A Traveler From Altruria. William Dean Howells
and, besides, I could not imagine why a walking delegate should wish to address his clumsy satire to me particularly. For the present, at least, there was nothing for it but to deal with this inquiry as if it were made in good faith and in the pursuit of useful information. It struck me as grotesque; but it would not have been decent to treat it as if it were so. I was obliged to regard it seriously, and so I decided to shirk it.
“Well,” I said, “that opens up rather a large field, which lies somewhat outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what they do with their leisure. I’m pretty certain, though, you won’t meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn’t afford it, and I fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our guests. We respect them thoroughly; every American does, and we know that the prosperity of the country rests with them; we have a theory that they are politically sovereign, but we see very little of them, and we don’t associate with them. In fact, our cultivated people have so little interest in them socially that they don’t like to meet them, even in fiction; they prefer refined and polished ladies and gentlemen, whom they can have some sympathy with; and I always go to the upper classes for my types. It won’t do to suppose, though, that we are indifferent to the working classes in their place. Their condition is being studied a good deal just now, and there are several persons here who will be able to satisfy your curiosity on the points you have made, I think. I will introduce you to them.”
The Altrurian did not try to detain me this time. He said he should be very glad indeed to meet my friends, and I led the way toward a little group at the corner of the piazza. They were men whom I particularly liked, for one reason or another; they were intelligent and open-minded, and they were thoroughly American. One was a banker; another was a minister; there was a lawyer, and there was a doctor; there was a professor of political economy in one of our colleges; and there was a retired manufacturer—I do not know what he used to manufacture: cotton or iron, or something like that. They all rose politely as I came up with my Altrurian, and I fancied in them a sensation of expectancy created by the rumor of his eccentric behavior which must have spread through the hotel. But they controlled this if they had it, and I could see, as the light fell upon his face from a spray of electrics on the nearest pillar, that sort of liking kindle in theirs which I had felt myself at first sight of him.
I said, “Gentlemen, I wish to introduce my friend, Mr. Homos,” and then I presented them severally to him by name. We all sat down, and I explained: “Mr. Homos is from Altruria. He is visiting our country for the first time, and is greatly interested in the working of our institutions. He has been asking me some rather hard questions about certain phases of our civilization; and the fact is that I have launched him upon you because I don’t feel quite able to cope with him.”
They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked, with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, “What point in our polity can be obscure to the author of ‘Glove and Gauntlet’ and ‘Airs and Graces’?”
They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked my friend: “Is it long since you left Altruria?”
“It seems a great while ago,” the Altrurian answered, “but it is really only a few weeks.”
“You came by way of England, I suppose?”
“Yes; there is no direct line to America,” said the Altrurian.
“That seems rather odd,” I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.
“Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere,” the banker instructed me.
“The tariff has killed our shipbuilding,” said the professor. No one took up this firebrand, and the professor added: “Your name is Greek, isn’t it, Mr. Homos?”
“Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families,” said the Altrurian.
“And do you think,” asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, “that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled Atlantis’?”
“No, I can’t say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to Britain.”
“Yes, we know that,” the minister intervened, “but it is perfectly astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean’s surface a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since Columbus sailed westward.”
“No, you wouldn’t. And I wish,” the doctor suggested in his turn, “that Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us about ours.”
“Yes,” I coincided, “I’m sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At least I should; but I brought our friend up in the hope that the professor would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a defenceless stranger.” Since the professor had given me that little stab, I was rather anxious to see how he would handle the desire for information in the Altrurian which I had found so prickly.
This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious about Altruria as the rest, and said he would rather hear of it. But the Altrurian said: “I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to talk of Altruria as long as you like; or, if you will come to us, I shall be still happier to show you many things that I couldn’t make you understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and I hope you will have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have fancied in my friend here,” he went on, with a smile toward me, “a suspicion that I was not entirely single in some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize.”
“Oh, not at all,” I protested, for it was not polite to admit a conjecture so accurate. “We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the foreigner, though we believe in it fully: we are used to the English tourist.”
My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: “I am very glad to hear it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the apparent contradictions were so colossal—”
“We have everything on a large scale here,” said the banker, breaking off the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, “and we rather pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I said, I don’t believe in you, but I respect you.” I thought this charming, myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly and in terms so just and generous.
“Pretty good,” said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear, “for a bloated bond-holder.”
“Yes,”