Through the Eye of the Needle

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"Do you mean at once?" Lord Moors asked.

"The hours of the obligatory labors are nearly past for the day. But if
you are interested in learning what you will be set to doing to-morrow,
the Communal authorities will be pleased to instruct you during the
Voluntaries this afternoon. You may be sure that in no case will your
weakness or inexperience be overtasked. Your histories will be studied,
and appropriate work will be assigned to each of you."

Mrs. Thrall burst out, "If you think I am going into my kitchen--"

Then I burst in, "I left my mother in _her_ kitchen!"

"And a very fit place for her, I dare say," she retorted, but Lady Moors
caught her mother's arm and murmured, in much the same distress as showed
in my husband's mild eyes, "Mother! Mother!" and drew her within.

XIII

Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those
people, and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the
two men, and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady
Moors, but addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the
American party in his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to
Rebecca. They were all rather bewildered, and so were the butler and
the footmen, and the _chef_ and his helpers, and the ladies' maids.
These were even more shocked than those they considered their betters,
and I quite took to my affections Lord Moors' man Robert, who was in an
awe-stricken way trying to get some light from me on the situation. He
contributed as much as any one to bring about a peaceful submission to
the inevitable, for he had been a near witness of what had happened to
the crew when they attempted their rebellion to the authorities; but he
did not profess to understand the matter, and from time to time he seemed
to question the reality of it.

The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took
an attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with
interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr.
Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into
the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first
task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian
style of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he
liked it better, and during the three hours of the first morning's
Obligatoires, his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be
restrained rather than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five
minutes for rest out of every twenty, and he could not get over his
life-long habit of working against time. The Altrurians tried to make
him understand that here people must not work _against_ time, but must
always work _with_ it, so as to have enough work to do each day;
otherwise they must remain idle during the Obligatoires and tend to
demoralize the workers. It seemed that Lady Moors had a passion for
gardening, and she was set to work with her father on the border of
flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was hoeing. She knew about
flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself by growing them, and
so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to dig, she was delighted
to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her father were cronies,
and when I went round in the morning with Aristides to ask if we could do
anything for them, we heard them laughing and talking gayly together
before we reached them. They said they had looked their job (as Mr.
Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the Voluntaries, and
had decided how they would manage, and they had set to work that morning
as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her mother get the
breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a picnic, though
from the look of Mrs. Thrall's back, as she turned it on me, when I saw
her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in her hand, I
decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.

Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about
him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our
quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party
of Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They
were having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand
each other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the
Altrurians were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were
doing something which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered
our services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of
his suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of
enthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr.
Ruskin's direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather
amateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of
pure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed
upon him and shook hands with him; their affection did not go further,
and he was able to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they
would not feel it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very
simple matter like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had
been using to carry the water off. They understood what he was saying,
from his gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like
to join them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone
out of a neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We
explained to him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he
was looking at them admirably, and he said, "It's really very good," and
we understood that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he
added, "I should really fancy trying it myself one day," and we told them
they wanted to go and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we
persuaded them not to urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his
work in his yachting flannels.

I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point
of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and
high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American
millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any
further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his
merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was
only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for
a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it.
Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for
an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard
idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so
far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would
make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.

We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in
making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and
shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused
outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician
rescued them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been
employed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better
mind by withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it
by working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the
rebels were the ladies' maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not
to have required the application of the net and filament; but they had
not such appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so
much. However, in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or
less resigned, though they did not profess to understand it.

You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the
personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall's _chef,_ Anatole, I found my
affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship's man Robert,
my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline
man, with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an
exalted position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he
could easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with
misgivings, not for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall.
It became my pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur
Anatole, who, when he imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what
he had never liked to tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of
Americans on the subject, that he had belonged in France to a party of
which the political and social ideal was almost identical with that
of the Altrurians. He asked for an early opportunity of addressing the
village Assembly and explaining this delightful circumstance in public,
and he profited by the occasion to embrace the first Altrurian we met and
kiss him on both cheeks.

