Through the Eye of the Needle

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But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria, where it has not
altogether lost its religious nature. A sort of march in the temples is
as much a part of the worship as singing, and so dancing has been
preserved from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious people
among us. In the lovely afternoons you see young people dancing in the
meadows, and hear them shouting in time to the music, while the older men
and women watch them from their seats in the shade. Every sort of
pleasure here is improvised, and as you pass through a village the first
thing you know the young girls and young men start up in a sort of
_girandole_, and linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure
along through the street and out over the highway to the next village,
and the next and the next. The work has all been done in the forenoon,
and every one who chooses is at liberty to join in the fun.

The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger, and we knew what to
expect there after a while, but the country is perpetually varied, and
the unexpected is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds, on
which we travelled, are planted with fruit and nut trees and flowering
shrubs, and our progress is through a fragrant bower that is practically
endless, except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near the entrance
of a village, with vines trained about white pillars, and clusters of
grapes (which are ripening just now) hanging down. The change in the
climate created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and letting in
the equatorial current, which was begun under the first Altrurian
president, with an unexpended war-appropriation, and finished for what
one of the old capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly
astonishing. Aristides says he told you something about it in his speech
at the White Mountains, but you would never believe it without the
evidence of your senses. Whole regions to the southward, which were
nearest the pole and were sheeted with ice and snow, with the temperature
and vegetation of Labrador, now have the climate of Italy; and the
mountains, which used to bear nothing but glaciers, are covered with
olive orchards and plantations of the delicious coffee which they drink
here. Aristides says you could have the same results at home--no! _in the
United States_--by cutting off the western shore of Alaska and letting in
the Japanese current; and it could be done at the cost of any average
war.

VI

But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these
international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop
and camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and
bread and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round
us. Since my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in
the fields and pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over
an open fire, Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we
have a banquet fit for kings--or for the poor things in every grade below
them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is
always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the
mountains--there is not much rainfall--and carried in little concrete
channels along the road--side from village to village, something like
those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the
Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle
of it the whole night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After
supper we can read awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the
telephone wires anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a
lesson of Altrurian grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall
asleep with the Southern Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly
safe, though it was a long time before I could imagine the perfect safety
of it. In a country where there are no thieves, because a thief here
would not know what to do with his booty, we are secure from human
molestation, and the land has long been cleared of all sorts of wild
beasts, without being unpleasantly tamed. It is like England in that, and
yet it has a touch of the sylvan, which you feel nowhere as you do in our
dear New England hill country. There was one night, however, when we were
lured on and on, and did not stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then
we went to sleep without supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and
were not hungry, and about one o'clock in the morning I was awakened by
voices speaking Altrurian together. I recognized my husband's voice,
which is always so kind, but which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and
compassionate note in it now. The other was lower and of a sadness which
wrung my heart, though I did not know in the least what the person was
saying. The talk went on a long time, at first about some matter of
immediate interest, as I fancied, and then apparently it branched off
on some topic which seemed to concern the stranger, whoever he was. Then
it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the stranger were leaving us and
Aristides were going a little way with him. Presently I heard him coming
back, and he put his head in at the van curtains, as if to see whether I
was asleep.

"Well?" I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. "Oh, I
don't mind," I said. "Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest
voice I ever heard. What did he want?"

"Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old
capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against
the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial
influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way,
if you don't mind."

The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides
got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous
zone. "I think," he said, "they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt
if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times
past as an object-lesson."

"But who was your unknown friend?" I asked, a great deal more curious
about him than about the capitalistic ruin.

"Oh, just a poor murderer," he answered easily, and I shuddered back:
"A murderer!"

"Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and
he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace."

"And is the remorse his only punishment?" I asked, rather indignantly.

"Isn't that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first
murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a
mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this.
We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of
his face. I was rather glad you, couldn't see him, my dear. It is an
awful face."

I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said,
"Really, Aristides, I can't follow you. How are innocent people to be
protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?"

"They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case
was carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided
that he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to
expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be
expiated--by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with
him?"

