The text that circulates under the title The Beggar’s Purse is a short wartime tale by Samuel Hopkins Adams, framed by a publisher’s notice explaining that it was written and printed at cost so that its sale might move War Savings Stamps. The narrative follows a single day in the life of a comfortable Philadelphia bachelor whose habits are quietly overturned by a magical wallet, and the volume as it survives in digital form appends the full licensing apparatus of Project Gutenberg. It belongs to the literature of the First World War home front, a piece of patriotic persuasion dressed as light comedy.
A Wallet With a Question
The story opens on E. Van Tenner, a man of fixed routines—eating, sleeping, rising, working, and visiting his club on a schedule that never varies—whose comfortable income is never overstrained. The war has touched both his income and his habits, and he has borne the disruption without resentment. He is, by his own account, patriotic: he has subscribed liberally to the first and second Liberty Loans and knows every argument for War Savings Stamps by heart. So when a professional-looking beggar with white whiskers appears at his elbow and asks for a contribution, Van Tenner refuses three times over.
The beggar has one argument left, and it turns on the word “savings.” Buy a single stamp out of what is already saved on current expenses, he urges—give up nothing you need or want. Van Tenner calls this magic; the beggar agrees that it is white magic. Learning that Van Tenner is about to leave for a twenty-four-hour business trip to New York with money carried loose in his pockets, the beggar hands him a cheap, flat wallet fitted with a celluloid tablet and a pencil, stamped with the legend “What’s the good?”—which he describes as a profound inquiry into first causes. The condition is simple: keep all his money in the purse and spend only from it, and within twenty-four hours he will save enough for two stamps, eight dollars and twenty-eight cents. No scrimping is required; the beggar insists that parsimony in those who can afford to spend does positive harm. To remove money for a wasteful purpose is to loose the magic, and the magic makes itself felt in the conscience. Van Tenner empties his pockets into the purse, and the beggar vanishes through a bewitched compartment that drops down into a chasm.
The Education of a Traveler
What follows is a day of small surrenders. At the station a porter reaches for his bag, and when Van Tenner feels for silver the purse seems to bite him; he says “None,” and startles the man. At the Pullman window the wallet comes forth reluctantly, the question “What’s the good?” rises in his mind, and he declines the last parlor-car chair, finding himself ten paces off before he quite recovers. He reasons that a day coach may suit him better, and enters his first savings: fifty-five cents for the station porter, fifteen for the Pullman porter.
In the day coach he meets Welland, a neighbor in the automobile business who earns twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a year in commissions and is riding the coach on principle. Fewer heavy parlor cars mean less demand on coal and rolling stock, Welland explains, and the railroads cannot handle automobiles anyway, which relieve the strain on suburban traffic. He points out women doing rough scrap-iron work at men’s pay because the railroad cannot find enough men, while a husky parlor-car attendant picks up towels for tips—”He gets none of my money!” At the terminus two Red-Caps are repelled and Welland carries his own suitcase, calling it a traveling gymnasium. Van Tenner enters fifteen cents for the Red-Cap he refused.
A chorus of taxi cries greets him outside, but the purse demands “What’s the good?” of a forty-cent fare to the Hotel Von Gorder, and Van Tenner politely says he will walk. The outraged chauffeur threatens him; ordinarily a pacifist, Van Tenner is fired by the purse to ask, “Where is your draft registration card?” The chauffeur turns pallid and flees in his taxi. Shocked at his own new self, Van Tenner boards a cable car running within a block of his hotel and arrives as quickly as a taxi would have brought him. He deducts the five-cent fare and adds fifteen cents as the probable tip he has escaped—”the sheer blackmail of the dread of being considered a short sport.” His account now stands at a dollar sixty, and he begins to suspect that much of his dribbled change has been blackmail paid by vanity to extortion.
