Part 69

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.