The question rather staggered me, but I said, "He ought to have been
imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter."

"Cain was not imprisoned an hour."

"That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large
who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other
murderers?"

"In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for
money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic
countries, as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that
this seems very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the
idea, and then you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On
the whole, I am sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and
heard him. He had a face like death--"

"And a voice like death, too!" I put in.

"You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to
talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an
undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only
thing, in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the
life he took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by
destroying another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but
we can always do mercy with divine omniscience." As he spoke the sun
pierced the edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and
roofs of the Regionic capital which we were approaching.

At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our
having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and
public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of
punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it
visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case
had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had
seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our
prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are
kept, I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an
American at heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our
police-stations at night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give
bail for a wretched girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but
had been arrested for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the
smell woke me in the night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite
ceased to dream about it.

The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize
the facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make
them the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the
prisoners in what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first
they did not conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly
barbarous; they have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had
carefully explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They
thought it right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could
not understand that the state really took away their wages, and left
their families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived
them of. They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives
and children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an
offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental
countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such
an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me
I was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised.
Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.

VII

Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our
travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty
of the country!

The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of
it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this
wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times,
in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the
hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help
him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet
meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or
instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or
mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the
case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or
reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.

It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this,
where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of
obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything
unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all
sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard,
with straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and
sandals for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at
home gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in
the fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it
by labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every
foot, because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men,
very old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of
voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they
could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and
bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some
pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their
sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a
little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy
would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove
of small pines, for the _coulisses_, and using a level of grass for the
stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us to
come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that I
can feel I make among them.

Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal
curiosity to get a look at Aristides' capitalistic wife, as they call me.
I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely
descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called
me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the
woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our
van into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two
old men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then
all sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the
woods, where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and
began to get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse
the rest. Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of
artists, it was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had
artists' manners, free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in
everything, and a wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh.
Aristides is always explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that
is, some one who works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one
here is asked to do work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every
kind of work. When this happens, the authorities find out something for
him that he had _better_ like, by letting him starve till he works. That
picnic lasted the whole afternoon and well into the night, and then the
picnickers went home through the starlight, leading the little ones, or
carrying them when they were too little or too tired. But first they came
down to our van with us, and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared
into it, and then left us, and sent their voices back to us out of the
dark.

One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole
population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress
of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work
is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking
something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man
and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and
entered separately. Aristides called out, "Oh, it is a wedding! You are
in luck, Eveleth," and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.

Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were
garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have
blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of
Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among
the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just
inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again
separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the
elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood
facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn
which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of
statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the
young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man
and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other,
and having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been
questioned as to the continuance of their affection. She said that
probably every one present knew that they had been friends from
childhood, and none would be surprised that they now wished to be united
for life. They had been carefully instructed as to the serious nature of
the marriage bond, and admonished as to the duties they were entering
into, not only to each other, but to the community. At each successive
visit to the authorities they had been warned, separately and together,
against the danger of trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and
they had faithfully endeavored to act upon this advice, as they
testified. In order to prove the reality of their affection, they had
been parted every third month, and had lived during that time in
different Regions where it was meant they should meet many other young
people, so that if they felt any swerving of the heart they might not
persist in an intention which could only bring them final unhappiness. It
seems this is the rule in the case of young lovers, and people usually
marry very young here, but if they wish to marry later in life the rule
is not enforced so stringently, or not at all. The bride and groom we saw
had both stood these trials, and at each return they had been more and
more sure that they loved each other, and loved no one else. Now they
were here to unite their hands, and to declare the union of their hearts
before the people.

Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people
come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses
were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the
last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of
themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state,
and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce
would indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of
lasting grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against
the commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and
ready to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands,
and declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The
congregation broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the
bride and groom with their families, who came up to them and embraced
them, pressing their cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.

