Through the Eye of the Needle

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XVIII

I was one of the earliest of the guests, for I cannot yet believe that
people do not want me to come exactly when they say they do. I perceived,
however, that one other gentleman had come before me, and I was both
surprised and delighted to find that this was my acquaintance Mr.
Bullion, the Boston banker. He professed as much pleasure at our meeting
as I certainly felt; but after a few words he went on talking with Mrs.
Strange, while I was left to her mother, an elderly woman of quiet and
even timid bearing, who affected me at once as born and bred in a wholly
different environment. In fact, every American of the former generation
is almost as strange to it in tradition, though not in principle, as I
am; and I found myself singularly at home with this sweet lady, who
seemed glad of my interest in her. I was taken from her side to be
introduced to a lady, on the opposite side of the room, who said she had
been promised my acquaintance by a friend of hers, whom I had met in the
mountains--Mr. Twelvemough; did I remember him? She gave a little
cry while still speaking, and dramatically stretched her hand towards a
gentleman who entered at the moment, and whom I saw to be no other than
Mr. Twelvemough himself. As soon as he had greeted our hostess he
hastened up to us, and, barely giving himself time to press the still
outstretched hand of my companion, shook mine warmly, and expressed the
greatest joy at seeing me. He said that he had just got back to town, in
a manner, and had not known I was here, till Mrs. Strange had asked him
to meet me. There were not a great many other guests, when they all
arrived, and we sat down, a party not much larger than at Mrs. Makely's.

I found that I was again to take out my hostess, but I was put next the
lady with whom I had been talking; she had come without her husband, who
was, apparently, of a different social taste from herself, and had an
engagement of his own; there was an artist and his wife, whose looks I
liked; some others whom I need not specify were there, I fancied, because
they had heard of Altruria and were curious to see me. As Mr. Twelvemough
sat quite at the other end of the table, the lady on my right could
easily ask me whether I liked his books. She said, tentatively, people
liked them because they felt sure when they took up one of his novels
they had not got hold of a tract on political economy in disguise.

It was this complimentary close of a remark, which scarcely began with
praise, that made itself heard across the table, and was echoed with a
heartfelt sigh from the lips of another lady.

"Yes," she said, "that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough's
books."

"We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough's books," the first lady triumphed,
and several began to extol them for being fiction pure and simple, and
not dealing with anything but loves of young people.

Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and
one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a
description of a surgical operation that made her feel as if she had
been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that
passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but
it was not art.

The painter asked, Why was it not art?

The author answered, Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything
that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.

"Precisely," said the painter--"art _is_ choice."

"On that ground," the banker interposed, "you could say that political
economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it."

"It would have its difficulties," the painter admitted, "but there
are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human
moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who
would object to Mr. Twelvemough's describing an eviction from an East
Side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her
children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the
household furniture?"

"_I_ should object very much, for one," said the lady who had
objected to the account of the surgical operation. "It would be too
creepy. Art should give pleasure."

"Then you think a tragedy is not art?" asked the painter.

"I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too
much," said the lady. "There are enough of them in real life, without
filling all the novels with them. It's terrible the number of beggars
you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr.
Twelvemough's novels, too?"

"Well, it wouldn't cost me any money there. I shouldn't have to give."

"You oughtn't to give money in real life," said the lady. "You ought to
give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are
impostors."

"It's some comfort to know that the charities are so active," said the
elderly young lady, "even if half the letters one gets _do_ turn out
to be appeals from them."

"It's very disappointing to have them do it, though," said the artist,
lightly. "I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn't
seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they've
found it a failure?"

"Well," said Mr. Bullion, "perhaps they have suspended during the hard
times."

They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have,
and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people
become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence
of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and
surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, "Who goes there?"
the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
street below, "Despair!"

"I had an amusing experience," Mr. Twelvemough began, "when I was doing a
little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter."

"For the sake of the literary material?" the artist suggested.

"Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look
for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor's son, who had
got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and
could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper
any more."

"A checkered employ," the banker mused aloud.

"It was not of a simultaneous nature," the novelist explained. "So he
came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little,
and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would
undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work
for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a
manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of
work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job
copying parts for a new play he had written."

The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.

