the factory that employs us is something very different from the ordinary earthly model. our business is to finish making little wooden toys — bears, cattle men, and the like — for children. the things are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished by hand, because the work of unskilful but interested men — and it really is an extremely amusing employment — is found to give a personality and interest to these objects no machine can ever attain.
we carvers — who are the riffraff of utopia — work in a long shed together, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the length of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toys for each spell of work. the rules of the game as between employer and employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us; they are drawn up by a conference of the common council of wages workers with the employers, a common council which has resulted in utopia from a synthesis of the old trades unions, and which has become a constitutional power; but any man who has skill or humour is presently making his own bargain with our employer more or less above that datum line.
our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humorous smile. he dresses wholly in an indigo blue, that later we come to consider a sort of voluntary uniform for utopian artists. as he walks about the workshop, stopping to laugh at this production or praise that, one is reminded inevitably of an art school. every now and then he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or departs to the machinery to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning out. our work is by no means confined to animals. after a time i am told to specialise in a comical little roman-nosed pony; but several of the better paid carvers work up caricature images of eminent utopians. over these our employer is most disposed to meditate, and from them he darts off most frequently to improve the type.
it is high summer, and our shed lies open at either end. on one hand is a steep mountain side down which there comes, now bridging a chasm, now a mere straight groove across a meadow, now hidden among green branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the purple forest overhead. above us, but nearly hidden, hums the machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into which, with a mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. every now and then, bringing with him a gust of resinous smell, a white-clad machinist will come in with a basketful of crude, unwrought little images, and will turn them out upon the table from which we carvers select them.
(whenever i think of utopia that faint and fluctuating smell of resin returns to me, and whenever i smell resin, comes the memory of the open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green lake, the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high beyond floats the atmospheric fairyland of the mountains of glarus, twenty miles away.)
the cessation of the second and last spell of work comes about midday, and then we walk home, through this beautiful intricacy of a town to our cheap hotel beside the lake.
we should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that we were earning scarcely more than the minimum wage. we should have, of course, our uneasiness about the final decisions of that universal eye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham numbers on our consciences; but that general restlessness, that brooding stress that pursues the weekly worker on earth, that aching anxiety that drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking, and violent and mean offences will have vanished out of mortal experience.
