She was quite the reverse of beautiful--to some she was positively
unpleasant to look upon; but that made no difference to Mrs.
Thaddeus Perkins, who, after long experience with domestics, had
come to judge of the value of a servant by her performance rather
than by her appearance. The girl--if girl she were, for she might
have been thirty or sixty, so far as any one could judge from a
merely superficial glance at her face and figure--was neat of
aspect, and, what was more, she had come well recommended. She bore
upon her face every evidence of respectability and character, as
well as one or two lines which might have indicated years or
toothache--it was difficult to decide which. On certain days, when
the weather was very warm and she had much to do, the impression was
that the lines meant years, and many of them, accentuated as they
were by her pallor, the whiteness of her face making the lines seem
almost black in their intensity. When she smiled, however, which
she rarely did--she was solemn enough to have been a butler--one was
impressed with the idea of hours of pain from a wicked tooth. At
any rate, she was engaged as waitress, and put in charge of the
first floor of the Perkins household.
"I fancy we've at last got a real treasure," said Mrs. Perkins.
"There's no nonsense about Jane--I think." The last two words were
added apologetically.
"Where did you get her?" asked Thaddeus. "At an Imbecility Office?"
"I don't quite know what you mean--an Imbecility Office?"
"Only my pet, private, and particular name for it, my dear. You
would speak of it as an Intelligence Office, no doubt," was the
reply. "My observation of the fruit of Intelligence Offices has
convinced me that they deal in Imbecility."
"Not quite," laughed Mrs. Perkins. "They look after Domestic
Vacancies."
"Well, they do it with a vengeance," said Perkins. "We've had more
vacancies in this house to do our cooking and our laundering and our
house-work generally than two able-bodied men could shake sticks at.
It seems to me that the domestic servant of to-day is fonder of
preoccupation than of occupation."
"Jane, I think, is different from the general run," said Mrs.
Perkins. "As I said, she has no nonsense about her."
"Is she--an--an ornament to the scene--pretty, and all that?" asked
Perkins.
"Quite the reverse," replied the little house-keeper. "She is as
plain as a--as a--"
"Say hedge-fence and be done with it," said Perkins. "I'm glad of
it. What's the use of providing a good dinner for your friends if
they are going to spend all their time looking at the waitress?
When I give a dinner it makes me tired to have the men afterwards
speak of the waitress rather than of the puree or the birds. If any
domestic is to dominate the repast at all it should be the cook."
"Service counts for a great deal, though, Ted," suggested Mrs.
Perkins.
"True," replied Thaddeus; "but on the whole, when I am starving,
give me a filet bearnaise served by a sailor, rather than an empty
plate brought in in style by a butler of illustrious lineage and
impressive manner." Then he added: "I hope she isn't too homely,
Bess--not a 'clock-stopper,' as the saying is. You don't want
people's appetites taken away when you've worked for hours on a menu
calculated to tickle the palates of your guests. Would her
homeliness--ah--efface itself, for instance, in the presence of a
culinary creation, or is it likely to overshadow everything with its
ineffaceable completeness?"
"I think she'll do," returned Mrs. Perkins; "especially with your
friends, who, it seems to me, would one and all insist upon
finishing a 'creation,' as you call it, even if lightning should
strike the house."
"From that point of view," said he, "I'm confident that Jane will
do."
So Jane came, and for a year, strange to relate, was all that her
references claimed for her. She was neat, clean, and capable. She
was sober and industrious. The wine had never been better served;
the dinner had rarely come to the table so hot. Had she been a
butler of the first magnitude she could not so have discouraged the
idea of acquaintance; her attraction, if anything, was a combination
of her self-effacement and her ugliness. The latter might have been
noticed as she entered the dining-room; it was soon forgotten in the
unconsciously observed ease with which she went through her work.
"She's fine," said Perkins, after a dinner of twelve covers served
by Jane with a pantry assistant. "I've always had a sneaking notion
that nothing short of a butler could satisfy me, but now I think
otherwise. Jane is perfection, and there is nothing paralyzing
about her, as there is about most of those reduced swells who wait
on tables nowadays."
In August the family departed for the mountains, and the house was
left in charge of Jane and the cook, and right faithfully did they
fulfil the requirements of their stewardship. The return in
September found the house cleaned from top to bottom. The hardwood
floors and stairs shone as they had rarely shone before, and as only
an unlimited application of what is vulgarly termed "elbow-grease"
could make them shine. The linen was immaculate. Ireland is not
freer from snakes than was the house of Perkins from cobwebs, and no
speck of dust except those on the travellers was visible. It was
evident that even in the absence of the family Jane was true to her
ideals, and the heart of Mrs. Perkins was glad. Furthermore, Jane
had acquired a full third set of teeth, which seemed to take some of
the lines from her face, and, as Perkins observed, added materially
to the general effect of the surroundings, although they were
distressingly new. But, alas! they marked the beginning of the end.