"It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than
amusing," said the banker. "It shows that something can be done, if you
try."

"Well," said Mr. Twelvemough, "I thought that was the moral, myself, till
the fellow came afterwards to thank me. He said that he considered
himself very lucky, for the manager had told him that there were six
other men had wanted that job."

Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little
bewilderment. She murmured, "I suppose the joke is that he had befriended
one man at the expense of six others."

"Oh," I returned, "is that a joke?"

No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, "How do you manage with
poverty in Altruria?"

I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, "In Altruria
we have no poverty."

"Ah, I knew you would say that!" he cried out. "That's what he always
does," he explained to the lady. "Bring up any one of our little
difficulties, and ask how they get over it in Altruria, and he says they
have nothing like it. It's very simple."

They all began to ask me questions, but with a courteous incredulity
which I could feel well enough, and some of my answers made them laugh,
all but my hostess, who received them with a gravity that finally
prevailed. But I was not disposed to go on talking of Altruria then,
though they all protested a real interest, and murmured against the
hardship of being cut off with so brief an account of our country as I
had given them.

"Well," said the banker at last, "if there is no cure for our poverty, we
might as well go on and enjoy ourselves."

"Yes," said our hostess, with a sad little smile, "we might as well enjoy
ourselves."

XIX

The talk at Mrs. Strange's table took a far wider range than my meagre
notes would intimate, and we sat so long that it was almost eleven
before the men joined the ladies in the drawing-room. You will hardly
conceive of remaining two, three, or four hours at dinner, as one often
does here, in society; out of society the meals are despatched with a
rapidity unknown to the Altrurians. Our habit of listening to lectors,
especially at the evening repast, and then of reasoning upon what we
have heard, prolongs our stay at the board; but the fondest listener,
the greatest talker among us, would be impatient of the delay eked out
here by the great number and the slow procession of the courses served.
Yet the poorest American would find his ideal realized rather in the
long-drawn-out gluttony of the society dinner here than in our temperate
simplicity.

At such a dinner it is very hard to avoid a surfeit, and I have to guard
myself very carefully, lest, in the excitement of the talk, I gorge
myself with everything, in its turn. Even at the best, my overloaded
stomach often joins with my conscience in reproaching me for what you
would think a shameful excess at table. Yet, wicked as my riot is, my
waste is worse, and I have to think, with contrition, not only of what I
have eaten, but of what I have left uneaten, in a city where so many
wake and sleep in hunger.

The ladies made a show of lingering after we joined them in the
drawing-room; but there were furtive glances at the clock, and presently
her guests began to bid Mrs. Strange good-night. When I came up and
offered her my hand, she would not take it, but murmured, with a kind of
passion: "Don't go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria--my
mother and me!"

I was by no means loath, for I must confess that all I had seen and heard
of this lady interested me in her more and more. I felt at home with her,
too, as with no other society woman I have met; she seemed to me not only
good, but very sincere, and very good-hearted, in spite of the world she
lived in. Yet I have met so many disappointments here, of the kind that
our civilization wholly fails to prepare us for, that I should not have
been surprised to find that Mrs. Strange had wished me to stay, not that
she might hear me talk about Altruria, but that I might hear her talk
about herself. You must understand that the essential vice of a system
which concentres a human being's thoughts upon his own interests, from
the first moment of responsibility, colors and qualifies every motive
with egotism. All egotists are unconscious, for otherwise they would be
intolerable to themselves; but some are subtler than others; and as most
women have finer natures than most men everywhere, and in America most
women have finer minds than most men, their egotism usually takes the
form of pose. This is usually obvious, but in some cases it is so
delicately managed that you do not suspect it, unless some other woman
gives you a hint of it, and even then you cannot be sure of it, seeing
the self-sacrifice, almost to martyrdom, which the _poseuse_ makes
for it. If Mrs. Makely had not suggested that some people attributed
a pose to Mrs. Strange, I should certainly never have dreamed of looking
for it, and I should have been only intensely interested, when she began,
as soon as I was left alone with her and her mother:

