I did not realize till afterwards that she had not said a word about America, and whether this was by accident or design, I could not help letting the fact praise her. I do not see how anybody could have done justice in the circumstances with greater dignity. She set me free, but she has bound me to her in ties which will last my life, and if ever the chance offers to do her or hers a good turn it will not be lost upon me. I have heard since that old Baysley had arranged it with Mr. Ralson that they were to go back on the same salary to Timber Creek, but Mrs. Baysley put her foot down on that. She and her girls have determined that they will stay in New York, and if any hint of their trouble gets home, it will not be through their bringing it.
I have written this out pretty squarely, and when I began, I thought I was going to tell you how I made it up with America. But it really made itself up; nobody had any sort of agency in it, and I least of all. Besides, I do not find it possible to write you the whole story as I intended, but sometime I will tell it, when we meet. I have talked every minute of my life over with America, and she knows just how unworthy I am. She agrees with Mrs. Baysley about me, but I guess she forgives me more because she loves me more.
Her forgiveness does not and cannot change the facts, and I am not bringing to the happiness in store for me any overpowering sense of desert. I wish I could, for her dear sake, for she is worthy of unalloyed rapture. I feel that my ignominy is a sort of slight to her, but I cannot help it. To such a girl her love should be “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” and I come clouded and fissured from an experience that I can never think of without shame. You can say I exaggerate, and I know that in a manner I do. But I am not wrong in recognizing that I have laid up for myself a life-long regret, which I may forget from time to time, but which, whenever I remember it, must be the pang that it is now. I forebode an inextinguishable vitality in the thing, and I know that in whatever happiest moment of the future I recur to it, the fact that I have hurt some one, that I have betrayed the creature that trusted me, that in my infernal soft-heartedness I have wronged the hope I inspired, will be a torture out of which the anguish cannot pass.
If you say I am not very well, and perhaps that I am looking at these things with sick eyes, I cannot deny it. I am not well yet, but there is nothing more serious than the cough that the grippe usually leaves behind it. There is talk of my going South somewhere for that, and the talk is that I am not to go alone. But I will write you later about that.
Yours ever,
W. ARDITH.
XLIX.
From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.
NEW YORK, March 12, 1902.
My dear Margaret:
I shall be glad to know, some day after we meet, just how a Boston woman so completely of our old tradition as you, should have allowed herself to become so absorbed in the loves of my wild Westerners. I could understand, of course, if you had met them in the fine ether of one of James’s stories — I wish he still wrote about Americans — you would have been bewitched with his delicate precis of that affair; but not how you could suffer the affair at first hand, with the heat of their savage life in it: not merely suffer it, but long for it more and more, and heap me with reproaches for not satisfying your famine for it.
In each letter I have written you since my letter of the 23d February, in which I intimated a tragic property in the situation, I have tried to feed your curiosity with divinations which I thought filling, but which you seem not to have found so; and at times your ingratitude has driven me almost to invention. The fact is I have felt myself becoming every day more peripheral to the situation. At the most I could catch a glimpse of its interior; I could chance a flying conjecture, I could seize a meteoric intimation, now from the secretary of the heroine, now from heroine herself. The heroine’s father has been mostly in Washington; the hero has been safe from me in the hold of his grippe. What I knew, what I guessed, I generously shared with you; but I have too manifestly failed to appease your impatience. Now, when I come to you at last with the substance of the accomplished fact, I have reason to fear that you will reject it as gross commonplace, wholly unworthy of the fine issues promised earlier, and declare that I tardily bring you tidings which every one else that cares can know a day later.
Yes, Miss Ralson and Mr. Ardith are engaged: I do not know how, or when, or why. But she has told me so herself, in my quality of old friend: my date, if not the date of my acquaintance, justifies the phrase. They are engaged, and they are going to be married, and going to the Bermudas: there is no such desperate haste for their marriage, but the voyage is in the urgent interest of his convalescence, for the grippe has left him with a cough, for which Miss Ralson has heard that the air of those semi-tropical islands is soveriegn; she is already talking of his health as if she had been in charge of it for years.
They are not going to take the secretary with them; she remains to console Miss Ralson’s parents, and she has been promised me for my own consolation in the absence of my lovers. But I do not know that I shall outstay them here. New York will be very empty without them. I cannot go back to any pleasure in the Van der Doeses after the spectacle of this elemental passion; Prince Henry has gone home, and there is little in the civic affairs of the metropolis to entertain me. I have not yet decided between the steamer for Liverpool and the train for Boston; but if you do not see me soon you will hear from me before you expect: one gets to Liverpool so suddenly. Perhaps if I take the steamer I shall find the Ardiths in Europe before I return; and I cannot imagine finding them in Boston.
