Through the Eye of the Needle

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I suppose you are anxious, if these letters which are piling up and
piling up should ever reach you, or even start to do so, to know
something about the Altrurian cities, and what they are like. Well, in
the first place, you must cast all images of American cities out of your
mind, or any European cities, except, perhaps, the prettiest and
stateliest parts of Paris, where there is a regular sky-line, and the
public buildings and monuments are approached through shaded avenues.
There are no private houses here, in our sense--that is, houses which
people have built with their own money on their own land, and made as
ugly outside and as molestive to their neighbors and the passers-by as
they chose. As the buildings belong to the whole people, the first
requirement is that they shall be beautiful inside and out. There are a
few grand edifices looking like Greek temples, which are used for the
government offices, and these are, of course, the most dignified, but the
dwellings are quite as attractive and comfortable. They are built round
courts, with gardens and flowers in the courts, and wide grassy spaces
round them. They are rather tall, but never so tall as our great hotels
or apartment-houses, and the floors are brought to one level by
elevators, which are used only in the capitals; and, generally speaking,
I should say the villages were pleasanter than the cities. In fact, the
village is the Altrurian ideal, and there is an effort everywhere to
reduce the size of the towns and increase the number of the villages.
The outlying farms have been gathered into these, and now there is not
one of those lonely places in the country, like those where our farmers
toil alone outdoors and their wives alone indoors, and both go mad
so often in the solitude. The villages are almost in sight of each other,
and the people go to their fields in company, while the women carry on
their house-keeping co-operatively, with a large kitchen which they
use in common; they have their meals apart or together, as they like. If
any one is sick or disabled the neighbors come in and help do her work,
as they used with us in the early times, and as they still do in country
places. Village life here is preferred, just as country life is in
England, and one thing that will amuse you, with your American ideas, and
your pride in the overgrowth of our cities: the Altrurian papers solemnly
announce from time to time that the population of such or such a capital
has been reduced so many hundreds or thousands since the last census.
That means that the villages in the neighborhood have been increased in
number and population.

Meanwhile, I must say the capitals are delightful: clean, airy, quiet,
with the most beautiful architecture, mostly classic and mostly marble,
with rivers running through them and round them, and every real
convenience, but not a clutter of artificial conveniences, as with us. In
the streets there are noiseless trolleys (where they have not been
replaced by public automobiles) which the long distances of the ample
ground-plan make rather necessary, and the rivers are shot over with
swift motor-boats; for the short distances you always expect to walk, or
if you don't expect it, you walk anyway. The car-lines and boat-lines are
public, and they are free, for the Altrurians think that the community
owes transportation to every one who lives beyond easy reach of the
points which their work calls them to.

Of course the great government stores are in the capitals, and
practically there are no stores in the villages, except for what you
might call emergency supplies. But you must not imagine, Dolly, that
shopping, here, is like shopping at home--or in America, as I am learning
to say, for Altruria is home now. That is, you don't fill your purse with
bank-notes, or have things charged. You get everything you want, within
reason, and certainly everything you need, for nothing. You have only to
provide yourself with a card, something like that you have to show at the
Army and Navy Stores in London, when you first go to buy there, which
certifies that you belong to this or that working-phalanx, and that you
have not failed in the Obligatories for such and such a length of time.
If you are not entitled to this card, you had better not go shopping, for
there is no possible equivalent for it which will enable you to carry
anything away or have it sent to your house. At first I could not help
feeling rather indignant when I was asked to show my work-card in the
stores; I had usually forgotten to bring it, or sometimes I had brought
my husband's card, which would not do at all, unless I could say that I
had been ill or disabled, for a woman is expected to work quite the same
as a man. Of course her housework counts, and as we are on a sort of
public mission, they count our hours of travel as working-hours,
especially as Aristides has made it a point of good citizenship for us to
stop every now and then and join in the Obligatories when the villagers
were getting in the farm crops or quarrying stone or putting up a house.
I am never much use in quarrying or building, but I come in strong in the
hay-fields or the apple orchards or the orange groves.

The shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us--I mean, with
you--because the fashions do not change, and you get things only when you
need them, not when you want them, or when other people think you do. The
costume was fixed long ago, when the Altrurian era began, by a commission
of artists, and it would be considered very bad form as well as bad
morals to try changing it in the least. People are allowed to choose
their own colors, but if one goes very wrong, or so far wrong as to
offend the public taste, she is gently admonished by the local art
commission. If she insists, they let her have her own way, but she seldom
wants it when she knows that people think her a fright. Of course the
costume is modified somewhat for the age and shape of the wearer, but
this is not so often as you might think. There are no very lean or very
stout people, though there are old and young, just as there are with us.
But the Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples
do, and the life of work keeps down their weight. You know I used to
incline a little to over-plumpness, I really believe because I overate at
times simply to keep from thinking of the poor who had to undereat, but
that is quite past now; I have lost at least twenty-five pounds from
working out-doors and travelling so much and living very, very simply.

IX

I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I
forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous
tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one's
preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the
artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and
libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than
other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so
little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.

The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has
numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are
the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study
in them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books
relating to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away
every noon, so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely
at your disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with
the rest of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study
should be carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify
this theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are
allowed to take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you
have is immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel
hurried and are not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.

The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are
delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible
bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand
indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever
get my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am
writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you,
but then I should have had left out a good many things that happened
during our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should
have got to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better
keep to the form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at
random, why that is very much the way I write them.

I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you
remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can
have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing
heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the
architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an
edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language
characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of
the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth
Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and
garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the
overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths
between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there
is no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from
them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under
them at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by
colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day
flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the
stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with
arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades
are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming
and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the
streets are rather deserted.

But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never
get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous
uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in
the wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can
fancy it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of
our architects projected while they were still in the fervor of
excitement from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the
White City. They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole
Altrurian continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As
we travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old
railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my
husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital
we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately
white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels,
and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could
not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were
lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was
inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his
country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some
scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal
convenience, performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or
orator, or gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral,
among them! That seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how
it was. Like everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had
been no war for so long that there were no famous soldiers to
commemorate. But he stopped our van when he came to the first of the many
arches which spanned the highway, and read out to me in English the
Altrurian record that it was erected in honor of the first President of
the Altrurian Commonwealth, who managed the negotiations when the
capitalistic oligarchies to the north and south were peacefully annexed,
and the descendants of the three nations joined in the commemoration of
an event that abolished war forever on the Altrurian continent.

Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty
and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of
the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different
highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody
a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the
idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working,
and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything
by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else's brow. The
people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways
and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands,
after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was
a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it
during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during
the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and
all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since
the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of
July or an everlasting picnic.

But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make
haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really
coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we
had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to
the one where we had left our dear mother--for Aristides claims her,
too--and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the top,
though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day, and
knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded cliff
and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At first I
could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still beyond
a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that a
large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was
crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they
were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and
jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.

I was quite bewildered, and I don't know what to say I was the next
thing, when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag
from her peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so
large, and the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused
wonder what those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her
marines and crew. I couldn't ask any coherent questions, and luckily
Aristides was answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by
wheeling our van down on the beach and making for the point nearest the
yacht. He had time to say he did not believe she was a government vessel,
and, in fact, I remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River
getting up steam to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks
covered with sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the
private yacht of some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and
coming in my mind while my husband was talking with some of the
Altrurian girls who were there helping with the men. They said that the
yacht had gone ashore the night before last in one of the sudden fogs
that come up on that coast, and that some people whom the sailors seemed
to obey were camping on the edge of the upland above the beach, under a
large tent they had brought from the yacht. They had refused to go to the
guest-house in the nearest village, and as nearly as the girls could make
out they expected the yacht to get afloat from tide to tide, and then
intended to re-embark on her. In the mean time they had provisioned
themselves from the ship, and were living in a strange way of their own.
Some of them seemed to serve the others, but these appeared to be used
with a very ungrateful indifference, as if they were of a different race.
There was one who wore a white apron and white cap who directed the
cooking for the rest, and had several assistants; and from time to time
very disagreeable odors came from the camp, like burning flesh. The
Altrurians had carried them fruits and vegetables, but the men-assistants
had refused them contemptuously and seemed suspicious of the variety of
mushrooms they offered them. They called out, "To-stoo!" and I understood
that the strangers were afraid they were bringing toad-stools. One of the
Altrurian girls had been studying English in the nearest capital, and she
had tried to talk with these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way,
but they could make nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she
wanted to say, but as she spelled it phonetically they were not able to
read her English. She asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had
heard of, and when I said yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp
of the castaways.

