a penny of her own, nor that the peerless Guinevere had half-a-crown (or
whatever the coinage was) to buy her Launcelot a love token. And though
Scheherazade--that peerless, self-contained, circulating library of a
thousand and one volumes--told enough stories to her Sultan to have made
the fortune of a modern publisher, she could hardly have made less even
if she had had the felicity to write a modern novel. The favourite of
the harem would, it is certain, have found a purse a hollow mockery.
Now we modern women are the descendants, more or less remote, of
Rebecca, Guinevere, and Scheherazade, and our greatest resemblance to
our fair ancestresses is that most of us have no money to spend, and
those of us who have do not know how to spend it. Heredity is an excuse
for being what might be called the stingy sex.
What would the world have been like had the purse-strings of time been
held by women? More comfortable, possibly, but, probably, much less
beautiful. It takes the great, splendid masculine spendthrifts in high
places to glorify the world with treasures of priceless art. But it was
an immortal maiden queen who inspired the greatest poet of all time, and
as the production of poetry has always been cheap, so poetry was the
splendid and inexpensive contribution to the glory of her reign made by
a not too extravagant queen. It is the men who keep alive the
extravagance, the beauty, and the ideality of life. But little credit to
them who have always been able to put their hands in their trousers
pockets and jingle the pennies.
Now time may mean money for men, but who ever heard that time meant
money for women? No one, for the simple reason that it does not. Time
and trouble are of so little value to the average woman that she
squanders the one and is prodigal of the other in the most appalling
way. And by the average woman, are meant all such who do not earn their
own living, no matter how modestly; nor those who have some serious
purpose in life, though without the object of earning; nor those who, as
wives and mothers, may estimate their time as of the value of a general
servant's. But apart from these the rank and file of women, consist of
the aimless ones--and there are all sorts of aimless ones: rich and
poor, high and low,--who potter vaguely through life, through shops,
through streets, through joy, through sorrow; think feebly, talk
feebly, and feel feebly, and finally fade away, and cease to exist. Now
think of the majority of men frittering away life like that!
For ten years I lived opposite an able-bodied, middle-aged woman who sat
in a rocking-chair by the window, crocheting from luncheon time until
dark, four mortal hours, and this for ten long years! Then she moved or
died, I don't remember which. And yet, after all, how many of us sit
with our hands folded, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but just
mentally and physically limp, weighed down by empty, useless time, which
we try to kill with yawning desperation.
We are adepts of the idle industries because our time is of no earthly
consequence. Think of the miles of lace we crochet, the impossible
embroideries we make, the countless odds and ends we construct, of no
earthly use except to catch dust. Think of the hours we waste at the
piano which no one wants to hear and which we never learn to play; think
of the awful pictures we make, which no one wants to see; the
innumerable things we do that are so much better done by some one else.
There may be male loafers, superabundant male loafers, but it seems to
me as if their united numbers are as nothing compared to those worthy
lady loafers who are perfectly respectable and perfectly idle. Why
should a woman be permitted to loaf unreproved? Is idleness a feminine
privilege?
The average man is trained to do some one thing as well as his
intelligence and his industry will permit, but the average woman is
trained to do nothing, at least nothing well--she cannot even keep house
well. Her only object is to fill her aimless existence with something,
anything, just to kill time.
In other days girls were carefully taught all domestic employments; they
had to learn to keep house, to sew delicately, to cook, and, indeed, to
do all those innumerable minor things which are of such vast importance.
The modern girl is only taught not to be illiterate, that is all. With
this negative quality as a dowry, a pretty face and nice clothes, and
some empty chatter, she is bestowed on a perfectly innocent young man in
search of a helpmate.
Perhaps for the first time she has a little money--I speak, of course,
of the respectable middle-class woman, for the lowest and highest are of
no account, meeting, as they often do, on the dead level of
extravagance. Now what can we expect of a young middle-class wife who
has some money for the first time? That she wastes it when it should be
saved, and saves it when it should be spent. She buys cheap food, but
she decorates her baby with that white plush cloak and that awful plush
cap which her middle-class soul loves, and which bear witness to her
prosperity. So her olive branch is carried about in plush while her
husband has dismal retrospects of other days, hardly appreciated, when
he took his luscious supper at a third-rate restaurant, which in
remembrance seems a banquet fit for the gods.
