Through the Eye of the Needle
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W. D. Howells >> Through the Eye of the Needle
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"Canvasback duck?" she asked, and at that moment the servant set before
the anxious inquirer a platter of these renowned birds, which you know
something of already from the report our emissaries have given of their
cult among the Americans.
Every one laughed, and after the gentleman had made a despairing flourish
over them with a carving-knife in emulation of Mr. Makely's emblematic
attempt upon the turkey, both were taken away and carved at a sideboard.
They were then served in slices, the turkey with cranberry sauce, and the
ducks with currant jelly; and I noticed that no one took so much of the
turkey that he could not suffer himself to be helped also to the duck. I
must tell you that there a salad with the duck, and after that there was
an ice-cream, with fruit and all manner of candied fruits, and candies,
different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the
coffee.
"Well, now," Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, "I
must let you imagine the pumpkin-pie. I meant to have it, because it
isn't really Thanksgiving without it. But I couldn't, for the life of me,
see where it would come in."
XV
The sally of the hostess made them all laugh, and they began to talk
about the genuine American character of the holiday, and what a fine
thing it was to have something truly national. They praised Mrs. Makely
for thinking of so many American dishes, and the facetious gentleman said
that she rendered no greater tribute than was due to the overruling
Providence which had so abundantly bestowed them upon the Americans as a
people. "You must have been glad, Mrs. Strange," he said to the lady at
my side, "to get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else
so potent to bring us home from Europe."
"I'm afraid," she answered, "that I don't care so much for the American
oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back."
"In time for the turkey, perhaps?"
"No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native
land," said the lady.
"Ah, well, say the canvasback duck, then? The canvasback duck is no
alien. He is as thoroughly American as the turkey, or as any of us."
"No, I should not have missed him, either," persisted the lady.
"What could one have missed," the gentleman said, with a bow to the
hostess, "in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been
nothing, I should not have missed it," and when the laugh at his drolling
had subsided he asked Mrs. Strange: "Then, if it is not too indiscreet,
might I inquire what in the world has lured you again to our shores, if
it was not the oyster, nor the turkey, nor yet the canvasback?"
"The American dinner-party," said the lady, with the same burlesque.
"Well," he consented, "I think I understand you. It is different from the
English dinner-party in being a festivity rather than a solemnity;
though, after all, the American dinner is only a condition of the English
dinner. Do you find us much changed, Mrs. Strange?"
"I think we are every year a little more European," said the lady. "One
notices it on getting home."
"I supposed we were so European already," returned the gentleman, "that
a European landing among us would think he had got back to his
starting-point in a sort of vicious circle. I am myself so thoroughly
Europeanized in all my feelings and instincts that, do you know, Mrs.
Makely, if I may confess it without offence--"
"Oh, by all means!" cried the hostess.
"When that vast bird which we have been praising, that colossal roast
turkey, appeared, I felt a shudder go through my delicate substance, such
as a refined Englishman might have experienced at the sight, and I said
to myself, quite as if I were not one of you, 'Good Heavens! now they
will begin talking through their noses and eating with their knives.'
It's what I might have expected!"
It was impossible not to feel that this gentleman was talking at me; if
the Americans have a foreign guest, they always talk at him more or less;
and I was not surprised when he said, "I think our friend, Mr. Homos,
will conceive my fine revolt from the crude period of our existence which
the roast turkey marks as distinctly as the graffiti of the cave-dweller
proclaim his epoch."
"No," I protested, "I am afraid that I have not the documents for the
interpretation of your emotion. I hope you will take pity on my ignorance
and tell me just what you mean."
The others said they none of them knew, either, and would like to know,
and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter
in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead
up to it ever since we sat down. "I've been struck, first of all, by the
fact, in our evolution, that we haven't socially evolved from ourselves;
we've evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don't think you'll
find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our
peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life; I doubt it,
sometimes. If you begin with the earliest thing in the day, if you begin
with breakfast, as society gives breakfasts, you have an English
breakfast, though American people and provisions."
"I must say, I think they're both much nicer," said Mrs. Makely.
"Ah, there I am with you! We borrow the form, but we infuse the spirit. I
am talking about the form, though. Then, if you come to the society
lunch, which is almost indistinguishable from the society breakfast, you
have the English lunch, which is really an undersized English dinner.