What I seem to see (with, I own, a somewhat self distrustful forecast) is the end of those social ambitions, not very poignantly anxious, which have betrayed themselves to me in Miss Ralson. The house in the East side Nineties (have I never told you of that house? When I have been told so much of it!) will be built, but I doubt whether it will be made the basis of a more studied attack on the mythic Four Hundred: that poor Four Hundred which everyone who does not doubt it, abuses; and which has been driven to deny its own existence, by the intolerable self-consciousness created in it by the popular superstition. I hope rather that the Ralson residence may become the scene of those literary orgies which have been so lacking in New York, and without which it has been unable to realize itself a literary centre. I can imagine the energies of the young wife dedicated to culture in the interest of her young husband, and carrying him forward on the line of his aspirations with tireless devotion. The difficulty, if any, will be that she may not be able to distinguish between literature and journalism; in this she will be genuinely New York; and will conceive of accomplishing his career for him by making her father buy him a newspaper: say The Signal; I hear that her father already owns a controlling interest in it, and that Casman is merely his man.
I am not otherwise in the financial confidence of the Trust, though since his daughter’s engagement has been announced to me — the events have necessarily been prodigiously foreshortened in the brief time allowed them — he has, as a parent, taken me to his heart. After his daughter left us at dinner (which we had in their apartment) last night he approached the matter in a vein of jocose inquiry, and invited my opinion of Mr. Ardith by the subtle generality that these things were all in a lifetime. I ventured to say that they were very pleasant things to have in one’s lifetime; and he rejoined to the effect that if Make (so he shortens her name of America) was suited, he was; and though it was rather sudden, it was the kind of thing that would have seemed sudden, anyway. He laughed with a great spread of his white moustache, and pushed me the whiskey, and began to patronize me with condescensions suitable to a woman of my years. He cannot make me out, I believe, but these money-getters, though they are bewildered by the difference of some other man, are never abashed by it. I have no doubt but in his heart he despises the fineness of the pretty boy, and hopes to coarsen him to his own uses. The worst of it is that the fineness of Ardith will render him the easier victim; money compels even the poetic fancy, and he will mis
imagine this common millionaire into something rare and strange, and of rightful authority over such as himself.
But the daughter, who is of the father’s make, with the difference of “the finer female sense,” may be the poet’s refuge. I will not despair for him; at least I will not let you despair.
As you know I have sometimes had my misgivings that their affair was not worthy of your interest, but you have convinced me that it was worthy of mine. These people whom it seems to have concerned less intimately, who are as it were the material out of which our romance has fashioned itself, have certainly their limitations. They could not appeal to us from the past or present keeping of our own lives. If they were not so intensely real to themselves, they might seem to me characters in a rather crude American story. In fact are not they just that? They are certainly American and certainly crude; and now that they are passing beyond my social contact, I feel as safe from them, and from the necessity of explaining them or justifying them, as if they were shut in a book I had finished reading. I am rather disposed to rejoice that I have known them no more than I have. If I could find the author I should like to make him my compliment on having managed so skilfully that he left some passages to my conjecture. What was the trouble, for instance, of my poor boy’s— “half-broken and withdrawn” — that day in the park? What unknown shores of tragedy has not their story skirted in its course? Over what turbider social depths may not it have swum beyond my ken? Who was that mystical and subordinate second in his affections, if his darkling problem was one of conduct and not of art? Did it concern Miss Ralson, and if it did, how? I shall never know, and what is perhaps less acceptable, you, Margaret, never will, either
Your affectionate brother,
OTIS.
THE END
LETTERS OF AN ALTRURIAN TRAVELLER
CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
The magazine in which the work was first published in serial format
I.
New York, September 1st, 1893.
My dear Cyril:
I hoped before this to have seen you again in Altruria, and given you by word of mouth some account of my experiences and observations in this country; but I have now been here more than a year, and I find myself still lingering here in a kind of fascination. At times I seem to myself to have been in a fantastic dream since I landed on its shores, with the spectacle of so many things before me happening without law and without reason, as things do in sleep; and then, again, it is as if I were carried by some enchantment back to the old competitive period in our own country; for, after all, America is like a belated Altruria, tardily repeating in the nineteenth century the errors which we committed in the tenth. In fact, if you could imagine an Altruria where the millennium had never yet come, you would have some conception of America; and, perhaps, I had better leave you with this suggestion, and not attempt farther to generalize from my impressions, but give you these at first hand and let you form your own idea of the American civilization from them.
