Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  It had cost $2.40 each to get them there and back with their baggage. To feed them, using the animals on the place and the garden, was not above $2.00 a week. This left $2,430.00. To Mrs Olsen and the sturdy flaxen-braided damsel she had to help her, Dacia paid cash, — $10.00 a week, including the girl’s board, but this was only $130.00. Then Dacia paid herself back the $500.00 she had invested, allowed $300.00 for refitting, and had a clear $1,500.00 for her further plans.

  Dacia smiled and put it in the bank. She was twenty-two now. That winter she rented a pleasant hall; supplied it with refreshments from the lunch room; had dancing classes established under decent and reasonable management; sublet it for part of the time, and added steadily to her little fund.

  Another summer’s vacation income, with greater patronage and small additional expense, left her, at twenty-three, with quite a little sum. She had all together her first saving of $500.00, additional for a year $200.00 (she earned $15.00 a week, boarded for $7.00, dress and incidentals, $3.00 and saved $4.00), the first year’s $1,500.00, the winter’s additional earning from her rented hall, amounting to $800.00, and the second year’s increased income of $1,800.00 — in all $4,800.00.

  ‘Daddy,’ said she, ‘let’s you and me go into the road business. Can’t we rent a stone-crusher? How many horses would it need? Don’t you think the county will help?’

  Mr Ordway went up to the ranch with her and looked over the plant. There were the rough but usable sleeping and eating accommodations, and a small saw and planing mill. There were the Olsens, extremely pleased with themselves. The good wife had earned not only her wages but about half of the board money, paid in for milk, meat, eggs and vegetables. This had gone promptly back to Dacia in payment for their stock, and also enabled them to lay in groceries for the winter. Fuel was plenty and Mr Olsen’s two years’ work had already covered most of their purchase money.

  ‘But how about labor, Miss Promoter?’ asked Mr Ordway. ‘Do you realize what it means to feed and pay the force of men we’d need?’

  ‘And how about The Unemployed?’ she answered promptly. ‘Some of them are good workmen — and you know how to pick and manage them. If they are sure of shelter and food and steady work, even at moderate pay — don’t you think you could get ’em to come?’

  Mr Ordway consulted with local officials and other owners of homesteads and timber land in the neighborhood. Everyone wanted the road. Here was some capital offered, waterpower, a competent manager and accommodations for the men. And here was ‘The Problem of The Unemployed’ looming ahead for the winter. This would remove a little of that difficulty.

  So the County was induced to help.

  ‘It’s only a drop in the bucket,’ said Dacia, ‘but if County Canomish can do it, why can’t the others? There’s Power enough — there’s Material enough — there’s Brains enough — and there’s Labor enough. And a little capital goes a good way, seems to me.’

  By spring they had a good hard road, opening up much valuable land and adding much to the prosperity of the whole region; and Dacia had just enough money left, from another winter’s earnings and saving, to fumigate and refit her camp.

  But that year everything was easier on account of the road, and the greater popularity of the place kept it fuller, and longer open. Five hundred girls and women, in different parties, came up; and Dacia invested one dollar from each $12.50 in improving and beautifying the place, still clearing over $2,500.

  She was twenty-four now, and very happy. So was Mr Ordway. He was able to dispose of some of his lumber and start planting the fruit ranch which his heart desired. Mrs Ordway viewed it all with grudging admiration.

  ‘Yes — it’s very nice,’ she admitted to her daughter. ‘Very nice, indeed, but I can’t help thinking what your father would have done with a chance like this. But then, he was a man of Financial Genius! If only you had been a boy, Dacia! And if he had only lived to help you!’

  ‘But my second father is helping me,’ said Dacia. ‘And I’m perfectly willing to be a girl — rather glad I am one, in fact.’ Then she consulted further with Mr Ordway. ‘Daddy — can you make furniture out of the kind of wood you’ve got there?’

  ‘Why, yes — I could, I suppose. I never thought of it — plain kitchen sort of furniture. There’s not much hard wood.’

