A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 12

"It isn't a new thing to us," said the young fellow, with a short laugh.

"And there isn't much to explain about it. You'll see them all through New England. When a man finds he can't get his funeral expenses out of the land, he don't feel like staying to be buried in it, and he pulls up and goes."

"But people used to get their living expenses here," I suggested. "Why can't they now?"

"Well, they didn't use to have Western prices to fight with; and then the land wasn't worn out so, and the taxes were not so heavy. How would you like to pay twenty to thirty dollars on the thousand, and a.s.sessed up to the last notch, in the city?"

"Why, what in the world makes your taxes so heavy?"

"Schools and roads. We've got to have schools, and you city folks want good roads when you come here in the summer, don't you? Then the season is short, and sometimes we can't make a crop. The frost catches the corn in the field, and you have your trouble for your pains. Potatoes are the only thing we can count on, except gra.s.s, and, when everybody raises potatoes, you know where the price goes."

"Oh, but now, Mr. Camp," said Mrs. Makely, leaning over toward him, and speaking in a cosey and coaxing tone, as if he must not really keep the truth from an old friend like her, "isn't it a good deal because the farmers' daughters want pianos, and the farmers' sons want buggies? I heard Professor Lumen saying, the other day, that, if the farmers were willing to work as they used to work, they could still get a good living off their farms, and that they gave up their places because they were too lazy, in many cases, to farm them properly."

"He'd better not let _me_ hear him saying that," said the young fellow, while a hot flush pa.s.sed over his face. He added, bitterly: "If he wants to see how easy it is to make a living up here, he can take this place and try for a year or two; he can get it cheap. But I guess he wouldn't want it the year round; he'd only want it a few months in the summer, when he could enjoy the sightliness of it, and see me working over there on my farm, while he smoked on his front porch." He turned round and looked at the old house in silence a moment. Then, as he went on, his voice lost its angry ring. "The folks here bought this place from the Indians, and they'd been here more than two hundred years. Do you think they left it because they were too lazy to run it, or couldn't get pianos and buggies out of it, or were such fools as not to know whether they were well off? It was their _home_; they were born and lived and died here. There is the family burying-ground over there."

Neither Mrs. Makely nor myself was ready with a reply, and we left the word with the Altrurian, who suggested: "Still, I suppose they will be more prosperous in the West on the new land they take up?"

The young fellow leaned his arms on the wheel by which he stood. "What do you mean by taking up new land?"

"Why, out of the public domain--"

"There _ain't_ any public domain that's worth having. All the good land is in the hands of railroads and farm syndicates and speculators; and if you want a farm in the West you've got to buy it; the East is the only place where folks give them away, because they ain't worth keeping. If you haven't got the ready money, you can buy one on credit, and pay ten, twenty, and thirty per cent. interest, and live in a dugout on the plains--till your mortgage matures." The young man took his arms from the wheel and moved a few steps backward, as he added: "I'll see you over at the house later."

The driver touched his horses, and we started briskly off again. But I confess I had quite enough of his pessimism, and as we drove away I leaned back toward the Altrurian and said: "Now, it is all perfect nonsense to pretend that things are at that pa.s.s with us. There are more millionaires in America, probably, than there are in all the other civilized countries of the globe, and it is not possible that the farming population should be in such a hopeless condition. All wealth comes out of the earth, and you may be sure they get their full share of it."

"I am glad to hear you say so," said the Altrurian. "What is the meaning of this new party in the West that seems to have held a convention lately?

I read something of it in the train yesterday."

"Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds, who don't want to pay back the money they have borrowed, or who find themselves unable to meet their interest.

It will soon blow over. We are always having these political flurries. A good crop will make it all right with them."

"But is it true that they have to pay such rates of interest as our young friend mentioned?"

"Well," I said, seeing the thing in the humorous light which softens for us Americans so many of the hards.h.i.+ps of others, "I suppose that man likes to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip. That's human nature, you know."

"Is it?" asked the Altrurian.

It seemed to me that he had asked something like that before when I alleged human nature in defence of some piece of every-day selfishness.

But I thought best not to notice it, and I went on: "The land is so rich out there that a farm will often pay for itself with a single crop."

"Is it possible?" cried the Altrurian. "Then I suppose it seldom really happens that a mortgage is foreclosed, in the way our young friend insinuated?"

"Well, I can't say that exactly"; and, having admitted so much, I did not feel bound to impart a fact that popped perversely into my mind. I was once talking with a Western money-lender, a very good sort of fellow, frank and open as the day; I asked him whether the farmers generally paid off their mortgages, and he answered me that if the mortgage was to the value of a fourth of the land, the farmer might pay it off, but if it were to a half, or a third even, he never paid it, but slaved on and died in his debts. "You may be sure, however," I concluded, "that our young friend takes a jaundiced view of the situation."

