” I said, and I shook hands cordially with both of them. “It will be the greatest possible advantage for Mr. Homos to see certain phases of American life at close range, and he couldn’t possibly see them under better auspices than yours, Camp.”

  “Yes, I’m going to drive him through the hill country after haying, and then I’m going to take him down and show him one of our big factory towns.”

  I believe this was done, but finally the Altrurian went on to New York, where he was to pass the winter. We parted friends; I even offered him some introductions; but his acquaintance had become more and more difficult, and I was not sorry to part with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable, and I was glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for whatever strange thing he might do next. I think he remained very popular with the classes he most affected; a throng of natives, construction hands, and table-girls saw him off on his train; and he left large numbers of such admirers in our house and neighborhood, devout in the faith that there was such a commonwealth as Altruria, and that he was really an Altrurian. As for the more cultivated people who had met him, they continued of two minds upon both points.

  THE END

  THE DAY OF THEIR WEDDING

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  I

  WHEN the train slowed before drawing into the station at Fitchburg, Sister Althea took up her bag from the floor, and began to collect her paper parcels into her lap, as if she were going to leave the car. Then she sat gripping the bag to her side and staring out into the night, blotched everywhere with the city lights and the railway signals — red and green and orange. From time to time she looked round over her shoulder into the car, up and down the aisle, and again set her face towards the window, and held it so rigidly, to keep herself from turning any more, that it hurt her neck.

  The car was a day-coach on a night train, and most of the few passengers were taking preparations for leaving it. An old gentleman in the seat across the aisle, whom she had asked more than once whether the train was sure to stop at Fitchburg, was already buttoned up in a light overcoat, which he had the effect of wearing in compliance with charges against exposing himself to the night air. He sat humming to himself while he held fast an umbrella and a bundle such as one married sister might send to another by their father; it was in several sections of wrapping-paper, and was tied with tape. He leaned over towards Sister Althea, and asked, benevolently, “Was you expecting to meet friends in Fitchburg?”

  Sister Althea started and looked round. He repeated the question, and she gasped out, “Nay; I am not expecting friends to meet me.” She had framed her reply with a certain mechanical exactness which he seemed to feel.

  “Oh! ah! From the Family at Yardley, I presume?”

  Sister Althea faltered a moment before she answered, “Yee.”

  She let her head droop forward a little, and with her Shaker bonnet slanting downward over her deeply hidden face she looked like a toucan, except fo
r the gayety of color with which nature mocks that strange bird’s grotesqueness. She was in Shaker drabs as to her prim gown, and her shawl crossed fichuwise upon her breast; her huge bonnet was covered with a dove-colored satin. To the eye that could not catch a glimpse of her face, or rightly measure her figure as she sat dejected for the moment following her speech, she must have looked little and old.

  The friendly person in the seat opposite began humming to himself again. He stood up before the train halted, and he said to Sister Althea, as he turned to leave the car, “Well, I wish you good-evening.”

  “Good-evening,” said Sister Aithea, faintly; and now, when the train stopped at last, and the noises of the station began to make themselves heard outside, with the bray of a supper-gong above all, she jumped to her feet and started into the aisle as if she were going to leave the car too. She even made some steps towards the door; then she came back, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she sat down again, and remained as motionless as before.

  People came and took places, and arranged their wraps, and put their parcels into the racks, and settled themselves for their journey. Among the rest a woman came in, followed by a man with a child. When he had put the child in the seat beside her, he stood talking with her till she drove him away. She said she did not want him to get off after the cars began to move. He laughed and kissed her, and after he had got almost to the door he came back and kissed her again. Sister Althea trembled at each kiss. When the man lifted the little one and kissed it, and put it down again on the seat beside its mother, the tears came into her eyes.