Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM

AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM

BY

ELIZABETH HASTINGS

“The world, which took but six days to make, is like to take six thousand to make out.”—Sir Thomas Browne.

New York

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND LONDON

1895

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1895,

By MACMILLAN AND CO.

Norwood Press:

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM

CHAPTER I

“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.

CHAPTER II

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.

CHAPTER III

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.”

CHAPTER IV

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.”

The end of the dinner interrupted our discussion of horses. It also interrupted the Man of the World in the act of storing away nuts and candies in his pocket. He was glad I liked riding.

“Perhaps,” he said, drawing my chair back for me (the Man of the World was a perfect gentleman—at times) “we can have a ride in the park together some day.”

Presently I found myself watching him as he conversed with my hostess’ daughter in the parlour. The round face was heavy when he was silent. When he talked, it lit up with precocious intelligence. He had a blasé air, as of one who is permanently weary of many things, and in his blue eyes I saw gleams of the knowledge of good and evil. The child was old,—as old as the serpent in the garden.

He was destined to much mortification that night. My mistake was repeated with emphasis by another boarder, an elderly gentleman in black.

He chucked the Man of the World under the chin when the latter rose politely to say, “Won’t you take my chair, sir?”

“Thank you, thank you, little boy,” said the old gentleman, “and who might you be?”

We all suffered for a moment. Then the child said,—

“I might be the Prince of Wales, but I am Morey Steiner.”

CHAPTER V

Something at last became real to me: that was the misery of the poor. It seemed sadder than anything else in the world, except the misery of their benefactors. I could hardly tell whether, in this great tragedy of poverty, it was actor or spectator who suffered most.

I saw on the one side hunger, sin, ignorance, and they weighed down upon me like a nightmare. I became familiar with the crowded quarters of the city, where the population was nine hundred to the acre. I knew the inside of great shops, where women worked and starved on two dollars a week.

On the other side I saw brave attempts to help, that were yet half futile. There were charities, religious and secular; relief-giving societies, working into the hands of general organizations; there were settlements among the poor. But they all fought against frightful odds. The lot of many who were trying to help was to look and suffer, impotently.

A kind of morbid fascination drew me continually to the foreign quarters. I liked the picturesqueness of the crowded streets, where women in gay head-dresses chattered, holding their babies in their arms. I liked the alley-ways lined with old-clothes shops, and the corners where Russians, Italians, Germans, Jews congregated, talking, laughing, quarrelling. The quaint children in old-world garments interested me; and the aged, wrinkled faces of men and women roused often a feeling of remembrance, as if I had known them somewhere, in book or picture.

The most crowded district was near the sea. A broad thoroughfare called Traffic Street skirted the city at the water edge. On the outer side were enormous warehouses and dock-yards; on the inner, tall tenements.

Looking between the great buildings, I caught sudden glimpses of blue water, with my old friends, the white sea-gulls, floating overhead. And often, in coming down rickety tenement-house steps, from scenes that left me sick and faint, the sight of tall masts of ships thrilled me with their inevitable suggestion of freedom and escape.

I had begun to feel that the misery of it was greater than I could bear. Then suddenly the Lad appeared.

CHAPTER VI

The Lad was a great comfort to me.

I had for several days been conscious of the presence of a new-comer in the house. He was a young Southerner, with fine dark eyes, and extraordinary alertness of body.

There was something in the stranger’s face that pleased me. Perhaps it was his resolute mouth and a certain air of high-mindedness. Perhaps it was only the boyish way in which his soft hair waved back from his forehead.

I called him “the Lad,” because he looked so young by the side of the Man of the World.

One day as I was talking with my friend, the Butterfly Hunter, I was startled by being told that the Lad had done some brilliant scientific work, and had already made for himself a reputation.

“He is only a boy!” I exclaimed.

“He is a man of twenty-seven,” said the Lad, who had come in unnoticed.

After that we became acquainted rapidly.

I had never seen anybody so keenly alive. He was eager, restless, quivering with vitality. There was a kind of ferocity in his way of working; he was busy finishing a book, with a name occupying two lines. I do not yet know what it means. And he walked every day for miles, coming home hungry and tired.

I found myself trying to classify him. I had fallen into the habit of classifying everybody. Was he more interested in his own soul, I wondered, or in the oppression of the working-man?

