The Women of Tomorrow Part 12

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 Lancas.h.i.+re, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton, inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 mult.i.tudes behind it, past and present mult.i.tudes, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s. 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 mult.i.tudes 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 cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--s.h.i.+RKING-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 gra.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 c.o.c.ktails 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 d.u.c.h.ess.

The d.u.c.h.ess 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, 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 taxicabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the Novellapolis Athletic Club--an infinitely resourceful estate, which Margaret knows as intimately as the d.u.c.h.ess 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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. 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. n.o.body 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?"