To spend money in just proportion to one's income, however small, and
not to spend too little--for there is such a thing!--requires a higher
degree of intelligence than the aimless and the inexperienced possess,
and the woman who earns money has a keener, juster knowledge of its
value than the woman who gets it from the masculine head of the family
under whose thumb she languishes. Also, as I have said before, she has
to learn the value of time in the process of evolution from the harem to
the ballot-box.
I have a dear friend, a woman with a massive intellect, who is, however,
not above economy. She has been in search of an ideal greengrocer, and,
after much tribulation of spirit and waste of precious hours that mean
literally pounds to her, she found him in Shepherd's Bush. Lured by the
bucolic name, tempted by a vision of sprouts at "tuppence" per pound
instead of "tuppence ha'penny," she made a pilgrimage there, wasted a
whole precious morning, and joined a phalanx of other mistaken female
economists who stood on wet flags in Indian file, each waiting her turn
to be served. My intelligent friend waited twenty-five minutes, until
she was finally rescued by a serving young man, and had the rapture of
saving sevenpence.
She, naturally, returned home in triumph and in a 'bus, but she was so
used up by her economy that it would have been flattery to call her a
wreck. That night she had a chill, the doctor was summoned in hot haste,
and he proceeded to attend her with that assiduity which only adds
another terror to illness. When to this is added the bills for a
protracted visit to the seaside, my intelligent friend confessed that it
hardly paid to save sevenpence.
Now is it not also the extravagance of pure economy that takes women to
the "sales," where they buy all the things they do not want? Would there
be sales-days if there were only men in the world? Did you ever see a
man go from one shop to another to get a necktie "tuppence" cheaper? To
be penny wise is indeed the supreme attribute of women! For the
economical one it is a terrible ordeal to go shopping with a father or a
brother; a lover is different, he is still full of temporary patience.
But husbands and fathers have no patience.
"If you like it, take it, but don't waste people's time," says the irate
man, as if there weren't innumerable steps to be taken after the initial
process of liking.
"I think I can get it a little nicer at Smith's," you urge, while your
dear one looks at you cynically, for nicer means cheaper, and he knows
it. "Come on then," and he bundles you into a cab, drives to Smith's,
and lets the cab wait while you try to make up your mind. Those dreadful
cabs, how they do make the economical woman suffer. Did you ever hear a
woman declare that it is really cheaper in the end to take a cab? When
does a woman ever think of the end? The average woman avoids a cab on
principle. She feels it due to this same principle to draggle her skirts
through the mud, to get her feet wet, and to come home an "object." But
thank goodness, she has saved a cab fare, and you can get twelve quinine
pills for tuppence.
Is it not also a part of our extravagant economy that makes women eat
such queer things when they are by their lonely selves? What
self-respecting man would lunch off a sultana cake, a tart, or an ice?
Show me the self-respecting woman who has not done it! Women know how to
cook--some of them--but none of them know how to eat. A woman feels that
to eat well and substantially is a sheer waste; there is nothing to show
for it, but she would not hesitate a moment to spend even more in
something that she can show. A man doesn't think twice about having a
"ripping" good dinner and a bottle of extra good wine; he thinks it is
money well spent, but he will be hanged before he would buy himself an
ornamental waistcoat and sustain life on a penny bun.
What awful things we should eat if it were not for men! I am sure _table
d'hôte_ dinners were invented by some philanthropist to save women. "I
cannot eat _à la carte_," said a friend of mine in a piteous burst of
confidence: "it's just like eating money." So when her husband travels
with her he always leads her to the _table d'hôte_ if only to preserve
her from starvation. When she is resigned to the cost, she has an
excellent appetite. I really think if it were not for men women would
wrap themselves in sable and point lace and starve to death.
