CHAPTER XVIII[ToC]
MATURING PLANS
I received several offers from other firms and as a result of these my wages were advanced first to three dollars a day and then to three and a half. Still Ruth refused to take things easier by increasing the household expenses. During the third year we lived exactly as we had lived during the first year. In a way it was easier to do this now that we knew there was no actual necessity for it. Of course it was easier, too, now that we had fallen into a familiar routine. The things which had seemed to us like necessities when we came down here now seemed like luxuries. And we none of us had either the craving for luxuries or the time to enjoy them had we wished to spend the money on them. In the matter of clothes we cared for nothing except to be warmly and cleanly dressed. Strip the problem of clothes down to this and it's not a very serious one. To realize that you've only to remember how the average farmer dresses or how the homesteader dresses. It's only when you introduce style and the conventions that the matter becomes complicated. Perhaps it was easier for me to dress as I pleased than for the boy or Ruth but even they got right down to bed rock. The boy wore grey flannel shirts and so at a stroke did away with collars and cuffs. For the rest a simple blue suit, a cap, stockings and shoes were all he needed outside his under clothes which Ruth made for him. Ruth herself dressed in plain gowns that she could do up herself. For the street, she still had the costumes she came down here with. None of us kept any extra clothes for parade.
We carried out the same idea in our food, as I've tried to show; we insisted that it must be wholesome and that there must be enough of it. Those were the only two things that counted. Variety except of the humblest kind, we didn't strive for. I've seen cook books which contain five hundred pages; if Ruth compiled one it wouldn't have twenty. Here again the farmer and the pioneer were our models. If anyone in the country had lived the way we were living, it wouldn't have seemed worth telling about. I find the fact which amazes people in our experiment was that we should have tried the same standard in the city. Everyone seems to think this was a most dangerous thing to attempt. The men who on a camping trip consider themselves well fed on such food as we had to eat expect to starve to death if placed on the same diet once within sound of the trolley cars. And on the camping trip they do ten times the physical labor and do it month after month in air that whets the appetite. Then they come back and boast how strong they've grown, and begin to eat like hogs again and wonder why they get sick.
We camped out in the city—that's all we did. And we did just what every man in camp does; we stripped down to essentials. We could have lived on pork scraps and potatoes if that had been necessary. We could have worried along on hard tack and jerked beef if we'd been pressed hard enough. Men chase moose, and climb mountains and prospect for gold on such food. Why in Heaven's name can't they shovel dirt on the same diet?
So, too, about amusements. When a man is trying to clear thirty acres of pine stumps, he doesn't fret at the end of the day because he can't go to the theatre. He doesn't want to go. Bed and his dreams are amusement enough for him. And he isn't called a low-browed savage because he's satisfied with this. He's called a hero. The world at large doesn't say that he has lowered the standard of living; it boasts about him for a true American. Why can't a man lay bricks without the theatre?
As a matter of fact however we could have had even the amusements if we'd wanted them. For those who needed such things in order to preserve a high standard of living they were here. And I don't say they didn't serve a useful purpose. What I do say is that they aren't absolutely necessary; that a high standard of living isn't altogether dependent on sirloin steaks, starched collars and music halls as I've heard a good many people claim.