At the hotel he asks for a five-dollar room with bath, feels a pang in the purse, and asks instead for a four-dollar room. The clerk’s supercilious conditional clause makes him hesitate, and a newcomer named J. Q. Smith is promptly given Room 1118 at three dollars; Van Tenner firmly takes the four-dollar room. In the washroom a whisk-broom attendant pesters him until an inspired inquiry as to whether the man is of military age removes him. At the café door two young women guard hats and coats—descendants, in the narrator’s phrase, of the horseleech’s daughters—and Van Tenner knows he has long been enriching an unknown capitalist who rents the privilege for eight thousand dollars a year, yet he cannot face their disdain. He flees, and partly by ingenuity: he takes the free elevator to his room and hangs hat and coat gratis in the clothes press, noting that the room equals the five-dollar variety except that it is higher up. He enters a dollar saved on the room and ten cents each on the washroom and the coat check.
Small Tests, Sharp Pangs
Resuming his cast-off garments, Van Tenner notices discomfort at his left big toe and finds a large hole in his sock. In a nearby department store he considers striped silk hosiery at about his usual three-dollar price, but hesitates over what the purse will say. The purse makes no protest; the legend “What’s the good?” has lost its accusing edge. Recalling the beggar’s warning not to scrimp himself, he tells the clerk he will take the pair, and the wallet gives of its wealth in strict neutrality. But when the salesman asks whether he will take them along, Van Tenner begins to give a delivery address and is interrupted by an “Ouch!” and then an “Ugh!”—the purse, quiet during the deal, catches at his breath like a douche of ice water over the heart. He asks whether delivery can be made that afternoon. A floorwalker approaches anxiously to ask if he is ill, and an unknown incitement forces Van Tenner to ask whether delivery costs the store anything. It costs time and labor, the floorwalker says, from twelve cents a package upward. The magic, Van Tenner realizes, works beyond the limits of his own exchequer; it will not watch him waste anybody’s money, even a store’s. He takes the socks with him, the floorwalker thanks him, and departing he feels as if a very soft and satisfied kitten were purring against his chest. He warns it not to grow too dictatorial.
Business occupies the rest of the afternoon, the purse playing an honorable and unprotesting part, though at one point it permits a taxi expenditure of more than two dollars to save necessary time. Van Tenner is relieved to find the receptacle so reasonable and begins to feel he could live on terms of amity with it indefinitely. But when he pays the chauffeur, the wallet produces the exact amount with a precision he finds significant, and he searches in vain for a tip. The purse demands “What’s the good?” of a present to a man in whom he has no possible interest and who has done nothing he is not paid by his employer to do. Van Tenner admits “Not the slightest” before the disgusted driver and cheerfully notes the precise amount; twenty-five cents joins the mounting record.
His evening is free, and he decides on a light, hasty dinner followed by the theater, if the magical arbiter permits. By leaving his outer apparel in his room he eludes the coat-check impost and smiles at the disgruntled Amazons, who seem to ask whether this comparatively nude intruder has pawned his overcoat. Ordering a Dry Martini, he feels the beggar’s wallet drop from his vest pocket to the pit of his stomach, pressing with destructive insistence. He tells the waiter to wait, then in an indignant undertone informs the purse that it is not its affair to censor his morals and habits—it is a committee on finance and that is all. The purse asks “What’s the good?” with sweet reasonableness, and Van Tenner reflects that either he has an appetite for dinner, in which case he does not need the cocktail, or he needs the cocktail to create an appetite, in which case it is high time he quit the habit. Had not the beggar told him he needn’t give up anything he would not be better off without? He cancels the Martini.
Over dinner he studies the theatrical advertisements, hesitating among Atta Boy, Oh, Slush, and Gertie’s Green Garters, and fixes on the last. He must retrieve his coat and hat, saving another dime. Upstairs he switches on the lights, dresses, locks his door and starts for the elevator, but a slight insistent cramp in the pocketbook halts him. He is not spending money, so a protest against theatergoing would be premature. He starts again and catches his breath over a more pronounced pang; his eyes turn upward to the glowing glass of his transom. He has left the lights on, wasting coal for the hotel upon which he has already saved a dollar and fifty-five cents. He murmurs “You are certainly some little economist!” and returns to leave the room in darkness.
