Part 1
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The Autonym Library.
_Paper, 1s. 6d.; cloth, 2s._
=1.= =THE UPPER BERTH.= By F. MARION CRAWFORD. Fourth Edition.
=2.= =MAD SIR UCHTRED OF THE HILLS.= By S. R. CROCKETT. Fourth Edition.
=3.= =BY REEF AND PALM.= By LOUIS BECKE. Preface by the EARL OF PEMBROKE. Third Edition.
=4.= =THE PLAYACTRESS.= By S. R. CROCKETT. Fifth Edition.
=5.= =A BACHELOR MAID.= By MRS. BURTON HARRISON.
=6.= =MISERRIMA.= By G. W. T. OMOND.
=7.= =TWO STRANGERS.= By MRS. OLIPHANT.
=8.= =ANOTHER WICKED WOMAN.= By S. DE PENTHENY.
=9.= =THE SPECTRE OF STRATHANNAN.= By W. E. NORRIS.
=10.= =KAFIR STORIES.= By W. C. SCULLY.
=11.= =MOLLY DARLING!= By MRS. HUNGERFORD.
=12.= =A GAME OF CONSEQUENCES.= By ALBERT KINROSS.
=13.= =SLEEPING FIRES.= By GEORGE GISSING.
=14.= =THE RED STAR.= By L. MCMANUS.
=15.= =A MARRIAGE BY CAPTURE.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
=16.= =CHRONICLES OF AN EMINENT FOSSIL.= By W. DUTTON BURRARD.
=17.= =AN IMPOSSIBLE PERSON.= By CONSTANCE COTTERELL.
=18.= =WHICH IS ABSURD.= By COSMO HAMILTON.
_Uniform with this Volume._
=A GENDER IN SATIN.= By RITA. =THE MAKING OF MARY.= By JEAN FORSYTH. =DIANA’S HUNTING.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN. =SIR QUIXOTE.= By JOHN BUCHAN. =FOR HONOUR OF THE FLAG.= By CLARK RUSSELL. =LE SELVE.= By OUIDA.
AN ALTRUIST
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_BOOKS BY OUIDA._
=LE SELVE.= (In the Half-crown Series). Cr. 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d.
=THE SILVER CHRIST and A LEMON TREE.= (In “The Pseudonym Library.”) Paper, 1s. 6d.; cloth, 2s.
=TOXIN.= (In “The Century Library.”) Illustrated. Paper, 1s. 6d.; cloth, 2s.
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.
An Altruist
BY OUIDA
AUTHOR OF “TOXIN,” “LE SELVE,” “THE SILVER CHRIST,” ETC.
Second Edition
LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN 1897
COPYRIGHT BY T. FISHER UNWIN _for Great Britain and United States of America_
[Illustration]
AN ALTRUIST.
[Illustration]
The scene is Wilfrid Bertram’s rooms in Piccadilly, facing the Green Park. The time is six o’clock in the afternoon. The audience is a goodly number of men and women of that class which calls itself Society. The rooms are small and the guests are many. A few look contemptuously amused. A great many appear excruciatingly bored.
“It’s all rot!” says one gentleman in confidence to his walking-stick.
It is the general opinion, though it has but one spokesman.
“What a shame, when he is so much in earnest!” says a pretty girl.
“Bores always are awfully in earnest,” replies the critic. “If he’d only give us something to drink----”
“You can get plenty to drink in the street,” says the young lady, with a withering glance.
Meantime, Wilfrid Bertram, who has been speaking for more than an hour without contradiction, except such as he read on his friends’ faces, perceives at last that he has been wearying them; a knowledge which is always slow to steal upon the teacher of mankind.
He stops in the middle of a very fine peroration.
“My dear people,” he remarks, a little irritably--“I mean, ladies and gentlemen--if you are so soon weary of so illimitable a subject, I fear I must have failed to do it justice.”
“So soon?--oh, hang it!” says the man who has wished for something to drink. “We came upstairs at half-past four, and you’ve had all the jaw to yourself ever since, and it’s past six now, and we’re all as thirsty as dogs.”
An expression of extreme disdain passes over the lecturer’s face.
“I did not invite _you_, Lord Marlow,” he says, very coldly. “If I had done I would have provided beer and skittles for your entertainment.”
“Oh, I say Wilfrid, come, finish your address to us; it’s extremely interesting,” observes, in amiable haste, a much older man, with a bald head and pleasant, ruddy countenance, who is his uncle, Lord Southwold.