Is it not the woman who is the apostle of appearances? Go to a dinner
party where the wines and the food are rather poor and well served, and
you may be sure it is the fault of the dear female economist at the head
of the table.
Who of us has not come across a gorgeous establishment where it takes
three footmen and a butler to serve a tough chop of New Zealand lamb.
The presiding goddess afterwards drives out in the park in an equipage
magnificent with coachman and footman, and horses shining like satin
with care and good feeding. No, they are not fed on New Zealand lamb!
For some people it is a wildly extravagant economy to ride in a 'bus. I
know of a family of girls who pine for a 'bus ride as we poor things do
for a chariot and four. They can't afford it; it would ruin the family
credit, which is only kept up by a magnificent carriage--unpaid for--and
a superb coachman and footman whose wages are owing. If one of these
girls were to be seen in a 'bus, it would mean their downfall in the
eyes of the confiding tradesmen. No, not everybody can afford to ride in
a 'bus. After all it is only the rich and great the world permits to be
shabby.
I heard of a nice girl who "slums" and who lives in the East End, having
shaken the dust of Mayfair from her feet. She has reduced self-sacrifice
to a science, and her life is an orgie of self-denial, and she is a
hollow-eyed, haggard young martyr, and keeps body and soul together on
five shillings a week. My only criticism of this scheme of altruism is
that every once in a while she neglects and starves herself into an
awful fit of illness, and has to be taken back to Mayfair and brought to
life, and then the good physician sends a thumping big bill to her
parents, who never get any credit for charity. Now I think even a modern
martyr ought to have just a grain of common sense.
There is a certain intellectual town in America where tramcars still
issue return tickets at reduced rates. How well I remember two dear
maiden ladies, armed with principles, walking up and down in the snow
and sleet of a winter's night one whole hour waiting for the particular
tram which would accept their tickets. They let unnumbered other trams
jingle merrily past, while they paddled about in the slush, strong in
their sense of economy. They each saved three cents, and one nearly died
of pneumonia.
One wonders how many of us die because of our reckless economy? Are we
not for ever doing things for which we have neither the strength nor
the capacity, just to save a few pennies, and do not many of us repent
all our life long? I well remember a lady who to save hiring a man,
lifted her piano to slip a rug under. When I saw her, she had, in
consequence, been a helpless invalid for years with an incurable spine
complaint.
Are not cheap servants another favourite female economy? I have seen a
sensible woman rejoice because she had captured a cheap servant as if,
what with aggravation of spirits and broken crockery, a cheap servant
does not take it out of one in nervous prostration. Not to mention that
the incompetent eat just as much as the competent!
Did I not read this very day how two delightful female economists,
waiting for the opening of a certain theatre, sat on camp-stools from
nine in the morning till seven in the evening of a cold, damp winter day
for a chance to dive into the pit, and so to save a shilling or two. Was
there ever a more cheering example of feminine wisdom and thrift?
I knew a woman who had the economical fad to get double service out of a
match, but she found it awfully expensive. She went upstairs one night
to dress for dinner. A doorway, hung with a frail, floppy art-curtain,
connected her bedroom and her dressing-room. As she entered, she heard
shrieks of "fire" in the street, and tearing open the window she found
the house opposite in flames, and in an instant fire-engines came
clattering through the crowd. She was a kind soul, but she did enjoy
herself immensely, watching it comfortably from her window. It was over
in no time, and as she looked at the chaos of fire-engines and firemen
the thought struck her how convenient it would be if there were another
fire just then in the street, for here they all were ready to put it
out!
Whereupon she lighted the gas, and, true to her principles, carried the
burning match to her dressing-room, through the floppy art-curtain. The
next instant it was all in a blaze, and she was hanging out of the
window shrieking "fire." They broke down her front door, trailed miles
of dirty oozing hose upstairs, and finally left her gazing drearily at
the black ceiling, the sodden furniture, the dirty water pouring
downstairs, and a hideous burnt wall where the fatal art-curtain had
been.
"At any rate," she said to herself, as she took a great, long breath,
"it was convenient."
But since then she has never used a match twice.
