in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible
to organize masses of individuals into industrial regiments which
required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the
need of leadership, of _multitudinous_ leadership. And with leadership
came the rewards of leadership. And the wives and daughters of the
leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose
in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure
and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.
While the maids went to the "slums," the mistresses went to the
suburbs.
What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of
antiquarians above his rotted corpse.
Wyatt and his equally humble successors in genius, Hargreaves and
Crompton, artisans! Where in history shall we find men the world took
more from, gave less to?
To Hargreaves, inventing the spinning-jenny, a mob and a flight from
Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton,
inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the
delicate pulling motion of the spinster's arm)--to Crompton, poverty
so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to
investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired
to his "Hall-in-the-Wood" and his workman wages!
Little did Wyatt and Hargreaves and Crompton eat of the bread of
idleness they built the oven for.
But Arkwright! There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career,
the new aristocracy about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made
spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else's devices. He
patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them.
He overlooked his defeats in the courts. He bit and gouged and endured
and invented and organized till, from being a barber and dealing in
hair-dyes and bargaining for the curls of pretty girls at country
fairs, he ended up Sir Richard Arkwright and--last perfect touch in a
fighting career--was building a church when he died.
And his son was England's richest commoner.
It was the dawn of the day of common richness.
The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old aristocracy had
been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of
exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got
diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper
third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested
from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted
(and so recently!) to the machinery _set_ going by that spontaneous
explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years
ago, _kept_ going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women,
and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.
Marie's view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are
billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by
somebody's work, that just "Being a Good Woman" or "Being a Decent
Fellow" is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other
people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of
miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a
parasite as the vicious parasite:--that the former differs from the
latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting
it in return for nothing.
Getting something for nothing is the fundamental immorality of the
world. But we don't believe it. There will be a revolution before we
get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an
intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis
for three meals a day is a fraud.
Marie didn't mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental,
non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew
out a motor-car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such
a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind
it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big
men's fingers, little children's fingers, pulling the strings,
delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury
of a remote revenge.
[Illustration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--WORKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A GOOD JOB
AND STIR IT CONSTANTLY FROM BREAKFAST TO SUPPER.]
Perhaps the reason why she didn't catch on to the fact that, instead
of being the world's creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse
was that she was so busy.
You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and
invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much
more difficult than her brother's, who simply got up in the morning
and took the same old 7.42 to the same old office.
When he wanted clothes he went to the nearest decent tailor.
No such cinch for Marie. Her tailor lived in Sutherton, on the
directly opposite side of the city from the suburb in which Marie
lived. Just to get to that tailor's cost Marie an hour and a half of
effort. She had got up early, but by the time the tailor had stuck the
world's visible supply of pins into the lines of her new coat, most of
the forenoon had been arduously occupied.
Of course many forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The
modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes
increasingly complex and minute and exacting and time-occupying in
precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which
occupation must be devised.
Besides, it gives employment to the tailors.
This is the really meritorious function of the leisure class. It
gives employment. And every extension of its tastes and needs gives
more employment. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number
and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and
perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hairdressers and plumed-bird
hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and
Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers
and matinee heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and
fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not
forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish.
In fact, Marie and her friends, in the course of a year, gave as much
employment as a fair-sized earthquake. That is, in the course of a
year, they destroyed, without return, a large amount of wealth and set
many people to work replacing it. If we had a large enough leisure
class we should have no need of fires and railroad wrecks and the
other valuable events which increase our prosperity by consuming it.
Marie belonged to the real Consumers' League. And she consumed
prettily and virtuously. It wasn't bad air that suffocated her soul.
It was no air.
[Illustration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--SHIRKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A DOCTOR,
A FAMILY, A NICE BRIGHT DAY, AND A BOX OF CHOCOLATES: USE THEM ALL UP.]