"Now, really," said Mrs. Makely, "I must insist upon dropping this everlasting talk about money. I think it is perfectly disgusting, and I believe it was Mr. Makely's account of his speculations that kept me awake last night. My brain got running on figures till the dark seemed to be all sown with dollar-marks, like the stars in the Milky Way. I--ugh! What in the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!"

Mrs. Makely pa.s.sed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the driver pulled up short and a group of barefooted children broke in front of his horses and scuttled out of the dust into the road-side bushes like a covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same in size, but there turned out to be only five or six; or at least no more showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush in quiet enjoyment of the lady's alarm.

"Don't you know that you might have got killed?" she demanded, with that severity good women feel for people who have just escaped with their lives. "How lovely the dirty little dears are!" she added, in the next wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half-length above the bushes, and she asked: "Don't you know that you oughtn't to play in the road when there are so many teams pa.s.sing? Are all those your brothers and sisters?"

He ignored the first question. "One's my cousin." I pulled out a half-dozen coppers, and held my hand toward him. "See if there is one for each." They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical problem except the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing.

I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out at her feet and caught it up in his mouth. "Oh, good gracious!" I called out in my light, humorous way. "Do you suppose he's going to spend it for candy?" The little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed with the grat.i.tude that even small favors inspire. "Bring your sister here," I said to the boldest boy, and, when he came up with the little woman, I put another copper into her hand. "Look out that the greedy dog doesn't get it," I said, and my gayety met with fresh applause. "Where do you live?" I asked, with some vague purpose of showing the Altrurian the kindliness that exists between our upper and lower cla.s.ses.

"Over there," said the boy. I followed the twist of his head, and glimpsed a wooden cottage on the border of the forest, so very new that the sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down from the threshold, which still wanted a doorstep, and came slowly out to us. The children ran to her with their coppers, and then followed her back to us.

Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us: "I hope you weren't frightened. We didn't drive over any of them."

"Oh, I wasn't frightened," said the young woman. "It's a very safe place to bring up children, in the country, and I never feel uneasy about them."

"Yes, if they are not under the horses' feet," said Mrs. Makely, mingling instruction and amus.e.m.e.nt very judiciously in her reply. "Are they all yours?"

"Only five," said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock.

"He's my sister's. She lives just below here." Her children had grouped themselves about her, and she kept pa.s.sing her hands caressingly over their little heads as she talked. "My sister has nine children, but she has the rest at church with her to-day."

"You don't speak like an American," Mrs. Makely suggested.

"No, we're English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That's _my_ little palace." The woman nodded her head toward the cottage.

"It's going to be very nice," said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception of her pride in it.

"Yes, if we ever get money to finish it. Thank you for the children."

"Oh, it was this gentleman." Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the merit of my good action as modestly as I could.

"Then thank _you_, sir," said the young woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely: "You're not living about here, ma'am?"

"Oh no, we're staying at the hotel."

"At the hotel! It must be very dear, there."

"Yes, it is expensive," said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction in her voice which we all feel in spending a great deal of money.

"But I suppose you can afford it," said the woman, whose eye was running hungrily over Mrs. Makely's pretty costume. "Some are poor, and some are rich. That's the way the world has to be made up, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this point, so that the driver felt warranted in starting up his horses. When we had driven beyond earshot she said: "I knew she was not an American, as soon as she spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no self-respect. That was a pretty bold bid for a contribution to finish up her 'little palace'! I'm glad you didn't give her anything, Mr.

Twelvemough. I was afraid your sympathies had been wrought upon."

"Oh, not at all," I answered. "I saw the mischief I had done with the children."

The Altrurian, who has not asked anything for a long time, but had listened with eager interest to all that pa.s.sed, now came up smiling with his question: "Will you kindly tell me what harm would have been done by offering the woman a little money to help finish up her cottage?"

I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political economy. "The very greatest harm. It would have pauperized her. You have no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing. As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it, and they begin to live upon it. The sight of those coppers which I gave her children--more out of joke than charity--demoralized the woman. She took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to guard against every approach to a thing of that sort."

"I don't believe," said Mrs. Makely, "that an American would have hinted, as she did."

"'No, an American would not have done that, I'm thankful to say. They take fees, but they don't ask charity, yet." We went on to exult in the n.o.ble independence of the American character in all cla.s.ses, at some length. We talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last he asked, with a faint sigh: "Then, in your conditions, a kindly impulse to aid one who needs your help is something to be guarded against as possibly pernicious?"

"Exactly," I said. "And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing with the problem of poverty. We cannot let people suffer, for that would be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them."