His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire
whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be
assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science;
that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his
concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in
studying the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the
substitution of the more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use
of which, he understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the
course of his preparation for the role of _chef_, which he had played
both in France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi;
and the result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this
moment he has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the
Altrurian table. This has added to their dietary in several important
particulars, the fungi he has discovered being among those highly
decorative and extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the
deep woods and offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the
ruins of the old capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will
grow. Anatole is very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal
Assembly has lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their
preparation for the table, with sketches of them as he found them
growing, colored after nature by his own hand. He has himself become a
fanatical vegetarian, having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing
for the meats he stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and
American bourgeoisie in the days which he already looks back upon as
among the most benighted of his history.

XIV

The scene has changed again, Dolly, and six months have elapsed without
your knowing it. Aristides and I long ago completed the tour of the
capitals which the Thrall incident interrupted, and we have been settled
for many months in the Maritime Capital, where it has been decided we had
better fill out the first two years of my husband's repatriation. I have
become more and more thoroughly naturalized, and if I am not yet a
perfect Altrurian, it is not for not loving better and better the best
Altrurian of them all, and not for not admiring and revering this
wonderful civilization.

During the Obligatories of the forenoons I do my housework with my own
hands, and as my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and
try to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort
of nightmare from which we have happily awakened. You see how terribly
frank I am, my dear, but if I were not, I could not make you understand
how I feel. My heart aches for you, there, and the more because I know
that you do not want to live differently, that you are proud of your
economic and social illogicality, and that you think America is the best
country under the sun! I can never persuade you, but if you could only
come here, once, and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and
believing would be the wish never to go away, but to be at home here
always.

I can imagine your laughing at me and asking Mr. Makely whether the
_Little Sally_ has ever returned to Altruria, and how I can account for
the captain's failure to keep his word. I confess that is a sore point
with me. It is now more than a year since she sailed, and, of course, we
have not had a sign or whisper from her. I could almost wish that the
crew were willing to stay away, but I am afraid it is the captain who is
keeping them. It has become almost a mania with me, and every morning,
the first thing when I wake, I go for my before-breakfast walk along the
marble terrace that overlooks the sea, and scan the empty rounding for
the recreant ship. I do not want to think so badly of human nature, as I
must if the _Little Sally_ never comes back, and I am sure you will not
blame me if I should like her to bring me some word from you. I know that
if she ever reached Boston you got my letters and presents, and that you
have been writing me as faithfully as I have been writing you, and what a
sheaf of letters from you there will be if her masts ever pierce
the horizon! To tell the truth, I do long for a little American news! Do
you still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning, and burning, and
mommicking, and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war
since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as
much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities
are, your heroism and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion,
are equal to them.

It is no use to pretend that in little over a year I can have become
accustomed to the eventlessness of life in Altruria. I go on for a good
many days together and do not miss the exciting incidents you have in
America, and then suddenly I am wolfishly hungry for the old sensations,
just as now and then I _want meat_, though I know I should loathe the
sight and smell of it if I came within reach of it. You would laugh, I
dare say, at the Altrurian papers, and what they print for news. Most of
the space is taken up with poetry, and character study in the form of
fiction, and scientific inquiry of every kind. But now and then there is
a report of the production of a new play in one of the capitals; or an
account of an open-air pastoral in one of the communes; or the progress
of some public work, like the extension of the National Colonnade; or the
wonderful liberation of some section from malaria; or the story of some
good man or woman's life, ended at the patriarchal age they reach here.
They also print selected passages of capitalistic history, from the
earliest to the latest times, showing how in war and pestilence and
needless disaster the world outside Altruria remains essentially the same
that it was at the beginning of civilization, with some slight changes
through the changes of human nature for the better in its slow approaches
to the Altrurian ideal. In noting these changes the writers get some sad
amusement out of the fact that the capitalistic world believes human
nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy
have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these
things were once human nature, which is always changing, while brute
nature remains the same. Now and then they touch very guardedly on that
slavery, worse than war, worse than any sin or shame conceivable to the
Altrurians, in which uncounted myriads of women are held and bought and
sold, and they have to note that in this the capitalistic world is
without the hope of better things. You know what I mean, Dolly; every
good woman knows the little she cannot help knowing; but if you had ever
inquired into that horror, as I once felt obliged to do, you would think
it the blackest horror of the state of things where it must always exist
as long as there are riches and poverty. Now, when so many things in
America seem bad dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad
dream; the reality was so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of
some of the slaves; and when I think of it I want to grovel on the ground
with my mouth in the dust. But I know this can only distress you, for you
cannot get away from the fact as I have got away from it; that there it
is in the next street, perhaps in the next house, and that any night when
you leave your home with your husband, you may meet it at the first step
from your door.

