FEMALES OF THE SPECIES
The family at Sutton House comprised Mr. and Mrs. Sutton, both under
thirty-five, their only child a boy eight years old, and his tutor, a
young college man.
The place was very beautiful. The house, Southern colonial, was large
and dignified without being showy. The park and gardens surrounding it
contained eleven acres—at least the chauffeur, who brought me from the
station, so informed me. Certainly they were ample and perfectly kept.
The trees were noticeably handsome, all of them indigenous. Though an
unusually elaborate establishment for America, it was not an imitation.
Perhaps its most striking feature was that it did not suggest England or
any other foreign country. It looked to be just what it was—the country
home of a well-bred American family of large fortune.
The American atmosphere was so distinct that—watching the house as we
approached along the wide drive, I had a subconscious expectation of
seeing an old negro, immaculately dressed, make his appearance. He
didn’t come. Nor when we passed near the stables and garage was there
any sound of laughing or singing. At the side entrance I was met by the
housekeeper, an Englishwoman.
There were fifteen servants besides the men in the stables, in the
garage, and the gardeners. Every one of them foreigners.
“Why will Americans persist in surrounding themselves with indifferent
foreign ‘help’ when they might have the best servants and most loyal
Americans, for the asking?” was the question that I asked myself that
night after my arrival at the Sutton House, and I am still asking it.
I have known many foreign servants. Even the best of them was not so
good as a competent negro would have been in the same place. I am a
Southerner born and bred among negroes. Besides, I am descended from a
long line of slave-owning ancestors. I do not believe that Abraham
Lincoln himself was a more loyal American than the present-day
descendants of the people he fought to free.
Yet in spite of their excellent qualities, their loyalty, we turn them
down. Just let an American family get a little money, and the first
thing they do in the way of display is to secure as many “help” as their
pocketbook will permit.
Being foreigners, all the servants at Sutton House were, of course,
“help.” Even the French maid spoke of herself as “Madame’s porsonal
help,” and even the fact that she received sixty dollars a month in
wages, her laundry, a room to herself, and all the clothes that her
mistress did not care to wear the second time did not prevent her from
disloyalty. A negro girl would have given better service than this woman
and never have permitted her mistress to be criticised in her presence.
Under my direction there were five chambermaids, a scrubwoman, and a man
for cleaning. The man was a Swede and the maids all Irish. My wages were
forty dollars a month with laundry and a room to myself. Because I
chanced to take the fancy of the housekeeper I took all my meals with
her instead of with the other servants. Had it been otherwise I would
have heard more back-stairs gossip than I did.
Certainly I heard enough to make me know that, excepting the
housekeeper, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Sutton had a friend among their
“help.” Unlike the horde of foreigners who have usurped their rightful
places, negro servants are loyal to their employers. A negro, as a rule,
has too much self-esteem to belittle the person from whom he takes
wages.
Sutton House was crowded with guests every week-end, but from Monday
noon to Friday afternoon Mrs. Sutton was generally alone with her little
son and his tutor. Mr. Sutton usually returned to the city with the
first of his guests to leave Monday morning, and seldom made his
appearance before Saturday afternoon. He stood well in his profession,
was a hard worker, and might have been devoted to his home had the
distance between his office and Sutton House admitted of his spending
his nights there.
Mrs. Sutton, so I learned from the housekeeper, was an only child of
wealthy parents—the darling of her old father, who had insisted on
humoring every whim. It being her whim to come to Sutton House before
her husband’s business permitted him to leave town, the family had moved
out.
Compared with the department store, the premium station, and the Sea
Foam Hotel this position was a holiday among perfect surroundings. It is
true that week-ends every servant had as much as he or she could
properly do. The rest of the time the chambermaids finished their work
before ten o’clock. After that I arranged for them to go off, leaving
two on watch until lunch-time. At lunch the watch changed, and again at
seven, their dinner-hour. This last watch remained on until ten, which
was supposed to be the family bedtime. All that was required of them was
to sit, one on each bedroom floor, and be ready to respond promptly when
called. While on watch I encouraged, or at least I tried to encourage,
these girls to read, to sew, or do any quiet handiwork.
So far as I saw, it was effort thrown away. Not one of the five ever
darned her stockings—of course they all wore silk stockings, also silk
underwear. Indeed, I believe three out of the five boasted that she
never wore anything besides silk except when she was on duty. Instead of
employing her mind or her fingers, one and all of the five would sit
gazing out the nearest window and resort to all sorts of tricks to go to
the servants’ quarters. Judging by these women, and the thousands of
other men and women of the same race, I am convinced that what we are
pleased to call “wonderful Irish imagination” is the result of
idleness—air-castle building. They are the most gorgeous of liars.
