AN EXPERIMENT

IN ALTRUISM

Margaret Pollock Sherwood

“When Tantalus,” said Janet, “was standing in the water that he could not reach, and was dying of thirst, a Philosopher came by. ‘Don’t you understand,’ said the Philosopher, ‘that what you want is water?’”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, turning to look at the girl’s face. Her colour was shifting quickly in the cool October air.

“I mean,” she answered, with her lips curling into her wickedest smile, “that I have been talking with my cousin Paul. He explained, with an air of giving information, that what I need is faith.”

“Your cousin Paul,” growled the Doctor, “has a most remarkable way of discovering what the rest of us have always known.”

“Did you always know that?” asked the girl. “I had an idea that you thought I needed a tonic.”

“There’s the ‘brotherhood of man,’” the Doctor went on. “Your cousin Paul thinks that he has discovered or invented the ‘brotherhood of man.’”

“Don’t you mean,” I suggested, “that he discovers and acts upon what the rest of us have always known without letting it make any particular difference?”

“I cannot see that he is trying any harder than the rest of us to find out how to treat his neighbour,” said the Doctor. “Living in the slums is as comfortable nowadays as living anywhere else. At least, it is at Barnet House. That has as good appointments as any house in the city.”

“Good plumbing isn’t quite everything,” I ventured to say.

“Those university men who go to live with the poor are too supercilious,” said the Doctor. “They patronize humanity. And the ‘cousin Paul’ doesn’t stop there. He patronizes the Creator, too. He is constantly reminding the Creator that He is being recognized by one of the first families.”

Janet laughed. “You are clever,” she said, “but you aren’t polite. Paul does bend over a little in his efforts to help. But his mother’s son could hardly avoid that. Think of the family!”

“The whole thing is artificial,” continued the Doctor. “Your cousin goes to live in a tenement, tries to become intimate with its inhabitants, and carries up his own coal. He could never realize that it would be just as lofty a course of action to carry coal in his own house in Endicott Square, and to become intimate with his barber!”

“That would not be picturesque,” said Janet.

There was a pause.

“You say he patronizes the Creator,” mused Janet. “Wouldn’t it be better to say that he interprets God and patronizes man? I think that I dislike the former more than the latter. He is so sure of his beliefs. And he is so puzzled to know how any one can doubt what he believes.”

The Doctor changed the subject with, “What you want is some work to do.”

The girl’s smile vanished, and her face grew bitter.

“What’s the use of working,” she demanded, “when it doesn’t mean anything? You can never do the thing you want to do. You can only do what somebody else wants to do. I am tired of succeeding in other people’s ambitions.”

“You haven’t had a great deal of experience of that kind, have you?” asked the Doctor.

She did not listen. “The world is buttoned up wrong,” she said, “just one hole wrong. I get what you want, and somebody else wants what you get. I believe that hopes were given to us simply in order to hurt. The gods must enjoy dangling before our eyes, just out of reach, the things we pray for. Probably they like to see us clutching the air.”

“Do you know how to ride a horse?” asked the Doctor.

“Yes.”

“Then you had better do it, and let the gods alone. There is one good thing about being on horseback: you can’t despair. If you do, you fall off.”

Here we reached my door, and I went in. I paused for a minute, to watch the two women going down the street,—the Doctor, with her free, even step; the girl with quick, irregular movements.

It seemed to me that Janet was the most inexplicable of all the inexplicable people I had met since my arrival, six weeks ago. Something must have hurt her cruelly. She saw all life in the light of her own pain, and she rebelled against the suffering whose ultimate meaning she could not understand.

Yet now, with the sunlight in her warm brown hair, she looked, in her radiant colouring, like a symbol of all the joy and gladness in the world.

I had come to a strange city, to do a peculiar work. At last—and I was thirty-nine years old—I was free to render humanity the service I had always wanted to give.

So I took up my Cause. What special cause it was there is no need to say. It was one of those that are never won while the world sins on, and yet are never lost.

The city was new to me. Its streets, its spires, and its sky were all strange.

But not so strange as its ideas. I found that I had come to a centre of new notions, and that my scheme was only one of many for the salvation of mankind. All that was most advanced was represented here: new faiths, new co-operative experiments in trade, new revelations of the occult.

