Margaret Pollock Sherwood

“ 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. ”

“ But God and love and immortality are not to be had for the asking. They are true in so far as we make them true.”
“So you have solved the problem of the Sphinx?” I said. “It is a good solution; that is, as good as any mere thought about life can be.”
“I suppose,” continued Janet, “that we are bound to answer back in act to every question we can ask. We must rise to the level of our loftiest inquiry. The first suspicion we get of immortality makes us responsible for it. Henceforth we must win it for ourselves.” ”

“ In my bewilderment I found myself asking if it were worth while to try to understand.
109My pretty Janet was wasting her days in attempting to find a satisfactory way of thinking about life; while the Altruist, who alone among us was content with his knowledge of things seen and unseen, had succeeded only, I sometimes thought, in thrusting between himself and his fellow-man a theory of how to treat him, and between himself and God the shadow of an explanation of Him.
Could one, after all, take life as simply as the Lad took it, waiving abstract inquiry while one attended to the matter in hand? ”

“ The Altruist’s economic ideas would have filled them with surprise.
My misgivings concerning all this work did not come from the usual objections to it, that the proceedings of huge bodies are often too slow to be of use, because of the time wasted in adjusting formalities, and that the energy meant for action is dissipated in argument. I was impressed only by the hopelessness of finding out what to do. After patient inquiry the gulf between misery and the wish to help was nearly as wide as before. Facts may be facts without telling the truth, and with all our knowledge we did not understand. ”

“ They work up from below. There has never been a great reform that did not originate with the so-called ‘People.’ All that culture can do is occasionally to supply directing power, cold brain force, to the impulse of the masses. Something deeper than thought, in the primary instincts of the masses, keeps the race sane, healthy, right at heart.”
“It is strange to hear that,” mused the Altruist, “in the face of the awful degradation and the crying sin of the slums of this city. Nothing short of miraculous regeneration, physical, mental, and spiritual, can save them.” ”

“ But My Lady interrupted my description of the misery of the unemployed in the East End.
“I do not believe in voting special relief for these people,” she said. “Their suffering will be a lesson to them. When they have work they are improvident; when it stops they starve. They must learn thrift and economy, even if it has to be taught them in this severe way.” ”

“ The only trouble with the residents at Barnet House is that they have too great a sense of responsibility about other people’s lives, and too little about their own. Society has, I presume, as just a claim to a man’s best work as the poor have to his interest. Those young men do not belong to society at all, because they do not share its burdens. ”

“ I asked.
“It is hard to believe, even of the Altruist. How do you suppose he greeted that hurt child? ‘Janet,’ he said, ‘I have always had an intuition that you were not meant for mere happiness.’”
I groaned. “He doesn’t mean to be cruel,” I said, “but he has not the simple instinct—”
“A few of the simpler human instincts are really necessary,” interrupted the Doctor, “in any attempt to help human beings. If the Altruist had more feeling and less transcendentalism, it would be better.” ”

“ Some, whose faces had been made sweet by sorrow, were striving only to find expression for sympathy with human pain. Some, who looked eager, restless, dissatisfied, were trying, I thought, to find in the lives of others the absorbing interest they had missed in their own. A few, I feared, had espoused the cause of the needy for the sake of social distinction. An interest in the poor was one of the really important things, like the cut 99of one’s sleeves, or one’s knowledge of Buddha. ”

“ If more folks felt that way, there wouldn’t be all this trouble between labour and capital. The working-people were going to have their rights, and if these were not given, they would fight for them. But the working-man was quite willing to meet the capitalist half way and settle things peacefully if it could be done.
The young Socialist smiled at this militant formulation of the principle of brotherly love, but the Altruist did not hear. ”

“ Agnosticism, as I had watched it, had weakened the whole moral fibre. With Janet, for instance, loss of faith in God had meant loss of faith in herself and in everything else.
“I can’t understand that,” said the Lad. “The feeling that the old ground is slipping from under me makes me want to gird up my loins and start to find new.
“But there is a terrible amount of suffering in the mental growth of the race,” he continued, after a pause. “I can stand the loss of the hope and comfort in the old ideas, but I can’t stand the pain that my changed belief gives my poor old father. ”

“ In a way we all fail, and to go back to what I said first, it is largely because of a lack of sympathy. We forget that this is all-important, and keep thrusting our ideals between us and human beings. Each one of us has an abstract standard to which mankind must conform. It is equally fatal when the idea is cleanliness and when it is godliness. I suppose that it will take a thousand years for us to learn that we are responsible to humanity and not to notions. ”

