The night after I had first seen Mildred Brewster at aunt Madison’s I
lay awake for hours, feverishly tossing upon my pillow, and revolving
many thoughts. I then made one resolve. I would try to win the
friendship of this woman who had touched me, who had moved me in a way
that no one had ever done before.
It was not so much by what she had said, for I had heard the same or
kindred thoughts expressed by other lips; but I had never before met a
woman so strong, well poised and thoughtful, a woman who united girlish
grace and charm with all the persistent ardor of one who, I was sure,
could not only die for an idea, but, what is far rarer, live for it day
by day and year by year, although forced to meet indifference and
coldness or the quiet contempt which cuts to the quick in every
sensitive nature.
As I had sat by the firelight that night, watching the color come and go
in her face,—that changeful, eager face,—for the first time in a dreary
twelve-month I had felt my heart leap up with warmth and sympathy. From
a thoughtless, happy girlhood, from the life of a gay, pleasure-loving
young lady, I had been rudely summoned to face some of the bitterest
realities of life. No matter what they were. I am not writing about
myself. But though my life was still rich and full of opportunities, if
I had but known it, yet in my blindness and selfishness it had seemed
utterly wrecked to me. I had sunk into a dull, prosaic routine, and
under a proud mask of gay indifference was trying to hide a heart dead
to hope, ambition, and love. Yet, no! not dead to love, though I had
thought it so; but in the heart-hunger which was not satisfied, I was
fast becoming self-centred, cold, and cynical.
Like a dreary desert the long years which must be lived stretched
desolately before me, and my only aim was to fill the minutes of each
day so full as to leave me no leisure for memory or thought.
As I closed my eyes to sleep that night my last thought was, “Yes, I
_will_ know her. I _must_ know her. Oh, if I could only be like her, a
creature of thought and purpose, absorbed in some idea, caring for
something beside my wretched, silly self! Perhaps she can help me. I
will ask her. I can trust _her_.”
I had been deceived in others; I had given my utmost trust to those who
had proved utterly unworthy, and in bitterness of spirit I had resolved
never to trust again, never to leave the gateway to my heart unguarded;
but now, before I knew it, the locks had yielded, and I stood with
lonely, outstretched arms, begging for love to enter in. After all, I
was still young, and very, very human.
And love came. It came before my fallen pride had found words to ask for
it. I had something to live for now. _I had found a friend._ What
romance has ever been written that tells of woman’s love for woman? And
yet the world is full of it, despite the skeptics, and the Davids and
Jonathans find their counterparts in thousands of the unwritten lives of
women. Yes, I had found not a new acquaintance, but a warm heart-friend.
Thank God that she knew it and I knew it before the wealth which came so
fast upon the beginning of our friendship could create a gulf between
us, which, once established, my pride would never have allowed me to
cross. Mildred knew, she always knew, that I had loved her first, and
wanted her for herself alone.
I knew, when the wealth came, that it would not make her any the less my
friend, but I was only one among her many friends. I knew that our paths
would be different now, and though she would always think kindly of me,
I could not expect to see and know her as I had fondly dreamed in the
first days of our friendship.
“No, I can never return to her what she can give, what she has already
given to me; my little life can play but a small part in the large life
that has come to her,” I said drearily, as I turned back, after the
first shock of surprise, to readjust myself to the old routine of
thought and feeling, which, I had dared to hope, had been put behind me
forever.
“Ah, well, I have made believe be happy before, I can do so again,” I
said to myself, grimly.
But one day—how well I remember it—as I passed down Chestnut Street in
Salem noting the brilliant winter sunlight shining down from the
cloudless blue through the black lace work of branches high arching
overhead, and casting fantastic shadows on the brick walls of the
stately old mansions on either side, some one handed me a letter. This
is what it said:—
... “You asked me to be your friend, you said I could help you, and now
I ask you to be my friend, to come here to this great city where I must
be for a time and help me. I felt brave and strong at first, I was not
afraid to be rich, but I begin to tremble now, to feel strangely weak
and girlish and unprotected; to feel, in short, that I need a friend,
that I need what I think you can be to me. After aunt Madison had been
with me only a few days she was obliged to return to Boston, leaving me
quite alone. Of course Madam Grundy says that I must have a chaperon,
but I do not want a chaperon, and I should be wretched with a
‘companion,’ perfunctorily trying to entertain me, learning all my plans
and secrets, and hypocritically assenting to everything I do and say.