The afternoon tea is English again, with its troops of eager females and
stray, reluctant males; though I believe there are rather more men at the
English teas, owing to the larger leisure class in England. The afternoon
tea and the 'at home' are as nearly alike as the breakfast and the lunch.
Then, in the course of time, we arrive at the great society function,
the dinner; and what is the dinner with us but the dinner of our
mother-country?"
"It is livelier," suggested Mrs. Makely, again.
"Livelier, I grant you, but I am still speaking of the form, and not of
the spirit. The evening reception, which is gradually fading away, as a
separate rite, with its supper and its dance, we now have as the English
have it, for the people who have not been asked to dinner. The ball,
which brings us round to breakfast again, is again the ball of our
Anglo-Saxon kin beyond the seas. In short, from the society point of view
we are in everything their mere rinsings."
"Nothing of the kind!" cried Mrs. Makely. "I won't let you say such a
thing! On Thanksgiving-day, too! Why, there is the Thanksgiving dinner
itself! If that isn't purely American, I should like to know what is."
"It is purely American, but it is strictly domestic; it is not society.
Nobody but some great soul like you, Mrs. Makely, would have the courage
to ask anybody to a Thanksgiving dinner, and even you ask only such
easy-going house-friends as we are proud to be. You wouldn't think of
giving a dinner-party on Thanksgiving?"
"No, I certainly shouldn't. I should think it was very presuming; and you
are all as nice as you can be to have come to-day; I am not the only
great soul at the table. But that is neither here nor there. Thanksgiving
is a purely American thing, and it's more popular than ever. A few years
ago you never heard of it outside of New England."
The gentleman laughed. "You are perfectly right, Mrs. Makely, as you
always are. Thanksgiving is purely American. So is the corn-husking, so
is the apple-bee, so is the sugar-party, so is the spelling-match, so is
the church-sociable; but none of these have had their evolution in our
society entertainments. The New Year's call was also purely American, but
that is now as extinct as the dodo, though I believe the other American
festivities are still known in the rural districts."
"Yes," said Mrs. Makely, "and I think it's a great shame that we can't
have some of them in a refined form in society. I once went to a
sugar-party up in New Hampshire when I was a girl, and I never enjoyed
myself so much in my life. I should like to make up a party to go to one
somewhere in the Catskills in March. Will you all go? It would be
something to show Mr. Homos. I should like to show him something really
American before he goes home. There's nothing American left in society!"
"You forget the American woman," suggested the gentleman. "She is always
American, and she is always in society."
"Yes," returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, "you're quite right
in that. One always meets more women than men in society. But it's
because the men are so lazy, and so comfortable at their clubs, they
won't go. They enjoy themselves well enough in society after they get
there, as I tell my husband when he grumbles over having to dress."
"Well," said the gentleman, "a great many things, the day-time things, we
really can't come to, because we don't belong to the aristocratic class,
as you ladies do, and we are busy down-town. But I don't think we are
reluctant about dinner; and the young fellows are nearly always willing
to go to a ball, if the supper's good and it's a house where they don't
feel obliged to dance. But what do _you_ think, Mr. Homos?" he
asked. "How does your observation coincide with my experience?"
I answered that I hardly felt myself qualified to speak, for though I had
assisted at the different kinds of society rites he had mentioned, thanks
to the hospitality of my friends in New York, I knew the English
functions only from a very brief stay in England on my way here, and from
what I had read of them in English fiction and in the relations of our
emissaries. He inquired into our emissary system, and the company
appeared greatly interested in such account of it as I could briefly
give.
"Well," he said, "that would do while you kept it to yourselves; but now
that your country is known to the plutocratic world, your public
documents will be apt to come back to the countries your emissaries have
visited, and make trouble. The first thing you know some of our bright
reporters will get on to one of your emissaries, and interview him, and
then we shall get what you think of us at first hands. By-the-by, have
you seen any of those primitive social delights which Mrs. Makely regrets
so much?"
"I!" our hostess protested. But then she perceived that he was joking,
and she let me answer.
I said that I had seen them nearly all, during the past year, in New
England and in the West, but they appeared to me inalienable of the
simpler life of the country, and that I was not surprised they should not
have found an evolution in the more artificial society of the cities.
"I see," he returned, "that you reserve your _opinion_ of our more
artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it
out of you yet before you leave us."
"Those horrid reporters!" one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.