At the theater a ducal personage behind a grille negligently reports nothing available in the orchestra before a week from Wednesday, while an undistinguished individual in the lobby mentions that the Bilbosh Agency has good seats. At the agency Van Tenner is told there is one in the eighth row for three dollars and thirty cents; at the mention of the price the purse leaps from his hand and falls flat on its face upon the floor. He takes it out and gives it air. There is in him a definite streak of obstinacy: he has undertaken to see Gertie’s Green Garters and will see it, assuming the receptacle permits. He retraces his steps to the theater, retires to a corner of the lobby, and draws forth the chancellor of his exchequer. The purse asks “What’s the good?”—but as inquiry, not challenge. Van Tenner says the good is that he has done a day’s work and is entitled to some amusement, and asks what the harm is. The purse appears complaisantly to accept this view. Back at the ticket window he asks the duke of the diagram for the best seat for tonight: tenth row in the balcony, one sixty-five. He asks whether the stage can be seen from it, and the duke wearily says, “Oh, yes—you can see the stage,” his tone commenting on the inquirer’s vanity as though he were the kind of cheap person who goes into the balcony. But Van Tenner’s vanity is now armored like the tropic—and there the surviving narrative breaks off.
The Last Question and the Club of the Limit
The tale’s final exchange is brief and lands like a punch line. “How many stamps can I take?” asks Van Tenner, and the answer comes back: “One hundred and ninety-eight more,” which will bring his total investment to $828 and yield $1000 at maturity. “I’ll buy,” declares E. Van Tenner, styled in the text an “exwaster,” and with that he joins the “Take-the-Limit Club.” The story closes there, having converted its comedy of small economies into a subscription.
What the Purse Is Arguing
The beggar’s white magic is a device for making a moral case without preaching it. Every pang the wallet administers translates a wartime economy into the language of conscience: the tip refused is vanity exposed, the taxi declined is coal and rolling stock spared, the lights left burning are somebody else’s coal. Adams is careful to distinguish this from miserliness. The beggar explicitly warns against parsimony in those who can afford to spend, and the purse raises no objection to silk socks or a balcony seat—only to waste, to blackmail paid for appearances, and to money spent on those who have done nothing to earn it. The running account Van Tenner keeps, item by item, is the story’s real argument: that a dollar saved here and a dime saved there, without any sacrifice of what one actually needs, adds up to stamps, and stamps add up to a thousand dollars at maturity. The “Take-the-Limit Club” is the punchline of that arithmetic.
A Pamphlet With a Purpose
The publisher’s notice and foreword make the book’s occasion plain. Smith & Porter Press of Boston intended a gratis booklet for friends, hoping the story might aid the sale of War Savings Stamps; when large firms asked to buy quantities for their own people, Adams suggested he would forgo remuneration if the books were furnished at cost, and the publisher gladly agreed, feeling well repaid if every book sold a single stamp. The tale is thus propaganda in the most literal sense—a thing written to be given away so that it might sell something else—and its charm lies in how lightly it carries that errand.
The digital text that preserves it ends where the story does, and the rest of the file is the ordinary machinery of Project Gutenberg: the end notice, the file-naming conventions, the credit to David Widger, and the long General Terms of Use. Those terms explain that works drawn from public-domain print editions carry no United States copyright, that the Project Gutenberg trademark may not be used on fee-charging eBooks without permission, and that users may copy, modify, print, and give away the text freely while redistribution remains subject to the trademark license. Section 1 sets out the conditions of use, the requirement that the license’s opening sentence travel with every copy, the rules for alternate formats, and the provisions for reasonable fees, including a twenty percent royalty on gross profits donated to the Foundation and refunds for users who disagree with the license within thirty days. Later paragraphs address defects and liability. None of it belongs to Adams’s story, but it is the frame through which the story now reaches most readers—a wartime pamphlet about saving small change, preserved by an institution devoted to giving books away.
