Public-domain ebook
An Experiment in Altruism
Language: en435 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #67432.
The opening · free to read
“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 book keeps going
Keep reading, and see it illustrated
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
