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.”