My astonishment was very great to discover that he rarely thought about his soul, and that he was not trying to reform anything.

This was partly because he was so busy. His whole effort was centred in his work, and everything else was crowded out.

“I feel the strength of my youth upon me,” he said one day, “but I have done so little, and the days are so short.”

Before I knew it I was taking long walks with the Lad, by the bridges over the tidal river north of the city, or eastward by the shipping and the sea. We watched the sailing of out-bound vessels, and the landing of emigrants from returning ships.

He told me about his father and his sister. He talked, too, a great deal about his work, insisted on talking about it, although he knew that I could not understand him.

I presently came to be a kind of maiden aunt to him. I gave him advice on various matters. I introduced him to Janet and the Doctor and the Altruist, who all regarded him as a new and interesting specimen.

The longer I knew him, the more he cheered me. There was something in his very presence that was like the coming of the young west wind.

CHAPTER VII

“Her device, within a ring of clouds, a heart with shine about it.”—Ben Jonson.

“But what do you do it for? You can’t help. You only harrow up your own feelings.” It was Janet who spoke, perverse, unhappy, winsome Janet, sitting in a tall, old-fashioned chair at the side of her little tea-table.

“I suppose that it is better,” I answered slowly, “to have one’s feelings harrowed up over other people than over one’s self.”

“That’s a very neat thrust,” said the girl. “Thank you. Do you know what the Doctor says about all this reform-scheming and theorizing?”

“No.”

“That it is all ‘shoveling-fog.’ That is a ’longshore expression. Don’t you like it?”

“Very much,” I said. “But doesn’t it suit as well any kind of talking, even the discussion of the ‘Is-life-worth-living’ question?”

“You must have been doing some especially good deed,” said Janet, leaning her pretty head against the back of her chair and looking at me through half-shut eyes. “You are so disagreeable. There isn’t any soil that philanthropy thrives in so well as in the ruins of the social and domestic virtues.”

“Child,” I said, “I did not mean to be personal. Why don’t you stop thinking, and try to find shoes and stockings for some of my poor people?”

Quick tears sprang into her shining eyes.

“‘I sometimes think it were best just to let the Lord alone;

I am sure some people forget he was there before they came,’”

she quoted. “I do not know what the poor have done that I should descend upon them as a last affliction. First, dirt; then a financial crisis and no work; then hunger and cold; and then I. It is like the plagues in Egypt.”

I leaned back in my chair, powerless. It was becoming evident to me that no one could solve Janet’s problems for her.

“It would be cowardly,” she said. “Because I am unhappy, should I try to work off my ill-humour upon the poor?”

“They might like to look at you,” I suggested.

She was making tea, and she stopped, holding a dainty cup in her right hand, to look up at me. That face, whose expression changed so often, baffled and fascinated me. The mouth curved often into cynical smiles, but the eyes were the eyes of a dreamer. At times Janet seemed to me a child. At times she bore the weary expression of one who has fought many battles and has won but few.

“No,” she said. “I am one of the people whose agnosticism absolves them from all action. You know the type. We find it difficult to get up in the morning or to button our boots because we cannot comprehend the infinite. Really, agnosticism makes a very soft down cushion on which to recline at one’s ease.”

“Don’t you sometimes get tired of thrusting arrows into yourself?” I asked. “It must be hard to be a St. Sebastian where you have to be persecutor and martyr too.”

“Please don’t make epigrams,” said the girl. “It is a sign of degeneracy. I am sorry to see you beginning to show traces of it.”

“I thought perhaps you would not understand me if I did not try to speak in epigrams,” I answered meekly.

Janet rose from her chair and came over to stand at my side, brushing back, with kindly fingers, a lock of hair that had escaped from under my bonnet.

“But to go back to the question of good works,” she said. “It seems to me that it is useless to try anything. Listen. When I was twelve years old I wanted to do some work for the city charity organization.

“They sent me to take two aprons to a woman on Harrow Street. ‘It was quite safe,’ they said. So I went down through the dirty street into an inner court, and began to climb the stairs. It was perfectly dark; it was unutterably filthy.

“The woman, I found, lived in the garret, and, after the last flight of stairs, I had to climb a ladder to reach her. In the loft at the top of the ladder I saw,—I shall never forget it!—a woman diseased, shrunken, helpless. Half her face was withered and gone; she was cold, hungry, dirty. Two miserable little girls were crawling around her, crying.

