Chapter 26

With a roar the beast sprang at him--sprang through the loop--and at the other end of the rope Loveless yanked quickly and caught her by the last hind leg going through. Putting spurs to his horse, Loveless galloped away, hauling the lioness back across the gully and up into the tree, where she swung to and fro, dangling by the one hind foot and snapping upward at the rope she could not reach.

"Got her!" yelled the Colonel. "Now the rains can come when they like."

The beast was furious. She was still swinging, head down like a pendulum, from the limb of the tree, and was tossing her body about in frantic endeavor to get loose. Means approached close and deftly slipped a noose over one of the wildly gyrating fore-legs. Leading his rope over the branch of another tree, he stretched her out in a helpless position parallel with the ground.

"Now lower away on both lines," said the Colonel.

He dismounted and stood beneath her, directing affairs as methodically as the foreman of a construction gang.

"Steady, Means--a little more, Loveless--now together--easy."

She came within his reach and with a quick grab he caught and held her two hind legs with both hands while Kearton bound them together with a piece of light line.

The rest was easy. In less than five minutes she was bound securely and lowered all the way to the ground to rest in the shade.

It was nearly noon, and time to call a halt to let the heat of the day pass over before attempting to bring her back to camp. Porters were sent to fetch food and more water, horses were off-saddled and turned loose to graze, and one by one the dogs came straggling in.

The men stretched themselves out on the ground where a bush or a tree afforded some protection from the sun. But the Colonel kept wandering over to the prize, to examine a knot, to arrange a better shade, or to pour the last drops of water from his canteen into her open mouth. Once he stood over her for a while, watching her vain attempts to cut the ropes with her teeth.

"Yes, you're a beauty," he finally said. "You're certainly a beauty. I guess we'll just have to take you home with us as a souvenir of the trip."

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 767-777 part 4.}

By WILLIAM HARD

IV

THE WASTERS

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.