A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 13

"I see," he answered. "It is a terrible quandary."

"I wish," said Mrs. Makely, "that you would tell us just how you manage with the poor in Altruria."

"We have none," he replied.

"But the comparatively poor--you have some people who are richer than others?"

"No. We should regard that as the worst incivism."

"What is incivism?"

I interpreted, "Bad citizens.h.i.+p."

"Well, then, if you will excuse me, Mr. h.o.m.os," she said, "I think that is simply impossible. There _must_ be rich and there _must_ be poor. There always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as anybody. Didn't Christ Himself say, 'The poor ye have always with you'?"

VII

The Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened by the air of complacency she put on after delivering this poser: "Do you really think Christ meant that you _ought_ always to have the poor with you?" he asked.

"Why, of course!" she answered, triumphantly. "How else are the sympathies of the rich to be cultivated? The poverty of some and the wealth of others, isn't that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there could not be anything like charity, and Paul said, 'The greatest of these is charity.' I believe it's 'love' in the new version, but it comes to the same thing."

The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp, and then lapsed into a silence that lasted until we came in sight of the Camp farm-house. It stood on the crest of a road-side upland, and looked down the beautiful valley, bathed in Sabbath sunlight, and away to the ranges of hills, so far that it was hard to say whether it was sun or shadow that dimmed their distance.

Decidedly, the place was what the country people call sightly. The old house, once painted a Brandon red, crouched low to the ground, with its lean-to in the rear, and its flat-arched wood-sheds and wagon-houses stretching away at the side of the barn, and covering the approach to it with an unbroken roof. There were flowers in the beds along the underpinning of the house, which stood close to the street, and on one side of the door was a clump of Spanish willow; an old-fas.h.i.+oned June rose climbed over it from the other. An aged dog got stiffly to his feet from the threshold stone and whimpered as our buckboard drew up; the poultry picking about the path and among the chips lazily made way for us, and as our wheels ceased to crunch upon the gravel we heard hasty steps, and Reuben Camp came round the corner of the house in time to give Mrs. Makely his hand and help her spring to the ground, which she did very lightly; her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity, and at thirty-five she had the gracile ease and self-command of a girl.

"Ah, Reuben," she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first name, with the emotion which expressed itself more definitely in the words that followed, "how I envy you all this dear, old, homelike place! I never come here without thinking of my grandfather's farm in Ma.s.sachusetts, where I used to go every summer when I was a little girl. If I had a place like this, I should never leave it."

"Well, Mrs. Makely," said young Camp, "you can have this place cheap, if you really want it. Or almost any other place in the neighborhood."

"Don't say such a thing!" she returned. "It makes one feel as if the foundations of the great deep were giving way. I don't know what that means exactly, but I suppose it's equivalent to mislaying George's hatchet and going back on the Declaration generally; and I don't like to hear you talk so."

Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered, pleasantly: "The Declaration is all right, as far as it goes, but it don't help us to compete with the Western farm operations."

"Why, you believe every one was born free and equal, don't you?" Mrs.

Makely asked.

"Oh yes, I believe that; but--"

"Then why do you object to free and equal compet.i.tion?"

The young fellow laughed, and said, as he opened the door for us: "Walk right into the parlor, please. Mother will be ready for you in a minute."

He added: "I guess she's putting on her best cap for you, Mr. h.o.m.os. It's a great event for her, your coming here. It is for all of us. We're glad to have you."

"And I'm glad to be here," said the Altrurian, as simply as the other. He looked about the best room of a farm-house that had never adapted itself to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellent in its upholstery and as severe in its decoration as hair-cloth chairs and dark-brown wall-paper of a trellis pattern, with drab roses, could make it. The windows were shut tight, and our host did not offer to open them.

A fly or two crossed the doorway into the hall, but made no attempt to penetrate the interior, where we sat in an obscurity that left the high-hung family photographs on the walls vague and uncertain. I made a mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have a rustic funeral take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: "I hope your mother is as well as usual this morning?" I perceived that this murmur was produced by the sepulchral influence of the room.

"Oh yes," said Camp, and at that moment a door opened from the room across the hall, and his sister seemed to bring in some of the light from it to us where we sat. She shook hands with Mrs. Makely, who introduced me to her, and then presented the Altrurian. She bowed very civilly to me, but with a touch of severity, such as country people find necessary for the a.s.sertion of their self-respect with strangers. I thought it very pretty, and instantly saw that I could work it into some picture of character; and I was not at all sorry that she made a difference in favor of the Altrurian.

"Mother will be so glad to see you," she said to him, and, "Won't you come right in?" she added to us all.

We followed her and found ourselves in a large, low, sunny room on the southeast corner of the house, which had no doubt once been the living-room, but which was now given up to the bedridden invalid; a door opened into the kitchen behind, where the table was already laid for the midday meal, with the plates turned down in the country fas.h.i.+on, and some netting drawn over the dishes to keep the flies away.

