Through the Eye of the Needle
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W. D. Howells >> Through the Eye of the Needle
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"Eveleth," said her mother, "you ought not to speak so before Mr. Homos.
He will not know what to think of you, and he will go back to Altruria
with a very wrong idea of American women."
At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. "Yes,"
she said, "you must excuse me. I have no right to speak so. But one is
often much franker with foreigners than with one's own kind, and,
besides, there is something--I don't know what--that will not let me keep
the truth from you."
She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept
her from her own hold, she broke out:
"He thought he would make some sort of atonement to me, as if I owed none
to him! His money was all he had to do it with, and he spent that upon me
in every way he could think of, though he knew that money could not buy
anything that was really good, and that, if it bought anything beautiful,
it uglified it with the sense of cost to every one who could value it in
dollars and cents. He was a good man, far better than people ever
imagined, and very simple-hearted and honest, like a child, in his
contrition for his wealth, which he did not dare to get rid of; and
though I know that, if he were to come back, it would be just as it was,
his memory is as dear to me as if--"
She stopped, and pressed in her lip with her teeth, to stay its tremor.
I was painfully affected. I knew that she had never meant to be so open
with me, and was shocked and frightened at herself. I was sorry for her,
and yet I was glad, for it seemed to me that she had given me a glimpse,
not only of the truth in her own heart, but of the truth in the hearts of
a whole order of prosperous people in these lamentable conditions, whom I
shall hereafter be able to judge more leniently, more justly.
I began to speak of Altruria, as if that were what our talk had been
leading up to, and she showed herself more intelligently interested
concerning us than any one I have yet seen in this country. We appeared,
I found, neither incredible nor preposterous to her; our life, in her
eyes, had that beauty of right living which the Americans so feebly
imagine or imagine not at all. She asked what route I had come by to
America, and she seemed disappointed and aggrieved that we placed the
restrictions we have felt necessary upon visitors from the plutocratic
world. Were we afraid, she asked, that they would corrupt our citizens or
mar our content with our institutions? She seemed scarcely satisfied when
I explained, as I have explained so often here, that the measures we had
taken were rather in the interest of the plutocratic world than of the
Altrurians; and alleged the fact that no visitor from the outside had
ever been willing to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had
nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals among us. I assured
her, and this she easily imagined, that, the better known these became,
the worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern our priors felt,
in regard to them, was that our youth could not conceive of them in their
enormity, but, in seeing how estimable plutocratic people often were,
they would attribute to their conditions the inherent good of human
nature. I said our own life was so directly reasoned from its economic
premises that they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was often an
absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic premises. I confessed that this
error was at the bottom of my own wish to visit America and study those
premises.
"And what has your conclusion been?" she said, leaning eagerly towards
me, across the table between us, laden with the maps and charts we had
been examining for the verification of the position of Altruria, and my
own course here, by way of England.
A slight sigh escaped Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted as an expression of
fatigue; it was already past twelve o'clock, and I made it the pretext
for escape.
"You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly," I said,
"that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that
question."
She laughed, and did not try to detain me now when I offered my hand for
good-night. I fancied her mother took leave of me coldly, and with a
certain effect of inculpation.
XXII
It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be
impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with
a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say
after you have read this.
I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest
that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could
befall me. But, such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.
I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of
a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of
feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no
longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as
an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women
which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had
any sentiment towards them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my
very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their
brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended
by that difference between their civilization and ours which forbade
reasonable hope of happiness in any sentiment for them tenderer than
that of the student of strange effects in human nature. But we have not
yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.
After I last wrote you, a series of accidents, or what appeared so, threw
me more and more constantly into the society of Mrs. Strange. We began to
laugh at the fatality with which we met everywhere--at teas, at lunches,
at dinners, at evening receptions, and even at balls, where I have been a
great deal, because, with all my thirty-five years, I have not yet
outlived that fondness for dancing which has so often amused you in me.