The men and women that I met filled me with astonishment. They were all self-conscious and introspective. Most of them were brooding over wrongs,—the concrete wrongs of others, or their own abstract injuries, in a world that hid from them the great secret of existence. And they were all devising ways and means to correct the misdeeds of man and of God.

Perhaps it was the many theories that lent a kind of unreality to the life in the streets. I used almost to wonder if it were a pantomime, arranged to illustrate our ideas. Something certainly made the thoroughfares and the houses in the city look like scenery in a play, and I was always half-expecting them to fold up and move off the stage.

The street on which I lived was especially theatrical. Opposite was a house consisting of one Gothic tower; the stucco houses next, with their low windows and gabled roofs, suggested Nürenburg. Near by was a studio building, guarded by two carven lions; and round the corner stood a huge armoury, with a machicolated roof. It all looked like a mediæval background, prepared for the tumult of a play.

But the tumult never came. Nothing ever disturbed us there except great thoughts.

If it had not been for the Cause, I should have been lonely. Not that it was especially companionable, but that it made me acquainted with the Doctor and the Altruist, and, in fact, with all the other people, except the Lad, and the Man of the World, and the Butterfly Hunter. They were at my boarding-place.

The Altruist was Janet’s cousin Paul. It was he who introduced me to Janet, and to her namesake, little Jean. They lived opposite in one of the gray stucco houses. Jean was a year-old baby, and her godmother a young woman of twenty-four.

I used often to see them together upstairs, Jean’s yellow head shining against her aunt’s brown hair. I liked to think of them as I went wandering with my ideas about abstract humanity through this visionary town.

The Altruist was terribly in earnest. He considered our social system all wrong, and he wrote and lectured and preached about it constantly.

He lived in one of the city slums.

The morning after my arrival I went down to the East End to ask him about his work. I had heard much about him. He had left a home of great beauty to go to that sin-stricken corner of the city, and the fame of his sacrifice had spread abroad.

I found him nailing a board to the steps of the tenement-house where he lived. He greeted me cordially, holding out a small, shapely right hand in welcome.

The house stood in a row of tall tenements, near the terminus of an elevated road. All round it the streets were swarming with children, Russian and Jewish children, dirty, ragged, and forlorn. Some of them were kicking dirt toward the Altruist’s clean steps; others were eyeing him with respectful curiosity.

“What do you do down here? How can you help?” I asked when the Altruist had seated me in his study. It was in the rear of the building, on the ground floor, and it looked out into a densely populated court.

“Do? Oh, very little actual work. I just live, for the most part,” he answered, smiling.

He still held in his hand the hammer with which he had been working. I watched him closely, as he sat in the rough wooden chair in the bare, uncarpeted room.

He was a small man, with vivid blue eyes and dark hair. There was a touch of excitement in his manner, and I thought I detected in his face a certain dramatic interest in the situation.

“I live quietly in my rooms here,” he continued. It was hard to hear his voice above the noise of the court and the roar of the elevated trains. “There is no organized work that I am attempting. I have even given up my church, in order that no machinery may interfere with my purely human relation to my neighbours. I am trying simply to lead a normal life among my brethren. I study; I make calls and receive them. There is nothing extraordinary in the situation. I merely choose my friends, and choose them here, instead of up-town.”

I glanced at the hammer that the Altruist’s hands were clasping nervously. A look of exultation crept into his eyes.

“Yes, I repair the doorstep,” he said. “That I do not do up-town. But somebody has to do it here. I am willing to do anything that will convince my friends here of my desire for good-fellowship.”

The pathos of this unasked service touched me. It was full of the everlasting irony of zeal; the queer achievement mocked the great design.

“But do you not feel a little at a loss,” I asked, “as to what to do next?”

“Does one feel at a loss in De Ruyter or in Endicott Square?” demanded the Altruist, defiantly.

“I have come down here because I have seen great misery,—misery of poverty, misery of sin. I have cast in my lot with the victims of our civilization. The awful condition of these people is the result not only of their transgression of the laws of God, but also of our transgression of the law of Christ. Our whole social and industrial systems are built up on the law of competition, the law of beasts, by which the greedier and stronger snatch the portion of the weak.”

The Altruist had clasped his hands over the end of the upright hammer, and was leaning his chin against them. His voice had taken a high key, and it sounded as if it came from a long way off.

“These people are weak, and are trodden under foot. They are trodden under our feet, and their blood is on our garments.”