“And I stood there stupefied, unable to speak, unable to grasp all the horror before me. I could do nothing for them. I only stared, helplessly, and petted the little girls. Then I gave that bed-ridden woman the two gingham aprons and came away.

“That scene made an impression upon me that I shall never lose. Since then, all the charity work I have heard of has seemed as ironic as that. Such misery is hopeless. Something deeper than human misdeeds must be the cause. I cannot help it; I cannot help believing that we are the sport of the gods, who sit behind the curtain and laugh at our hurt.”

In the pause that followed, Janet went to the window, forgetting to put down the empty cup that she had taken from me.

Suddenly she turned to me, with her chin raised in defiance.

“Moreover,” she said slowly, “I don’t want to forget my own life entirely in the lives of other people. I want it all, the pleasure and the pain of it, the whole cup down to the dregs.”

There was nothing for me to say; I rose to go.

“What do you think of the Lad?” I asked.

The girl’s face brightened. “He is interesting,” she said. “He is so different. It seems to me that he is the only one of us who is really living. The rest of us are merely talking about it.”

CHAPTER VIII

Whether she went driving in royal state under her white carriage robes, or watched from the nursery window the people passing below, or stood in her little night-dress on her brass bed before being tucked in, Jean was always adorable.

One day I took the Lad to see her.

He had already called at the house a number of times, but Jean had never been brought down to the parlour.

Perhaps he had never before been acquainted with a little child. I saw him watch every motion of her yellow head as she sat on the floor, looking solemnly at the people about her. Jean was a grave baby.

Presently she lifted her hand and very earnestly pointed one tiny finger at the Lad.

I had seen her do this many times. It was her usual way of expressing approval of a new acquaintance. But the Lad had never seen it, and to him it meant, “Thou art the man.”

He begged to be allowed to take her up. As he lifted her, his face flushed.

I did not tell him that she clung to him so closely, and refused so peremptorily to go to any one else, partly because his arms were so strong. Jean liked the grasp of firm muscles. To the Lad it seemed that her obstinacy was only love for him.

He would not go home. Sitting before the open fire, he gazed at the child on his knee, and ignored all my glances.

Jean looked at him steadily for a long time, her hazel eyes meeting his of darker brown. Then she played with his watch-chain. Presently she was induced to display all her accomplishments. She pointed to her feet when they were named, to her eyes, her hair, and even, ‘by request,’ to her tongue.

Sitting there and watching them in the shadows of the firelight, I could not help thinking how much alike they were.

Jean played until she was sleepy; then she yawned, and the Lad laughed to see the tears come into her eyes.

By and by her head nodded; she was almost asleep. Not content with her position, she crawled up, as she did with her father, and put her head down in the Lad’s neck, then went to sleep with one helpless hand hanging over his shoulder, the other softly patting him.

The Lad started when she put down her head; then he held her close.

It was partly the way in which his arm curled round her, and partly the light from her fuzzy hair that made them look like the Murillo picture of Saint Anthony and the Christ-child.

When I went over to take Jean away, the Lad looked up, and I saw that his eyes were moist with tears.

They were faithful lovers after that. Jean used to watch for him from the windows upstairs, and sometimes when she saw him coming she would smile.

He called often, always asking for her. (This was partly because he did not dare ask each time for Janet.) And the child was carried downstairs with her arms stretched out impatiently to meet him.

One night he arrived when she was asleep, but her mother sent for her. The nurse came in softly, cradling the child in her arms. Her yellow hair was wet and curly about her face; below her white night-dress hung one baby foot.

The Lad bent down and kissed it.

CHAPTER IX

My fellow-philanthropists talked much of the “Settlement Idea.” Its adherents maintained that the world had not yet seen any self-sacrifice so beautiful as this attempt to share the lives of the poor by living among them. On the other hand, members of old, thoroughly organized, comfortable societies for doing good pronounced the new methods extremely vague.

I wished to see for myself.

Before I had visited Barnet House, the settlement of university men in Brand Street, a similar house was opened by young college women in the West End.