"You may not know how unusual I am in asking this favor of you, Mr.
Homos; but you might as well learn from me as from others that I am
rather unusual in everything. In fact, you can report in Altruria, when
you get home, that you found at least one woman in America whom fortune
had smiled upon in every way, and who hated her smiling fortune almost
as much as she hated herself. I'm quite satisfied," she went on, with a
sad mockery, "that fortune is a man, and an American; when he has given
you all the materials for having a good time, he believes that you must
be happy, because there is nothing to hinder. It isn't that I want to be
happy in the greedy way that men think we do, for then I could easily be
happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough.
But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you
will be disappointed. I have not the faith that they say upholds you
Altrurians in trying to help out, if I don't see my way out. It seems to
me that my reason has some right to satisfaction, and that, if I am a
woman grown, I can't be satisfied with the assurances they would give
to little girls--that everything is going on well. Any one can see that
things are not going on well. There is more and more wretchedness of
every kind, not hunger of body alone, but hunger of soul. If you escape
one, you suffer the other, because, if you _have_ a soul, you must
long to help, not for a time, but for all time. I suppose," she asked,
abruptly, "that Mrs. Makely has told you something about me?"

"Something," I admitted.

"I ask," she went on, "because I don't want to bore you with a statement
of my case, if you know it already. Ever since I heard you were in New
York I have wished to see you, and to talk with you about Altruria; I did
not suppose that there would be any chance at Mrs. Makely's, and there
wasn't; and I did not suppose there would be any chance here, unless I
could take courage to do what I have done now. You must excuse it, if it
seems as extraordinary a proceeding to you as it really is; I wouldn't at
all have you think it is usual for a lady to ask one of her guests to
stay after the rest, in order, if you please, to confess herself to him.
It's a crime without a name."

She laughed, not gayly, but humorously, and then went on, speaking always
with a feverish eagerness which I find it hard to give you a sense of,
for the women here have an intensity quite beyond our experience of the
sex at home.

"But you are a foreigner, and you come from an order of things so utterly
unlike ours that perhaps you will be able to condone my offence. At any
rate, I have risked it." She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered
herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. "Well, the long and the short
of it is that I have come to the end of my tether. I have tried, as truly
as I believe any woman ever did, to do my share, with money and with
work, to help make life better for those whose life is bad; and though
one mustn't boast of good works, I may say that I have been pretty
thorough, and, if I've given up, it's because I see, in our state of
things, _no_ hope of curing the evil. It's like trying to soak up
the drops of a rainstorm. You do dry up a drop here and there; but the
clouds are full of them, and, the first thing you know, you stand, with
your blotting-paper in your hand, in a puddle over your shoe-tops. There
is nothing but charity, and charity is a failure, except for the moment.
If you think of the misery around you, that must remain around you for
ever and ever, as long as you live, you have your choice--to go mad and
be put into an asylum, or go mad and devote yourself to society."

XX

While Mrs. Strange talked on, her mother listened quietly, with a dim,
submissive smile and her hands placidly crossed in her lap. She now said:
"It seems to be very different now from what it was in my time. There are
certainly a great many beggars, and we used never to have one. Children
grew up, and people lived and died, in large towns, without ever seeing
one. I remember, when my husband first took me abroad, how astonished we
were at the beggars. Now I meet as many in New York as I met in London or
in Rome. But if you don't do charity, what can you do? Christ enjoined
it, and Paul says--"

"Oh, people _never_ do the charity that Christ meant," said Mrs.
Strange; "and, as things are now, how _could_ they? Who would dream
of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling
_all_ and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We
_know_ that Christ was perfectly right, and that He was perfectly
sincere in what He said to the good young millionaire; but we all go away
exceeding sorrowful, just as the good young millionaire did. We have to,
if we don't want to come on charity ourselves. How do _you_ manage
about that?" she asked me; and then she added, "But, of course, I forgot
that you have no need of charity."

"Oh yes, we have," I returned; and I tried, once more, as I have tried so
often with Americans, to explain how the heavenly need of giving the self
continues with us, but on terms that do not harrow the conscience of the
giver, as self-sacrifice always must here, at its purest and noblest. I
sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one
was secured against want by the common provision, and against the
degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want. The "dead-level
of equality" is what the Americans call the condition in which all would
be as the angels of God, and they blasphemously deny that He ever meant
His creatures to be alike happy, because some, through a long succession
of unfair advantages, have inherited more brain or brawn or beauty than
others. I found that this gross and impious notion of God darkened even
the clear intelligence of a woman like Mrs. Strange; and, indeed, it
prevails here so commonly that it is one of the first things advanced as
an argument against the Altrurianization of America.