“ The Altruist pronounced their questions ignorant and crude, and explained the apparent contradiction in his beliefs as a part of the eternal paradox at the heart of all things.
I invited Janet to go with me on this particular Sunday, but she refused.
“I think that I would rather not hear Paul expound Job,” she said.
“He will do it brilliantly,” I suggested.
“Too brilliantly,” she laughed. “He talks so wisely of all human experience that you suspect him of never having had any of his own. He stands condemned by the amount of wisdom that he can utter concerning life which he has not shared. ”

“ Young working-men flocked round him to hear him set forth the wrongs of our present system of government, and the better things to be. Night after night the hall was crowded by men and women of all ranks and all occupations, who watched with untiring interest his treatment of positivism, agnosticism, atheism, Schopenhauerism, and his triumphant exposition of a belief that they are all recognized and transcended in the creed of the Anglican church. ”

“ I demanded. “I do not know any men who work harder than some of those residents at Barnet House. Whether their effort is mistaken is not for us to decide.”
“No, I was not fair,” said the Doctor, penitently, “but I have been meditating a long time on the relation of the man with a mission to the public at large. It seems to me that no one ought to throw the burden of his support on benevolent societies. You can’t take doing good as a profession: you have got to do good work. We have no right to palm off an interest in the lives of others as a substitute for living ourselves.” ”

“ 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 38white 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.” ”

“ I knew, in a dim fashion, that the Populist had the floor, and was insisting that the one way to achieve universal good was by adopting the platform of his political party. I knew that the Temperance woman, who was sweet-faced and young, 121rose to say sternly that we were all wrong. Only by wakening the moral forces could the race be saved. For a world given over to passion there was no economic salvation. ”

“ The Doctor and the district nurse cared for the patient.
Sitting out by the fire, I hung the little flannel robes again and again in the warmest place, saying over and over the lines of the folk-song:—
“Mine ear is full of the murmur of rocking cradles.
‘For a single cradle,’ saith Nature, ‘I would give every one of my graves.’” 90All night long I was hushed into awe by the coming of new life, and hurt by a pain that the presence of death does not give. ”

“ But the Altruist shook his head. “His character has a certain nobility,” he said, “but he lacks the supreme touch of definite belief. The loftiest souls are sure. But I think the university wrong in confusing spiritual instinct with intellectual power.”
The Altruist was curiously radical in some of his views.
Even I gave the Lad only half-hearted approval. He had but his brains and his forth-coming book to win his way for him, and I could not help wondering if the confession had been necessary.
Janet was the only one of us who thoroughly liked the action. ”

“ To this I assented readily.
“In the first place,” she continued, with a thoughtful air, “through all this machinery of leagues and clubs and organizations we are beginning to lose our sense of individual responsibility. As soon as we find an act of charity that ought to be done, we start a society to do it for us.”
“But when,” I protested, “has a sense of individual responsibility in regard to the poor been so strong? Social problems have never been so closely studied as they are to-day. Look at the seriousness of our young men and women! Think of Barnet House, and the College Settlement!” ”

“ In a few days many of the contractors had filled their shops with 166new employés, and the work was going on as usual, while the Tailoress and her followers were adrift. Nothing had been ripe for the revolt except the enthusiasm of the rebels.
I had been sorely puzzled by the problem. The cause I felt was just, but I found it difficult to face the idea of the misery that failure would bring. I was hardly heroic enough to agree with the Altruist and the Anarchist that the defeated strikers would be sufficiently rewarded by the martyr’s consolation of suffering gloriously for their faith. ”

“ I answered, “but leave her her books.”
“Nay,” said Janet, “I will take away her Longfellow and give her Amiel. Shall the poor be shut off from the sources of our inspiration?”
The Tailoress was different from the other working-people that I knew. Most of them were weighed down by a constant sense of wrong, but the Tailoress never rebelled against the hardships of her lot. They seemed to have no power over her. Perhaps she forgot them in her hunger and thirst for beauty and knowledge. ”

“ 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.
23Looking 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ They cannot even keep clean. It is absolutely impossible. Cleanliness is the most expensive luxury in the world. What beauty and graciousness can be brought into their lives so long as they cannot take baths?”
“We cannot correct at once,” the Altruist answered, “all the evil consequences of our present system. But we can bring these people into touch with higher spiritual ideals—”
“We can form clubs,” I hastened to say, wishing to appease the Doctor by means of a practical suggestion. “We can teach the women to sew, or we can have a literary club and teach them how to read.” ”

“ The Altruist, I discovered in an indirect way, sacrificed a large part of his private income in providing for the many who could find no employment. The excitement of the occasion afforded him a kind of painful happiness. The war of liberation had begun. He gave a lecture in his auditorium on “The Defeat that is Success.”
“I am really beginning to sway these young working-men,” he confided to me exultantly afterward. “The labour-movement will lose its chief danger if men who occupy neutral ground between the two parties in the struggle can act as mediators. ”