Each and every one of the maids at Sutton House claimed to be direct
descendants of an Irish king. One of them assured me that if she had her
“rights” she would be living in a palace and never have to “turn her
hand”—the Princess Royal of Ireland. Each one of them had so many saints
in her family that I used to wonder how she kept track of them all.
Needless to say, they were inveterate churchgoers. Such weird ideas as
they attributed to their priest!
“Father Hallahan said we were not to abuse the Germans,” one of them
told the Italian scrubwoman. “The Germans are good friends to the
Irish.”
This failing to impress the scrubwoman, the Princess Royal gave
additional information.
“Yes, and the order came straight from Rome,” said she, with a defiant
toss of her nappy-looking head.
This so aroused the little Italian woman that she damned the Germans and
she damned the Irish, but most of all she damned Rome. I have never seen
a more furious human being. How she rolled out Italian swear words! Her
husband was in the Italian army and she was struggling to keep their
little home together and their children at school. Her father, her
brother, and two of her husband’s brothers had been killed in the war.
She came to me with tears streaming over her face. When she had turned
over her mop and pail to me she fell on her knees, and, burying her face
in her apron, knelt beside the bathtub, rocking her body back and forth
and sobbing. The Princess Royal and her sister German sympathizer took
the next train to Philadelphia. They were replaced by two Swedes, quiet,
hard-working girls.
The middle of my second week the housekeeper told me that Mrs. Sutton
wished me to go out with her that evening after dinner. Heretofore the
housekeeper had accompanied her on these evening automobile trips. Now
the old woman complained of feeling unwell and I was to take her place.
The car that evening was a fast roadster with three seats. I sat on the
back seat. After a run of about an hour we stopped at a country inn.
Mrs. Sutton told me that I might either come in or remain in the car.
It was a lovely evening during the last of May. Sure that our stop would
be only for a few minutes, I decided to remain in the car; Mrs. Sutton
followed by the chauffeur, a young Italian with good legs, entered the
inn. After waiting in the car for more than a half-hour, and feeling
cramped from sitting so long, I got out and strolled around the grounds.
Finally, prompted by a desire to kill time, I stepped up on the piazza
and looked in through a window.
Mrs. Sutton and the chauffeur were having supper together. By a casual
observer they might easily have been mistaken for lovers. After their
meal they joined the dancers. More than an hour later they returned to
the car in which I had resumed my seat about fifteen minutes earlier. It
was well past two o’clock when we finally returned to Sutton House.
The next morning I got up soon after sunrise and sat at the window of my
room. There had been a warm shower during the earlier hours, and the
gardens and grove looked like Paradise—the perfectly kept lawns, the
flowers just beginning to give a touch of color here and there, the
great trees with their young leaves softly green and glistening. And
over all a clear blue sky, through which floated banks of wonderful
white clouds that looked as though they might have been freshly washed
by the angels. Young summer, like a spirit, walked.
With all this peace and beauty around me I sat and dreamed. At first it
was not a pleasant dream though it concerned a new combination—a
discovery that, as a rule, thrills a writer. In my dream I questioned if
in place of time-worn love-affairs between masters and serving-maids, we
writers of realism would have to depict mistresses courting
straight-legged chauffeurs. The idea was too repulsive. In spite of the
scene witnessed the night before, the tears of the doll-baby young woman
at the publishing house and other whispered hints, I refused to believe
it. Even though such a diseased condition was creeping in I was sure it
would be wiped out by the World War before it had time to take root.
The thought of the war caused my dreams to change. I had my first vision
of America, perhaps the world, as it would be after the terrible
conflict in which my country had just entered. After it—for surely good
must come of so great a disaster—there would be no idle, untrained women
to menace human progress. In America we would have neither human cooties
nor human drudges; all such inhuman creatures wiped out by the war, we
would become a nation of workers, struggling to carry out the ideals of
the founders of our country.
During breakfast I notified the housekeeper that I must leave at the end
of the week. She remonstrated vigorously. When her offer to increase my
wages failed to move me she confided to me her plan for my promotion.
She, it appeared, had been the nursery-governess of Mrs. Sutton, had
remained in the family, and when her former pupil married had taken
charge of her new home as housekeeper. Now, the old woman continued,
having saved enough to keep her comfortable, she wished to spend her
last days among her own people in England. I was to take her position as
housekeeper.