The gentleman resumed: "In the mean time, I don't mind saying how it
strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American
things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the
smaller towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all
refined they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it
is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected
with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure we
must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of
pleasure."
"Mr. Homos, you know," Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the
aptest moment, "thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn't to
have any servants."
"Oh no, my dear lady," I put in. "I don't think that of you as you
_are_. None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your
conditions you _must_ have servants, and that you cannot possibly
work unless poverty obliges you."
The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs.
Makely's words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully
redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone
seemed to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position.
"Sometimes," she said, "I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we
could be freed from our servile bondage to servants."
Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the
world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one's own work. But
they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs.
Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how
the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could,
they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all
thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not
feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman
there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her
plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of
them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.
Mrs. Makely rose, and the other ladies rose with her, for the Americans
follow the English custom in letting the men remain at table after the
women have left. But on this occasion I found it varied by a pretty touch
from the French custom, and the men, instead of merely standing up while
the women filed out, gave each his arm, as far as the drawing-room, to
the lady he had brought in to dinner. Then we went back, and what is the
pleasantest part of the dinner to most men began for us.
XVI
I must say, to the credit of the Americans, that although the eating and
drinking among them appear gross enough to an Altrurian, you are not
revolted by the coarse stories which the English sometimes tell as soon
as the ladies have left them. If it is a men's dinner, or more especially
a men's supper, these stories are pretty sure to follow the coffee; but
when there have been women at the board, some sense of their presence
seems to linger in the more delicate American nerves, and the indulgence
is limited to two or three things off color, as the phrase is here, told
with anxious glances at the drawing-room doors, to see if they are fast
shut.
I do not remember just what brought the talk back from these primrose
paths to that question of American society forms, but presently some one
said he believed the church-sociable was the thing in most towns beyond
the apple-bee and sugar-party stage, and this opened the inquiry as to
how far the church still formed the social life of the people in cities.
Some one suggested that in Brooklyn it formed it altogether, and then
they laughed, for Brooklyn is always a joke with the New-Yorkers; I do
not know exactly why, except that this vast city is so largely a suburb,
and that it has a great number of churches and is comparatively cheap.
Then another told of a lady who had come to New York (he admitted, twenty
years ago), and was very lonely, as she had no letters until she joined a
church. This at once brought her a general acquaintance, and she began to
find herself in society; but as soon as she did so she joined a more
exclusive church, where they took no notice of strangers. They all
laughed at that bit of human nature, as they called it, and they
philosophized the relation of women to society as a purely business
relation. The talk ranged to the mutable character of society, and how
people got into it, or were of it, and how it was very different from
what it once was, except that with women it was always business. They
spoke of certain new rich people with affected contempt; but I could see
that they were each proud of knowing such millionaires as they could
claim for acquaintance, though they pretended to make fun of the number
of men-servants you had to run the gantlet of in their houses before you
could get to your hostess.
One of my commensals said he had noticed that I took little or no wine,
and, when I said that we seldom drank it in Altruria, he answered that he
did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much.
"Dining, you know, means overeating," he explained, "and if you wish to
overeat you must overdrink. I venture to say that you will pass a worse
night than any of us, Mr. Homos, and that you will be sorrier to-morrow
than I shall." They were all smoking, and I confess that their tobacco
was secretly such an affliction to me that I was at one moment in doubt
whether I should take a cigar myself or ask leave to join the ladies.
The gentleman who had talked so much already said: "Well, I don't mind
dining, a great deal, especially with Makely, here, but I do object to
supping, as I have to do now and then, in the way of pleasure. Last
Saturday night I sat down at eleven o'clock to blue-point oysters,
consomme, stewed terrapin--yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had
taken more of it--lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery
mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages,
caviare, radishes, celery, and olives interspersed wildly, and drinkables
and smokables _ad libitum_; and I can assure you that I felt very
devout when I woke up after church-time in the morning. It is this
turning night into day that is killing us. We men, who have to go to
business the next morning, ought to strike, and say that we won't go
to anything later than eight-o'clock dinner."
"Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four-o'clock tea,"
said another.
Our host seemed to be reminded of something by the mention of the women,
and he said, after a glance at the state of the cigars, "Shall we join
the ladies?"
One of the men-servants had evidently been waiting for this question. He
held the door open, and we all filed into the drawing-room.