How we all do love to save at the spiggot even if it does pour out at
the bung-hole! Who of us has not seen a woman grow thin and sharp and
old, in the struggle to save pennies while her open-handed husband
throws away pounds? It takes a big, broad-minded woman to know when to
open her purse-strings, and perhaps even a bigger and more strong-minded
one to keep them always comfortably ajar.
At what early age can the girl-child be taught that what is too cheap is
usually very dear? The majority of women never learn it. How many a
woman goes out to buy a warm woollen frock and returns home with a
be-chiffoned tissue-paper silk, because it was cheap and looked so
"smart." That ghastly, temporary smartness which is a kind of whited
sepulchre! There is no doubt that the Englishwomen--and I include the
Americans--are the most extravagant in the world.
A Frenchwoman once expressed her amazement to me at the enormous amount
of money Englishwomen spend on what is as useless as froth. Chiffon is
the bane of the Englishwoman; she drapes herself in cheap chiffons while
a Frenchwoman puts her money in a bit of good lace. She adorns herself
with poor furs where a Frenchwoman would buy herself a little thing, but
a good little thing. Finally, when the thrifty Frenchwoman has gathered
together quite a nice collection of lace and fur, the Englishwoman has
nothing to show for her money but a mass of torn and dirty chiffon whose
destination is the rag-bag. After all it is an age of wax beads and
imitation lace, and they represent as well as anything our extravagant
economy.
Is not our middle-class cooking a monument to our extravagance? A
British housewife has it in her power to take away the stoutest appetite
with her respectable joint, her watery vegetable, and the pudding or
tart that should lie as heavy on her conscience as they do on the
stomach. If the Englishwoman would only take to the chiffons of cooking
instead of the chiffons of clothes! It is an extravagance to cook badly;
it is an extravagance to buy things because they are cheap; it is an
extravagance to waste time in doing what someone else can do better (if
one can afford it). After all it is only fair to employ others when one
has the means. Don't we all want to live? Suppose editors wrote the
whole contents of their papers, and publishers only published their own
immortal works! What then?
The other day I had to buy some china to replace what had been broken.
"They break it so quickly," I said to the polite salesman, in a burst of
grief. "But if they didn't, what should we do?" he asked. It really had
not occurred to me before, so a polite salesman taught me a lesson.
It belongs to the economy of the universe that neither we nor anything
else should last for ever. Nature herself is methodically economical,
witness the regular passing of the seasons. And does she not utilise one
in the making of the next?
Yes, what we women need most of all is to be taught unextravagant
economy, which includes the value both of money and of time, for the day
is coming when women's time will really be worth something. Probably it
will work a political economical revolution, but that cannot be helped,
and, after all, the world's progress is punctuated by revolutions. If
women enter men's sphere, the men will have to do something else. Still,
women are barred by their very weakness from innumerable employments,
and though they demand to vote, one never hears a very enthusiastic plea
on their part to fight.
So let women earn, or at all events let them be given money as a right
and not as a begrudged charity, and it will be cheaper for men in the
end, with the result that our economy will become less irresponsibly
extravagant. Possibly we will not save much, but we may live better,
and, joy of joys, the doctors' bills will undoubtedly grow beautifully
less, for I am sure that the immense prosperity of that learned and
disinterested profession is mainly due to our extravagant economy.
_A Modern Tendency_
Where are the aged gone? At any rate the aged women? The fact is, there
are no aged women; for, behold! the hairdresser, the milliner and the
dressmaker have all decreed that there shall be no old age--and, lo! the
miracle is performed; and our venerable grandmothers who once were old
are now only strenuous copies, perhaps a trifle overdone, of our more or
less youthful selves.
Who has not been told that she looks most lovely in a hat in which her
last grain of common sense must clamour aloud that she really looks like
a fright? Have not each of us, my suffering sisters, had relays of awful
hats tried on our unoffending heads till we look like tortured ghosts,
crowned by a wreath of roses or cabbages, and loomed over by a terrible
young person in black satin? How that young person--well--prevaricated,
and how the cold irony of her eye cut us to the quick!