I believe I did, at last, succeed in showing her how charity still
continues among us, but in forms that bring neither a sense of
inferiority to him who takes nor anxiety to him who gives. I said that
benevolence here often seemed to involve, essentially, some such risk as
a man should run if he parted with a portion of the vital air which
belonged to himself and his family, in succoring a fellow-being from
suffocation; but that with us, where it was no more possible for one to
deprive himself of his share of the common food, shelter, and clothing,
than of the air he breathed, one could devote one's self utterly to
others without that foul alloy of fear which I thought must basely
qualify every good deed in plutocratic conditions.

She said that she knew what I meant, and that I was quite right in my
conjecture, as regarded men, at least; a man who did not stop to think
what the effect, upon himself and his own, his giving must have, would be
a fool or a madman; but women could often give as recklessly as they
spent, without any thought of consequences, for they did not know how
money came.

"Women," I said, "are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice
themselves without wronging any one."

"Or, rather," she continued, "without the sense of wronging any one. Our
men like to keep us in that innocence or ignorance; they think it is
pretty, or they think it is funny; and as long as a girl is in her
father's house, or a wife is in her husband's, she knows no more of
money-earning or money-making than a child. Most grown women among us,
if they had a sum of money in the bank, would not know how to get it
out. They would not know how to indorse a check, much less draw one. But
there are plenty of women who are inside the conditions, as much as men
are--poor women who have to earn their bread, and rich-women who have to
manage their property. I can't speak for the poor women; but I can speak
for the rich, and I can confess for them that what you imagine is true.
The taint of unfaith and distrust is on every dollar that you dole out,
so that, as far as the charity of the rich is concerned, I would read
Shakespeare:

'It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.'

"Perhaps that is why the rich give comparatively so little. The poor can
never understand how much the rich value their money, how much the owner
of a great fortune dreads to see it less. If it were not so, they would
surely give more than they do; for a man who has ten millions could give
eight of them without feeling the loss; the man with a hundred could give
ninety and be no nearer want. Ah, it's a strange mystery! My poor husband
and I used to talk of it a great deal, in the long year that he lay
dying; and I think I hate my superfluity the more because I know he hated
it so much."

A little trouble had stolen into her impassioned tones, and there was a
gleam, as of tears, in the eyes she dropped for a moment. They were
shining still when she lifted them again to mine.

"I suppose," she said, "that Mrs. Makely told you something of my
marriage?"

"Eveleth!" her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.

"Oh, I think I can be frank with Mr. Homos. He is not an American, and he
will understand, or, at least, he will not misunderstand. Besides, I dare
say I shall not say anything worse than Mrs. Makely has said already. My
husband was much older than I, and I ought not to have married him; a
young girl ought never to marry an old man, or even a man who is only
a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the
best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to
respect each other, when there couldn't be any question of more. He was
a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from
a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of
its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have.
He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated,
and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had
a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one
would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a
burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he
was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that
money was an evil in itself."

"That is what we think," I ventured.

"Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had
times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at
any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all
to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps I could learn how to give it
without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must
have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part
with it, too. I have given and given; but there seems some evil spell on
the principal that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the
same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that
frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead, people
grows in the grave."

"Eveleth!" her mother murmured again.

"Oh yes," she answered, "I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they
only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to
be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others and with safety to
myself."

XXI

It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of this luxury for the
first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately
house, and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely pride and
profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity,
a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its
operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely's far inferior
scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I
was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been
at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had
now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange's environment. There
were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of
thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew
itself into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there was the value
of a skilled artisan's wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings
of the books that showed from the library shelves there was almost as
much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every
fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as
fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been
lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles
and princes of other times had contributed to embellish.

"My husband," Mrs. Strange went on, "bought this house for me, and let me
furnish it after my own fancy. After it was all done we neither of us
liked it, and when he died I felt as if he had left me in a tomb here."

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