A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

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"But people used to get their living expenses here," I suggested. "Why
can't they now?"

"Well, they didn't use to have Western prices to fight with; and then the
land wasn't worn out so, and the taxes were not so heavy. How would you
like to pay twenty to thirty dollars on the thousand, and assessed up to
the last notch, in the city?"

"Why, what in the world makes your taxes so heavy?"

"Schools and roads. We've got to have schools, and you city folks want
good roads when you come here in the summer, don't you? Then the season is
short, and sometimes we can't make a crop. The frost catches the corn in
the field, and you have your trouble for your pains. Potatoes are the only
thing we can count on, except grass, and, when everybody raises potatoes,
you know where the price goes."

"Oh, but now, Mr. Camp," said Mrs. Makely, leaning over toward him, and
speaking in a cosey and coaxing tone, as if he must not really keep the
truth from an old friend like her, "isn't it a good deal because the
farmers' daughters want pianos, and the farmers' sons want buggies? I
heard Professor Lumen saying, the other day, that, if the farmers were
willing to work as they used to work, they could still get a good living
off their farms, and that they gave up their places because they were too
lazy, in many cases, to farm them properly."

"He'd better not let _me_ hear him saying that," said the young fellow,
while a hot flush passed over his face. He added, bitterly: "If he wants
to see how easy it is to make a living up here, he can take this place and
try for a year or two; he can get it cheap. But I guess he wouldn't want
it the year round; he'd only want it a few months in the summer, when he
could enjoy the sightliness of it, and see me working over there on my
farm, while he smoked on his front porch." He turned round and looked at
the old house in silence a moment. Then, as he went on, his voice lost its
angry ring. "The folks here bought this place from the Indians, and they'd
been here more than two hundred years. Do you think they left it because
they were too lazy to run it, or couldn't get pianos and buggies out of
it, or were such fools as not to know whether they were well off? It was
their _home_; they were born and lived and died here. There is the family
burying-ground over there."

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 will 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.

"Yes, doesn't it?" she made haste to interpose, before the Altrurian could
say anything. "That is just the way we all feel about it, Mrs. Camp. I
assure you, if it were not for the accounts in the papers and the talk
about it everywhere, I couldn't believe there _was_ any such place as
Altruria; and if it were not for Mr. Twelvemough here--who has to keep all
his inventions for his novels, as a mere matter of business routine--I
might really suspect him and Mr. Homos of--well, _working_ us, as my
husband calls it."

The Altrurian smiled politely, but vaguely, as if he had not quite caught
her meaning, and I made answer for both: "I am sure, Mrs. Makely, if you
could understand my peculiar state of mind about Mr. Homos, you would
never believe that I was in collusion with him. I find him quite as
incredible as you do. There are moments when he seems so entirely
subjective with me that I feel as if he were no more definite or tangible
than a bad conscience."

"Exactly!" said Mrs. Makely, and she laughed out her delight in my
illustration.

The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps
all remained soberly silent. "I hope it isn't so bad as that," he said,
"though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of
misgiving. I don't know just what it is; but, if I could remove it, I
should be very glad to do so."

Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: "Well, then, in the first
place, my husband and I were talking it over last night after we left you,
and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money
afterward. It isn't so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia,
remained undiscovered till within such a very few years, as it is the
condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another,
and not each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moonshine;
such a thing never was and never can be; it is opposed to human nature,
and would take away incentive and all motive for exertion and advancement
and enterprise. I don't know _what_ he didn't say against it; but one
thing, he says it's perfectly un-American." The Altrurian remained silent,
gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little
manner: "I hope you won't feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what
I've repeated to you. I know my husband is awfully Philistine, though he
_is_ such a good fellow, and I don't, by any means, agree with him on all
those points; but I _would_ like to know what you think of them. The
trouble is, Mrs. Camp," she said, turning to the invalid, "that Mr. Homos
is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to
hear of it at first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means
to make him open up about it."

"There is no offence," the Altrurian answered for himself, "in what Mr.
Makely says, though, from the Altrurian point of view, there is a good
deal of error.

"Does it seem so strange to you," he asked, addressing himself to Mrs.
Camp, "that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for
one another instead of each for himself?"

"No indeed!" she answered. "Poor people have always had to live that way,
or they could not have lived at all."

"That was what I understood your porter to say last night," said the
Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: "I suppose that even
in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?"

"Well, I don't know about that," I said. "I suppose there are more people
independently rich than there are people independently poor."

"We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why
the Altrurian system should be considered so very un-American. Then, as to
whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic
expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first
Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed
to be directly influenced by His life, there was an altruism practised as
radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a
working economy in Altruria."

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