She thought she was breathing, however, and breathing fast. Why, it
was half past eleven before she got back downtown from her tailor, and
she bought a wedding present till one, and she was just famished and
ran to a tea room, but she had hardly touched a mouthful when she
remembered there was a girl from out of town who had come in to spend
a month doing nothing and had to be helped, but though she rushed to
the 'phone she couldn't get her friend before it was time to catch her
suburban train home; in order to do which she jumped into the station
'bus, only to remember she had forgotten to buy a ribbon for her
Siamese costume for the Benefit Ball; but it was too late now and she
spent her time, going out on the train, trying to think of some way of
getting along without it, and her head began to ache; but luckily she
met some of the girls on her way from the station to her high-school
sorority alumnae reunion and they began to tell her how to do it; but
she had to hurry away because she had promised to go to the house of
one of the girls and do stencil patterns, which started to be
beautiful, but before she could get any of them really done she
recollected that Chunk Brown had sent over a bunch of new songs and
was coming to call to-night and she had to scoot home and practice
"June time is moon time and tune time and spoon time," as well as "The
grass is blue o'er little Sue," till there was just one hour left
before dinner and she was perfectly crazy over the new "do" which one
of the girls had showed her and she rushed upstairs and went at that
"do" and by dinner time she had got it almost right, so that her
father told her always to do her hair like that and brother wished he
had it down at the factory to replace a broken dynamo brush, while as
for Chunk, he was nicer than ever till he learned he had to take her
to a rehearsal of the Siamese Group for the Benefit Ball: so that,
what with having to coax him to go and what with changing into her
costume, she got to the rehearsal so tired she couldn't stand up to
go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated
aesthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out
the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie
there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a
spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must
go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow,
which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which
pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two
periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting along the
spiral and into Culture pretty well, till it was eleven o'clock and
she waked Chunk up out of a chair in the hall and made him take her
home; and he said the Swami was a _very clever_ man and she said
American men had no culture and didn't understand women, and Chunk
didn't even say good night to her, and she went to sleep crying, and
remembering she hadn't after all learned from the girls how to get
along without that ribbon in her costume and she must get up early and
buy it, which made her utter one final little plaintive sniffle of
vexation.
It was a nice child's life, full of small things which looked big,
uncorrected in its view of love, culture, charity, or anything else by
any carrying of the burdens, enduring of the shocks, or thrilling to
the triumphs, of a really adult life. Her brother, when he went to
work, was her junior. In five years he was much her senior. (You may
verify this by observation among your own acquaintances.) Marie was
not a minute older now than when she left school. Talking to her at
twenty-six was exactly the same experience as talking to her at
twenty-one. That was what the world, from John Wyatt to her father,
had done for her.
[Illustration: SEE THE PROUD HUSBAND. HE DID IT ALL HIMSELF.]
From such a life there are necessarily revulsions. The empty leisure
of the Nice Girl is quite successfully total waste. But it becomes
intolerable to that waster who, though not desiring genuine
occupation, desires genuine sensation.
Hence smart sets.
Every social group in which there is much leisure has its own smart
set. There may be a million dollars a year to spend. There may be only
a few thousands. But there is always a smart set.
How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its
plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury
itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere.
You see a little crowd of women come into the Mandarin Tea Room of the
St. DuBarry in Novellapolis in the fresh West. When they remove their
automobile veils you see that they were once, and very recently, the
nicest sort of members of the sewing circle and the W. C. T. U. of
Lone Tree Crossing.
When the waiter comes along with their cocktails and they begin to sip
them out of their tea cups, you wake up with a jerk to realize that
it's half past three in the afternoon and the evening has begun.
How rapid it all is!
There's Margaret Simpson. A few years ago you might have seen her
pumping the water for Jim's breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking
bugs off the potato vines.
Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He
owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented
bottle-stopper. He's a pavement contractor. His wife has just as
much leisure as any duchess.
The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it
possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her
own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Downtown District,
cooeperatively owned, cooeperatively maintained, magnificently
equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest rooms of the department
stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and
pay no more attention to the florist than to one's own gardener,
with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St.
DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty shops, with coachmen on
the taxicabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the
Novellapolis Athletic Club--an infinitely resourceful estate, which
Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.
This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth
floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel
scales. After an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company
light therapy, she weighed out at 182-6.
At luncheon she ate only puree of tomatoes, creamed chicken and
sweetbreads, Boston bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore
cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.
After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all
around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any
duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It
ended up with: "Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and
dieting I've been doing I can't wear under a twenty-seven? It's
ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These
stock sizes all run large. If it's made to order I can wear a
twenty-six as easy as anybody."
Then she met up with her friends at the St. DuBarry.
You watch the waiter bring another round of drinks and you perceive
that the evening is well under way and that the peak of the
twenty-four hours is being disputatiously approached.
It appears that Perinique's is a swell place to dine, but that the
cheese is bad. The cheese is good right here at the St. DuBarry, but
they don't know how to toast the biscuits. At the Gruenewurst the
waiters are poor. At Max's the soup is always cold. The mural
decorations at the Prince Eitel are so gloomy they give you a chill.
Despair settles down on the scene. There seems to be no likelihood
that there will be any dinner at all anywhere. In the absence,
however, of that kind of good cheer, another kind is spread on the
table when the inquiry is flung down whether or not the way in which
Jim looked at Dora last night has been generally observed.