As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at
the largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said
to me, "What name shall I say, ma'am?" and I answered distinctly, so
that he might get the name right, "Mr. and Mrs. Homos." Then he held
back the flap of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a
drawing-room, and called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us
pass, in the way that I remembered so well, "Mr. And Mrs. 'Omos!" and a
severe-looking, rather elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was
both anxious and forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst
out, "You don't mean to say you speak English?"

I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather
poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, "Have you
been cast away on this outlandish place, too?"

I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I
could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian
accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in
the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their
misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind.
But she merely said, "Oh!" and then she seemed to recollect herself, and
frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my
husband in presenting me. "Mr. Thrall, Mrs. ----"

She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, "Homos," and as the old man
had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.

"And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian," I said, and
then, as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign
of liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she
hadn't in all the time I have been away from New York. "I am glad you are
so comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won't need us, I see. The people
about will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear," and I was
sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent
millionaire's wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would
have been altogether mistaken.

I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should
have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous
pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after
they came on to New York.

He was beginning, "Oh no, oh no," but I cut in. "My husband and I are on
our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You
will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we
are rather in your housekeeper's way."

It _was_ nasty, Dolly, and I won't deny it; it was _vulgar_. But what
would _you_ have done? I could feel Aristides' mild eye sadly on me, and
I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them, till that
old man spoke again, so timidly: "It isn't my--it's my wife, Mrs. Homos.
Let me introduce her. But haven't we met before?"

"Perhaps during my first husband's lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington
Strange."

"Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when
we were both young--a good man, if ever there was one; the best in the
world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah--my dear, you remember my
speaking of Mrs. Strange?"

He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating
whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may
think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead
husband that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the
affection for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a
father. Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I
should forget him.

Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, "I
think I have met Mr. Strange," and now I saw in the background, sitting
on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a
very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it
at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social
Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for
she rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded
himself from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he
rather liked what had happened.

Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, "Do stop and have
some breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter,
Lady Moors and--and Lord Moors?" The girl took my hand, and the young man
bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not
to be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall
and myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the
weather, and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide,
and my husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did
not sit down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the
door of the tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law,
and as she now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped
out, "But you are not _leaving_ us? What shall we _do_ with all these
natives?"

This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. "_Natives_! They are
cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure you
you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only
Altrurian by marriage!"

She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in,
and she came back with, "But we don't speak the language, and they don't
speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?"

"Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just
left. But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the
natives in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very
sensitive, and if you fail in any point of consideration, they will
understand that you do not want their hospitality."

"I imagine our own people will be able to look after us," she answered
quite as nastily. "We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay
our way here as we do elsewhere."

"The experiment will be worth trying," I said. "Come, Aristides!" and I
took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some
hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look
back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power,
and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him
because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It
must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the
shoulder and said, "Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth," till I thought I should
scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was
horrid, and what did he want me to do?

After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought
we had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving
them to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the
neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the
shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one
chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would
have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in
their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me,
but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not
anticipate the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in
fact, I wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I
could, for the thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the
rest of our tour.

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