“Immensely interesting!” echo everybody: they can say so with animation, almost with veracity, now that they are aware it is drawing to an end.
“I ask your pardon if my infirmities have done injustice to a noble theme. I fear I have failed to make myself intelligible,” says Bertram, in a tone intended to be apologetic, but which is actually only aggressive, since it plainly implies that his pearls have been thrown before swine. He closes the manuscript and note-books which are lying before him with the air of a person who is prepared for anything from the obtuseness and ingratitude of humanity.
“Nothing could be clearer than what you’ve said,” says the gentleman who wanted a drink. “Nobody is to have anything they can call their own, and everybody who likes is to eat in one’s plate and bathe in one’s bath.”
“At theatres the buffoon in the gallery is usually turned out, with the approval of the entire audience,” Bertram remarks, with sententious chilliness. “Were I not in my own chambers----”
Lord Marlow laughs rudely.
“I don’t think you could throw me downstairs. Your diet of brown bread and asparagus don’t make muscle.”
“My dear fellow--before women--pray be quiet,” murmurs a guardsman who is on the seat next to him.
“Do finish your reading, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold, coaxingly. “Your views are so disinterested if they are a--a--a little difficult to carry out as the world is constituted.”
“Excuse me,” replies Bertram, “I have trespassed too long on every one’s indulgence. It is, I believe, altogether impossible to attempt to introduce altruism and duty into a society which considers Lord Marlow’s type of humanity as either wholesome or ornamental.”
“I never knew a lecture that didn’t end in a free fight,” says his uncle Southwold, hurriedly. “But we can’t have one here, Wilfrid, there are too many ladies present.”
A shabby little old gentleman, doubled up in his chair, who is his grace of Bridlington, murmurs doubtfully: “I don’t see how your theories would work, Bertram.”
“Don’t you, Duke? Is there not such a proverb as _Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra_?”
The duke nods, and coughs. “There is. But I am afraid it will land you in Queer Street sometimes. There’s another old saw, you know, ‘Look before you leap!’ Safer of the two, eh?”
“For the selfish, no doubt,” replies Bertram.
His hand is on his note-book; he is thinking with regret of the concluding passages which he has not been able to read, and a little also that Cicely Seymour, the young lady who snubs Marlow, has a very beautiful profile, as a white gauze hat laden with white lilac rests on the fair coils of her hair.
That brute Marlow is at her elbow, saying something idiotic; Bertram cannot hear what, but he hears her laugh, and knows that she is probably being made to laugh at himself.
The intruding Marlow’s jeer at his vegetarian views is unjust to him, for he is tall and well made, though slender; but then, as his people often tell him, his muscle was built up in the score of unregenerate years before his Oxford terms, when he was as philistine as any other Eton boy, though he liked his books better than the playing-fields.
He is the younger son of a peer, has a little money of his own, and makes a little more by writing for scholarly reviews; but beyond all he is an altruist, a collectivist, a Fourrierist, an Engelist, a Tolstoi-ist; and, in common with other theorists, he has imagined that to be told the truth is enough to make people believe in it and observe its gospel. He has been continually deceived in this impression; but he has always held it, and it is proportionately irritating to him when, after having shed the light of information upon his contemporaries, they still show no symptoms of being converted.
Even the old duke, who is his godfather, and is generally tender to his theories, does nothing but nod his head and repeat like a magpie: “Look before you leap!”
“I think you said that property was like a cancer in the body politic?” observes a lover of practical politics, a Unionist member of parliament, putting his glass in his eye.
“I said the consolidation and transmission of property was so,” replies Bertram, with some hauteur: people cannot even quote him correctly!
“Ah! seems to me the same thing.”
“No more the same thing than Seltzer and the Sellinger!” cries Marlow.
“Oh, indeed,” says the politician, humbly; “forgive my stupidity.”
Bertram implies by a gesture that his indulgence to human imbecility is inexhaustible, but sorely tried.
“I had hoped,” he says, sententiously, “that you would have gathered from my previous discourse how intense is my conviction that those who possess property should give it up, generously, spontaneously, for the good of all, before awaiting that inevitable retribution which will fall on them if they continue to insult the People by their display of wealth, unearned and unjustified; for the riches of the noble and the millionaire are as absolutely theft as any stolen goods obtained by violence and fraud, and do continually provoke the crimes which they so savagely denounce and punish----”
“Humph! That’s strong,” mutters the duke.