You conclude that poor, dear, innocent Dora ought not to have been
looked at in that way. You were hasty. Nobody is innocent in the
Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry, when not there. Dora, you soon
learn, deserves to be looked at in any and all ways. It's not for her
that we're worried. It's for Jim.
At the name of Jim, Margaret begins to look uncomfortable and
helpless. She sinks lower and lower into her chair; and says nothing;
and keeps on saying nothing; and seems likely to drown in silence; but
her friends start in to rescue her. You can't help seeing some of the
life-lines as they are thrown out.
"If I were _you_, Margaret, and _my_ husband behaved to _me_ as Jim is
behaving to _you_, _I'd_----"
"When you married Jim, Margaret, you were the prettiest----"
"No wonder Dora's husband divorced her."
"It's a wonder she wouldn't confine herself to making trouble for her
own husbands without----"
"The trouble with you, Margaret, is that you're too good to Jim,
letting him run around with Dora and not doing anything yourself. If
you had any sense you'd make him so jealous he'd walk on his hands
and hold a loaf of sugar on his nose for you."
"Say, Fannie, why don't you tell your friend Ned to cut in here and
pay a little attention to Marge?"
"Oh, Ned's no good."
"Well, then, I'll tell my husband to----"
"Don't you do it! I started my husband once on a thing like that and
he went at it so strong--Choose a bachelor."
"That's right. Ned's not married. Let him do it."
"Somebody ought to."
"Say, Fannie, call Ned on the 'phone."
"All right. I'll be back in a minute."
"Say, Marge, we'll eat at the Royal Gorge and I'll put you and Ned
side by side."
"And _I'll_ sit next to your husband and tell him how strong Ned is
with the ladies. He'll take a good look all right."
"Now buck up, Marge, and encourage Ned a little. Don't be a fool."
"I tell you, Marge, you'll do a lot more with Jim by cutting up a
little bit than by all this dieting you're trying to do."
"Say, Marge, it's a good thing you've got on your white broadcloth and
your willow plumes."
"You can get 'em at Delatour's now for twenty-five dollars."
"Hello, Fannie, did you get Ned?"
"I got him all right, but what do you think? He's got another date for
to-night, so he can't come."
"Oh, flam!"
"Well, well, here's Dora now, as usual. I suppose she'll try to butt
in."
But she doesn't. She just hesitates beside the table long enough to
say: "Got to sweep right along, girlies. Going to buzz out to the
Inland Inn for dinner with Ned. Yep. What's the matter? You know Ned.
Our old friend Ned. The same. He's waiting for me now. G'bye."
Talk of nerve! You have to hand it to that Dora girl!
Exit Dora. Enter Jim and five or six other men, mostly husbands to the
women already present.
Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him
not only that but everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of
drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-butter sauce at
the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait
at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to
eat his hat if Dora's divorce wasn't her husband's fault. Must have
been. Never saw the husband. But Dora's character! Jim drinks off one
of the cocktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank,
and returns to Dora's character. No straighter little girl ever came
to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and
leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie
takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has
been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off
another of Frank's cocktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find
Margaret. She's still crying. He thinks she's crying because Ned is
away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur's vein. Is he not her
husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him
into the "Now I warn you to cut it out" of the tyrannical manikin
with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them
quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There's a terrible
row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons
explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains,
individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches
a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain
that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about
trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen'l'man
to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the
only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, can't help seeing
what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a
sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a
couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites.
Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out
from the curb to the street-center everybody's head is out of window
and everybody's voice is saying "The Suddington," "The Gruenewurst,"
"Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."
The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night
leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a
useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic
Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social
Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the
one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the
current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence,
carries them out of the world's mental life. If it is the one toward
frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a
quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of
service which produce power and character.
* * * * *
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back
into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And
it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all
other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in
torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world's
worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its
sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong,
its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle
for existence! What a work!
But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the
ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she
began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future--_of her type_.
From the facts of modern leisure the positive character reacts
toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service.
Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed
expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education
of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates
new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs
along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern
facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling
made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character--like
Marie's--just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them
into final irresponsibility and inutility.
But Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't _emotional_ enough in her
negativeness--to plunge into _dissipation_. It wasn't in her nature to
do any _plunging_ of any kind. Good, safe, motionless _sponging_ was
her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed
respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She
is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment
appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all
occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on
it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really
did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the
barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see
lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high
reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a
recognized commercial asset.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner
table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order
the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made
it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social
attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and
he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly
and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt
stud.
No struggle in Marie's life so far! No _having_ to swim in the cold
water of daily enforced duty or else sink. _No being accustomed to the
disagreeable feel of that water._
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being _hardened_
to work. That was everything.