You can very well imagine what a godsend the reports of Aristides and the
discussions of them have been to our papers. They were always taken down
stenographically, and they were printed like dialogue, so that at a
little distance you would take them at first for murder trials or divorce
cases, but when you look closer, you find them questions and answers
about the state of things in America. There are often humorous passages,
for the Altrurians are inextinguishably amused by our illogicality, and
what they call the perpetual _non sequiturs_ of our lives and laws. In
the discussions they frequently burlesque these, but as they present them
they seem really beyond the wildest burlesque. Perhaps you will be
surprised to know that a nation of working-people like these feel more
compassion than admiration for our working-people. They pity them, but
they blame them more than they blame the idle rich for the existing
condition of things in America. They ask why, if the American workmen
are in the immense majority, they do not vote a true and just state, and
why they go on striking and starving their families instead; they cannot
distinguish in principle between the confederations of labor and the
combinations of capital, between the trusts and the trades-unions, and
they condemn even more severely the oppressions and abuses of the unions.
My husband tries to explain that the unions are merely provisional, and
are a temporary means of enabling the employees to stand up against the
tyranny of the employers, but they always come back and ask him if the
workmen have not most of the votes, and if they have, why they do not
protect themselves peacefully instead of organizing themselves in
fighting shape, and making a warfare of industry.

There is not often anything so much like news in the Altrurian papers as
the grounding of the Thrall yacht on the coast of the Seventh Region, and
the incident has been treated and discussed in every possible phase by
the editors and their correspondents. They have been very frank about it,
as they are about everything in Altruria, and they have not concealed
their anxieties about their unwelcome guests. They got on without much
trouble in the case of the few sailors of the _Little Sally_, but the
crew of the _Saraband_ is so large that it is a different matter. In the
first place, they do not like the application of force, even in the mild
electrical form in which they employ it, and they fear that the effect
with themselves will be bad, however good it is for their guests.
Besides, they dread the influence which a number of people, invested with
the charm of strangeness, may have with the young men and especially the
young girls of the neighborhood. The hardest thing the Altrurians have to
grapple with is feminine curiosity, and the play of this about the
strangers is what they seek the most anxiously to control. Of course, you
will think it funny, and I must say that it seemed so to me at first, but
I have come to think it is serious. The Altrurian girls are cultivated
and refined, but as they have worked all their lives with their hands
they cannot imagine the difference that work makes in Americans; that it
coarsens and classes them, especially if they have been in immediate
contact with rich people, and been degraded or brutalized by the
knowledge of the contempt in which labor is held among us by those who
are not compelled to it. Some of my Altrurian friends have talked it over
with me, and I could take their point of view, though secretly I could
not keep my poor American feelings from being hurt when they said that to
have a large number of people from the capitalistic world thrown upon
their hands was very much as it would be with us if we had the same
number of Indians, with all their tribal customs and ideals, thrown upon
our hands. They say they will not shirk their duty in the matter, and
will study it carefully; but all the same, they wish the incident had not
happened.

