They tell me that a respectable and ancient profession, and one always
honoured by literature, is dying out; and if that is true, then two
more clauses of the tenth Commandment will lose their meaning. For
a long time to come we shall go on grudging our neighbour his
house--there's no doubt about that; but even as his ox and ass have
ceased to enter into practical ethics because our average neighbour
doesn't possess either, so we hear it is to be with his servant and
his maid.
They have had their day. There are no domestic servants at the
registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more
enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in
the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our
own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from
the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man
at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible
to eat a dinner which we have ourselves cooked and served up. Better
for us, all that, it may well be; but will it be better for our girls?
I am sure it will not.
Domestic service, I have said, is an employment which literature has
always approved. From Gay to Hazlitt, from Swift to Dickens, there
have been few writers of light touch upon life who have not had a kind
eye for the housemaid. There's a passage somewhere in Stevenson for
which I have spent an hour's vain hunting, which exactly hits the
centre. The confidential relationship, the trim appearance, not
without its suggestion of comic opera and the soubrette of the
_Comédie Française_, the combined air of cheerfulness and respect
which is demanded, mind you, on either side the bargain--all this is
acutely and vivaciously observed in half a page by a writer who never
missed a romantic opening in his days. The profession, indeed, has
never lacked romance in real life. Strangeness has persistently
followed beauty in and out of the kitchen. The number of old
gentlemen who have married their cooks is really considerable.
Younger gentlemen, whose god has been otherwhere, have married
their housemaids. A Lord Viscount Townshend, who died in 1763 or
thereabouts, did so in the nick of time, and left her fifty thousand
pounds. Tom Coutts the banker, founder of the great house in the
Strand, married his brother's nursemaid, and loved her faithfully for
fifty years. She gave him three daughters who all married titles; but
she was their ladyships' "dear Mamma" throughout; and Coutts himself
saw to it that where he dined she dined also. There's nothing in caste
in our country, given the essential solvent.
A stranger story still is this one. Some fifteen years ago a barrister
in fair practice died, and made by will a handsome provision for his
"beloved wife." This wife, thereby first revealed to an interested
acquaintance, had acted as his parlourmaid for many years, standing
behind his chair at dinner, and bringing him his evening letters on a
tray; and she had been so engaged on the day of his death. Nobody of
his circle except, of course, her fellow-servants, knew that she stood
in any other relationship to her so-called master. I consider her
conduct admirable; nor do I think his necessarily blameworthy. Those
two, depend upon it, understood each other, and had worked out a
common line of least resistance. On the distaff side there is the
tale of the two maiden ladies so admirably served by their butler
that when, to their consternation, he gave warning, they held a
heart-to-heart talk together, as the result of which one of them
proposed in all the forms to the invaluable man, and was accepted. It
is deplorable that a pursuit which opens vistas so rose-coloured as
these should be allowed to lapse.
A lady whom I knew well, and whose recent death I deplore, was cured
of a bad attack of neuritis by being cut off all domestic assistance,
except her cook's, and set to do her own housework. Therefore it is
probable that we should all be the better for the same treatment;
but, as I asked just now, will the girls be the better for it? The
disengaged philosopher can only answer that question in one way. That
feverish community-work which they have been doing through a four
years' orgy of patriotism will have taught them very much of life and
manners. It will have taught them, among other more desirable things,
how to spend money, and how to keep a good many young men greatly
entertained; but it will not, I fear, have taught them how to save
money, how to make one man happy and comfortable, or how to bring up
children in the fear of God.
And if it has failed to teach those things it will have failed to fit
them for this world, to say the least. It will not only have failed
them, but it will have failed us with them. For the world needs at
this moment a thousand things before it can be made tolerable again;
and all of those can be summed up into one paramount need, which is
for men and women who will observe faithfully the laws of their being.
And what, pray, are the laws of their being? At the outside, three; in
reality, two: to work, to love and to have children.
At this hour neither men nor women will work. The strain is taken off,
the bow relaxed. At the same time they must have money, that they may
spend it; for as always happens in moments of reaction, the
simplest way of expressing high spirits and a sense of ease is
wild expenditure. So wages must be high, and because wages are high
everything is dear. There are no houses, and there will be none; there
can be no marriages, and there will be none; there will be no milk for
children, so there will be no children. How long are such things to
go on? Just so long as we disregard the laws of our being. We began to
neglect them long before the war, and they must be learned again. We
must learn first what they are, and next, how to keep them.
Now the education of men is another text; but for women there can be
little doubt but that the prime educationary in the laws of being is
domestic service. You can be ribald about it. That is easy. But where
else is a girl to learn how to keep house? And if she does not learn
how to be a mother, as indeed she may, poor dear, she gets to know
very much of what to do when she becomes one.
So I hope to see a soberer generation of girls return to a profession
which they have always adorned, for the schooling of which their
husbands and children shall rise up and call them blessed.