Mrs. Makely bustled up to the bedside with her energetic, patronizing cheerfulness. "Ah, Mrs. Camp, I am glad to see you looking so well this morning. I've been meaning to run over for several days past, but I couldn't find a moment till this morning, and I knew you didn't object to Sunday visits." She took the invalid's hand in hers, and, with the air of showing how little she felt any inequality between them, she leaned over and kissed her, where Mrs. Camp sat propped against her pillows. She had a large, n.o.bly moulded face of rather masculine contour, and at the same time the most motherly look in the world. Mrs. Makely bubbled and babbled on, and every one waited patiently till she had done, and turned and said, toward the Altrurian: "I have ventured to bring my friend, Mr. h.o.m.os, with me. He is from Altruria." Then she turned to me and said: "Mr. Twelvemough you know already through his delightful books"; but, although she paid me this perfunctory compliment it was perfectly apparent to me that in the esteem of this disingenuous woman the distinguished stranger was a far more important person than the distinguished author. Whether Mrs. Camp read my perception of this fact in my face or not I cannot say, but she was evidently determined that I should not feel a difference in her. She held out her hand to me first, and said that I never could know how many heavy hours I had helped to lighten for her, and then she turned to the Altrurian and took his hand. "Oh!" she said, with a long, deep-drawn sigh, as if that were the supreme moment of her life. "And are you really from Altruria? It seems too good to be true!" Her devout look and her earnest tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not inhere in them, but Mrs. Makely took them on their surface.

"Yes, doesn't it?" she made haste to interpose, before the Altrurian could say anything. "That is just the way we all feel about it, Mrs. Camp. I a.s.sure you, if it were not for the accounts in the papers and the talk about it everywhere, I couldn't believe there _was_ any such place as Altruria; and if it were not for Mr. Twelvemough here--who has to keep all his inventions for his novels, as a mere matter of business routine--I might really suspect him and Mr. h.o.m.os of--well, _working_ us, as my husband calls it."

The Altrurian smiled politely, but vaguely, as if he had not quite caught her meaning, and I made answer for both: "I am sure, Mrs. Makely, if you could understand my peculiar state of mind about Mr. h.o.m.os, you would never believe that I was in collusion with him. I find him quite as incredible as you do. There are moments when he seems so entirely subjective with me that I feel as if he were no more definite or tangible than a bad conscience."

"Exactly!" said Mrs. Makely, and she laughed out her delight in my ill.u.s.tration.

The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps all remained soberly silent. "I hope it isn't so bad as that," he said, "though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of misgiving. I don't know just what it is; but, if I could remove it, I should be very glad to do so."

Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: "Well, then, in the first place, my husband and I were talking it over last night after we left you, and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money afterward. It isn't so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia, remained undiscovered till within such a very few years, as it is the condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another, and not each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moons.h.i.+ne; such a thing never was and never can be; it is opposed to human nature, and would take away incentive and all motive for exertion and advancement and enterprise. I don't know _what_ he didn't say against it; but one thing, he says it's perfectly un-American." The Altrurian remained silent, gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little manner: "I hope you won't feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what I've repeated to you. I know my husband is awfully Philistine, though he _is_ such a good fellow, and I don't, by any means, agree with him on all those points; but I _would_ like to know what you think of them. The trouble is, Mrs. Camp," she said, turning to the invalid, "that Mr. h.o.m.os is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to hear of it at first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means to make him open up about it."

"There is no offence," the Altrurian answered for himself, "in what Mr.

Makely says, though, from the Altrurian point of view, there is a good deal of error.

"Does it seem so strange to you," he asked, addressing himself to Mrs.

Camp, "that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for one another instead of each for himself?"

"No indeed!" she answered. "Poor people have always had to live that way, or they could not have lived at all."

"That was what I understood your porter to say last night," said the Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: "I suppose that even in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?"

"Well, I don't know about that," I said. "I suppose there are more people independently rich than there are people independently poor."

"We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why the Altrurian system should be considered so very un-American. Then, as to whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed to be directly influenced by His life, there was an altruism practised as radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a working economy in Altruria."

"Ah, but you know," said Mrs. Makely, with the air of advancing a point not to be put aside, "they had to drop _that_. It was a dead failure. They found that they couldn't make it go at all among cultivated people, and that, if Christianity was to advance, they would have to give up all that crankish kind of idolatry of the mere letter. At any rate," she went on, with the satisfaction we all feel in getting an opponent into close quarters, "you must confess that there is a much greater play of individuality here."

Before the Altrurian could reply, young Camp said: "If you want to see American individuality, the real, simon-pure article, you ought to go down to one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk.

They come shambling along with all the individuality of a flock of sheep."

"Some," said Mrs. Makely, heroically, as if she were one of these, "must be sacrificed. Of course, some are not so individual as others. A great deal depends upon temperament."

"A great deal more depends upon capital," said Camp, with an offensive laugh. "If you have capital in America, you can have individuality; if you haven't, you can't."

His sister, who had not taken part in the talk before, said, demurely: "It seems to me you've got a good deal of individuality, Reub, and you haven't got a great deal of capital, either," and the two young people laughed together.

Mrs. Makely was one of those fatuous women whose eagerness to make a point excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. "I'm sure," she said, as if speaking for the upper cla.s.ses, "we haven't got any individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, you have to be so in society. If you keep a.s.serting your own individuality too much, people avoid you. It's very vulgar and the greatest bore."

"Then you don't find individuality so desirable, after all," said the Altrurian.

"I perfectly detest it!" cried the lady, and evidently she had not the least notion where she was in the argument. "For my part, I'm never happy except when I've forgotten myself and the whole individual bother."

Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnis.h.i.+ng.