A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 11

"Why, no," said the Altrurian, with absolute simplicity. He must have perceived the despair I fell into at this answer, for he asked: "Why should I have minded doing for others what I should have been willing to do for myself?"

"There are a great many things we are willing to do for ourselves that we are not willing to do for others. But even on that principle, which I think false and illogical, you could not be justified. A gentleman is not willing to black _his own_ boots. It is offensive to his feelings, to his self-respect; it is something he will not do if he can get anybody else to do it for him."

"Then in America," said the Altrurian, "it is not offensive to the feelings of a gentleman to let another do for him what he would not do for himself?"

"Certainly not."

"Ah," he returned, "then we understand something altogether different by the word gentleman in Altruria. I see, now, how I have committed a mistake. I shall be more careful hereafter."

I thought I had better leave the subject, and, "By-the-way," I said, "how would you like to take a little tramp with me to-day farther up into the mountains?"

"I should be delighted," said the Altrurian, so gratefully that I was ashamed to think why I was proposing the pleasure to him.

"Well, then, I shall be ready to start as soon as we have had breakfast. I will join you down-stairs in half an hour."

He left me at this hint, though really I was half afraid he might stay and offer to lend me a hand at my toilet, in the expression of his national character. I found him with Mrs. Makely, when I went down, and she began, with a parenthetical tribute to the beauty of the mountains in the morning light: "Don't be surprised to see me up at this unnatural hour. I don't know whether it was the excitement of our talk last night, or what it was, but my sulphonal wouldn't act, though I took fifteen grains, and I was up with the lark, or should have been, if there had been any lark outside of literature to be up with. However, this air is so glorious that I don't mind losing a night's sleep now and then. I believe that with a little practice one could get along without any sleep at all here; at least, _I_ could. I'm sorry to say poor Mr. Makely _can't_, apparently. He's making up for his share of my vigils, and I'm going to breakfast without him. Do you know, I've done a very bold thing: I've got the head-waiter to give you places at our table; I know you'll hate it, Mr. Twelvemough, because you naturally want to keep Mr. h.o.m.os to yourself, and I don't blame you at all; but I'm simply not going to _let_ you, and that's all there is about it."

The pleasure I felt at this announcement was not unmixed, but I tried to keep Mrs. Makely from thinking so, and I was immensely relieved when she found a chance to say to me, in a low voice: "I know just how you're feeling, Mr. Twelvemough, and I'm going to help you keep him from doing anything ridiculous, if I can. I _like_ him, and I think it's a perfect shame to have people laughing at him. I know we can manage him between us."

We so far failed, however, that the Altrurian shook hands with the head-waiter when he pressed open the wire-netting door to let us into the dining-room, and made a bow to our waitress of the sort one makes to a lady. But we thought it best to ignore these little errors of his and reserve our moral strength for anything more spectacular. Fortunately we got through our breakfast with nothing worse than his jumping up and stooping to hand the waitress a spoon she let fall; but this could easily pa.s.s for some attention to Mrs. Makely at a little distance. There were not many people down to breakfast yet; but I could see that there was a good deal of subdued sensation among the waitresses, standing with folded arms behind their tables, and that the head-waiter's handsome face was red with anxiety.

Mrs. Makely asked if we were going to church. She said she was driving that way, and would be glad to drop us. "I'm not going myself," she explained, "because I couldn't make anything of the sermon, with my head in the state it is, and I'm going to compromise on a good action. I want to carry some books and papers over to Mrs. Camp. Don't you think that will be quite as acceptable, Mr. h.o.m.os?"

"I should venture to hope it," he said, with a tolerant seriousness not altogether out of keeping with her lightness.

"Who is Mrs. Camp?" I asked, not caring to commit myself on the question.

"Lizzie's mother. You know I told you about them last night. I think she must have got through the books I lent her, and I know Lizzie didn't like to ask me for more, because she saw me talking with you, and didn't want to interrupt us. Such a nice girl! I think the Sunday papers must have come, and I'll take them over, too; Mrs. Camp is always so glad to get them, and she is so delightful when she gets going about public events.

But perhaps you don't approve of Sunday papers, Mr. h.o.m.os."

"I'm sure I don't know, madam. I haven't seen them yet. You know this is the first Sunday I've been in America."

"Well, I'm sorry to say you won't see the old Puritan Sabbath," said Mrs.

Makely, with an abrupt deflection from the question of the Sunday papers.

"Though you ought to, up in these hills. The only thing left of it is rye-and-Indian bread, and these baked beans and fish-b.a.l.l.s."

"But they are very good?"

"Yes, I dare say they are not the worst of it."

She was a woman who tended to levity, and I was a little afraid she might be going to say something irreverent; but, if she were, she was forestalled by the Altrurian asking: "Would it be very indiscreet, madam, if I were to ask you some time to introduce me to that family?"

"The Camps?" she returned. "Not at all. I should be perfectly delighted."

The thought seemed to strike her, and she asked: "Why not go with me this morning, unless you are inflexibly bent on going to church, you and Mr.

Twelvemough?"

The Altrurian glanced at me, and I said I should be only too glad, if I could carry some books, so that I could compromise on a good action, too.

"Take one of your own," she instantly suggested.