Jane ceased to wait upon the table with that solemnity which is
essential to the manner of a "treasure"; she smiled occasionally,
and where hitherto she had treated the conversation at the table
with stolid indifference, a witticism would invariably now bring the
new teeth unto view.
"Alas!" cried Thaddeus, "our butleress has evoluted backwards. She
grins like an ordinary waitress."
It was too true. The possession of brilliantly white teeth seemed
to have brought with it a desire to show them, which was destructive
of that dignity with which Jane had previously been hedged about,
and substituted for it a less desirable atmosphere of possible
familiarity, which might grow upon very slight provocation into
intimacy, not to mention a nearer approach to social equality.
"I don't suppose we can blame her exactly," said Perkins, when
discussing one or two of Jane's lapses from her old-time standard.
"I haven't a doubt that if I'd gone for years without teeth, I'd
become a regular Cheshire cat, with a new, complete edition de luxe
of celluloid molars. Still, I wish she'd paid more attention to the
dinner and less to Mr. Barlow's conversation last night. She stood
a whole minute, with the salad-bowl in her hand, waiting for him to
reach the point of his story about the plumber who put a gas-pipe
through Shakespeare's tenor in Westminster Abbey, and when he
finished, and she smiled, you'd have thought a dozen gravestones to
the deceased's memory had been conjured up before us."
"It's a small fault, Thaddeus," returned Mrs. Perkins, "but I'll
speak to her about it."
"Oh, I wouldn't," said Perkins; "let it go; she means well, and when
we got her we didn't suspect she'd turn out such a jewel. She's
merely approaching her norm, that is all. We ought to be thankful
to have had such perfection for one year. It's too bad it couldn't
continue; but what perfection does?"
Nothing, therefore, was said, and Jane smiled on, yet waited most
acceptably and kept all things decently and in order--for a little
while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and
additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins
himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work
alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend
from Boston appeared--a friend interested in bric-a-brac and china
generally. Thaddeus, to whom a luncheon in solitary grandeur was
little short of abomination, invited his Boston friend to stay and
share pot-luck with him, knowing, hypocrite that he was, that pot-
luck did not mean pot-luck at all, but a course luncheon which many
men would have found all-sufficient at dinner. The Boston friend
accepted, and the luncheon was served by Jane. In the course of the
repast the visitor observed:
"Pretty good china you have, Perkins."
"Yes," returned Thaddeus, "pretty good. I've always had a penchant
for china. My mother-in-law thinks I'm extravagant, and sometimes I
think she is right. You never saw my Capodimonte coffees, did you?"
"No," replied the Bostonian, "I never did. Where'd you get 'em?"
"London," replied Perkins, "last time I was over. You must see
them, by all means. Ah, Jane, hand Mr. Bunkerrill one of the
Capodimonte coffees."
"Wan o' the what, sorr?" asked the treasure.
Thaddeus blushed. To have his jewel go back on him at such a crisis
was excessively annoying. "One of those gold after-dinner coffee-
cups--one of the little ones, with the flowery raised figures," he
said, sharply.
"Oh!" said Jane, "wan o' thim with somebody else's initial on the
bottom?"
"Yes," said Thaddeus, fuming inwardly.
"Quite a connoisseur, that woman," laughed the visitor, as Jane went
after the dinner-cup. "She's observed the china mark. She know's N
doesn't stand for Perkins."
Thaddeus laughed weakly. "She probably thinks we got them second-
hand," he said.
"Very likely you did," retorted the Bostonian, and Jane returned
with the desired cup. "An admirable specimen," continued the
connoisseur; and them, turning the cup bottom upwards in search of
the mark, he disclosed to his own and Thaddeus's astonished gaze no
less an object than the remains of a mashed green pea, a
reminiscence of the last Perkins dinner, and conclusive evidence
that at times Jane was not as careful in the washing of her china as
she might have been.
