A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 9

"Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill time, and you cannot escape from it without taking away the living of those dependent on you?"

"Yes," I put in, "and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The question is unanswerable."

"That is true; in your conditions, it is unanswerable," said the Altrurian.

"I think," said Mrs. Makely, "that, under the circ.u.mstances, we do pretty well."

"Oh, I don't presume to censure you. And if you believe that your conditions are the best--"

"We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds," I said, devoutly; and it struck me that, if ever we came to have a national church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions ought to be in the confession of faith.

The Altrurian's mind had not followed mine so far. "And your young girls,"

he asked of Mrs. Makely--"how is their time occupied?"

"You mean after they come out in society?"

"I suppose so."

She seemed to reflect. "I don't know that it is very differently occupied.

Of course, they have their own amus.e.m.e.nts; they have their dances, and little clubs, and their sewing-societies. I suppose that even an Altrurian would applaud their sewing for the poor?" Mrs. Makely asked, rather satirically.

"Yes," he answered; and then he asked: "Isn't it taking work away from some needy seamstress, though? But I suppose you excuse it to the thoughtlessness of youth."

Mrs. Makely did not say, and he went on: "What I find it so hard to understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion, such as you have been describing to me. I don't see how you keep well."

"We _don't_ keep well," said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amus.e.m.e.nt. "I don't suppose that when you get above the working cla.s.ses, till you reach the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America."

"Isn't that rather extreme?" I ventured to ask.

"No," said Mrs. Makely, "it's shamefully moderate," and she seemed to delight in having made out such a bad case for her s.e.x. You can't stop a woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better left it alone.

"But," said the Altrurian, "if you are forbidden by motives of humanity from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?"

"Well," said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, "we prefer to take medicine."

"You must approve of that," I said to the Altrurian, "as you consider exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely," I entreated, "you're giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been telling Mr. h.o.m.os that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don't take that consolation from me."

"I won't, altogether," she said. "I couldn't have the heart to, after the pretty way you've put it. I don't call it very athletic, sitting around on hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I don't deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing." She paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: "And you ought to see what wrecks they get home in the fall!"

The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry; his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.

"But your ladies," he asked, "they have the summer for rest, however they use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say so," he added, with a deferential glance at me.

"Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the cla.s.s that can afford it," said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded as if she felt a tacit censure in his question. "It wouldn't be the least use for us to stay and fry through our summers in the city simply because our fathers and brothers had to.

Besides, we are worn out, at the end of the season, and they want us to come away as much as we want to come."

"Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their att.i.tude toward women."

"They are perfect dears," said Mrs. Makely, "and here comes one of the best of them."

At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her shoulders. "Whose character is it you're blasting?" he asked, jocosely.

"Where in the world did you find it?" she asked, meaning the shawl.

"It was where you left it--on the sofa, in the side parlor. I had to take my life in my hand when I crossed among all those waltzers in there. There must have been as many as three couples on the floor. Poor girls! I pity them, off at these places. The fellows in town have a good deal better time. They've got their clubs, and they've got the theatre, and when the weather gets too much for them they can run off down to the sh.o.r.e for the night. The places anywhere within an hour's ride are full of fellows. The girls don't have to dance with one another there, or with little boys. Of course, that's all right if they like it better." He laughed at his wife, and winked at me, and smoked swiftly, in emphasis of his irony.

"Then the young gentlemen whom the young ladies here usually meet in society are all at work in the cities?" the Altrurian asked him, rather needlessly, as I had already said so.

"Yes, those who are not out West, growing up with the country, except, of course, the fellows who have inherited a fortune. They're mostly off on yachts."

"But why do your young men go West to grow up with the country?" pursued my friend.

"Because the East is _grown_ up. They have got to hustle, and the West is the place to hustle. To make money," added Makely, in response to a puzzled glance of the Altrurian.

"Sometimes," said his wife, "I almost hate the name of money."

"Well, so long as you don't hate the thing, Peggy."

"Oh, we must have it, I suppose," she sighed. "They used to say about the girls who grew into old maids just after the Rebellion that they had lost their chance in the war for the Union. I think quite as many lose their chance now in the war for the dollar."

"Mars hath slain his thousands, but Mammon hath slain his tens of thousands," I suggested, lightly; we all like to recognize the facts, so long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.

"Yes, quite as bad as that," said Mrs. Makely.

"Well, my dear, you are expensive, you know," said her husband, "and if we want to have you--why, we've got to hustle first."

"Oh, I don't blame you, you poor things! There's nothing to be done about it; it's just got to go on and on; I don't see how it's ever to end."

The Altrurian had been following us with that air of polite mystification which I had begun to dread in him. "Then, in your good society you postpone, and even forego, the happiness of life in the struggle to be rich?"

"Well, you see," said Makely, "a fellow don't like to ask a girl to share a home that isn't as nice as the home she has left."

"Sometimes," his wife put in, rather sadly, "I think that it's all a mistake, and that we'd be willing to share the privations of the man we loved."

"Well," said Makely, with a laugh, "we wouldn't like to risk it."

I laughed with him, but his wife did not, and in the silence that ensued there was nothing to prevent the Altrurian from coming in with another of his questions: "How far does this state of things extend downward? Does it include the working cla.s.ses, too?"

"Oh no!" we all answered together, and Mrs. Makely said: "With your Altrurian ideas, I suppose you would naturally sympathize a great deal more with the lower cla.s.ses, and think they had to endure all the hardships in our system; but if you could realize how the struggle goes on in the best society, and how we all have to fight for what we get, or don't get, you would be disposed to pity our upper cla.s.ses, too."

"I am sure I should," said the Altrurian.

Makely remarked: "I used to hear my father say that slavery was harder on the whites than it was on the blacks, and that he wanted it done away with for the sake of the masters."

Makely rather faltered in conclusion, as if he were not quite satisfied with his remark, and I distinctly felt a want of proportion in it; but I did not wish to say anything. His wife had no reluctance.

"Well, there's no comparison between the two things, but the struggle certainly doesn't affect the working cla.s.ses as it does us. They go on marrying and giving in marriage in the old way. They have nothing to lose, and so they can afford it."

"Blessed am dem what don't expect nuffin! Oh, I tell you, it's a working-man's country," said Makely, through his cigar-smoke. "You ought to see them in town, these summer nights, in the parks and squares and cheap theatres. Their girls are not off for their health, anywhere, and their fellows are not off growing up with the country. Their day's work is over, and they're going in for a good time. And, then, walk through the streets where they live, and see them out on the stoops with their wives and children! I tell you, it's enough to make a fellow wish he was poor himself."