I say civilization, because one has to use some such term to describe a state which has advanced beyond the conditions of cannibalism, tribalism, slavery, serfdom and feudalism; but, of course, no Altrurian would think America a civilized country, though many of the Americans are as truly civilized as ourselves. We should not think it a democratic country, though many of the Americans are really democrats, and they are all proud of their republican form of government, though it is now little but a form. Far less should we think it a Christian country, though it abounds in good people, who love one another, and lead lives of continual self-sacrifice. The paradox is intelligible when you reflect that these Americans are civilized, and democratic and Christian, in spite of their conditions and not because of them. In order to do them full justice, you must remember that they are still, socially as well as civically, sunk in the lowest depths of competition, and that, theoretically at least, they prize this principle as the spring of all the personal and public virtues. To us this is a frightful anomaly; but because they do not feel it so, they are often able to do and to will the good, as I have intimated. Nowhere else in the whole world is capitalism now carried to such brutal excess, and yet nowhere else have qualities which we should think impossible in a capitalistic state shown themselves so nobly, so beautifully. It is this fact, in its different aspects, which, I suppose, has formed for me that fascination I have felt almost from the first moment of my arrival.
I had hardly been in the country a week before an illustration of the facility with which human nature adjusts itself to bad conditions and makes them tolerable by its patience, eclipsed all the little instances that were every moment offering themselves to my notice. The great event at Homestead, which our Altrurian papers will have given you some account of, occurred little over a year ago, but it is already forgotten. To the Americans it was not astounding that a force of armed workmen should bloodily fight out their quarrel with the mercenaries of their masters. In many states no change of the laws in respect to the incident has taken place to prevent its repetition, on any larger or smaller scale. None of the legal procedures have resulted in anything, and so far as the arrests for murder on either side are concerned, the whole affair has ended like a comic opera; and the warring interests have left the stage singing the same chorus together. The affair is, in fact, so thoroughly bouffe that I have to take my imagination in both hands before I can conceive of it as a fact; but the Americans are so used to these private wars between the banded forces of labor and the hirelings of capital, that they accept it as something almost natural, or as a disease inherent in the nature of things, and having its own laws and limitations. The outbreak at Homestead, as you know, was followed by something like a civic convulsion among the miners in Tennessee and in Idaho, and by a strike of railroad employés at Buffalo, which destroyed immense values, delayed traffic, and shed blood on both sides. In this last strike it was thought a great gain that the railroad managers, instead of employing mercenaries to shoot down the strikers, appealed to the state for protection; and it was somehow felt to be a fine effect of patriotism that the militia should occupy the scene of the riot in force and bear themselves toward the strikers like the invaders of an enemy’s country.
If it had not all been so tragical in other aspects, the observer must have been amused by the attitude of most Americans towards these affairs. They seemed really to regard them as proofs of the superiority of the plutocracy which they call a republic, and to feel a kind of pride in the promptness and ferocity of the civil and military officials in suppressing symptoms which ought to have appealed to every sane person as signs of the gravest organic disorder. To my mind nothing seems so conclusive against their pretensions to civilization as the fact that these terrible occurrences are accepted as the necessary incidents of civilization.
There was, indeed, a certain small percentage of the people who felt the significance of the disasters; and I am anxious to have you understand that the average of intelligence among the Americans, as well as the average of virtue, is very high, not according to the Altrurian standard, of course, but certainty according to the European standard. Bad as their plutocracy is, it is still the best system known to competitional conditions, except perhaps that of Switzerland, where the initiative and the referendum enable the people to originate and to ultimate legislation, while the Americans can do neither. Here, the people, as you know, can only elect representatives; these again delegate their powers to committees, which in effect make the laws governing the nation. The American plutocracy is the old oligarchic conception of government in a new phase, and while it is established and maintained by a community mostly Christian, it is essentially pagan in its civic ideal. Yet this people, whose civic ideal is pagan, are, many of them, not only Christian in creed, but Christian
in life, so far as their polity and their society permit them to think rightly and act generously. There are beautiful and pathetic instances of approach to our ideal among them which constantly win my admiration and compassion. That is to say, certain Americans are good and gentle not because of conditions that invite them to be so, but in spite of conditions that invite them to be otherwise, almost with the first economic and social lessons which they teach. Almost from the beginning the American is taught to look out for himself in business and in society, and if he looks out for others at the same time it is by a sacrifice of advantages which are vitally necessary to him in the battle of life. He may or he may not make these sacrifices; he very often does, to such effect that the loveliest and lovablest natures I have known here have been those of unsuccessful Americans, and the ugliest and hatefullest, those of successful Americans. But the sad thing, and the droll thing, is that they think their bad conditions the source of their virtues, and they realty believe that without the inducements to rapacity on every hand there would be no beauty in yielding and giving.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 771
