You don't get a very good class of servant down this way, my mother
says, but then she is so particular. She is the kind of mistress who
knows how to do everything better herself, and that kind never gets good
servants; it seems to paralyze the poor girls, and make them limp and
without an idea in their heads, or what they choose to call their heads,
which I strongly suspect is their stomachs. You can punish or reward a
servant best through its stomach, and don't give them beer, or
beer-money either! Beer makes them cross or cheeky, depending, I
suppose, on the make of the beer. Mother never gives it. They buy it, I
know, but I never tell. It would be as much as my place (in the kitchen)
is worth, and I value my right of free entry.
Mother is terribly down on dust too. She has a book about germ culture,
and sees germs in everything. It doesn't make her any happier. But as
for dusting, so far as I can see, what they call dusting is only a plan
for raising the dirt and taking it to some other place. It gets into our
mouths in the end. I do pity Matter that is always getting into the
wrong place, chivied here and there, with no resting-place for the sole
of the foot. For whenever Mother sees dust anywhere, or suspects it, she
makes a cross with her finger in it, and the servants are supposed to
see the cross and feel ashamed. Though I don't believe any servant was
ever ashamed in her life. 'Tisn't in their natures. They just grin and
bear with it--with the dust, and the scolding too.
"It's 'er little way," I heard Sarah say once, not a bit unkindly or
disagreeably, though, after Mother had come down on her about something.
But once I caught the very same girl shaking her fist at George's back
and calling him "an old beast!"
"Sarah," I said, "whom are you addressing?"
"The doctor's donkey, miss," she said, as quick as lightning, pointing
to it grazing in the doctor's garden next door. People were always
overloading that donkey, and shaking their fists at it.
I must get to the new cook. The last one gave Mother notice, and I never
could find out why, because she was fond of Mother and could stand the
cats.
"Oh, I like _you_, ma'am," I heard her say, just as if she disliked some
one else. Mother took no notice, but left the kitchen, and Cook took a
currant off her elbow and pulled down her sleeves, and mumbled to Sarah,
"It isn't right, and I for one ain't going to help countenance it.
A-visiting his family now and then between jobs, just like a burglar--or
some-think worse!"
What is worse than a burglar? I was passing the scullery window, and
Sarah had just thrown a lot of boiling water into a basin in front of
them both, so that it made a mist and she didn't see me. I knew, though,
she was saying something rude, for when Sarah told her she "shouldn't
reely," she muttered something more about a "neglected angel!" I did
think at first she meant me, or perhaps the doctor's donkey as usual,
but then the words didn't fit either of us? I asked her straight if she
did mean the donkey, just for fun, and she said the poor beast was
minding his own business and I had better do the same.
She left us next month, crying worse than I ever did in my life for
really serious things. Mother patted her on the back as she went out at
the back door, and she kept saying, "A poor girl's only got her
character, mum, and she is bound to think of it--" and Mother said,
"Yes, yes, you did quite right!" and seemed just to want her out of the
house and a little peace and quiet and will of her own. The very moment
Sarah's back was turned, she set to work and turned everything into the
middle of the room and left it there while she and Cook swept round into
every corner. Ariadne and I rather enjoyed clearing our bed of the
towel-horse before we could lie down in it, and having dinner off the
corner of the kitchen-table because the dining-room one was lying on its
back like a horse kicking.
Of course George wasn't allowed home all this time. Mother wrote to him
where he was staying at the Duke of Frocester's for the shooting
(George shooting! My eye!--and the keeper's legs!) and said he had
better not come home till we were straight again. I was in no hurry to
be straight again. It was like Heaven. When I was a child I always built
my brick houses crooked, and Ariadne called me Queen Unstraight, and
that made me cry. But she liked this too. We made all the beds, and
didn't bother to tuck them in. It isn't necessary to do so when we turn
head over heels in the bed-clothes onto the floor every night three
times to make us dizzy and sleepy. We washed up everything with a nice
lather of three things mixed that occurred to me, Hudson's, Monkey Soap,
and Bath Eucryl. In the end there wasn't a speck of dirt, or pattern
either, left on the plates. It looked much cleaner. Why should one eat
one's meat off a fat Chinese dragon or have bees all round the edge of
one's soup plate ready to fall in? It is a dirty idea. We basted the
joints turn and turn about, and our own pinafores. They couldn't scold
us for not keeping clean, any more than they can pigs when they put them
in a sty. We asked no questions or bothered Mother at all, but we
black-leaded the steps and bath-bricked the grates, and washed down the
walls with soda-water. The wallpaper peeled off here and there, but that
shows it was shabby and ready for death.
Mother said afterwards that she couldn't see any improvement anywhere,
but anyhow we enjoyed ourselves and that is everything. We spent money
on it, for we bought _décalcomanie_ pictures, and did bouquets all over
the mantelpieces, but Mother insisted we should peel all these off again
before George came back. He couldn't come back till we got that cook,
for George is most absurdly particular about our servants. Sarah has got
used to him, and there seems to be no idea of her going. She has to
valet him, for he is always beautifully dressed. She has to take the
greatest care of her own appearance, and get her nails manicured and her
hair waved when he is at home. That is about all for her. But the cook
he calls the keeper of his conscience, that is to say, his digestion.