“La Propriété c’est le vol,” murmurs Cicely Seymour “La propriété d’autrui, oui; mais pas la mienne!”
“If there’s no flimsy anywhere,” asks Lord Marlow, “who’ll breed racers?”
“Who’ll buy Comet clarets?”
“Who’ll employ cooks?”
“Who’ll keep up shootin’?”
“Who’ll build _Valkyries_?”
“Who’ll go by the Flying Dutchman?”
“Who’ll dance cotillons?”
Bertram replies with dignity: “My friends, these are mere frivolous jests on your part. When the entire structure of our rotten and debased society shall have been shattered there will of course be no place in a regenerate world for these mere foolish egotisms.”
“Foolish egotisms!” echoes Lord Southwold. “Oh, Lord! A good glass of wine a foolish egotism?”
“Do you mean you want Local Option?” asks the duke, with some alarm. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that.”
Bertram answers with irritation; “There is no question of local option or of total abstinence, Duke. If property were generally and duly distributed, wine would be so too; and if individualism were duly recognised, you would no more dare to interfere with the drunkard than with the genius.”
“African sherry all round--what a millennium!” cries his uncle. “Tipplers all over the place, and no lock-up to put ’em in! What an Arcadia!”
“Genius has frequently been rudely compared to inebriety,” remarks the practical politician; “but I have never known quite such a slap in the face given to it as this. Max Nardau is deferential in comparison.”
“Look, sir,” says Bertram, addressing the duke, but glancing at Cicely Seymour--“look at the utter debasement of our financial system! What are banks except incentives to crime? What are the Bourses, the Exchanges, or Wall Street, except large seething cauldrons of sin? What are the great speculating companies if not banded thieves for the stripping of a gullible public? What is the watch you wear, with its visible chain glaring across your waistcoat, except a base, mean, grinning mockery of the hungry man who meets you in the street?”
Marlow takes out his watch.
“My conscience is clear in that respect. My watch is a Waterbury, and wouldn’t fetch the hungry man a shilling if he pawned it.”
“And my chain,” says Lord Southwold, touching a steel one, “was my poor old Hector’s collar, and I wear it in memory of him. How he’d thresh out five acres of turnips before luncheon! We shall never see his like.”
Bertram grows impatient: “Individually you may wear Waterburys or dog-collars, but each is nevertheless a symbol of inequality between you and the man in the street, who is obliged to look at the church clock to see the hour at which he may seek the parish dole.”
“What profound philosophy!” cries Southwold. “What crimes one may commit without knowing it!”
“If a watch be an unwholesome sign of a bloated aristocracy, pray, Mr. Bertram, what are our jewels?” asks a very pretty woman, Lady Jane Rivaux.
“There are no words strong enough,” replies Bertram, “to condemn the use of gems, whether from a moral or an æsthetic point of view. In a purified condition of society they would of course become impossible abominations.”
The ladies present are too horrified to speak; Jane Rivaux, alone, recovering her first shock of surprise at such a blasphemy, asks, with vivacity:
“But all the people you would throw out of employment? The people who dig for jewels, don’t they dig? The people who polish them, and cut them, and set them, and deal in them; the people who make the iron safes, and the patent locks, you would throw them all out of work? Surely that wouldn’t be doing any good? What would become of the miners and lapidaries and jewellers and all the rest?”
Bertram smiles with pitying disdain.
“Oh, my dear Lady Jane, your kind of reasoning is as old as the hills, and carries its own refutation with it. All those workmen and tradesmen would be liberated from labours which now degrade them, and would thus be set free for higher work--work worthy of being illumined by the light of reason.”
“What work? Would they be all schoolmasters and governesses? Or all authors and artists?”
“What work? Such work as the Community might organise and distribute, such work as might be needful for the general good. When every one will work, every one will have leisure. The poet will mow the meadow in the morning and compose his eclogues in the afternoon. The painter will fell trees at dawn and at noon paint his landscapes in the forest. The sculptor will hew coal in the bowels of the earth for a few hours and come to the upper air to carve the marble and mould the clay. The author will guide the plough or plant the potato-patch at sunrise and will have the rest of the day free to write his novel or study his essay----”
“Humph!” says Southwold, ruffling his short grey hair in perplexity. “The precise use of wasting Sir Frederic Leighton’s time on a seam of coal, and Mr. Swinburne’s on a mowing machine, I don’t exactly perceive. However----”
“Pierre Loti is your ideal, then,” says Cicely Seymour. “He ‘has gone down to the deep in ships’ before he writes of sea life.”