No; I want an honest friend, one who knows the world as you do, who will
honestly speak her mind, who will take an interest in all my schemes,
and help to keep me from making blunders.
“I believe I could talk more freely, think more clearly, and do better
work if you were beside me, your honest eyes looking into mine. For, let
me tell you the secret, dear, of what first drew me to you. You are most
strangely like the sister whom I lost years ago, and whose
companionship, if she had lived, would have made life so rich for me. I
feel myself so alone; never before have I had so keen a sense of
loneliness as now, here, in this modern Babylon, with my old life and
work abandoned, and the new perplexing life which my wealth has brought
me just begun. Like me, you are alone in the world, singularly alone; so
come and be to me what my little Ruby would have been. When you speak I
could almost believe that I hear her voice; when you look at me I see
her eyes again. Your face haunts me. Come to me and I shall feel that my
Ruby is with me again.”
Standing in the sunshine beneath the old elms I read these loving words.
When I lifted my eyes again, the beautiful quaint old street was
suddenly transfigured. For months it had been to me but a bare
prison-house; now the sunshine was real sunshine, the sky was no longer
leaden, the world was, after all, a beautiful world, and I was glad to
live.
So bidding farewell to quiet Chestnut Street and the staid, historic old
city, I went to the “modern Babylon” to meet Mildred, and the new life
began. As the days went on I perceived that she seemed to have a
feverish dread that she should die with her work undone. My constant
anxiety was that she would succumb to the fearful nervous strain which
her sudden accession to wealth and responsibility had brought upon her.
But nothing seemed to rest her or relieve her mind except the
accomplishment of some of the ends she had in view, and as every new
project was consummated, she showed a relief and delight that to the
average society woman would have appeared inexplicable and at the same
time amusing.
“It seems to me,” said Mildred one day as we were strolling through the
park, after a morning on Cherry Street; “it seems to me that most people
have no imagination. It cannot be that all the pleasant, cultured people
whom one meets are so shamefully heartless and indifferent. They simply
have not the smallest realization of what is going on in this great
city, or any thought of their personal, individual responsibility about
it. They hear it all as a tale that is told. They have always heard it.
They are used to hearing it. From constant hearing it has become as
meaningless to them as the Lord’s Prayer has to most people. How many
who dare to say ‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven,’ ever
actually mean a word that they say, or lift a finger to bring it about?”
We walked on in silence. Presently Mildred burst out again:
“We are so apt to think that because we eat our three meals a day, and
can buy our opera tickets when we feel like it, that all the world is
doing well, and that if people are miserable it must somehow be their
own fault.
“I am convinced that if any people ever needed missionary work, it is
the society belles and the well-bred, cultured men of the clubs, who
know so little and care still less for this vast multitude of the
ignorant and suffering and fallen here at their very doors, and who look
with calm indifference on these hideous sores upon our modern life.
“I promise you, Ruby, after I get some of my irons out of the fire, I
mean to devote myself to a crusade to rescue what George Eliot calls the
‘perishing upper classes.’
“But ah,” she sighed, “it needs genius for that, and I have only money.
Oh, I would give half my millions if I had the scathing pen of a
Carlyle, or the power to plead for humanity like Mrs. Stowe or Walter
Besant or Dickens; if I could stir the hearts of the people with flaming
words that should help to sweep away the sloth, indifference, and
contemptible arrogance that makes one tenth of us forget that the other
nine tenths are our brothers and sisters!”
“If every one were as self-sacrificing as you, Mildred”—I began; but she
interrupted me almost sternly.