His digestion is as jumpy as he is. Sometimes it wants everything quite
plain, and he will eat nothing but our rice-puddings and cold shapes of
tapioca, etc.; at another time he calls it "apparition," and says the
very name of it makes him shiver. I am used to cold shapes, alas! He
sometimes brings things down from town himself--caviare and "patty de
foy." Children are not supposed to like that sort of thing, but we do,
and George gives them us; he is not mean in trifles. Sometimes it is
pheasants and partridges, that he has shot himself on ducal acres. They
are shot very badly, not tidily, with the shot all in one place as it
ought to be: Mr. Aix explained this to me. They are not to be cooked
till they are ready, and when they are they are a little too ready for
Mother and us, so Papa and Mr. Aix have to eat it all. George belongs to
the sect of the Epicureans; I heard him tell the cook so, also that he
is the reincarnation of a gentleman called Villon.
For a month Mother "sat in" for cooks, and all sorts of fat and lean
women came and went. Our establishment didn't seem attractive. George
bespoke a fat one, by letter, but Mother inclined to lean. These women
sat on the best chairs and prodded the pattern of the carpets with their
dusty umbrellas, and asked tons of questions,--far more than she asked
them, it seemed to me, and this one that we have at last got was the
coolest of all, but in rather a nice way. She was tall and thin, with a
long nose with a dip in it just before the tip, which was particularly
broad. Ariadne said afterwards that a nose like that seemed to need a
bustle. She said she was a north-country woman, and that is about all
she did tell us about herself, except her name, Elizabeth Cawthorne.
She sat and asked questions. When she came to the usual "And if you
please, ma'am, how many is there in family?" Mother answered, "Myself
and my son and my two daughters,--and my sister--she is
professional--and is here for long visits--that is all."
"Then I take it you are a widow, ma'am?"
Mother, getting very red, explained that George is very little at home,
so that in one way he didn't count, but in another way he did, for he is
very particular and has to be cooked for specially. Being an author, he
has got a very delicate appetite.
"A proud stomach, I understand ye. Well, I shall hope to give him
satisfaction." She said that as if she would have liked to add, "or I'll
know the reason why."
She seemed quite to have settled in her own mind that she was going to
take our place. She "blessed Mother's bonny face" before that interview
was over, and passed me over entirely.
She came in in a week, and the first time she saw George she was "doing
her hall." Ariadne and I were there as George's hansom drove up and he
got out and began a shindy with the cabman.
"Honeys, this will be your father, I'm thinking!" she said.
Perhaps she expected us to rush into his arms, but we didn't; we knew
better. We just said "Hallo!" and waited till he was disengaged with the
cabman, who wanted too much, as we are beyond the radius. George didn't
give it to him, but a good talking to instead. The new cook stopped
sweeping--servants always stop their work when there is something going
on that doesn't concern them, and looked quite pleased with George.
"He can explain himself, and no mistake!" she said to Sarah afterwards,
and she cooked a splendid dinner that night, for, says she to Sarah,
"seemed to her he was the kind of master who'd let a woman know if she
didn't suit him."
She doesn't "make much account of childer," in fact I think she hates
them, for when Ariadne showed her the young shoots in a pot of snowdrops
she was bringing up, and said, "See, cook, they have had babies in the
night!" Elizabeth, meaning to be civil, said, "Dis_gust_ing things,
miss!"
Still, she isn't really unkind to children, and admits that they have a
right to exist. She will boil me my glue-pot and make me paste, and lets
Ariadne heat her curling-tongs between the bars of the kitchen fire. She
doesn't "matter" cats, but she gives them their meals regular and
doesn't hold with them loafing in the kitchen, and getting tit-bits
stolen or bestowed. And they know she is just, though not generous, and
never forgets their supper. They were all hid, as it happened, when she
came about the place, but she said she knew she had got into a cat house
as soon as she found herself eating fluff with her tea, and she thinks
she ought to have been told. George laughs at her and calls her "stern
daughter of the north," but he wasn't a bit cross when she told him that
Ben ought to be sent to school. He even agreed, but Ben isn't sent. Ben
is still eating his heart out, and he keeps telling Elizabeth Cawthorne
so. He is much in the kitchen. She is very sensible. She just stuffs a
jam tart into his mouth, and says, "Tak' that atween whiles then, my
bonny bairn, to distract ye." Ben takes it like a lamb, and it does
distract him, or at any rate it distends him; he has got fat since she
came.
She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother _does_ look very
young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering
the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their
faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty
once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she
undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part
of her profession.
She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she
is "resting" in the _Era_, and all that time she is dreadfully cross,
because she would rather be doing than resting, for "resting" is only a
polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is
"out of a shop," which all actresses hate.