It would be futile and useless for me to attempt to describe the
emotions of Thaddeus. I fancy a large enough number of us having
been through similar experiences to comprehend the man's
mortification and his inward wrath. It was too great to find
suitable expression at the moment. Nothing short of the absolute
destruction of the cup and the annihilation of Jane could have
adequately expressed Perkins's true feelings. He was not by nature,
however, a scene-maker--it would have been better if he had been--so
he said nothing, abiding by his rule, which seemed to be that the
man of the house would do better to reprehend the short-comings of a
delinquent servant by blowing up his wife rather than by going
direct to the core of the trouble and reading the maid a lecture. A
great many men adopt this same method. I do. It is the easiest,
though it is possibly prompted by that cowardice which is latent
with us all. I never in my life have discharged more than one
servant, and I not only did not do it gracefully, but discharged the
wrong one; since which time I have left all that sort of work to
others more competent than I. Perkins's method was precisely thus.
"I'm not going to interfere," was his invariable remark in cases of
the kind under discussion; which was unwise, for if he had even
scolded a servant as he did his wife for the servant's fault he
might have secured better service sooner or later.
Unfortunately, when Mrs. Perkins reached home that night she was so
very tired with her exertions in the shops that Thaddeus hadn't the
heart to tell her what had happened, and when morning came the
episode was forgotten. When it did recur to his mind it so happened
that Mrs. Perkins was out of reach. The result was that a month had
passed before Mrs. Perkins cane into possession of the facts, and it
was then, of course, too late to mention it to Jane.
"You should have given her a good talking to at the time," said Mrs.
Perkins. "It's awful! I don't know what has got into Jane. My
best table-cloth has got a great hole in it, and she is very
careless with the silver. My fruit-knife last night was not clean."
"I suppose YOU spoke to her about that?" said Perkins, smiling.
"Not exactly; I sent for another, and handed her the dirty one,"
returned Mrs. Perkins. "I guess she felt all that I could have
said."
And time went on, and Jane continued to decay. She pulled corks
from olive-bottles with the carving-fork prongs and bent them
backwards. She developed a habit of going out and leaving her work
undone. The powdered sugar was allowed to resolve itself into
small, hard, pill-shaped lumps of various sizes. Breakfast had a
way of being served cold. The coffee was at times merely tepid; in
short, it seemed as if she really ought to be discharged; but then
there was invariably some reason for postponing the fatal hour.
Either her kindness to the children or a week or two of the old-time
efficiency, her unyielding civility, her scrupulous honesty, her
willing acquiescence in any new duty imposed, an impression that she
was suffering, any one or all of these reasons kept her on in her
place until she became so much a fixture in the household, so much
one of the family, that the idea of getting rid of her seemed beyond
the possibility of realization. That the axe should fall her
employers knew well, and many a resolve was taken that at the end of
the season she should go, yet neither Mrs. Perkins nor her husband
liked to tell her so. Her good points were still too potent,
although none could deny that all confidence in her efficiency was
shattered past repair. The situation finally reached a point where
it inspired reflections of a more or less humorous order.
"I tell you what I think," said Thaddeus one evening, after a
particularly flagrant breach on Jane's part, involving a streak of
cranberry sauce across a supposititiously clean plate: "you won't
discharge her, Bess, and I won't; suppose we send for Mr. Burke, and
get him to do it."
Mr. Burke was the one reliable man in town. It didn't make much
difference what the Perkinses wanted done, they generally sent for
Mr. Burke to do it, largely because when he attempted a commission
he saw it through. A carpenter and builder by trade, he had for
many years looked after the repairs needful to the Perkins'
dwelling; he had come often between Thaddeus and unskilled labor; he
had made bookcases which were dreams of convenience and sufficiently
pleasing to the eye; he had "fixed up" Mrs. Perkins's garden; he had
supplied the family with a new gardener when the old one had taken
on habits of drink, which destroyed not only himself but the
cabbages; he had kept an eye on the plumbers; he had put up, taken
down, and repaired awnings--in short, as Perkins said, he was a
"Universal." Once, when a delicate piece of bric-a-brac had been
broken and the china-mender asserted that it could not be mended,
Perkins had said, "See if Burke can't fix it," and Burke had fixed
it; and as final tribute to this wonder, Perkins had said, in
suffering:
"My dear, I'm afraid I have appendicitis. Send for Mr. Burke."
"Mr. Burke!" echoed his wife.
"Yes, Mr. Burke," moaned the sufferer. "If my vermiform appendix is
to be removed, I'd rather have Mr. Burke do it with a chisel and saw
than any surgeon I know; and I won't take ether either, because it
is such a satisfaction to see him work."