I am dreadfully afraid to say so, but there are no serving young ladies
who are so cruel as the milliners' young ladies. They are of course not
all perfectly beautiful, but their wonderful tresses are always built up
in such an artful way that they never fail to nestle in the nooks and
crevices of the most unearthly creations. But they always say "It just
suits Madam," even when they cannot possibly reconcile it to their
conscience!
One asks why do all the big shops employ, for the destruction of the
public, those tall sylph-like creatures who float about like denizens of
a higher sphere, in their wonderful black satins. These satin robes have
such an air that the white pins which occasionally hold together a rip
look only like an eccentric ornament. The divine lengths of those
graceful figures!
They are a serious unbending race to whom all things are becoming. So
when they trail up and down what may be termed the trial halls of
fashion to show off to a short, stout customer a garment to which she
mistakenly aspires, no wonder that, struck by a temporary insanity, she
succumbs. She is convinced that her five feet by an equal breadth will
look like a five-foot ten inches, which is, besides, so attenuated that
it is a problem how the young person can dispose of anything even so
ethereal as a penny bun. Why not be merciful and employ a dumpy lot for
dumpy customers!
It is a terrible thing in these days that there is no growing old. No
happy time comes when the tired features are at liberty to sink into
comfortable wrinkles, and nobody cares. The supreme joy of taking one's
well-earned rest saying, "Behold, I am old! Age also has its beauties
and compensations." The trouble is that nobody really believes it to be
a joy.
There is probably no parting so painful as the parting from the days of
one's youth; even if the outside be ever so youthful there is a knell in
one's heart that tolls to the burial. One of the surest signs of age is
when one begins to think of the past. Youth dreams of the future, middle
age lives in the present, but old age dreams of the past. But whoever
acknowledges dreaming of the past now that old age is out of fashion!
Years and years ago, when our mothers were very young, there was a
distinct fashion for elderly people; certain colours were sacred to
them, certain fashions, certain fabrics and certain jewels. What young
creature would have foolishly decked herself in either purple or yellow?
Youth rejoicing in sparkling eyes, resigned diamonds to its elders, and
all aglow with hope and illusions left point lace to deck the stately
shoulders of age along with velvet.
Now fashion is a republic and the only arbiter is a bank balance or
credit, and young things frisk it in diamonds, velvet, point lace and
sables, and their old grandmothers shiver along in _mousseline de soie_
and chiffon, roses wreathe their golden locks, red locks, black locks,
as the case may be, but never their grey locks, and the winds of heaven
fan their ageing shoulder-blades. The art of growing old gracefully is
so rare that no wonder we cling to the hairdresser and the dressmaker
with pathetic hands, just to postpone the evil hour; sometimes we think
we have escaped the evil hour altogether. How we do cheat ourselves!
It is perhaps one of the most blessed dispensations of our frail human
nature that we do not really know how we look; that when we gaze into a
mirror we do not see the sober disillusioning reflection, but rather
some fondly imagined image of ourselves. No woman is heroic enough to
look her imperfections squarely in the face, or why do we see such
curious apparitions? Why does that worn old face hide behind that white
veil dotted with black? Because, when she sees her mistaken old features
in the glass, then she sees what she longs to see, and when her old
heart cannot pump up sufficient pink she dabs on that ghastly rose which
has never yet deceived anyone.
Ah, yes, the twentieth century is distinctly reserved for youth--old age
is not in it! It is a bad fashion set by that spoilt child of the
world--America. The world pays the same deference to America that the
average American parent pays to his obstreperous child. Yes, the
American child rules the roost, and America rules the world; therefore,
what wonder that age grows more and more unpopular.
The other day I saw in several papers that in a certain industry no
workman would be employed in future who was more than forty. Put
yourself in the place of a man of forty who is shelved and knows of no
other way of earning his living! If he becomes a criminal, who can blame
him? Recently I read a curious paragraph about the increasing use of
hair-dye among working men. Not beer and tobacco, mind you, but just
hair-dye! Why? Because employers do not want old workmen. So the men
ward off the crime of growing old with hair-dye. Was there ever a more
comic tragedy?