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.