“Hush! never say that to me. What have I ever sacrificed? Nothing,
absolutely nothing. I have always had comforts; now I have everything
that heart can wish. In giving to others I deny myself nothing. Never
dare to let me for a moment imagine that I am doing anything more than
the simplest, most obvious duty. I must not cheat my conscience. I
should be the veriest hypocrite if I allowed myself to think that I am
generous. Is there anything generous in paying one’s debts, particularly
when one has not had to earn the money with which to pay them?
“I have always observed,” she continued, “that a little decency in a
millionaire goes a long way. I am not above temptation, and I have
already discovered that I am in danger of coming to believe that my
simple good will, common sense, and capacity for sympathy are something
rare and remarkable.
“Every one thinks to please me by telling me so. Do not let me deceive
myself. I have a clear vision now; help me to keep it and to be
faithful.”
Mildred’s voice quivered, and she drew my arm in hers while we walked
back to our rooms in silence.
“But the world is growing better, Mildred. Every intelligent person
admits that people are more kind and thoughtful than they used to be. No
one who has read history could deny it,” I resumed, as once more within
doors we sat down before the glowing grate to finish our talk.
“You and I believe it, dear, because we believe in God, and because we
believe that this is God’s world and not the devil’s,” Mildred replied.
“Half the women whom we saw parading their fine toilets this afternoon
believe it too, not because they know enough about history to see in it
the unfolding of the divine idea, but because they like to believe it;
because it makes them very comfortable to believe that by taking money
which some one else has earned and paying an annual fee out of it to
orphan asylums and hospitals, or to any outcome of our modern altruism,
they are thereby relieved from all further responsibility.
“But here is an intelligent man,—an English university man, who has read
history as well as you and I, and he says it is false. This is what he
writes,” said Mildred, taking a thick letter from her writing-desk. She
held it unopened for a moment and continued: “I met him when I was in
England. We had many a talk in our rambles together at Kew and Hampstead
Heath. He is a friend of William Morris and like him a socialist of the
deepest dye. I don’t half accept the accuracy of all his statements, but
he is an honest man and a gentleman. I am glad to know him, for I cannot
afford to be ignorant of such a man’s views on our social problems,
however much I may dissent from them. Now let me read you his letter.
... “You ask me to give you suggestions for the expenditure of your
wealth in benefiting humanity. This I must decline to do, my dear
friend. If I had your wealth I know what _I_ should do, or, at least,
what I ought to do, but _I_ am a socialist, and _you_ are not. I do not
believe in _laissez-faire_ as you do, and as a socialist I should use my
wealth and influence for a reorganization of society, not for a patching
up of what is at bottom false and rotten. Things are getting worse and
worse, and must continue to do so under the present social system. My
hope is that they will get so bad, so unutterably vile, that the people
will be compelled to throw aside their apathy and make a clean sweep. I
take no part in any of the hundred little schemes for ‘improving’ the
present system. I don’t want to improve the present system as you do. I
want to destroy it.
“We improve things that are already fairly good and can be made better,
but we destroy whatever is thoroughly rotten; at least I think all
rational people do so. So far as the present order is at all bearable,
it is due to certain socialist innovations, such as interference with
the capitalist, trade unions, movements like that of the Irish against
the particular class of thieves called landlords, etc.
“The people, the common people, who for centuries have silently suffered
and abjectly kissed the foot that kicked them and trod upon them, the
people, I say, are beginning to wake up. They are beginning to ask
questions, and they are questions which will have to be solved erelong,
even if it take another bloody French revolution to do it. I see no way
in which bloodshed is to be avoided. I look forward confidently to what
will seem to you very like a reign of terror ere this century closes.
Things must grow worse before they can get better. The crisis has not
come, but it is coming. Money has done much, but it cannot do
everything; the press will not always be bribed and muzzled as it is
to-day, nor Levi’s and Mulhall’s and Giffen’s statistics be doctored to
suit the capitalists who pay for them. The time is coming, Miss
Brewster, when the people _will be heard_; and _they will be heeded_,
for their words will be as short and sharp as fire and dynamite can make
them.
“Do not think I am telling you of what I wish to see. I am telling you
of what I know will come.
