A Traveler From Altruria. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ isn’t it?” I returned, with a glow of pride. “Our hotel here is a type of the summer hotel everywhere; it’s characteristic in not having anything characteristic about it; and I rather like the notion of the people in it being so much like the people in all the others that you would feel yourself at home wherever you met such a company in such a house. All over the country, north and south, wherever you find a group of hills or a pleasant bit of water or a stretch of coast, you’ll find some such refuge as this for our weary toilers. We began to discover some time ago that it would not do to cut open the goose that laid our golden eggs, even if it looked like an eagle, and kept on perching on our banners just as if nothing had happened. We discovered that, if we continued to kill ourselves with hard work, there would be no Americans pretty soon.”

      The Altrurian laughed. “How delightfully you put it! How quaint! How picturesque! Excuse me, but I can’t help expressing my pleasure in it. Our own humor is so very different.”

      “Ah,” I said; “what is your humor like?”

      “I could hardly tell you, I’m afraid; I’ve never been much of a humorist myself.”

      Again a cold doubt of something ironical in the man went through me, but I had no means of verifying it, and so I simply remained silent, waiting for him to prompt me if he wished to know anything further about our national transformation from bees perpetually busy into butterflies occasionally idle. “And when you had made that discovery?” he suggested.

      “Why, we’re nothing if not practical, you know, and as soon as we made that discovery we stopped killing ourselves and invented the summer resort. There are very few of our business or professional men now who don’t take their four or five weeks’ vacation. Their wives go off early in the summer, and, if they go to some resort within three or four hours of the city, the men leave town Saturday afternoon and run out, or come up, and spend Sunday with their families. For thirty-eight hours or so a hotel like this is a nest of happy homes.”

      “That is admirable,” said the Altrurian. “You are truly a practical people. The ladies come early in the summer, you say?”

      “Yes, sometimes in the beginning of June.”

      “What do they come for?” asked the Altrurian.

      “What for? Why, for rest!” I retorted, with some little temper.

      “But I thought you told me awhile ago that as soon as a husband could afford it he relieved his wife and daughters from all household work.”

      “So he does.”

      “Then what do the ladies wish to rest from?”

      “From care. It is not work alone that kills. They are not relieved from household care even when they are relieved from household work. There is nothing so killing as household care. Besides, the sex seems to be born tired. To be sure, there are some observers of our life who contend that with the advance of athletics among our ladies, with boating and bathing, and lawn-tennis and mountain-climbing and freedom from care, and these long summers of repose, our women are likely to become as superior to the men physically as they now are intellectually. It is all right. We should like to see it happen. It would be part of the national joke.”

      “Oh, have you a national joke?” asked the Altrurian. “But, of course! You have so much humor. I wish you could give me some notion of it.”

      “Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it,” I replied, “and your only hope of getting at ours is to live into it. One feature of it is the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men’s willingness to subordinate themselves to our women.”

      “Oh, I don’t find that very bewildering,” said the Altrurian. “It seems to me a generous and manly trait of the American character. I’m proud to say that it is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch. There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs must be of the greatest advantage to you; it has been so with us.”

      I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment, perhaps because it was now too dark for him to see it. “Our women have no influence in public affairs,” I said, quietly, after a moment.

      “They haven’t? Is it possible? But didn’t I understand you to imply just now that your women were better educated than your men?”

      “Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women are as a rule better schooled, if not better educated.”

      “Then, apart from the schooling, they are not more cultivated?”

      “In a sense you might say they were. They certainly go in for a lot of things: art and music, and Browning and the drama, and foreign travel and psychology, and political economy and Heaven knows what all. They have more leisure for it; they have all the leisure there is, in fact; our young men have to go into business. I suppose you may say our women are more cultivated than our men; yes, I think there’s no questioning that. They are the great readers among us. We poor devils of authors would be badly off if it were not for our women. In fact, no author could make a reputation among us without them. American literature exists because American women appreciate it and love it.”

      “But surely your men read books?”

      “Some of them; not many, comparatively. You will often hear a complacent ass of a husband and father say to an author: ‘My wife and daughters know your books, but I can’t find time for anything but the papers nowadays. I skim them over at breakfast, or when I’m going in to business on the train.’ He isn’t the least ashamed to say that he reads nothing but the newspapers.”

      “Then you think that it would be better for him to read books?”

      “Well, in the presence of four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives I should not like to say so. Besides, modesty forbids.”

      “No, but, really,” the Altrurian persisted, “you think that the literature of a book is more carefully pondered than the literature of a daily newspaper?”

      “I suppose even the four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives would hardly deny that.”

      “And it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the habitual reader of carefully pondered literature ought to be more thoughtful than the readers of literature which is not carefully pondered and which they merely skim over on their way to business?”

      “I believe we began by assuming the superior culture of our women, didn’t we? You’ll hardly find an American that isn’t proud of it.”

      “Then,” said the Altrurian, “if your women are generally better schooled than your men, and more cultivated and more thoughtful, and are relieved of household work in such great measure, and even of domestic cares, why have they no part in your public affairs?”

      I laughed, for I thought I had my friend at last. “For the best of all possible reasons: they don’t want it.”

      “Ah, that’s no reason,” he returned. “Why don’t they want it?”

      “Really,” I said, out of all patience, “I think I must let you ask the ladies themselves,” and I turned and moved again toward the hotel, but the Altrurian gently detained me.

      “Excuse СКАЧАТЬ