A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

W >> W. D. Howells >> A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

"Is that so?" asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. "Why?"

"Really, I can't say, and I don't know that I've explicit authority for my
statement."

"They are worse than the English used to be," he went on. "I didn't know
that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I
thought the war settled all that."

I sighed. "There are a good many things that the war didn't settle so
definitely as we've been used to thinking, I'm afraid. But, for that
matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in
the scale of savagery than ourselves even."

"Is that so? Well, that's pretty good on the English, anyway," said my
companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.

"My dear!" his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the
Altrurian, "I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a
little."

"I'll go if you'll tell me where," he said, and he confided to me, "Never
knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time."

"Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the
desk; or perhaps it's in the rack by the dining-room door--or maybe up in
our room."

"I thought so," said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were
the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.

I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at
once: "Oh, I'm so glad you've come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr.
Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds
so hard to understand. He was just now," the lady continued, "wanting to
know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our
young people in the dance, and I've been trying to tell him that we
consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the
piazza and look in at the windows."

She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in
the direction of the young country girls and country fellows who were
thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well
enough looking, and, as it was Saturday night, they were in their best. I
suppose their dress could have been criticised; the young fellows were
clothed by the ready-made clothing-store, and the young girls after their
own devices from the fashion papers; but their general effect was good,
and their behavior was irreproachable; they were very quiet--if anything,
too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was yielded them by
common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I
thought, as wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that
they should have no part in the gayety. I had often seen them there
before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had
always seemed quite normal, but now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it
seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had been having about the
working-men in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian
must have seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having
asked such a question, after he had been so fully instructed upon the
point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart, and
answered: "You might have told him, for one thing, that they were not
dancing because they had not paid the piper."

"Then the money consideration enters even into your social pleasures?"
asked the Altrurian.

"Very much. Doesn't it with you?"

He evaded this question, as he evaded all straightforward questions
concerning his country: "We have no money consideration, you know. But do
I understand that all your social entertainments are paid for by the
guests?"

"Oh no, not so bad as that, quite. There are a great many that the host
pays for. Even here, in a hotel, the host furnishes the music and the room
free to the guests of the house."

"And none are admitted from the outside?"

"Oh yes, people are welcome from all the other hotels and boarding-houses
and the private cottages. The young men are especially welcome; there are
not enough young men in the hotel to go round, you see." In fact, we could
see that some of the pretty girls within were dancing with other girls;
half-grown boys were dangling from the waists of tall young ladies and
waltzing on tiptoe.

"Isn't that rather droll?" asked the Altrurian.

"It's grotesque!" I said, and I felt ashamed of it. "But what are you to
do? The young men are hard at work in the cities, as many as can get work
there, and the rest are out West, growing up with the country. There are
twenty young girls for every young man at all the summer resorts in the
East."

"But what would happen if these young farmers--I suppose they are
farmers--were invited in to take part in the dance?" asked my friend.

"But that is impossible."

"Why?"

"Really, Mrs. Makely, I think I shall have to give him back to you," I
said.

The lady laughed. "I am not sure that I want him back."

"Oh yes," the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor.
"I know that I must be very trying with my questions; but do not abandon
me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!"

"Well, I won't," said the lady, with another laugh. "And I will try to
tell you what would happen if those farmers, or farm-hands, or whatever
they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the young
ladies would be scared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance
would stop."

"Then the young ladies prefer to dance with one another and with little
boys--"

"No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would
rather not dance at all than dance with people beneath them. I don't say
anything against these natives here; they are very civil and decent. But
they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would
be out of place with them, and they would feel it."

"Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them," said the
Altrurian, with a gleam of commonsense that surprised me, "and that as
long as your present conditions endure they never can be. You must excuse
the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your
economic ideals constantly creates in me. I always think of you
politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these
other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the
aristocratic countries of Europe in theory, or practice. It is very
puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to
establish insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of
the brotherhood which your policy proclaims?"

Mrs. Makely looked at me as if she were helpless to grapple with his
meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: "I
don't believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used
to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are
a very good thing."

Mrs. Makely now came to my support. "The Americans are very high-spirited,
in every class, and I don't believe one of those nice farm-boys would like
being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can't imagine how
proud some of them are."

"So that they suffer from being excluded as inferiors?"

"Oh, I assure you they don't feel themselves inferior! They consider
themselves as good as anybody. There are some very interesting characters
among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with
her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to.
That's her brother, standing there with her--that tall, gaunt young man
with a Roman face; it's such a common type here in the mountains. Their
father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last
battles that he was promoted. He was badly wounded, but he never took a
pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now the
son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The
daughter takes in sewing, and in that way they manage to make both ends
meet. The girl is really a first-rate seamstress, and so cheap! I give her
a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She's very
fond of reading; the mother is an invalid, but she reads aloud while the
daughter sews, and you've no idea how many books they get through. When
she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have
her sit down; it's hard to realize that she isn't a lady. I'm a good deal
criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts notions
into such people's heads, if you meet them in that way; they're pretty
free and independent as it is. But when I'm with Lizzie I forget that
there is any difference between us; I can't help loving the child. You
must take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They've got the father's
sword hung up over the head of the mother's bed; it's very touching. But
the poor little place is so bare!"

Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a
question she had the effect of having kept back.

"There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true
that everybody in Altruria does some kind of manual labor?"

"Why, certainly," he answered, quite as if he had been an American.

"Ladies, too? Or perhaps you have none."

I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian
had taken it ill. "Perhaps we had better try to understand each other
clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as
they have in England--"

"No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions," said Mrs.
Makely, with a republican fervor that did my heart good. "It is a word
that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person."

"But you said just now that you sometimes forgot that your seamstress was
not a lady. Just what did you mean by that?"

Mrs. Makely hesitated. "I meant--I suppose I meant--that she had not the
surroundings of a lady; the social traditions."

"Then it has something to do with social as well as moral qualities--with
ranks and classes?"

"Classes, yes; but, as you know, we have no ranks in America." The
Altrurian took off his hat and rubbed an imaginable perspiration from his
forehead. He sighed deeply. "It is all very difficult."

"Yes," Mrs. Makely assented, "I suppose it is. All foreigners find it so.
In fact, it is something that you have to live into the notion of; it
can't be explained."

"Well, then, my dear madam, will you tell me without further question what
you understand by a lady, and let me live into the notion of it at my
leisure?"

"I will do my best," said Mrs. Makely. "But it would be so much easier to
tell you _who_ was or who was not a lady. However, your acquaintance is so
limited yet that I must try to do something in the abstract and impersonal
for you. In the first place, a lady must be above the sordid anxieties in
every way. She need not be very rich, but she must have enough, so that
she need not be harassed about making both ends meet, when she ought to be
devoting herself to her social duties. The time is past with us when a
lady could look after the dinner, and perhaps cook part of it herself, and
then rush in to receive her guests and do the amenities. She must have a
certain kind of house, so that her entourage won't seem cramped and mean,
and she must have nice frocks, of course, and plenty of them. She needn't
be of the smart set; that isn't at all necessary; but she can't afford to
be out of the fashion. Of course, she must have a certain training. She
must have cultivated tastes; she must know about art and literature and
music, and all those kind of things, and, though it isn't necessary to go
in for anything in particular, it won't hurt her to have a fad or two. The
nicest kind of fad is charity; and people go in for that a great deal. I
think sometimes they use it to work up with, and there are some who use
religion in the same way; I think it's horrid; but it's perfectly safe;
you can't accuse them of doing it. I'm happy to say, though, that mere
church association doesn't count socially so much as it used to. Charity
is a great deal more insidious. But you see how hard it is to define
a lady. So much has to be left to the nerves, in all these things. And
then it's changing all the time; Europe's coming in, and the old American
ideals are passing away. Things that people did ten years ago would be
impossible now, or at least ridiculous. You wouldn't be considered vulgar,
quite, but you would certainly be considered a back number, and that's
almost as bad. Really," said Mrs. Makely, "I don't believe I can tell you
what a lady is."

We all laughed together at her frank confession. The Altrurian asked: "But
do I understand that one of her conditions is that she shall have nothing
whatever to do?"

"Nothing to _do_!" cried Mrs. Makely. "A lady is busy from morning till
night. She always goes to bed perfectly worn out."

"But with what?" asked the Altrurian.

"With making herself agreeable and her house attractive, with going to
lunches and teas and dinners and concerts and theatres and art
exhibitions, and charity meetings and receptions, and with writing a
thousand and one notes about them, and accepting and declining, and giving
lunches and dinners, and making calls and receiving them, and I don't know
what all. It's the most hideous slavery!" Her voice rose into something
like a shriek; one could see that her nerves were going at the mere
thought of it all. "You don't have a moment to yourself; your life isn't
your own."

"But the lady isn't allowed to do any useful kind of work?"

"_Work_! Don't you call all that work, and _useful_? I'm sure I envy the
cook in my kitchen at times; I envy the woman that scrubs my floors. Stop!
Don't ask why I don't go into my kitchen, or get down on my knees with the
mop. It isn't possible. You simply can't. Perhaps you could if you were
very _grande dame_, but if you're anywhere near the line of necessity, or
ever have been, you can't. Besides, if we did do our own household work,
as I understand your Altrurian ladies do, what would become of the servant
class? We should be taking away their living, and that would be wicked."

"It would certainly be wrong to take away the living of a
fellow-creature," the Altrurian gravely admitted, "and I see the obstacle
in your way."

"It's a mountain," said the lady, with exhaustion in her voice, but a
returning amiability; his forbearance must have placated her.

"May I ask what the use of your society life is?" he ventured, after a
moment.

"Use? Why should it have any? It kills time."

"Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill
time, and you cannot escape from it without taking away the living of
those dependent on you?"

"Yes," I put in, "and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It
is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on
that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need
the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The
question is unanswerable."

"That is true; in your conditions, it is unanswerable," said the
Altrurian.

"I think," said Mrs. Makely, "that, under the circumstances, we do pretty
well."

"Oh, I don't presume to censure you. And if you believe that your
conditions are the best--"

"We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds," I said,
devoutly; and it struck me that, if ever we came to have a national
church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions
ought to be in the confession of faith.

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?"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15