Equality & Looking Backward. Edward Bellamy
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it did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full of the most poignant sympathy.
“Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?” she said. “I was here when you came in. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heard you groan, I could not keep silent. What has happened to you? Where have you been? Can’t I do something for you?”
Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my own and was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is thrown him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir.
“God bless you,” I said, after a few moments. “He must have sent you to me just now. I think I was in danger of going crazy if you had not come.” At this the tears came into her eyes.
“Oh, Mr. West!” she cried. “How heartless you must have thought us! How could we leave you to yourself so long! But it is over now, is it not? You are better, surely.”
“Yes,” I said, “thanks to you. If you will not go away quite yet, I shall be myself soon.”
“Indeed I will not go away,” she said, with a little quiver of her face, more expressive of her sympathy than a volume of words. “You must not think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving you so by yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking how strange your waking would be this morning; but father said you would sleep till late. He said that it would be better not to show too much sympathy with you at first, but to try to divert your thoughts and make you feel that you were among friends.”
“You have indeed made me feel that,” I answered. “But you see it is a good deal of a jolt to drop a hundred years, and although I did not seem to feel it so much last night, I have had very odd sensations this morning.” While I held her hands and kept my eyes on her face, I could already even jest a little at my plight.
“No one thought of such a thing as your going out in the city alone so early in the morning,” she went on. “Oh, Mr. West, where have you been?”
Then I told her of my morning’s experience, from my first waking till the moment I had looked up to see her before me, just as I have told it here. She was overcome by distressful pity during the recital, and, though I had released one of her hands, did not try to take from me the other, seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold it. “I can think a little what this feeling must have been like,” she said. “It must have been terrible. And to think you were left alone to struggle with it! Can you ever forgive us?”
“But it is gone now. You have driven it quite away for the present,” I said.
“You will not let it return again,” she queried anxiously.
“I can’t quite say that,” I replied. “It might be too early to say that, considering how strange everything will still be to me.”
“But you will not try to contend with it alone again, at least,” she persisted. “Promise that you will come to us, and let us sympathize with you, and try to help you. Perhaps we can’t do much, but it will surely be better than to try to bear such feelings alone.”
“I will come to you if you will let me,” I said.
“Oh yes, yes, I beg you will,” she said eagerly. “I would do anything to help you that I could.”
“All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be now,” I replied.
“It is understood, then,” she said, smiling with wet eyes, “that you are to come and tell me next time, and not run all over Boston among strangers.”
This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely strange, so near within these few minutes had my trouble and her sympathetic tears brought us.
“I will promise, when you come to me,” she added, with an expression of charming archness, passing, as she continued, into one of enthusiasm, “to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you must not for a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or that I think you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know that the world now is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this.”
Chapter 9
Dr. and Mrs. Leete were evidently not a little startled to learn, when they presently appeared, that I had been all over the city alone that morning, and it was apparent that they were agreeably surprised to see that I seemed so little agitated after the experience.
“Your stroll could scarcely have failed to be a very interesting one,” said Mrs. Leete, as we sat down to table soon after. “You must have seen a good many new things.”
“I saw very little that was not new,” I replied. “But I think what surprised me as much as anything was not to find any stores on Washington Street, or any banks on State. What have you done with the merchants and bankers? Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists wanted to do in my day?”
“Not so bad as that,” replied Dr. Leete. “We have simply dispensed with them. Their functions are obsolete in the modern world.”
“Who sells you things when you want to buy them?” I inquired.
“There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of goods is effected in another way. As to the bankers, having no money we have no use for those gentry.”
“Miss Leete,” said I, turning to Edith, “I am afraid that your father is making sport of me. I don’t blame him, for the temptation my innocence offers must be extraordinary. But, really, there are limits to my credulity as to possible alterations in the social system.”
“Father has no idea of jesting, I am sure,” she replied, with a reassuring smile.
The conversation took another turn then, the point of ladies’ fashions in the nineteenth century being raised, if I remember rightly, by Mrs. Leete, and it was not till after breakfast, when the doctor had invited me up to the house-top, which appeared to be a favorite resort of his, that he recurred to the subject.
“You were surprised,” he said, “at my saying that we got along without money or trade, but a moment’s reflection will show that trade existed and money was needed in your day simply because the business of production was left in private hands, and that, consequently, they are superfluous now.”
“I do not at once see how that follows,” I replied.
“It is very simple,” said Dr. Leete. “When innumerable different and independent persons produced the various things needful to life and comfort, endless exchanges between individuals were requisite in order that they might supply themselves with what they desired. These exchanges constituted trade, and money was essential as their medium. But as soon as the nation became the sole producer of all sorts of commodities, there was no need of exchanges between individuals that they might get what they required. Everything was procurable from one source, and nothing could be procured anywhere else. A system of direct distribution from the national storehouses took the place of trade, and for this money was unnecessary.”
“How is this distribution managed?” I asked.
“On the simplest possible plan,” replied Dr. Leete. “A credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen on the public books at the beginning of each year, and a credit card issued him with which he procures at