XV

I am glad that I was called away from the disagreeable point I left in my
last, and that I have got back temporarily to the scene of the
Altrurianization of Mr. Thrall and his family. So far as it has gone it
is perfect, if I may speak from the witness of happiness in those
concerned, except perhaps Mrs. Thrall; she is as yet only partially
reconstructed, but even she has moments of forgetting her lost grandeur
and of really enjoying herself in her work. She is an excellent
housekeeper, and she has become so much interested in making the marquee
a simple home for her family that she is rather proud of showing it off
as the effect of her unaided efforts. She was allowed to cater to them
from the canned meats brought ashore from the yacht as long as they would
stand it, but the wholesome open-air conditions have worked a wonderful
change in them, and neither Mr. Thrall nor Lord and Lady Moors now have
any taste for such dishes. Here Mrs. Thrall's old-time skill as an
excellent vegetable cook, when she was the wife of a young mechanic, has
come into play, and she believes that she sets the best table in the
whole neighborhood, with fruits and many sorts of succulents and the
everlasting and ever-pervading mushrooms.

As the Altrurians do not wish to annoy their involuntary guests, or to
interfere with their way of life where they do not consider it immoral,
their control has ended with setting them to work for a living. They
have not asked them to the communal refectory, but, as long as they have
been content to serve each other, have allowed them their private table.
Of course, their adaptation to their new way of life has proceeded more
slowly than it otherwise would, but with the exception of Mrs. Thrall
they are very intelligent people, and I have been charmed in talking the
situation over with them. The trouble has not been so great with the
ship's people, as was feared. Such of these as have imagined their stay
here permanent, or wished it to be so, have been received into the
neighboring communes, and have taken the first steps towards
naturalization; those who look forward to getting away some time, or
express the wish for it, are allowed to live in a community of their own,
where they are not molested as long as they work in the three hours of
the Obligatoires. Naturally, they are kept out of mischief, but after
their first instruction in the ideas of public property and the
impossibility of enriching themselves at the expense of any one else,
they have behaved very well. The greatest trouble they ever gave was in
trapping and killing the wild things for food; but when they were told
that this must not be done, and taught to recognize the vast range of
edible fungi, they took not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker
tubers and roots, from which, with unlimited eggs, cheese, milk, and
shell-fish, they have constructed a diet of which they do not complain.

This brings me rather tangentially to Monsieur Anatole, who has become a
fanatical Altrurian, and has even had to be restrained in some of his
enthusiastic plans for the compulsory naturalization of his fellow
castaways. His value as a scientist has been cordially recognized, and
his gifts as an artist in the exquisite water-color studies of edible
fungi has won his notice in the capital of the Seventh Regional where
they have been shown at the spring water-color exhibition. He has printed
several poems in the _Regional Gazette_, villanelles, rondeaux, and
triolets, with accompanying versions of the French, into Altrurian by one
of the first Altrurian poets. This is a widow of about Monsieur Anatole's
own age; and the literary friendship between them has ripened into
something much more serious. In fact they are engaged to be married. I
suppose you will laugh at this, Dolly, and at first I confess that there
was enough of the old American in me to be shocked at the idea of a
French _chef_ marrying an Altrurian lady who could trace her descent to
the first Altrurian president of the Commonwealth, and who is universally
loved and honored. I could not help letting something of the kind escape
me by accident, to a friend, and presently Mrs. Chrysostom was sent to
interview me on the subject, and to learn just how the case appeared to
me. This put me on my honor, and I was obliged to say how it would appear
in America, though every moment I grew more and more ashamed of myself
and my native country, where we pretend that labor is honorable, and are
always heaping dishonor on it. I told how certain of our girls and
matrons had married their coachmen and riding-masters and put themselves
at odds with society, and I confessed that marrying a cook would be
regarded as worse, if possible.

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