  ‘But there’s some. And you can set out more, can’t you?’

  ‘Set out — ! Plant hardwood trees! Child, you’re crazy. Hardwood timber doesn’t grow up like lettuce.’

  ‘How long does it take to be — cuttable?’

  ‘Oh — thirty years at least, I should say.’

  ‘Well — let’s plant some. It will be valuable when I’m fifty-five or so — and your own children will be younger — they may be glad of it. But meantime I want to propose that you start a little Grand Rapids right by our waterfall there. Can’t the mill be turned into a furniture factory? Nice cheap plain furniture — painted or stained — and sold to the folks out here that can’t pay the freight on Eastern stuff.’

  ‘Hm!’ Mr Ordway considered. He got out his pencil. He made some estimates. ‘There’s that young Pedersen,’ he said, ‘the Olsen’s cousin — he’s a good designer — you’ve seen what he’s made for them?’

  Dacia had seen it, and had thought about it quite carefully, but she made no admissions.

  ‘Do you think he’d be useful?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure he would,’ said Mr Ordway. ‘Dacia, child, you surely have a business head — why there’s no real furniture factory on this coast. We might — we might do pretty well, I think.’

  Olaf Pedersen thought so too.

  ‘Your wood is much like the wood of our country,’ he said. ‘And we make furniture. I have no capital, but I will design and work, gladly.’

  They began cautiously, with a small workshop, a moderate investment in machinery, and Dacia’s big connection of people of small incomes, as advertising ground. She herself had so much faith in the enterprise that she gave up her position and became ‘the office force’ for the undertaking.

  Next year they established the firm of Ordway, Boone & Pedersen. The modesty of their methods was such that they encountered practically no opposition until it was too late to crush them.

  ‘A pleased customer is the best advertisement.’ And there were several hundred pleased customers spreading the good news. Furniture that was solid and strong; that was simple, novel and pretty; that was amazingly cheap; that was made right there in their own state — it really pleased the people, and they supported the business.

  Even the railroads, finding that their freight payment was as good as others, and that their trade was steadily growing, ceased to be antagonistic.

  Mr Ordway settled down to steady work that had a future.

  ‘Dacia,’ said he. ‘I’m mighty glad that, well, that I inherited you. You see, I can work and I’m honest, but you’ve got the brains. You can push.’

  ‘It’s Olaf, too, Daddy — it’s mostly Olaf — he puts the novelty and beauty into it.’

  ‘Yes, it’s Olaf too. You are both good partners. I shall leave the business to you when I go.’

  And he did, — to two who were partners of a closer sort long before then; and Boone & Pedersen developed a furniture industry which was of immense service to the whole coast.

  DR CLAIR’S PLACE

  ‘You must count your mercies,’ said her friendly adviser. ‘There’s no cloud so dark but it has a silver lining, you know, — count your mercies.’

  She looked at her with dull eyes that had known no hope for many years. ‘Perhaps you will count them for me: Health — utterly broken and gone since I was twenty-four. Youth gone too — I am thirty-eight. Beauty — I never had it. Happiness — buried in shame and bitterness these fourteen years. Motherhood — had and lost. Usefulness — I am too weak even to support myself. I have no money. I have no friends. I have no home. I have no work. I have no hope in life.’ Then a dim glow of resolution flickered in tho
se dull eyes. ‘And what is more I don’t propose to bear it much longer.’

  It is astonishing what people will say to strangers on the cars. These two sat on the seat in front of me, and I had heard every syllable of their acquaintance, from the ‘Going far?’ of the friendly adviser to this confidence as to proposed suicide. The offerer of cheerful commonplaces left before long, and I took her place, or rather the back-turned seat facing it, and studied the Despairing One.

