Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You may not know how unusual I am in asking this favor of you, Mr. Homos; but you might as well learn from me as from others that I am rather unusual in everything. In fact, you can report in Altruria, when you get home, that you found at least one woman in America whom fortune had smiled upon in every way, and who hated her smiling fortune almost as much as she hated herself. I’m quite satisfied,” she went on, with a sad mockery, “that fortune is a man, and an American; when he has given you all the materials for having a good time, he believes that you must be happy, because there is nothing to hinder. It isn’t that I want to be happy in the greedy way that men think we do, for then I could easily be happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough. But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you will be disappointed. I have not the faith that they say upholds you Altrurians in trying to help out, if I don’t see my way out. It seems to me that my reason has some right to satisfaction, and that, if I am a woman grown, I can’t be satisfied with the assurances they would give to little girls — that everything is going on well. Any one can see that things are not going on well. There is more and more wretchedness of every kind, not hunger of body alone, but hunger of soul. If you escape one, you suffer the other, because, if you have a soul, you must long to help, not for a time, but for all time. I suppose,” she asked, abruptly, “that Mrs. Makely has told you something about me?”

  “Something,” I admitted.

  “I ask,” she went on, “because I don’t want to bore you with a statement of my case, if you know it already. Ever since I heard you were in New York I have wished to see you, and to talk with you about Altruria; I did not suppose that there would be any chance at Mrs. Makely’s, and there wasn’t; and I did not suppose there would be any chance here, unless I could take courage to do what I have done now. You must excuse it, if it seems as extraordinary a proceeding to you as it really is; I wouldn’t at all have you think it is usual for a lady to ask one of her guests to stay after the rest, in order, if you please, to confess herself to him. It’s a crime without a name.”

  She laughed, not gayly, but humorously, and then went on, speaking always with a feverish eagerness which I find it hard to give you a sense of, for the women here have an intensity quite beyond our experience of the sex at home.

  “But you are a foreigner, and you come from an order of things so utterly unlike ours that perhaps you will be able to condone my offence. At any rate, I have risked it.” She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. “Well, the long and the short of it is that I have come to the end of my tether. I have tried, as truly as I believe any woman ever did, to do my share, with money and with work, to help make life better for those whose life is bad; and though one mustn’t boast of good works, I may say that I have been pretty thorough, and, if I’ve given up, it’s because I see, in our state of things, no hope of curing the evil. It’s like trying to soak up the drops of a rainstorm. You do dry up a drop here and there; but the clouds are full of them, and, the first thing you know, you stand, with your blotting-paper in your hand, in a puddle over your shoe-tops. There is nothing but charity, and charity is a failure, except for the moment. If you think of the misery around you, that must remain around you for ever and ever, as long as you live, you have your choice — to go mad and be put into an asylum, or go mad and devote yourself to society.”

  XX

  While Mrs. Strange talked on, her mother listened quietly, with a dim, submissive smile and her hands placidly crossed in her lap. She now said: “It seems to be very different now from what it was in my time. There are certainly a great many beggars, and we used never to have one. Children grew up, and people lived and died, in large towns, without ever seeing one. I remember, when my husband first took me abroad, how astonished we were at the beggars. Now I meet as many in New York as I met in London or in Rome. But if you don’t do charity, what can you do? Christ enjoined it, and Paul says—”

  “Oh, people never do the charity that Christ meant,” said Mrs. Strange; “and, as things are now, how could they? Who would dream of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling all and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We know that Christ was perfectly right, and that He was perfectly sincere in what He said to the good young millionaire; but we all go away exceeding sorrowful, just as the good young millionaire did. We have to, if we don’t want to come on charity ourselves. How do you manage about that?” she asked me; and then she added, “But, of course, I forgot that you have no need of charity.”

  “Oh yes, we have,” I returned; and I tried, once more, as I have tried so often with Americans, to explain how the heavenly need of giving the self continues with us, but on terms that do not harrow the conscience of the giver, as self-sacrifice always must here, at its purest and noblest. I sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one was secured against want by the common provision, and against the degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want. The “dead-level of equality” is what the Americans call the condition in which all would be as the angels of God, and they blasphemously deny that He ever meant His creatures to be alike happy, because some, through a long succession of unfair advantages, have inherited more brain or brawn or beauty than others. I found that this gross and impious notion of God darkened even the clear intelligence of a woman like Mrs. Strange; and, indeed, it prevails here so commonly that it is one of the first things advanced as an argument against the Altrurianization of America.

  I believe I did, at last, succeed in showing her how charity still continues among us, but in forms that bring neither a sense of inferiority to him who takes nor anxiety to him who gives. I said that benevolence here often seemed to involve, essentially, some such risk as a man should run if he parted with a portion of the vital air which belonged to himself and his family, in succoring a fellow-being from suffocation; but that with us, where it was no more possible for one to deprive himself of his share of the common food, shelter, and clothing, than of the air he breathed, one could devote one’s self utterly to others without that foul alloy of fear which I thought must basely qualify every good deed in plutocratic conditions.

  She said that she knew what I meant, and that I was quite right in my conjecture, as regarded men, at least; a man who did not stop to think what the effect, upon himself and his own, his giving must have, would be a fool or a madman; but women could often give as recklessly as they spent, without any thought of consequences, for they did not know how money came.

  “Women,” I said, “are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice themselves without wronging any one.”

