It got talked around among Marie's friends that she didn't want
children. This was considered very surprising, in view of all
that her father and husband had done for her.
Here is what they had done for her:
They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire,
to make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in
defiance of difficulty and at the cost of pain.
Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be
exposed to. With this small but important reservation: she might
work at avoiding pain.
When the cook had a headache she took Getting-Breakfast for it.
When Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the
headache.
It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost
everybody among those present, from the doctor down through
Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were
very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement
of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked
ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses,
the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the
world, had been round after long experimentation to be soothing
to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could
vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one
day's duration.
Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after
night with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous
than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases.
They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced.
Marie's spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.
The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost
her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great
pleasure to them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially,
she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her
husband.
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:
"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men
work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional
and commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only
leisured class we have and the most leisured class in the world."
Marie's father wasn't so very rich either. He was engaged in a
business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried
through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at
twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.
Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to
think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any
girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and
usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's
family.
This view of the matter gave Marie UNCONSCIOUSLY TO HERSELF, what
morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and
excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have
a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and family prosperity.
Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the
"therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.
Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much
alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of
the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle.
She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.
All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in
front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there
before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her
narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every
summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her
city-bound husband of the personal companionship which was the
one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave
her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.
But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her
to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went
beyond their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of
the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.
Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact; she was The Nice Girl.
She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken--a
perfect dear. She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she
never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her
husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against
high-balls in hot weather. She went twice a month during the
winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a
district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working
people but which, while she passed out the books, she
sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."
It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie
on her father, her husband, and herself.
A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at
Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and
they re-inscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the
man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His
name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making
Marie what she was.
What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized
wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have
gone into the making of leisure--for other people!
Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real
start of modern leisure.
In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield,
where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small
building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine
inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series
of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure
possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the
case, but for millions and millions of them.
It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing
never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in
the history of the world without the intervention of human
fingers.
On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title
and function. The Spinster ceased to be.
The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their
fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out
as the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of
separating forever.
We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all
understand that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired
his working force of TEN GIRLS, he prophesied the factory "slum."
We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he
utterly changed their character and how he marvelously increased
their number.
But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed
it, 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.
Looking at it in that way, one sometimes doesn't feel so sorry
for the maids.
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.
To get something for nothing is the fundamental immorality in 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.
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
hair-dressers 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.
She thought she was breathing, however, and breathing fast. Why,
it was half-past eleven before she got back down-town 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 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 esthete, 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 observations 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.
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 Down-town
District, cooperatively owned, cooperatively 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 taxi-cabs, 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, and after an hour of
Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company-light-therapy weighed
out at 182-6.
At luncheon she ate only puree of tomatoes, creamed
chicken-and-sweetbreads, Boston brown 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
Grunewurst 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. A ray
of light penetrates with the inquiry whether you saw the way Jim
looked at Dora last night. If _I_ was you, Margaret, and MY
husband looked at Dora like that, _I_--. . . No wonder Dora's
husband divorced her. . . . The trouble with Margaret is she's
too good to Jim. If she had any sense she could make him so
jealous he'd stand on his head for her. . . . Why don't you tell
Ned to cut in there and pay a little attention to Marge? . . .
Oh, Ned's no good. . . . Well, I'll tell MY HUSBAND--. . . Don't
you do it: I started my husband once on a thing like that and
he--. . . That's right. Ned's not married. Let him do it. . . .
Somebody ought to. . . . Call Ned on the 'phone. . . . We'll eat
at the Royal Gorge and I'll put 'em side by side. . . . I'LL sit
next to Jim and point it out to him. . . . Say, Marge, it's a
good thing you've got on your white broadcloth and those willow
plumes. . . . You can get 'em at Delatour's now for twenty-five
dollars. . . . Say, I called Ned on the 'phone and what do you
think? He's got an engagement for to-night. . . . Say, here's
Dora now.
Dora: "Got to sweep right along. Goin' to buzz out to the Inland
Inn for dinner with Ned."
Talk of nerve!
Exit Dora.
Enter Stern Moralist. Points gaunt finger at ex-members of Lone
Tree Crossing Sewing Circle. Says: "Back to your kitchens, women,
and get supper for your husbands."