So, when this happy pair of house-holders had reached what might be
described as the grand climateric of their patience, and it was
finally decided that Jane's usefulness was a thing of the past, and
utterly beyond redemption, Thaddeus naturally suggested turning to
his faithful friend, Mr. Burke, to rid them of their woes, and,
indeed, but for Jane's own intervention, I fear that course would
have proved the sole alternative to her becoming an irremovable
fixture in the household. But it was Jane herself who solved the
problem.
It was two days after the cranberry episode that the solution came,
and it was in this wise:
"Did ye send for me?" Jane asked, suddenly materializing in Mrs.
Perkins's room.
"No, Jane, I haven't; why?"
The girl began to shed tears.
"Because--you'd ought to have, ma'am. I know well enough that I
ain't satisfactory to you," she returned, her voice quivering, "and
I can't be, and I know you want me to go--and I--I've come to give
you notice."
Then Mrs. Perkins looked at Jane with sorrow on her countenance, for
she had acquired an affection for her which the maid's delinquencies
had not been able to efface.
"Can't you try and do better?" she asked.
"No, ma'am," returned Jane. "Not with the system--never. Mr.
Perkins is too easy, and you do be so soft-hearted it don't keep a
girl up to her work. When I first come here, ma'am, not knowin' ye
well, I was afraid to be anything but what was right, but the way
you took accidents, and a bit of a shortcomin' once in a while, sort
of took away my fear, and I've been goin' down hill ever since.
Servant-girls is only human, Mrs. Perkins."
Mrs. Perkins looked at Jane inquiringly.
"We needs to be kept up to our work just as much as anybody else,
and when a lady like yourself is too easy, it gets a girl into bad
habits, and occasionally it does us good if the gentleman of the
house will swear at us, Mrs. Perkins, and sort of scare us, so it
does. It was that that was the making of me. The last place I was
in, ma'am, I was so afraid of both the missus and the gentleman that
I didn't dare to be careless; and I didn't dare be careless with you
until I found you all the time a-smilin', whatever went wrong, and
Mr. Perkins never sayin' a word, whether the dishes come to the
table clean or not."
"Well, Jane," said Mrs. Perkins, somewhat carried away by this
course of reasoning, "you haven't been what we hoped--there is no
denying that; but knowing that you were disappointing us, why
couldn't you have made a special effort?"
"Oh, Mrs. Perkins," sobbed the poor woman, "you don't understand.
We're all disappointin' to them we loves, but--it's them we fear--"
"Then why aren't you afraid of us?"
Jane laughed through her tears. The idea was preposterous.
"Afraid of you and Mr. Perkins? Ah!" she said, sadly, "if I only
could be--but I can't. Why, Mrs. Perkins, if Mr. Perkins should
come in here now and swear at me the way Mr. Barley did when I
worked there, I'd know he was only puttin' it on, and that inside
he'd be laughin' at me. No, ma'am, it's no use. I feel that I must
go, or I'll be forever ruined. It was the cranberry showed me; a
girl had ought to be discharged for that. Dirty dinner plates isn't
excusable, and yet neither of you said a word, and next week it'll
be the same way--so I'm goin'. You won't send me off, so I've got
to do it myself."
"Very well, Jane," said Mrs. Perkins; "if that is the way you feel
about it we'll have to part, I suppose. I am sorry, but--"
The sentence was not finished, for Jane rushed weeping from the
room, and within a few days, her place having been filled, the house
knew her no more, except as an occasional visitor, ostensibly to see
the children. Later she got a place to her satisfaction, and one
night the Perkins were invited to dine with Jane's new employers.
They went and found their old-time "butler" at the very zenith of
her powers. She served the dinner as she had never served one in
her palmiest days in the Perkins's dining-room; and when all was
over, and when Mrs. Perkins went up-stairs to don her wrap to return
home, she found Jane above waiting to help her.
"I am glad to see you so happy, Jane," she said, as the girl held
her cloak.
"Ah, ma'am, I'm not very happy."
"You ought to be, here. Your work to-night was perfect."
"Yes," said Jane, "it had to be, for"--here her voice fell to a
whisper--"I don't dare let it be different, ma'am. Mrs. Harkins is
a regular divvle, and the ould gentleman--well, ma'am, he do swear
finer 'n any gentleman I ever met. It's just the place for me."
And Jane sighed as her old mistress left her.
"Wasn't she great, Bess?" said Thaddeus, on the way home.
"She was, indeed," replied Mrs. Perkins, with a smile. "It's a pity
I'm not a divvle."
Thaddeus laughed. "That's so," he said; "or that I never learned to
swear like a gentleman, eh?"