The Altruist went with me to Barnet House on Wednesday afternoon, when the residents always had a musicale or a reading for their friends in the neighbourhood. As we drew near the house and saw the white curtains and green plants in the window, shining out from among the dirt-begrimed tenements, I said to myself (my mood being severe) that it looked pretty, but sentimental. I tried to remember who had called this kind of effort to elevate the slums “a philanthropic picnic in a wilderness of sin.”

We were ushered by a tall young man into a great sunshiny room that was full of easy chairs and books and pictures.

This was one of the residents, the Altruist said in introducing him. He would doubtless be kind enough to tell me what I wished to know.

“The Settlement Idea is very simple,” said the Resident, in answer to my questions. He spoke with an air of dignity that seemed too old for him. “A number of people who wish to help the poor find a house, put it into good sanitary condition, and go to live there together, doing some independent work, and some work in common.”

“But what kind of work?” I asked. “Pardon me,—I can understand why you come, but not what you do when you get here.”

The Resident apparently did not notice the touch of discourtesy in my remark.

“The Settlement,” he said, looking hesitatingly toward the Altruist, “serves two purposes. It is a station for philanthropic work, and also a centre for social investigation.”

“What is social investigation?” I asked bluntly.

To my delight the young man laughed. “That is a quotation from an article I am writing. It sounds rather bookish, doesn’t it?”

“It is a very good sentence,—for an article,” I admitted.

“Why, you see,” said the Resident, his eyes twinkling, “social investigation means drains and foods and that kind of thing.”

“Yes?” I said inquiringly.

“And immorality and crime and amusements. Also wages and causes of popular discontent. In fact, it embraces almost everything.”

The mingled audacity and shyness of the boy’s manner were very winning. I was becoming interested, but the Altruist looked deeply pained by this lightness of tone.

“How is this work carried on?” I asked.

“By visits,” said the Resident briefly, “and statistics.”

“You go out from here to make the visits upon the poor—”

“And then we make the statistics,” he interrupted, “and publish them.”

Suddenly he became grave, and in doing so made himself seem ten years older.

“You look sceptical,” he said. “I am myself, sometimes. But, seriously, I think that this thing is worth doing. We come because we are really interested in these people. We are interested in all kinds of ways. One man here is doing regular missionary work. Another is writing a book about the reasons for unsanitary living in the slums, and is investigating the condition of every tenement in the East End. There’s a literary man here, looking for material. He goes around getting local colour, but he helps, too, and isn’t so useless as he might seem to be.”

“Helps in what?” I asked.

“In the collective work done by the House,” said the Resident. “We have all kinds of clubs,—literary, political, and scientific. You see, though each man is doing his own private work, we have organized effort. It isn’t all exploration. However, I believe I made our twofold object clear in that opening sentence.

“Then there are art exhibitions and lectures. We invite our neighbours to come to hear music, and to come to take baths. We charge five cents for the baths. The music is free. We have dinner parties too, and receptions. You ought to see the costumes that the East End can turn out. A Brand Street swell in his evening dress is a sight for gods and men.”

“I don’t see what you talk about,” I said. “Your guests must be hard to entertain.”

“Oh, we talk about dime museums and Tammany and the things that happen in the streets. That’s when we are adapting ourselves to our guests. Then we show them pictures, and talk about high art and literature. That’s when we are adapting our guests to us. It’s immensely elevating for them, immensely, just to talk with us.”

I found that my objections to the Settlement Idea were vanishing rapidly before this young man’s sense of humour.

“It really doesn’t do the people down here a great deal of harm,” he was saying, “and it does us a great deal of good.”

“Is your interest in the practical or in the theoretical side of the work?” I asked.

“In the latter. I am a student of economics, and have just taken my Ph.D. degree. Lately,” he added, flushing, “I have become a Socialist.”

The Altruist looked pleased.

“The state of things down here has convinced me that an entire reconstruction of our whole industrial system is the only thing that can help the poor.”

I asked him if the misery of the poor had not been much exaggerated in the sensational reform journals.

“It could not be exaggerated,” he said vehemently. “No, the half has not been told.”

As he recounted tale after tale of the sin and suffering caused by unrighteous laws of trade, I sat numb with that sense of personal hurt that one feels on first knowing that these things are true.

But the Resident stopped, for the bell rang, and a “neighbour” entered.

The other residents came in; several more guests arrived, and the Altruist, who had been unusually silent for the last fifteen minutes, became the centre of a group of listeners.

