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—“artischoice.”
“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?”
“Ishould 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 getsdoturn 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.”
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 theposeusemakes 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 youhavea 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,nohope 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.”
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, peopleneverdo the charity that Christ meant,” said Mrs. Strange; “and, as things are now, howcouldthey? Who would dream of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or sellingalland giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. Weknowthat 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 doyoumanage 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.”
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.”
“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.
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!
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 toher!” 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, IknowI'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.