  Not a bad looking woman, but so sunk in internal misery that her expression was that of one who had been in prison for a lifetime. Her eyes had that burned out look, as hopeless as a cinder heap; her voice a dreary grating sound. The muscles of her face seemed to sag downward. She looked at the other passengers as if they were gray ghosts and she another. She looked at the rushing stretches we sped past as if the window were ground glass. She looked at me as if I were invisible.

  ‘This,’ said I to myself, ‘is a case for Dr Clair.’

  It was not difficult to make her acquaintance. There was no more protective tissues about her than about a skeleton. I think she would have showed the utter wreck of her life to any who asked to look, and not have realized their scrutiny. In fact it was not so much that she exhibited her misery, as that she was nothing but misery — whoever, saw her, saw it.

  I was a ‘graduate patient’ of Dr Clair, as it happened; and had the usual enthusiasms of the class. Also I had learned some rudiments of the method, as one must who has profited by it. By the merest touch of interest and considerate attention I had the ‘symptoms’ — more than were needed; by a few indicated ‘cases I had known’ I touched that spring of special pride in special misery which seems to be co-existent with life; and then I had an account which would have been more than enough for Dr Clair to work on.

  Then I appealed to that queer mingling of this pride and of the deep instinct of social service common to all humanity, which Dr Clair had pointed out to me, and asked her —

  ‘If you had an obscure and important physical disease you’d be glad to leave your body to be of service to science, wouldn’t you?’ She would — anyone would, of course.

  ‘You can’t leave your mind for an autopsy very well, but there’s one thing you can do — if you will; and that is, give this clear and prolonged self-study you have made, to a doctor I know who is profoundly interested in neurasthenia — melancholia — all that kind of thing. I really think you’d be a valuable — what shall I say — exhibit.’

  She gave a little muscular smile, a mere widening of the lips, the heavy gloom of her eyes unaltered.

  ‘I have only money enough to go where I am going,’ she said. ‘I have just one thing to do there — that ought to be done before I — leave.’

  There was no air of tragedy about her. She was merely dead, or practically so.

  ‘Dr Clair’s is not far from there, as it happens, and I know her well enough to be sure she’d be glad to have you come. You won’t mind if I give you the fare up there — purely as a scientific experiment? There are others who may profit by it, you see.’

  She took the money, looking at it as if she hardly knew what it was, saying dully: ‘All right — I’ll go.’ And, after a pause, as if she had half forgotten it, ‘Thank you.’

  And some time later she added: ‘My name is Octavia Welch.’

  Dr Willy Clair — she was Southern, and really named Willy — was first an eager successful young teacher, very young. Then she spent a year or two working with atypical children. Then, profoundly interested, she plunged into the study of medicine and became as eager and successful a doctor as she had been a teacher. She specialized in psychopathic work, developed methods of her own, and with the initial aid of some of her numerous ‘GPs’ established a sanatorium in Southern California. There are plenty of such for ‘lungers,’ but this was of quite another sort.

  She married, in the course of her full and rich career, one of her patients, a young man who was brought to her by his mother — a despairing ruin. It took five years to make him over, but it was done, and then they were married. He worshipped her; and she said he was the real mainstay of the business — and he was, as far as the business part of it went.

  Dr Clair was about forty when I sent Octavia Welch up there. She had been married some six years, and had, among her other assets, two splendid children. But other women have husbands and children, also splendid — no one else had a psycho-sanatorium. She didn’t call it that; the name on the stationery was just ‘The Hills.’

  On the southern face of the Sierra Madres she had bought a high-lying bit of mesa-land and steep-sided arroyo, and gradually added to it both above and below, until it was now quite a large extent of land. Also she had her own water; had built a solid little reservoir in her deepest canyon; had sunk an artesian well far up in the hills behind, ran a windmill to keep the water up, and used the overflow for power as well as for irrigation. That had made the whole place such garden land as only Southern California knows. From year to year, the fame of the place increased, and its income also, she built and improved; and now it was the most wonderful combination of peaceful, silent wilderness and blossoming fertility.