  “Or, rather,” she continued, “without the sense of wronging any one. Our men like to keep us in that innocence or ignorance; they think it is pretty, or they think it is funny; and as long as a girl is in her father’s house, or a wife is in her husband’s, she knows no more of money-earning or money-making than a child. Most grown women among us, if they had a sum of money in the bank, would not know how to get it out. They would not know how to indorse a check, much less draw one. But there are plenty of women who are inside the conditions, as much as men are — poor women who have to earn their bread, and rich-women who have to manage their property. I can’t speak for the poor women; but I can speak for the rich, and I can confess for them that what you imagine is true. The taint of unfaith and distrust is on every dollar that you dole out, so that, as far as the charity of the rich is concerned, I would read Shakespeare:

  ‘It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.’”

  “Perhaps that is why the rich give comparatively so little. The poor can never understand how much the rich value their money, how much the owner of a great fortune dreads to see it less. If it were not so, they would surely give more than they do; for a man who has ten millions could give eight of them without feeling the loss; the man with a hundred could give ninety and be no nearer
want. Ah, it’s a strange mystery! My poor husband and I used to talk of it a great deal, in the long year that he lay dying; and I think I hate my superfluity the more because I know he hated it so much.”

  A little trouble had stolen into her impassioned tones, and there was a gleam, as of tears, in the eyes she dropped for a moment. They were shining still when she lifted them again to mine.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that Mrs. Makely told you something of my marriage?”

  “Eveleth!” her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.

  “Oh, I think I can be frank with Mr. Homos. He is not an American, and he will understand, or, at least, he will not misunderstand. Besides, I dare say I shall not say anything worse than Mrs. Makely has said already. My husband was much older than I, and I ought not to have married him; a young girl ought never to marry an old man, or even a man who is only a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to respect each other, when there couldn’t be any question of more. He was a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have. He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that money was an evil in itself.”

  “That is what we think,” I ventured.

  “Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps I could learn how to give it without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part with it, too. I have given and given; but there seems some evil spell on the principal that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead, people grows in the grave.”

  “Eveleth!” her mother murmured again.

  “Oh yes,” she answered, “I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others and with safety to myself.”

  XXI

  It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of this luxury for the first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately house, and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely pride and profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity, a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely’s far inferior scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange’s environment. There were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew itself into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there was the value of a skilled artisan’s wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings of the books that showed from the library shelves there was almost as much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles and princes of other times had contributed to embellish.

  “My husband,” Mrs. Strange went on, “bought this house for me, and let me furnish it after my own fancy. After it was all done we neither of us liked it, and when he died I felt as if he had left me in a tomb here.”

  “Eveleth,” said her mother, “you ought not to speak so before Mr. Homos. He will not know what to think of you, and he will go back to Altruria with a very wrong idea of American women.”

  At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. “Yes,” she said, “you must excuse me. I have no right to speak so. But one is often much franker with foreigners than with one’s own kind, and, besides, there is something — I don’t know what — that will not let me keep the truth from you.”

  She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept her from her own hold, she broke out:

  “He thought he would make some sort of atonement to me, as if I owed none to him! His money was all he had to do it with, and he spent that upon me in every way he could think of, though he knew that money could not buy anything that was really good, and that, if it bought anything beautiful, it uglified it with the sense of cost to every one who could value it in dollars and cents. He was a good man, far better than people ever imagined, and very simple-hearted and honest, like a child, in his contrition for his wealth, which he did not dare to get rid of; and though I know that, if he were to come back, it would be just as it was, his memory is as dear to me as if—”

  She stopped, and pressed in her lip with her teeth, to stay its tremor. I was painfully affected. I knew that she had never meant to be so open with me, and was shocked and frightened at herself. I was sorry for her, and yet I was glad, for it seemed to me that she had given me a glimpse, not only of the truth in her own heart, but of the truth in the hearts of a whole order of prosperous people in these lamentable conditions, whom I shall hereafter be able to judge more leniently, more justly.

  I began to speak of Altruria, as if that were what our talk had been leading up to, and she showed herself more intelligently interested concerning us than any one I have yet seen in this country. We appeared, I found, neither incredible nor preposterous to her; our life, in her eyes, had that beauty of right living which the Americans so feebly imagine or imagine not at all. She asked what route I had come by to America, and she seemed disappointed and aggrieved that we placed the restrictions we have felt necessary upon visitors from the plutocratic world. Were we afraid, she asked, that they would corrupt our citizens or mar our content with our institutions? She seemed scarcely satisfied when I explained, as I have explained so often here, that the measures we had taken were rather in the interest of the plutocratic world than of the Altrurians; and alleged the fact that no visitor from the outside had ever been willing to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals among us. I assured her, and this she easily imagined, that, the better known these became, the worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern our priors felt, in regard to them, was that our youth could not conceive of them in their enormity, but, in seeing how estimable plutocratic people often were, they would attribute to their conditions the inherent good of human nature. I said our own life was so directly reasoned from its economic premises that they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was often an absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic premises. I confessed that this error was at the bottom of my own wish to visit America and study those premises.

  “And what has your conclusion been?” she said, leaning eagerly towards me, across the table between us, laden with the maps and charts we had been examining for the verification of the position of Altruria, and my own course here, by way of England.

  A slight sigh escaped Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted as an expression of fatigue; it was already past twelve o’clock, and I made it the pretext for escape.

  “You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,” I said, “that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that question.”


  She laughed, and did not try to detain me now when I offered my hand for good-night. I fancied her mother took leave of me coldly, and with a certain effect of inculpation.

  XXII

  It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say after you have read this.

  I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could befall me. But, such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.

  I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had any sentiment towards them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended by that difference between their civilization and ours which forbade reasonable hope of happiness in any sentiment for them tenderer than that of the student of strange effects in human nature. But we have not yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.