Wherever my acquaintance widened among cultivated people, they had no
inspiration but to ask us to meet each other, as if there were really no
other woman in New York who could be expected to understand me. "You must
come to lunch (or tea, or dinner, whichever it might be), and we will
have her. She will be so much interested to meet you."
But perhaps we should have needed none of these accidents to bring us
together. I, at least, can look back and see that, when none of them
happened, I sought occasions for seeing her, and made excuses of our
common interest in this matter and in that to go to her. As for her, I
can only say that I seldom failed to find her at home, whether I called
upon her nominal day or not, and more than once the man who let me in
said he had been charged by Mrs. Strange to say that, if I called, she
was to be back very soon; or else he made free to suggest that, though
Mrs. Strange was not at home, Mrs. Gray was; and then I found it easy
to stay until Mrs. Strange returned. The good old lady had an insatiable
curiosity about Altruria, and, though I do not think she ever quite
believed in our reality, she at least always treated me kindly, as if I
were the victim of an illusion that was thoroughly benign.
I think she had some notion that your letters, which I used often to take
with me and read to Mrs. Strange and herself, were inventions of mine;
and the fact that they bore only an English postmark confirmed her in
this notion, though I explained that in our present passive attitude
towards the world outside we had as yet no postal relations with other
countries, and, as all our communication at home was by electricity, that
we had no letter-post of our own. The very fact that she belonged to a
purer and better age in America disqualified her to conceive of Altruria;
her daughter, who had lived into a full recognition of the terrible
anarchy in which the conditions have ultimated here, could far more
vitally imagine us, and to her, I believe, we were at once a living
reality. Her perception, her sympathy, her intelligence, became more and
more to me, and I escaped to them oftener and oftener, from a world where
an Altrurian must be so painfully at odds. In all companies here I am
aware that I have been regarded either as a good joke or a bad joke,
according to the humor of the listener, and it was grateful to be taken
seriously.
From the first I was sensible of a charm in her, different from that I
felt in other American women, and impossible in our Altrurian women. She
had a deep and almost tragical seriousness, masked with a most winning
gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for
others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment;
she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she
necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I
was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she
said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must
keep on doing as other people did. She could have renounced the world, as
there are ways and means of doing here; but she had no vocation to the
religious life, and she could not feign it without a sense of sacrilege.
In fact, this generous and magnanimous and gifted woman was without that
faith, that trust in God which comes to us from living His law, and
which I wonder any American can keep. She denied nothing; but she had
lost the strength to affirm anything. She no longer tried to do good from
her heart, though she kept on doing charity in what she said was a mere
mechanical impulse from the belief of other days, but always with the
ironical doubt that she was doing harm. Women are nothing by halves, as
men can be, and she was in a despair which no man can realize, for we
have always some if or and which a woman of the like mood casts from her
in wild rejection. Where she could not clearly see her way to a true
life, it was the same to her as an impenetrable darkness.
You will have inferred something of all this from what I have written of
her before, and from words of hers that I have reported to you. Do you
think it so wonderful, then, that in the joy I felt at the hope, the
solace, which my story of our life seemed to give her, she should become
more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that
she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer
herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing.
But what a fantastic dream it now appears!
XXIII
I can hardly tell you just how we came to own our love to each other; but
one day I found myself alone with her mother, with the sense that
Eveleth had suddenly withdrawn from the room at the knowledge of my
approach. Mrs. Gray was strongly moved by something; but she governed
herself, and, after giving me a tremulous hand, bade me sit.
"Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos," she began, "if I ask you whether you
intend to make America your home after this?"
"Oh no!" I answered, and I tried to keep out of my voice the despair with
which the notion filled me. I have sometimes had nightmares here, in
which I thought that I was an American by choice, and I can give you no
conception of the rapture of awakening to the fact that I could still go
back to Altruria, that I had not cast my lot with this wretched people.
"How could I do that?" I faltered; and I was glad to perceive that I had
imparted to her no hint of the misery which I had felt at such a notion.