  The business end of it was very simply managed. On one of the steep flat-topped mesas, the one nearest the town that lay so pleasantly in the valley below, she had built a comfortable, solid little Center surrounded by small tent-houses. Here she took ordinary patients, and provided them not only with good medical advice but with good beds and good food, and further with both work and play.

  ‘The trouble with Sanatoriums,’ said Dr Clair to me — we were friends since the teaching period, and when I broke down at my teaching I came to her and was mended— ‘is that the sick folks have nothing to do but sit about and think of themselves and their “cases.” Now I let the relatives come too; some well ones are a resource; and I have one or more regularly engaged persons whose business it is to keep them busy — and amused.’

  She did. She had for the weakest ones just chairs and hammocks; but these were moved from day to day so that the patient had new views. There was an excellent library, and all manner of magazines and papers. There were picture-puzzles too, with little rimmed trays to set them up in — they could be carried here and there, but not easily lost. Then there were all manner of easy things to learn to do; basket-work, spinning, weaving, knitting, embroidery; it cost very little to the patients and kept them occupied. For those who were able there was gardening and building — always some new little place going up, or a walk or something to make. Her people enjoyed life every day. All this was not compulsory, of course, but they mostly liked it.

  In the evenings there was music, and dancing too, for those who were up to it; cards and so on, at the Center; while the others went off to their quiet little separate rooms. Everyone of them had a stove in it; they were as dry and warm as need be — which is more than you can say of most California places.

  People wanted to come and board — well people, I mean — and from year to year she ran up more cheap comfortable little shacks, each with its plumbing, electric lights and heating — she had water-power, you see — and a sort of cafeteria place where they could eat together or buy food and take to their homes. I tell you it was popular. Mr Wolsey (that’s her husband, but she kept on as Dr Clair) ran all this part of it, and ran it well. He had been a hotel man.

  All this was only a foundation for her real work with the psychopathic cases. But it was a good foundation, and it paid in more ways than one. She not only had the usual string of Grateful Patients, but another group of friends among those boarders.

  And there’s one thing she did which is well worth the notice of other people who are trying to help humanity — or to make money — in the same way.

  You know how a hotel will have a string of ‘rules and regulations’ strung up in every room? She had that — and more. She had a ‘Plain Talk With Boarders’ leaflet, which was freely distributed — a most amusing and useful document. I haven’t
one here to quote directly, but it ran like this:

  You come here of your own choice, for your own health and pleasure, freely; and are free to go when dissatisfied. The comfort and happiness of such a place depends not only on the natural resources, on the quality of the accommodations, food, service and entertainment, but on the behavior of the guests.

  Each visitor is requested to put in a complaint at the office, not only of fault in the management, but of objectionable conduct on the part of patrons.

  Even without such complaint any visitor who is deemed detrimental in character or behavior will be requested to leave.

  She did it too. She made the place so attractive, so comfortable, in every way so desirable, that there was usually a waiting list; and if one of these fault-finding old women, or noisy, disagreeable young men, or desperately flirtatious persons got in, Dr Clair would have it out with them.

  ‘I am sorry to announce that you have been black-balled by seven of your fellow guests. I have investigated the complaints and find them well founded. We herewith return your board from date (that was always paid in advance) and shall require your room tomorrow.’

  People didn’t like to own to a thing like that — not and tell the truth. They did tell all manner of lies about the place, of course; but she didn’t mind — there were far more people to tell the truth. I can tell you a boarding-place that is as beautiful, as healthful, as exquisitely clean and comfortable, and as reasonable as hers in price, is pretty popular. Then, from year to year, she enlarged and developed her plan till she had, I believe, the only place in the world where a sick soul could go and be sure of help.

  Here’s what Octavia Welch wrote about it. She showed it to me years later:

  I was dead — worse than dead — buried — decayed — gone to foul dirt. In my body I still walked heavily — but out of accumulated despair I had slowly gathered about enough courage to drop that burden. Then I met the Friend on the train who sent me to Dr Clair....