One of the callers was a Salvation Army captain, whose regiment was passing through the city. One was a street-car driver. He had half an hour off, and had come to ask the time of a lecture to be given that night. Mrs. Milligan, the washerwoman who lived next door, ran in with her youngest boy. Then came a lady from Endicott Square, in a superb Parisian gown.

We conversed most amicably in the intervals of the music. When this was over, a domestic appeared with a tray, and the literary man made tea.

Before I left I had a few more words with the young Socialist.

“There’s no use talking,” he said earnestly. “However little direct practical good we do, there is no doubt that our opportunity is great for investigating. It is obviously better to study the working of economic laws in society itself than in books. I am trying to get acquainted with the working-people, and look at their grievances from their point of view. Socialism has been treated entirely too much from the standpoint of the scholar and the fanatic. I want to work in a more practical way, getting at the new political economy in the making.”

I came away quite willing to allow any number of young men with Ph.D. degrees, and honest enthusiasm, and a saving sense of fun, to live in the slums.

But I did not admit this to the Altruist.

CHAPTER X

After a first visit to the settlement of young women in the West End I found myself going there very often. The gracious friendliness with which I was met attracted me strongly, and I became more and more interested in the social experiment.

This new house was not in the slums. It stood in one of the old city squares, whose aristocratic inhabitants had long ago drifted away, leaving empty rooms for the families of mechanics and poorly paid clerks.

Life here was gray and monotonous. Into it my young girl friends had rushed, with little knowledge of its actual conditions, but with a firm determination to change them for the better. This kind of poverty did not mean starvation, they said, but something worse: dearth of culture, of beauty, of ideas.

They were all political economists of the school of Ruskin.

The residents numbered ten. Some of them were girls fresh from college; others were women who bore marks of years of brain-work. At their head was a slender, dignified lady, who, after ten years of academic life, had resigned a college professorship in the classics for the sake of closer contact with humanity.

All phases of the activity in the house soon became familiar to me.

Sometimes I found the doors stormed by crowds of eager children, waiting the moment when the ladies should permit them to enter, that they might deposit pennies in the bank, or take books from the library.

Once I watched a Mothers’ Meeting conducted by a fair-haired girl of twenty-two.

I visited the boys’ clubs, and realized that the rough lads were learning courtesy, and much besides.

Certain evenings were purely social. Then we conversed, or listened to music, or read stories aloud. On these occasions I learned many useful things from the “neighbours,” about house-keeping, and the bringing up of children, and even about politics.

One shabby little woman, whose husband had marched away with an industrial delegation to present a petition to Congress, told me that a terrible revolution was coming in which the working-man would at last gain his rights by means of powder and shot.

It would be hard to tell all the ways in which these young collegians “drew nearer the People”: through medicines given out by the resident physician in the dispensary downstairs; through presentations of Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works, and of scenes from eighteenth century comedy; through the lending of cook-books and of treatises on philosophy.

Once I even saw a resident taking care of a neighbour’s baby while the mother went shopping. The young philanthropist told me, however, the next time I saw her, that she had resolved not to dissipate her energy in that way.

But nothing else edified me so much as the evening discussions on problems of the day. The young women were even more eager than the men at Barnet House to walk in step with great popular movements. Some of them were fairly well equipped for practical economic study. Others were collecting statistics with the most engaging ignorance.

Every week, a club devoted to the study of social science, the “William Morris League,” met at the Settlement. On these evenings the head of the House sat, Lady Abbess fashion, with nun and novice at her side.

And men and women from various trades-unions, cigar-makers, street-car drivers, cotton-spinners, garment-workers, a motley group, listened to a paper on (perhaps): “How to form Protective Unions among Under-Paid Women.”

For the deliverance of the working-woman was the hope that lay nearest the Settlement’s heart.

I always went away from these discussions with feelings of mingled pride and amusement. These were strong and earnest young women, inspired by no wish for notoriety, but eager to help and to understand.

Yet it was a queer world, where the maidens formed trades-unions, and young men were making tea!

It was very good tea.

CHAPTER XI

The only serene face among us was that of the Butterfly Hunter. The eyes of the Altruist were clouded by the wrath of denunciation; the Lad’s were full of unfulfilled desire; and my own, I knew, were troubled: they had been for so long a time a mirror for pictures of sorrow. Into Janet’s face crept more and more often the puzzled expression of those who mistake their own bad moods for philosophic thought.

