Months,
the others for as long as they can; and, like drawing like, they make
communities set by set, breed by breed, division by division, over the
length and breadth of the land - from Maine and the upper reaches of the
Saguenay, through the mountains and hot springs of half-a-dozen
interior States, out and away to Sitka in steamers. Then they spend
money on hotel bills, among ten thousand farms, on private companies who
lease and stock land for sporting purposes, on yachts and canoes,
bicycles, rods, chalets, cottages, reading circles, camps, tents, and
all the luxuries they know. But the luxury of rest most of them do not
know; and the telephone and telegraph are faithfully dragged after them,
lest their men-folk should for a moment forget the ball and chain at
foot.
For sadness with laughter at bottom there are few things to compare with
the sight of a coat-less, muddy-booted, millionaire, his hat adorned
with trout-flies, and a string of small fish in his hand, clawing wildly
at the telephone of some back-of-beyond 'health resort.' Thus:
'Hello! Hello! Yes. Who's there? Oh, all right. Go ahead. Yes, it's me!
Hey, what? Repeat. Sold for how much? Forty-four and a half? Repeat.
No! I told you to hold on. What? What? Who bought at that? Say, hold
a minute. Cable the other side. No. Hold on. I'll come down. (Business
with watch.) Tell Schaefer I'll see him to-morrow.' (Over his shoulder
to his wife, who wears half-hoop diamond rings at 10 A.M.) 'Lizzie,
where's my grip? I've got to go down.'
And he goes down to eat in a hotel and sleep in his shut-up house. Men
are as scarce at most of the summer places as they are in Indian
hill-stations in late April. The women tell you that they can't get
away, and if they did they would only be miserable to get back. Now
whether this wholesale abandonment of husbands by wives is wholesome let
those who know the beauties of the Anglo-Indian system settle for
themselves.
That both men and women need rest very badly a glance at the crowded
hotel tables makes plain - so plain, indeed, that the foreigner who has
not been taught that fuss and worry are in themselves honourable wishes
sometimes he could put the whole unrestful crowd to sleep for seventeen
hours a day. I have inquired of not less than five hundred men and women
in various parts of the States why they broke down and looked so gash.
And the men said: 'If you don't keep up with the procession in America
you are left'; and the women smiled an evil smile and answered that no
outsider yet had discovered the real cause of their worry and strain, or
why their lives were arranged to work with the largest amount of
friction in the shortest given time.