“He is an officer,” objects Bertram, with regret and condemnation in his tone. “With his true and profound altruism he should have gone before the mast.”
“I suppose our sex will have to sweep and cook and sew before we are allowed to frolic?” asks Lady Jane.
“You’ll have to produce a certificate that you have made and baked three dozen pigeon pies before you’ll be allowed one waltz, Lady Jane,” says Marlow, who has with difficulty kept his mouth shut.
“We shall sweep our own chimneys, clean ourselves, and play the violin,” replies that lively person. “We shall have to cook our salmon before we’re allowed to fish for it; we shall have to roast our pheasants before we’re allowed to shoot them, and----”
Bertram interrupts her with scant courtesy: “I understood that those who did me the honour to come here to-day brought open minds and philosophical views to this meeting, or I should not have invited you to discuss and consider the best means for the educated classes to anticipate the coming changes of the world.”
“Why should we anticipate them,” murmurs the old duke, “when they’ll be so deucedly uncomfortable to all of us?”
“Yes, indeed,” says Southwold, “it’ll be bad enough to grin and bear’em.”
Bertram plays wearily with his shut note-book.
“If you cannot see the theoretic beauty of united and universal work, it is hopeless to expect that you should desire its practical adjustment to everyday life.”
“Well, but,” says the politician, who is nothing if not practical, “it is just the utter unworkableness of your system which damns it in the eyes of rational men. Pardon my saying so.”
Lady Southwold murmurs: “Give them some tea, Wilfrid; they are all growing cross.”
“As you please. But it is to me absolutely frightful to see how unconscious of your own doom, and how indifferent to the great movements of the day you all are----”
“If they are really great movements, they’ll move without us; you can’t stop an iceberg or an earthquake with your little finger. But there’s a good deal of grit in the old order of things still,” says the duke. “Yes, I’ll have a cup of tea, Wilfrid; I see you’ve got it there.”
Bertram murmurs wearily: “Critchett--tea!”
“Yes, sir,” says a person who is the perfection of all the virtues of valetdom.
Marlow, wholly undisturbed by the insults which have been heaped on him, calls out:
“And temperance drinks, Critchett! Lemons divorced from rum, sterilised milk, barley-water, tartaric acid----”
“Mr. Bertram,” says Cicely Seymour, “how do you reconcile your conscience to the debasing offices which you employ Critchett to fill for you?”
“Or to the fact of keeping a Critchett at all?” adds his aunt Southwold.
“Surely it’s Critchett who keeps him, ----, out of a strait-waistcoat?” murmurs Marlow.
Critchett hands tea and coffee and chocolate, in a silver service, with cakes, fruits, and biscuits.
“And all these pretty things, Mr. Bertram?” asks Lady Jane. “Surely they are the flesh-pots of Egypt, and ought not to be here?”
“They ought not,” replies Bertram, “nor Critchett either.”
“Oh, he is such a delightful servant; so noiseless, so _prévenant_, and so devoted to you; you would never find his equal if you sent him away.”
“No; but for one man to serve another is contrary to all principles of self-respect on either side.”
“My dear Wilfrid,” cries Lady Southwold, “how I wish you were small enough to be whipped! What a deal of good it would do you!”
Bertram smiles faintly.
“Flagellation was, I believe, most admirable discipline; but we have grown too effete for it. Our bodies are as tender as our hearts are hard.”
“I have always thought,” said Cicely Seymour, in a very soft voice, “that if everybody could be born with ten thousand a year, nobody would ever do anything wrong.”
Bertram looks at her approvingly. “You are on the right road, Miss Seymour. But as we cannot generalise property, we must generalise poverty. The result will be equally good.”
“Good Lord!” roars his uncle very loudly. “I never heard such a subversive and immoral doctrine in all my days!”
Bertram glances pityingly at him.
“And yet it is based on precisely the same theory as the one which you accepted when you passed the Compulsory Clause of the Parish Councils Bill.”
“The Upper House passed that infamous Bill. I was in the minority against it,” replies Southwold, very angrily.
“But when everybody’s got sixpence a day,” suggests a young man with an ingenuous countenance, “and nobody sixpence halfpenny, surely somebody’ll have a try for the illegal halfpenny, won’t they? It is human nature.”