This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with
a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank
toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories
approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their
wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later,
I understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely
do so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the
Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that
every other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage
ceremonial is something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a
Quaker wedding, and I could only compare this with the crazy romps with
which our house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes,
and tying ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the
pair to the train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them
conspicuous before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly
church weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social
effect, and ends with that everlasting thumping march from "Lohengrin,"
and the outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the
rude curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted
entrance cannot check.

VIII

We have since been at other weddings and at christenings and at funerals.
The ceremonies are always held in the temples, and are always in the same
serious spirit. As the Altrurians are steadfast believers in immortality,
there is a kind of solemn elevation in the funeral ceremonies which I
cannot give you a real notion of. It is helped, I think, by the custom of
not performing the ceremony over the dead; a brief rite is reserved for
the cemetery, where it is wished that the kindred shall not be present,
lest they think always of the material body and not of the spiritual body
which shall be raised in incorruption. Religious service is held in the
temples every day at the end of the Obligatories, and whenever we are
near a village or in any of the capitals we always go. It is very simple.
After a hymn, to which the people sometimes march round the interior of
the temple, each lays on the altar an offering from the fields or woods
where they have been working, if it is nothing but a head of grain or a
wild flower or a leaf. Then any one is at liberty to speak, but any one
else may go out without offence. There is no ritual; sometimes they read
a chapter from the New Testament, preferably a part of the story of
Christ or a passage from His discourses. The idea of coming to the temple
at the end of the day's labor is to consecrate that day's work, and they
do not call anything work that is not work with the hands. When I
explained, or tried to explain, that among us a great many people worked
with their brains, to amuse others or to get handwork out of them, they
were unable to follow me. I asked if they did not consider composing
music or poetry or plays, or painting pictures work, and they said, No,
that was pleasure, and must be indulged only during the Voluntaries; it
was never to be honored like work with the hands, for it would not
equalize the burden of that, but might put an undue share of it on
others. They said that lives devoted to such pursuits must be very
unwholesome, and they brought me to book about the lives of most artists,
literary men, and financiers in the capitalistic world to prove what they
said. They held that people must work with their hands willingly, in the
artistic spirit, but they could only do that when they knew that others
differently gifted were working in like manner with their hands.

I couldn't begin to tell you all our queer experiences. As I have kept
saying, I am a great curiosity everywhere, and I could flatter myself
that people were more eager to see me than to hear Aristides. Sometimes I
couldn't help thinking that they expected to find me an awful warning, a
dreadful example of whatever a woman ought not to be, and a woman from
capitalistic conditions must be logically. But sometimes they were very
intelligent, even the simplest villagers, as we should call them, though
there is such an equality of education and opportunity here that no
simplicity of life has the effect of dulling people as it has with us.
One thing was quite American: they always wanted to know how I liked
Altruria, and when I told them, as I sincerely could, that I adored it,
they were quite affecting in their pleasure. They generally asked if I
would like to go back to America, and when I said No, they were delighted
beyond anything. They said I must become a citizen and vote and take part
in the government, for that was every woman's duty as well as right; it
was wrong to leave the whole responsibility to the men. They asked if
American women took no interest in the government, and when I told them
there was a very small number who wished to influence politics socially,
as the Englishwomen did, but without voting or taking any responsibility,
they were shocked. In one of the Regionic capitals they wanted me to
speak after Aristides, but I had nothing prepared; at the next I did get
off a little speech in English, which he translated after me. Later he
put it into Altrurian, and I memorized it, and made myself immensely
popular by parroting it.

The pronunciation of Altrurian is not difficult, for it is spelled
phonetically, and the sounds are very simple. Where they were once
difficult they have been simplified, for here the simplification of life
extends to everything; and the grammar has been reduced in its structure
till it is as elemental as English grammar or Norwegian. The language is
Greek in origin, but the intricate inflections and the declensions have
been thrown away, and it has kept only the simplest forms. You must get
Mr. Twelvemough to explain this to you, Dolly, for it would take me too
long, and I have so much else to tell you. A good many of the women have
taken up English, but they learn it as a dead language, and they give it
a comical effect by trying to pronounce it as it is spelled.

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