“The rich are not voluntarily going to heed the bitter cry of the
famishing, except in one way, the only way they have ever known, namely,
almsgiving. They will give alms because it is noble to be a benefactor,
because it appeases their consciences, because it might be made
extremely inconvenient for them if they did not. But they will not give
justice. Justice! they never learned the meaning of the word.
“But some day these landed aristocrats ‘whose thin bloods crawl down
from some robber in a border brawl,’ who have never lifted their finger
to earn a penny in their lives, and who owe all that they have to these
same robber ancestors,—these people, I say, will some day be taught the
meaning of that same word ‘justice’ by some of the forty-five millions
of landless people in our little island. I shall not soon forget how
quickly the subscriptions for the poor went up a year or two ago, after
the riots.
“You have no conception, Miss Brewster, you can have no conception, of
the state of things here at present. Six millions of our people are
living on the brink of pauperism. I tell you, when I sit down to my
omelette and toast in the morning and reflect that there are two hundred
thousand human beings within two miles of me who don’t know where they
are going to get their next meal, when I read of the hundreds of
children who habitually go to school without any breakfast, and who not
unfrequently faint dead away over their books, I tell you it doesn’t
make my own breakfast relish any better.
“One night in the autumn, a year or two ago, I passed through Trafalgar
Square at twelve o’clock, and counted four hundred and eighty-three
homeless people lying out in the chill air upon the bare stones. Not one
of them had fourpence wherewith to pay for a night’s lodging. And this,
remember, was only one spot.
“There were many others where a similar sight might have been seen.
“‘Ah,’ but you say; ‘these are the dissolute and drunken, those who love
to be vagabonds.’
“I assure you that you are much mistaken. I have seen and talked with
thousands of these people, and a large number of them, probably a
fourth, are men from the country who can find no work there, and have
found none here—honest, hard-working British laborers. Two thirds of
these people are not vicious, or drunken, but they are out of work, they
are cold, they are hungry, they are naked, they are outcasts in this
Christian (?) land which has enough for all its children. All they ask
is work, hard work, dirty work, work for twelve hours a day, but that
they cannot get. Why? Because our accursed modern society is irrational,
wasteful, utterly selfish. Plenty of money, plenty of things worth
doing, plenty of men who would thank God if this work could be given
them to do; but what does our mad, maladjusted society say to them?
‘Emigrate! Clear the country! Away with you! We have no use for you.’
Malthus was right, after all, and we must reverse Browning.
‘There’s no God in heaven;
All’s wrong with the world.’
“Do you know of the blacksmith women in the ‘black country’? I have
recently been there, giving some addresses. Oh, the hideousness of it
all, with its starving people, its wretched, stunted lives, its ghastly
ugliness, its brutalized men and women! One sees women, who should be at
home nursing their babies, standing on their feet from morning till
night doing the work of men, swinging the hammer amidst grime and soot
and incessant noise. And if one of them drops at her post from sheer
exhaustion, there is a fiendish clanging thing that bangs on the floor
and shakes every bone in the poor wretch’s body.
“Mr. —— took Henry George to see the sight when he was here, and he told
me that George swore until he was black in the face.
“Oh, I know you think I am a hot-head; you will say these are
exceptional cases. You will doubtless try to do what all the good rich
people do (I admit, you see, that there are _some_ good ones); you will
doubtless try to help palliate all these horrors. If you were here you
might build an old men’s home for the poor men to whom society has never
given a chance, who, through no fault of their own, have been forced
from their cradle to live in stifling attics or damp, unwholesome
hovels, breathing poison, working their fingers off to give their hungry
children bread. You might build a comfortable home where these decrepit,
useless old fellows might enjoy the food which you give in charity, wear
your charity uniform, and look forward to filling a pauper’s grave, as
does one in nine of all the people who die in London. Or you might build
a splendid marble palace of a hospital or asylum, and herd together vast
numbers of little boys or fallen women or cripples, and try in some big,
mechanical, institutional way to do with your pound of cure what an
ounce of prevention would have accomplished a thousand times better, if
it could have come in the way of justice, not charity. Charity! how I
loathe the word! It is the iron which sears the conscience of your rich
Christian as does nothing else. He thinks to buy heaven with that word.