“Certainly not,” replies Bertram, very positively. “Nobody will even wish for an extra halfpenny, because when inequality shall be at an end envy and discontent will be unknown. Besides, if all the property of the world was confiscated or realised and equally distributed, the individual portion would come more nearly to half a crown a head per diem. On half a crown a head per diem any one can live----”
Lord Southwold sighs. “Oysters are three shillings a dozen,” he murmurs.
“Of course, if you expect to continue the indulgence of an epicure’s diseased appetites----” says Bertram, with impatience.
“It’s the oysters that are diseased, not our appetites,” says Southwold, with a second sigh.
“If,” says Bertram, ignoring his uncle’s nonsense--“if I have made anything clear in my recent remarks it must surely be that Property is, in the old copy-book phrase, the root of all evil; the mandrake growing out of the bodies of the dead, the poisonous gas exhaling from the carrion of prejudice, of injustice, and of caste.”
“But, my dear Wilfrid,” cries Lady Southwold, with equal impatience, “yours is rank Communism.”
“You can call it what you please. It is the only condition of things which would accompany pure civilisation. When, however, I speak of half a crown a day,” he pursues, “I use a figure of speech! Of course, in a purely free world there would be no coined or printed money, there would be only barter.”
“Barter!” echoes Marlow. “I should carry two of my Berkshire pigs, one under each arm, and exchange them with you for a thousand copies of your _Age to Come_.”
“I think barter would be inconvenient, Mr. Bertram,” says Cicely Seymour, doubtfully. “And what should I barter? I can’t make anything. I should have to cut off my hair and wait a year till it grew again.”
Every one laughs, and Bertram even relaxes his gravity.
“I fear, Miss Seymour, that Solon’s self would give you all you wished for a single smile!”
At that moment a small boy comes into the room, out of breath, grinning, with several oblong pieces of printed paper in his hand; he pushes his way unconcerned between the ladies and gentlemen, and thrusts the papers at Bertram.
“Here, mister, you must tone these here down; manager says as Fanshawe says as the British Public wouldn’t never stand them pars. he’s marked at no time; and manager says as I was to tell you Public is extra nervous now cos o’ that bomb at Tooting.”
Bertram takes the sheets in ill humour, and tears them across.
“Mr. Fanshawe is well aware that I never correct and I never suppress. I forbid the production of the article in a mutilated state.” He hands the pieces to the boy. “Bid Mr. Fanshawe return me my original copy.”
The boy looks frightened.
“Who’ll pay for this here settin’-up, sir, please, if proof ain’t to be used?”
“Did you say Fanshawe?” says Lord Southwold. “Do you mean the great Fanshawe of the _Torch_? Can anything be possibly too strong for him?”
“Oh, my dear Wilfred! do let us hear what you can have said? It must be something terrific!” says the old duke, who rather likes subversive opinions, considering philosophically that he will be in his grave before they can possibly be put into practice.
“What ’m I to tell the manager about payin’ for the settin’-up of this here, if type’s to be broke up, sir?” asks the boy, with dogged persistence.
“Go out of the room, you impudent little rascal!” says Bertram, in extreme irritation. “Critchett! turn that boy out!”
Marlow gets up and offers the boy a plate of pound cake.
“You are not civil to your sooty Mercury, Bertram. He offers you at this moment the most opportune illustration of your theories. He comes on an errand of the intellect, and if a somewhat soiled messenger, he should nevertheless be treated with the respect due to a guardian of literary purity and public morality. Sweet imp! refresh your inner man!”
The boy stuffs his mouth with cake and grins.
“Are these chambers mine or yours, Lord Marlow?” asks Bertram.
“Both mine and yours, or neither yours or mine. There is no such thing as exclusive possession. You have just told us so.”
“Critchett!” says Bertram, and points with stony gaze to the printer’s devil, “turn that boy out of the room.”
Critchett, reluctantly touching anything so sooty, takes him by the collar and drives him before him out of the room.
Marlow picks up the torn proofs. “Who’ll pay for the setting-up? asks this dear child. Unused proofs are, I suppose, first cousins to spilt milk and spoilt powder. Mayn’t we read this article? The title is immensely suggestive--‘Fist-right and Brain-divinity.’ Are you feloniously sympathetic with the Tooting bomb?”
Bertram takes the torn proofs from him in irritation and throws them into the open drawer of a cabinet.
“The essay is addressed to persons of intelligence and with principle,” he says, significantly.
“But it seems that Fanshawe has neither, if he fail to appreciate it?”