He spoke solemnly, and his eyes gleamed with the look of inspiration that the world’s fanatics share with the world’s saints.

“But,” I stammered, with a half-guilty feeling, “your being here does not bring these people bread.”

“It does not,” said the Altruist, “but it brings a little beauty into their lives. I share the work of the residents at Barnet House. We have clubs of all kinds. We have musicales and art exhibitions. There is much that is definite in our effort.”

Looking up, I caught sight of some Burne-Jones pictures on the roughly-plastered walls of the study.

“Isn’t it like trying to feed a hungry lion with rose-leaves?” I asked.

The Altruist’s face lighted up.

“It is not what we do that is important,” he said. “We stand for an eternal truth. Barnet House and my study here are only symbols of our faith. They have inestimable value, not in our petty achievement, but as a declaration of the right of our fellow-man to our sympathy and love.”

I listened with interest as my host proceeded to set forth his criticism of society and to unfold his plans for its reform. He talked brilliantly.

The race fell short of its grandest possibilities, he said, in losing its hold on abstract truths. Devotion to an ideal was forgotten in the adjustment of human lives to one another, rather than to something above and beyond them. In attempting to solve minor concrete problems, society had dissipated all energy for lofty thought.

In confiding to me his ideas for reconstruction the Altruist talked of human life as if it were something in which he did not share; as if he stood apart from its real issues, apart, and higher than his fellows, to whom he reached down a helping hand.

His conversation enabled me to understand his face. It was full of a fierce enthusiasm, which life had not yet tamed.

I found myself saying: “But your life is ascetic. In your devotion to an idea you sacrifice too much; you are like monks.”

“Not at all,” he maintained. “We take no vow. Our life is wonderfully broad and free. Instead of being bound by mere individual experience we share the lives of all.”

I wondered that I had not thought of this before.

“The usual existence of married people,” he said deliberately, “with its narrow, selfish interests, seems to me, especially in the case of women, largely animal. They cannot know the higher joys of service to one’s kind.”

It was strange to hear these opinions coming from the rounded, childlike lips.

“There is no reason,” he went on, “why families should not come down here to share their lives with the poor. That would be in some ways a better solution of the problem than Barnet House, or my solitary effort. Surely it is the duty of the cultured, to whom much has been given, to share of their abundance with those who starve.”

“But the children,—” I suggested. “It would not be possible to bring up children in such associations.”

“I sometimes think,” said the Altruist, “that a further sacrifice is necessary in order to wipe out the sins of our forefathers. Perhaps, in order to be free for this great work, it is the duty of the race to abstain for a generation from bringing children into the world,—for a generation or two,” he added dreamily.

“That,” I assented mentally, as I rose to go, “would certainly be effectual.”

The Man of the World (I shall introduce my friends in the order in which I met them; it is not artistic, but neither is life)—the Man of the World was fourteen years old.

I made his acquaintance in this wise.

One night I went down early to dinner. As I waited in the parlour for the bell to ring, a portière was drawn, and there entered what I supposed to be a little boy. He was so short, chubby, and round-faced that at first sight he looked younger than he was. I bent over, saying graciously as I held out my hand,—

“I wonder if you will tell me your name?”

When he looked up I realized what I had done. Evidently a mistaken world was in the habit of confusing smallness of stature with lack of experience.

“I beg your pardon?” was all he said, but the touch of dignity in the childish petulance of his tone rebuked me. That was the last time I ever patronized Morey Steiner.

The chill in the atmosphere was not dispelled even when he was formally presented to me by our hostess.

At dinner the Man of the World and I sat side by side. It was not until I asked him if he cared for Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle that my disgrace was retrieved. Dramatic criticism was the child’s strong point,—one of his strong points.

He told me that he thought Rip Van Winkle rather amusing. Then he asked me if I did not consider the knife-whetting business in Irving’s Shylock rather stagey. The part that he cared for most of all was Mr. Mansfield’s Beau Brummell.

Yes, he went to the theatre a great deal, sometimes with his father or his sisters, sometimes alone. That was his father, those were his sisters. His mother was dead. The family had just come to the city, and they were going to stay at this place until they found a house to live in.

I saw that his father represented money, and, looking down at the worldly-wise scrap of a lad at my side, I realized what wealth and American civilization can do for the very young.

“Did I play cards?” he asked suddenly. “No? Perhaps his brother would teach me when he came. His brother played well.”