Part 13 (2/2)

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.

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