AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM
AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM
AN EXPERIMENT IN ALTRUISM
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 iswater?’”
“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 discoveringwhat 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,” saidthe 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 tosay 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, thethings 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.