“I tell you, Miss Brewster, these people want what you and I want. They
want to preserve their self-respect, to have a chance once a week to
remember that they are human beings and not machines. They want to be
able in this Christian land to earn an honest living, to keep their
daughters from the streets, and to keep soul and body together without
sacrificing all decency and honor.
“How much delicacy and fine moral sentiment, to say nothing of physical
comfort, do you suppose is to be had in the sixty thousand families of
London, each of which lives in one room?
“Do you rich people suppose you are going to help this matter greatly by
leaving money in your wills to build asylums for the moral and physical
wrecks for which our incredible folly and selfish indifference is
responsible?
“Your time will come; sooner or later you will find much the same
condition of things in your own great cities. Do not believe that in
some mysterious way—as your politicians and newspapers are trying to
teach you—you, in America, are different from us.
“We are all in the same boat, because the structure of society is
everywhere the same. Money is literally king and god. It rules us
everywhere, and it is bringing about a state of things with which the
order imposed by a German Kaiser is a mild and beneficent régime.
Indeed, I am not sure but that the greatest social crash will come in
the United States, unless you soon come to recognize that a new order of
things must be brought about. You pride yourselves upon your universal
suffrage, but of what value is a vote to a poor man who must risk his
bread and butter if he dares to vote contrary to his employer’s wishes?
What avails universal suffrage when one third of your legislators can be
bought, and votes go to the highest bidder? No; universal suffrage is
totally inadequate to save us under the existing order of things.
“I am a socialist simply because I am a rational human being, who knows
the facts; because I am—I venture to think—endowed with reason and
imagination.
“I do not imagine, however, that socialism is going to produce any
perfect ideal order. I simply see that the economic order which has
sustained the civilized world for the past two or three hundred years is
now falling in pieces and must be replaced by something; that we are
approaching a period that will spell either socialism or chaos.
“If unhappily chaos should come, it will be due to the opponents of
socialism, which is the only peaceful, rational method of social
organization under the new economic conditions, due to machine industry
and the contraction of the world by means of the great scientific
discoveries of our time.
“If you want to see a fuller statement of my views and the grounds for
them, look at the article on Socialism in the ‘Forum’ last month. But we
socialists spend years in study, and we can’t give the results
adequately in a brief form. Miss Brewster, I feel that you are in
earnest, far more in earnest than most women whom I have met from your
country. I do not wonder that you are perplexed. I would not change
places with you. I would far rather have the sure conviction of the
truth as I see it, and be of little power in advancing the cause I
believe in, than to stand as you do, rich, powerful, overwhelmed with
responsibilities, not knowing how to use your power, and trying in vain
to patch up and prolong the existence of what is destined to be swept
away ere the next generation shall have come and gone.
“Smile at my pessimism if you like; time will verify my words. If ever
you come to see this as I do, perhaps then I may suggest some things for
you to do with your millions.”...
(Miss Brewster’s reply to the foregoing letter.)
... “Your letter has deeply stirred me. Not that anything you say
surprises me, or is new to me; but behind the words, I know, are the
sad, dreadful facts for which they stand; and, being a creature endowed
with some imagination, I can in some measure realize what that simple
statement means, when you say that six millions of your people are on
the brink of pauperism.
“Good God! what endless heartaches, what physical misery, what
degradation of mind and soul is implied in those few words! I am glad
you do not envy me my wealth. I am beginning to think that I am not so
much to be envied as I thought at first I might be. I have been amazed,
in these last few weeks, to learn from numberless sources of the
chagrin, disappointment, and perplexity of many rich men and women who
have thought to benefit the world by the ‘charity’ which you so despise.
They have put up great institutions, only to find that in many cases it
was the least helpful thing that they could do; that a large part of the
money was spent on taxes, insurance, agents, servants, go-betweens;
that, after all, when they had gathered their orphans or cripples or old
women together, they had brought about an utterly cheerless, artificial
state of things, and have proved that for the average human being with
natural human instincts the poorest home is often more preferable than
the most palatial asylum.