"I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up
your residence among us."
"No," I answered, as quietly as I could, "I had not thought of that."
"And you still intend to go back to Altruria?"
"I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the
friends I have in this house--" I stopped, for I did not know how I
should end what I had begun to say.
"I am glad you think we are your friends," said the lady, "for we have
tried to show ourselves your friends. I feel as if this had given me the
right to say something to you that you may think very odd."
"Say anything to me, my dear lady," I returned. "I shall not think it
unkind, no matter how odd it is."
"Oh, it's nothing. It's merely that--that when you are not here with us I
lose my grasp on Altruria, and--and I begin to doubt--"
I smiled. "I know! People here have often hinted something of that kind
to me. Tell me, Mrs. Gray, do Americans generally take me for an
impostor?"
"Oh no!" she answered, fervently. "Everybody that I have heard speak of
you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere.
But--"
"But what?" I entreated.
"They think you may be mistaken."
"Then they think I am out of my wits--that I am in an hallucination!"
"No, not that," she returned. "But it is so very difficult for us to
conceive of a whole nation living, as you say you do, on the same terms
as one family, and no one trying to get ahead of another, or richer, and
having neither inferiors nor superiors, but just one dead level of
equality, where there is no distinction except by natural gifts and good
deeds or beautiful works. It seems impossible--it seems ridiculous."
"Yes," I confessed, "I know that it seems so to the Americans."
"And I must tell you something else, Mr. Homos, and I hope you won't take
it amiss. The first night when you talked about Altruria here, and showed
us how you had come, by way of England, and the place where Altruria
ought to be on our maps, I looked them over, after you were gone, and I
could make nothing of it. I have often looked at the map since, but I
could never find Altruria; it was no use."
"Why," I said, "if you will let me have your atlas--"
She shook her head. "It would be the same again as soon as you went
away." I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: "Now, you
mustn't mind what I say. I'm nothing but a silly old woman, and
Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what I've been saying."
"Then Mrs. Strange isn't troubled, as you are, concerning me?" I asked,
and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.
"She won't admit that she is. It might be better for her if she would.
But Eveleth is very true to her friends, and that--that makes me all the
more anxious that she should not deceive herself."
"Oh, Mrs. Gray!" I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my
words.
She began to weep. "There! I knew I should hurt your feelings. But you
mustn't mind what I say. I beg your pardon! I take it all back--"
"Ah, I don't want you to take it back! But what proof shall I give you
that there is such a land as Altruria? If the darkness implies the day,
America must imply Altruria. In what way do I seem false, or mad, except
that I claim to be the citizen of a country where people love one another
as the first Christians did?"
"That is just it," she returned. "Nobody can imagine the first
Christians, and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own
day?"
"But Mrs. Strange--she imagines us, you say?"
"She thinks she does; but I am afraid she only thinks so, and I know her
better than you do, Mr. Homos. I know how enthusiastic she always was,
and how unhappy she has been since she has lost her hold on faith, and
how eagerly she has caught at the hope you have given her of a higher
life on earth than we live here. If she should ever find out that she was
wrong, I don't know what would become of her. You mustn't mind me; you
mustn't let me wound you by what I say."
"You don't wound me, and I only thank you for what you say; but I entreat
you to believe in me. Mrs. Strange has not deceived herself, and I have
not deceived her. Shall I protest to you, by all I hold sacred, that I am
really what I told you I was; that I am not less, and that Altruria is
infinitely more, happier, better, gladder, than any words of mine can
say? Shall I not have the happiness to see your daughter to-day? I had
something to say to her--and now I have so much more! If she is in the
house, won't you send to her? I can make her understand--"
I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray's
face.
"Mr. Homos," she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a
vague misgiving, "sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter
any more."
"Not see her any more?" I gasped.