"Do you think they wouldn't be too severe upon it?" I asked.

"Well, Mrs. Camp might," Mrs. Makely consented, with a smile. "She goes in for rather serious fiction; but I think Lizzie would enjoy a good, old-fas.h.i.+oned love-story, where everybody got married, as they do in your charming books."

I winced a little, for every one likes to be regarded seriously, and I did not enjoy being remanded to the young-girl public; but I put a bold face on it, and said: "My good action shall be done in behalf of Miss Lizzie."

Half an hour later, Mrs. Makely having left word with the clerk where we were gone, so that her husband need not be alarmed when he got up, we were striking into the hills on a two-seated buckboard, with one of the best teams of our hotel, and one of the most taciturn drivers. Mrs. Makely had the Altrurian get into the back seat with her, and, after some attempts to make talk with the driver, I leaned over and joined in their talk. The Altrurian was greatly interested, not so much in the landscape--though he owned its beauty when we cried out over it from point to point--but in the human incidents and features. He noticed the cattle in the fields, and the horses we met on the road, and the taste and comfort of the buildings, the variety of the crops, and the promise of the harvest. I was glad of the respite his questions gave me from the study of the intimate character of our civilization, for they were directed now at these more material facts, and I willingly joined Mrs. Makely in answering them. We explained that the finest teams we met were from the different hotels or boarding-houses, or at least from the farms where the people took city people to board; and that certain shabby equipages belonged to the natives who lived solely by cultivating the soil. There was not very much of the soil cultivated, for the chief crop was hay, with here and there a patch of potatoes or beans, and a few acres in sweet-corn. The houses of the natives, when they were for their use only, were no better than their turnouts; it was where the city boarder had found shelter that they were modern and pleasant. Now and then we came to a deserted homestead, and I tried to make the Altrurian understand how farming in New England had yielded to the compet.i.tion of the immense agricultural operations of the West. "You know," I said, "that agriculture is really an operation out there, as much as coal-mining is in Pennsylvania, or finance in Wall Street; you have no idea of the vastness of the scale." Perhaps I swelled a little with pride in my celebration of the national prosperity, as it flowed from our Western farms of five and ten and twenty thousand acres; I could not very well help putting on the pedal in these pa.s.sages. Mrs. Makely listened almost, as eagerly, as the Altrurian, for, as a cultivated American woman, she was necessarily quite ignorant of her own country, geographically, politically, and historically. "The only people left in the hill country of New England," I concluded, "are those who are too old or too lazy to get away. Any young man of energy would be ashamed to stay, unless he wanted to keep a boarding-house or live on the city vacationists in summer. If he doesn't, he goes West and takes up some of the new land, and comes back in middle-life and buys a deserted farm to spend his summers on."

"Dear me!" said the Altrurian. "Is it so simple as that? Then we can hardly wonder at their owners leaving these worn-out farms; though I suppose it must be with the pang of exile, sometimes."

"Oh, I fancy there isn't much sentiment involved," I answered, lightly.

"Whoa!" said Mrs. Makely, speaking to the horses before she spoke to the driver, as some women will. He pulled them up, and looked round at her.

"Isn't that Reuben Camp, _now_, over there by that house?" she asked, as if we had been talking of him; that is another way some women have.

"Yes, ma'am," said the driver.

"Oh, well, then!" and "Reuben!" she called to the young man, who was prowling about the door-yard of a sad-colored old farm-house, and peering into a window here and there. "Come here a moment--won't you, please?"

He lifted his head and looked round, and, when he had located the appeal made to him, he came down the walk to the gate and leaned over it, waiting for further instructions. I saw that it was the young man whom we had noticed with the girl Mrs. Makely called Lizzie on the hotel piazza the night before.

"Do you know whether I should find Lizzie at home this morning?"

"Yes, she's there with mother," said the young fellow, with neither liking nor disliking in his tone.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" said the lady. "I didn't know but she might be at church. What in the world has happened here? Is there anything unusual going on inside?"

"No, I was just looking to see if it was all right. The folks wanted I should come round."

"Why, where are they?"

"Oh, they're gone."

"Gone?"

"Yes; gone West. They've left the old place, because they couldn't make a living here any longer."

"Why, this is quite a case in point," I said. "Now, Mr. h.o.m.os, here is a chance to inform yourself at first hand about a very interesting fact of our civilization"; and I added, in a low voice, to Mrs. Makely: "Won't you introduce us?"

"Oh yes. Mr. Camp, this is Mr. Twelvemough, the author--you know his books, of course; and Mr. h.o.m.os, a gentleman from Altruria."

The young fellow opened the gate he leaned on and came out to us. He took no notice of me, but he seized the Altrurian's hand and wrung it. "I've heard of _you_" he said. "Mrs. Makely, were you going to our place?"

"Why, yes."

"So do, then. Mother would give almost anything to see Mr. h.o.m.os. We've heard of Altruria, over our way," he added to our friend. "Mother's been reading up all she can about it. She'll want to talk with you, and she won't give the rest of us much of a chance, I guess."

"Oh, I shall be glad to see her," said the Altrurian, "and to tell her everything I can. But won't you explain to me first something about your deserted farms here? It's quite a new thing to me."