“So, set your heart at rest. I am not going to spend my money in that
way. Whatever may be the political and social changes which will take
place in the next twenty years,—and doubtless they will be many and
great,—of one thing I am sure, no new condition of things can be made
permanent or harmonious except by means of two things. The first of
these is moral character. The second is intellectual insight into cause
and effect and relation. In any condition of things we must have
righteousness, and we must have trained minds. You will doubtless agree
with me that selfishness and ignorance are the two monster dragons that
are threatening now, as they always have done, to devour us, only we
should differ as to the way in which they are to be slain. You have a
definite theory as to how this is to be done, which I do not yet
thoroughly understand. I see your goal, but I do not understand how you
propose to reach it without doing away with individuality and crushing
out some of the deepest human instincts. True, many of our instincts are
brutish. There is still the tiger and the ape within us, which, as John
Fiske says, is our inheritance of ‘original sin’ from our brute
ancestors. I agree with you that such instincts must be eliminated, but
how? By dynamite, fear, revolution, legislation?
“You are right: we may make the selfish fear, and that is often a very
salutary thing to do if nothing better can be done. A business man was
telling me only the other day of the different relations between
employers and employees in Fall River and other manufacturing places
since the strikes of the last few years.
“But, after all, though fear and legislation can do something to convert
a brutal man into a decent man for a time, there must needs be something
else,—the gospel of love and humanity, which of his own free will he
must choose to accept and apply understandingly.
“I shall not attempt to palliate any of the existing evils, nor, on the
other hand, shall I attempt to undermine our present social and
political system even if I could. Certainly I shall not try to do this
until I am very certain that I see the right method of substituting
something better in its place.
“By the way, have you read Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’? It is very
suggestive, and Nationalization of Industries is getting to be more of a
fad in Boston than Esoteric Buddhism or Christian Science. Bellamy tells
us what we must try to attain; but, alas! he gives little hint of what
must be our first step toward the attainment. This is the problem which
you and I must help our generation to solve.
“Go on with your socialistic schemes. I believe they contain a half
truth; at all events, to talk about them as you do will make people
think, for you speak from the deepest conviction. Out of all this _sturm
und drang_ period must surely come clear insight and right action: at
least I am optimist enough to hope so; and my work shall be to think out
the solution, as far as I may, but at all events to do what in me lies
to set people to thinking; to make life a little sweeter and better; to
infuse into it more hope for a few of my generation, and thus help to
make their children ready for the new order of things if it comes.
“In this great city money flows like water. There are streets where, for
a mile, every house must be the home of a millionaire, for no one else
could afford to live in such a one. Yet, within two miles of these
palaces there is the direst want, the most frightful squalor, and the
problem of New York is fast getting to be like the problem of London.
“Most of our women dabble a little in charity now and then. They get up
charity balls and fairs to satisfy their consciences in that way, and
flatter themselves when they spend their money lavishly in luxuries for
their own pleasure that they are giving employment to the poor and doing
God service. They will sometimes give their money; they will sometimes
give a little time to cut out garments at a sewing circle; but not one
in five hundred will give her personal service even for a half day a
week in coming face to face with those who need the help of her
intelligence and her human sympathy.
“Of this I am convinced: men are never to be uplifted permanently,
except by human sympathy, intelligently directed and expressed, and by
personal contact with those who do not come to them to dole out
‘charity,’ but who come as brothers to lend them a helping hand.
“There are a few who begin the work; there are fewer still who continue
it. The other day a gentleman, who is giving his life to the rescuing of
street children, told me of the faintheartedness of his voluntary
helpers, who come a half dozen Sundays to his mission, but who rarely
come longer when they discover that, to use his own coarse but forcible
words, which you will pardon my quoting verbatim, ‘_they must be willing
to pick lice off those children for Christ’s sake_.’...
“Well, dear friend, we are both working in very different ways. You
would tear down; I would build up, or ‘patch up,’ as you say. Which of
us is the wiser, time will tell; but however differently we may labor,
it is for the same end after all that we are striving,—‘putting society
on a just and rational basis,’ as you would phrase it, or bringing God’s
kingdom upon earth, as the Christ called it,—and so I bid you
God-speed.”...