Mrs. Makely hailed me with, "Ah, Mr. Homos, I'm so glad you've come! We
poor women have been having a most dismal time!"
"Honestly," asked the funny gentleman, "don't you always, without us?"
"Yes, but this has been worse than usual. Mrs. Strange has been asking us
how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes'
walk of us, who had no dinner to-day. Do you call that kind?"
"A little more than kin and less than kind, perhaps," the gentleman
suggested. "But what does she propose to do about it?"
He turned towards Mrs. Strange, who answered, "Nothing. What does any one
propose to do about it?"
"Then, why do you think about it?"
"I don't. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow's,
'The Challenge'?"
"No, I never heard of it."
"Well, it begins in his sweet old way, about some Spanish king who was
killed before a city he was besieging, and one of his knights sallies out
of the camp and challenges the people of the city, the living and the
dead, as traitors. Then the poet breaks off, _apropos de rien:_
'There is a greater army
That besets us round with strife,
A numberless, starving army,
At all the gates of life.
The poverty-stricken millions
Who challenge our wine and bread
And impeach us all for traitors,
Both the living and the dead.
And whenever I sit at the banquet,
Where the feast and song are high,
Amid the mirth and the music
I can hear that fearful cry.
And hollow and haggard faces
Look into the lighted hall,
And wasted hands are extended
To catch the crumbs that fall.
For within there is light and plenty,
And odors fill the air;
But without there is cold and darkness,
And hunger and despair.
And there, in the camp of famine,
In wind and cold and rain,
Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
Lies dead upon the plain.'"
"Ah," said the facetious gentleman, "that is fine! We really forget how
fine Longfellow was. It is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs.
Strange! That sort of thing has almost gone out; and it's a pity."
XVII
Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strange
here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance.
The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of
some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a
good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has
been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have
been done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner is
given in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are
striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give
regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is
eaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to say
that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory
either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at
any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression of
American hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with the
plutocratic principle, and that it meant business.
I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, after
all, but a few thousands out of the many millions of American people.
These millions are so far from being in society, even when they are very
comfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not already
greatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the best
society of the great Eastern cities they would find it almost as strange
as so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception of
entertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they know
nothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselves
upon. When they begin, in the ascent of the social scale, to adopt forms,
it is still to wear them lightly and with an individual freedom and
indifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law renders
them vulgar.
Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact
characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a
plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to
dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given
a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he
is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him
a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a
hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the
swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked.
Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him
for any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if he
were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be
possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to
their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the
house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.
We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom
Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happened
then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I
saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have
been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening
with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really
gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant
conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-a-vis of me, who
had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintance
with. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went
away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that I
did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a
note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went,
I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I
had been, in the mean time, thoroughly coached concerning her by Mrs.
Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, that
she wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. "But Eveleth Strange wouldn't
do that," she explained, "because it would have the effect of paying me
back. I'm so glad, on your account, that you're going, for I do want you
to know at least one American woman that you can unreservedly approve of;
I know you don't _begin_ to approve of _me;_ and I was so vexed
that you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met her
here; it seemed to me as if she ran away early just to provoke me; and,
to tell you the truth, I thought she had taken a dislike to you. I wish I
could tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would be
perfectly hopeless, for you haven't got the documents, and you never
could get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn't
like any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did things
from such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, I
was perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, who
was twice her age and had nothing but his money; he was not related to
the New York Bellingtons at all, and nobody knows how he got the name;
nobody ever heard of the Stranges. In fact, people say that he used to be
plain Peter B. Strange till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop the
Peter and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have a
social as well as a financial history. People who dislike her insisted
that they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that the
high-motive business was just her pose; and that she had jumped at the
chance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her--and I know that she
did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were
dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was
always as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don't believe
that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybody
else. I don't suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men
are pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without a
cent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way; you
can't expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had her
reward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she got
all his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strange
seemed to be literally of no family; and she's lived quietly on in the
house he bought her ever since, except when she's in Europe, and that's
about two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I suppose
that her sisters and her cousins and her aunts come in for outdoor aid.
She's always helping somebody. They say that's her pose, now; but, if it
is, I don't think it's a bad one; and certainly, if she wanted to get
married again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. I
advise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will be
something worth while, in every way, and perhaps you'll convert her to
Altrurianism; she's as hopeful a subject as _I_ know."
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