"Yes; I don't see what good can come of it, and it's all very strange and
uncanny. I don't know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn't anything
personal. It's because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to
human nature that I don't see how--I am afraid that--"
"But I am not uncanny to _her!_" I entreated. "I am not unnatural,
not incredible--"
"Oh no; that is the worst of it. But I have said too much; I have said a
great deal more than I ought. But you must excuse it: I am an old woman.
I am not very well, and I suppose it's that that makes me talk so much."
She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a
movement towards her.
"No, no," she said, "I don't need any help. You must come again soon and
see us, and show that you've forgotten what I've said." She gave me her
hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a
little, pathetic whimper. "Oh, I _know_ I've said the most dreadful
things to you."
"You haven't said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray,
and that is what I care for." My own eyes filled with tears--I do not
know why--and I groped my way from the room. Without seeing any one in
the obscurity of the hallway, where I found myself, I was aware of some
one there, by that sort of fine perception which makes us know the
presence of a spirit.
"You are going?" a whisper said. "Why are you going?" And Eveleth had me
by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that
opened from the place. "I don't know all my mother has been saying to
you. I had to let her say something; she thought she ought. I knew you
would know how to excuse it."
"Oh, my dearest!" I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we
found ourselves in each other's arms.
"What are we doing?" she murmured.
"You don't believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?" I
besought her, straining her closer to my heart.
"I believe in you, with all my soul!" she answered.
We sat down, side by side, and talked long. I did not go away the whole
day. With a high disdain of convention, she made me stay. Her mother sent
word that she would not be able to come to dinner, and we were alone
together at table, in an image of what our united lives might be. We
spent the evening in that happy interchange of trivial confidences that
lovers use in symbol of the unutterable raptures that fill them. We were
there in what seemed an infinite present, without a past, without a
future.
XXIV
Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it
that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite
like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and
circumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of
the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident,
as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. "It
must be very weird," the man said; "something like being engaged to a
materialization." "Yes," said the girl, "quite the Demon Lover business,
I should think." She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at
sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at
Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety
for me. But so far as the open attitude of society towards us was
concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have
been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were
entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth
said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as
irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I
do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of
several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from
photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons
as to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which the
pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be
ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society
papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as
an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage,
and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodness
of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for no
more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my
own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me;
but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we
formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild
they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian
plutocrat!
We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it
spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came to
interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past
life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of
hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I
did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them
civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did
not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for
the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly
ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made
up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a
quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they
represented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I
refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they
printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my
silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of
guilt upon the charges.
The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a
degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my
distress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set
herself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was something
every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the
public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else
would think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when I
ventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found that
people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that
they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our
acquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I found
that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they
had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the
Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the
pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine,
they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr.
Makely's humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long after
the interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.
XXV
I linger a little upon these trivial matters because I shrink from what
must follow. They were scarcely blots upon our happiness; rather they
were motes in the sunshine which had no other cloud. It is true that I
was always somewhat puzzled by a certain manner in Mrs. Gray, which
certainly was from no unfriendliness for me; she could not have been more
affectionate to me, after our engagement, if I had been really her own
son; and it was not until after our common kindness had confirmed itself
upon the new footing that I felt this perplexing qualification on it. I
felt it first one day when I found her alone, and I talked long and
freely to her of Eveleth, and opened to her my whole heart of joy in our
love. At one point she casually asked me how soon we should expect to
return from Altruria after our visit; and at first I did not understand.
"Of course," she explained, "you will want to see all your old friends,
and so will Eveleth, for they will be her friends, too; but if you want
me to go with you, as you say, you must let me know when I shall see New
York again."
"Why," I said, "you will always be with us."
"Well, then," she pursued, with a smile, "when shall _you_ come
back?"
"Oh, never!" I answered. "No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it,
unless he is sent on a mission."
She looked a little mystified, and I went on: "Of course, I was not
officially authorized to visit the world outside, but I was permitted to
do so, to satisfy a curiosity the priors thought useful; but I have now
had quite enough of it, and I shall never leave home again."
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