After this growl of disapprobation, the speaker buried himself anew in the advertising columns of the Herald, and I lapsed into a brown study, which had for its germ the query, “Is it, then, more respectable, even among men, to kill time than to save it?”
I knew the reader of Froude well. He was, as I have intimated, a successful and a busy merchant; and I had often marvelled at his familiarity with English belles-lettres, and graver literature, the study of which is usually given up to so-called professional men. That hour a day explained it all. The crowded street-car was his sedan-chair. I also knew his critic; had seen him placed at such a woful disadvantage in the society of educated men and women, that my heart ached and my cheeks burned in sympathy with his mortification; had heard him deplore the deficiencies of his early training, and that the exigencies of his business-cares now made self-improvement impracticable. He would have protested it to be an impossibility that he could find a spare hour a day to devote to the neglected task; six hours a week—a whole day in a month, two weeks in a year. Yet a fortnight of newspaper-reading and idle gossip would be a sorry entry in his year-book. For this lazy murder of time cannot, by any stretch of conscience, be classed as healthful recreation, any more than can the one, two, three, ten hours a week during which Mrs. Neverthink sits with folded hands, discussing fashions and her neighbors’ frailties, the while her work is steadily doubling itself up, snowball-like, before the lever of each idle minute. All work and no play would make Mrs. Neverthink a dull and a diseased woman; but the fact is, she is not playing any more than she is working, as she sits, or stands to parley about trifles. She is only wasting time, making inevitable the haste. Oh! these “few words more,” with which the Neverthink tribe prolong the agony of their would-be-if-they-could industrious sisters, and heap up the burden of their own coming cares! The words which mean nothing, the driblets of a shallow, sluggish stream that meanders into anybody’s meadow, and spreads itself harmfully over the nearest pastures, instead of being directed into a straight, beneficent channel! “I haven’t a bit of system about me!” wails the worried creature, when the ponderous snow-ball has finally to be heaved out of the way by her own hands.
It would be a matter of curious interest could I recount how often I have heard this plaint from those of my own sex who are thus straining and suffering. From some it comes carelessly—a form of words they have fallen into the habit of repeating without much thought of what they mean. With a majority (I wish I were not obliged to say it!) it is rather a boast than a lament. The notable housekeeper who would be ashamed to admit that she does not look narrowly after paper and twine, bits of cold meat and scraps of butter, does not calculate wisely concerning coal, candle-ends and crusts—confesses, without a blush, that she takes no thought of the gold-dust, known among us as minutes and seconds, sifting through her lax fingers. By and by, she is as truly impoverished as if she had thrown away the treasure in nuggets, and then comes the lament, not repentance. She is “run to death with work, but she doesn’t see how it is to be helped. All other housekeepers are the same. She never could economize time; has no genius for arranging her labors to advantage.”
The building of such an one is the heaping together of boulders with crevices between, through which the winds of disappointment whistle sharply. System,—by which we mean a sagacious and economical apportionment of the duty to the hour and the minute; an avoidance of needless waste of time; a courageous putting forth of the hand to the plough, instead of talking over the work to be done while the cool morning moments are flying,—“System,” then, is not a talent! I wish I could write this in terms so strong and striking as to command the attention, enforce the belief of those whom I would reach. It is not a talent. Still less is it genius. It is a duty! and she who shirks it does herself and others wrong. If you cannot order your household according to this rule, the fault is yours, and the misfortune theirs.
“We are living too fast!” is the useless note of alarm sounded from press, and pulpit, and lecture-room; echoed in a thousand homes, in various accents of regret and dismay; most fearfully by the rattling clods upon the coffin-lid, that hides forever the careworn face of wife and mother, who has been trampled to death by the press of iron-footed cares. Is not this haste begotten by waste?
Is there any good reason why, in our homes—yours and mine, my toiling sister—and in those of our neighbors to the right and left of us, should not reign such method as prevails in our husbands’ places of business? Why, instead of meeting the morning with uplifted hands and the already desponding cry, “I have so much to do I cannot decide what to lay hold of first!” we should not behold our path already mapped out by our provident study over-night—its certain duties; its probable stumbling-blocks; recreation, devotion and rest—each in its proper place? Why we should not be ready, “heart within and God o’erhead,” to make the new day an event in our lives, a stepping-stone to higher usefulness to our kind and toward heaven? Why we should not bring to hindrance, as to duty, the resolute, hopeful purpose with which the miner bends over his pickaxe, the gardener over his spade, the book-keeper over his ledger? Why, in short, we should not magnify our office—make of housewifery, and child-tending, and sewing a profession—to be studied as diligently and pursued as steadily as are the avocations of the other sex?
I should not dare ask these questions, were I not already convinced, by years of patient examination of the subject, that it is feasible for a clear-headed, conscientious woman to do all this, and more. Would not “dare,” because I know by what a storm of indignant protest the queries will be met, not only from those who pride themselves upon the amiable foible of “having no system,” but on the part of deep-hearted women who are really anxious to do their share of this world’s great work.
The pale-faced mother over the way will tell me of the clutch of baby-fingers upon her garments whenever she essays to move steadily onward, and how the pressure of the same holds her eyes waking through the night-watches; how the weight of baby-lips upon the breast saps strength and vitality together. Dear and precious cares she esteems these; but they leave little time or energy for anything else. The matron, whose younglings have outgrown childhood, is ready with her story of the toils and distractions of a family of merry girls who are “in society,” and inconsiderate, unpunctual “boys,” who look to “mother” to supply, for the present, the place of the coming wife to each of them. Martha, wedded and middle-aged, but childless, is overpowered by cares, “put upon her by everybody,” she relates, with an ever-renewed sense of injury wearing into her soul, “because it is believed that women without children have nothing to do.”
One and all, they are eloquent upon the subject of unforeseen vexations, the ever-hindering “happenings” that, like the knots tied in wire-grass across the path by mischievous fairies, are continually tripping them up.
“Moreover,” says Mrs. Practical, “there is little use in attempting to be methodical and to save the scraps of time unless other people do. We are liable to have our precious hoard stolen at any moment. If my next-door neighbor persists in ‘dropping in’ whenever she feels lonely, or wants a receipt, or has a morsel of news she cannot keep, and cannot withdraw her unseasonable foot from my house under an hour at each visit, of what avail are my watchfulness and diligence?”