But the Hunter of Butterflies wore a look of peace.

I mistook this at first for the peace of attainment. It was not that: he was still pursuing—pursuing his butterfly.

He was, they told me, a noted entomologist. Many years ago he had discovered a very rare butterfly, the Erebia winifredæ. He had classified and named it, but had never been able to follow its entire history. With the scientist’s fine sense of the importance of the least details he was still studying it.

This winter he had come to the city in order to work with a member of the faculty in the university. They were attempting to raise the insect under artificial conditions, and were carefully watching its growth.

The difficulty of observing it in its home is very great, for it can be found only during certain portions of the year, and at great altitudes. It lives in the Himalaya Mountains, and in the Caucasus, just below the snow-line, in the bleak regions of rock and sedge.

I heard the story of its discovery. Years ago, when the scientist was young, he had gone with an exploring party through India to the southern side of the Himalayas. On one long walk he lost his way, and found himself at the bottom of a deep gully, whose walls were apparently too steep to climb. He was alone.

There was nothing to do except to scale the cliff. It was a perilous journey. After hours of painful struggle the young man reached the top, in a state of utter exhaustion. By a last effort he drew himself up over the edge of the precipice, and lay fainting for a time, prostrate on the rock.

When he woke, he found under his outstretched hand a little dark butterfly, with gold dust on its wings. It was his butterfly, and it made his name famous.

Every summer since that time he had climbed to the limit of vegetation, and had camped there on desolate mountain sides for weeks, watching the butterfly’s growth. He knew where and how it laid its eggs. He knew on what it fed. He had watched it change from grub to winged creature, and yet it baffled him.

He could not find out the length of its life. The seasons of warmth at the altitude of its home were short, and a part of its existence was passed in seasons when he could not study it.

He had brought home a collection of specimens with which to experiment. A room upstairs was devoted to them. Several times I was invited to enter.

I liked to watch the Butterfly Hunter as he bent his gray head over the cocoons. He was a tall man, and slender and lithe as a boy, from much walking.

That kindly, weather-beaten face puzzled me. I could not tell whether or no traces of passionate human experience lay hidden under the look of absorbing interest in the specimens he held in his hand.

He would bend over the little gray winding-sheets, touch one with his finger, reverently, then look on in silence.

His butterfly!

CHAPTER XII

The Lad did not tell me how deeply he was interested in Janet. He simply talked about her a large part of the time when he was with me. At first it had been the book that filled his thought; now it was Janet and the book.

Perhaps he did not know how far he was taking me into his confidence. Perhaps he did not care.

Janet puzzled him. “I don’t understand,” he said one day when we were taking one of our long walks. “She seems to be an absolute pessimist, and yet she takes a strong interest in some things.”

“For instance?”

“Well, in gowns.” He spoke unwillingly.

“She would not have any right to be a pessimist about her gowns,” I said. “They are too pretty.”

Here the Lad shot past me with his long stride. He had a way of forgetting me for a minute, and of walking swiftly ahead. He always turned and came back to apologize, and yet I objected decidedly to this phase of his absent-mindedness. It was hardly deferential, I thought, to a person of my years.

“You walk,” I said, when he paused to beg my pardon, “as if you had air in your bones. You must be related to the birds.”

“I was thinking,” he said, “and I forgot. I was thinking how strange it is to find women facing the newer criticism and making up their minds on religious matters. In the South they do not do it. They are all orthodox. It goes with being a woman.”

“I wonder why?”

“Partly because it is expected of them. Most of the men I know want their wives to take the beaten paths, no matter how far they themselves have strayed from them. Marriage of that kind doesn’t seem marriage to me. I want my wife—if I ever have one—to share all of my life, the intellectual part of it as well as the rest.

“That’s one thing I like about your friend,” he continued, apparently unconscious of the connection of ideas. There was a great deal of the scholar’s naïveté about the Lad. “She is so broad-minded. She looks at things as fairly and impersonally as a man does.”

I changed the subject abruptly, for I perceived that the Lad was going to say more than he meant to about Janet.

“How did you reach your present position?” I asked, for lack of something better. “You are an agnostic, I suppose?”