Even that did not cause me to change my mind. I told her that I must go
and not later than the end of that week. Along toward the middle of the
morning Mrs. Sutton’s French maid came to me. Madame wished to see me in
her bedroom at once. On entering Mrs. Sutton’s room, a fable told me by
Booger when I was a very small child flashed into my mind.
Booger was a young negro who served my father’s family in the double
capacity of stable-boy and my nurse. Born during that period when the
fortunes of the people of the Southern States were at lowest ebb,
resulting from our Civil War, I did not share the advantage of being
nursed by the “Mammy” adored by my older sisters and brothers. So far as
I know, my father’s stable-boy was my only nurse. And so far as I have
been able to learn, nobody knows why I bestowed on him the name of
Booger. To the rest of the world he was Peter.
“The Lord God done made Miss Rose white,” according to Booger. “But
yerly one mornin’ whilst Marse Adam was a-walkin’ in the Gyarden of Eden
he done kotch Miss Rose when she was a-turnin’ back her clothes an’
washin’ of her face. Miss Rose was so ’shamed that she turned red. She’s
been red ever sence.”
Mrs. Sutton, lying among her pillows, with the morning’s mail scattered
over the silken coverlet of her bed, reminded me of a half-opened white
rose caught at her toilet and blushing a shell-pink. She was more
beautiful than any flower in her garden. Her wide blue eyes were the
color of the sky into which I had gazed at sunrise, and as fathomless.
Who can fathom the soul of a flippant woman?
When I refused her offer to raise my wages she told me of the
housekeeper’s plan for my promotion. When that failed she acted like a
spoiled child. She wished to know my reason for leaving, she insisted on
knowing, she must know.
Looking at her—she seemed hardly more than a girl—I wondered if it might
not be a kindness to give her the reason for my sudden departure. Though
of course I had never intended to remain long enough to inherit the
housekeeper’s position, I had expected to stay three weeks, perhaps
four, and give one week’s notice before leaving. Now I determined to
tell her my reason for changing my plans—a reason within itself
sufficient to cause any conscientious servant to quit her employ.
I crossed to the foot of her bed and she smiled up at me.
“You really wish to know my reason?” I asked, speaking seriously. She
nodded, and, smiling, showed a flash of her perfect teeth. “It is
because I don’t care to appear as a witness in a divorce case in which
the co-respondent is your husband’s hired servant, your chauffeur.”
She stared at me dumfounded. When she understood her face flamed
crimson. Then she sprang up in bed and reached out to ring for her maid.
“You must not do that,” I told her, and I stepped between the head of
her bed and the electric buttons. “You may call your housekeeper but not
that Frenchwoman.”
“How dare you!” she cried, and her manner was so commonly melodramatic
that I almost smiled.
“I know the servants in your house better than you know them yourself,”
I told her, still holding my position. “And I shall do my best to
protect you from yourself.”
“Protect me!” she sneered. “You, my husband’s detective! Yes, that’s who
you are. My husband got you out here to watch me. You—you sneak!”
I let her talk until she wore herself out. When she again tried to ring
for her maid I rang for the housekeeper.
The housekeeper came. Honest old soul! On these evening trips when she
acted as chaperon they had gone in a touring-car. When they stopped at a
road-house she had always remained comfortably dozing in the tonneau.
“I shall take you straight to your mother, Mildred,” the housekeeper
informed Mrs. Sutton, when I had explained the situation. And I realized
that she had gone back twenty years, and was again the governess
threatening her spoiled charge. “Your mother will know what to do with
you.”
Feeling in honor bound to clear Mr. Sutton of the suspicion of employing
a detective I reminded his wife in the housekeeper’s presence that no
person who had entered her home in such a capacity would have given so
candid a reason for leaving. The old woman swept the suspicion aside
with a wave of her hand. Mr. Sutton was a gentleman, she assured me.
There should be no scandal, for Mildred’s mother knew how to manage her
daughter.
While I was packing my few belongings the housekeeper came to my room.
She would always be grateful to me, she said, for ringing for her and
not allowing Mildred to call the “French fool.” Then she offered to give
me a letter of recommendation and I accepted it. When paying the wages
due me she included my railroad ticket back to New York City. Not once
did she ask me to hold my tongue.
On returning to New York I learned that Mrs. Tompkins had ordered Alice
home; the hat-trimming season being over, Mrs. Wilkins was preparing to
resume her duties in the linen-room of the Coney Island hotel; and the
little organist had already gone to Maine to spend the summer with her
mother and sisters. The restaurant-keeper, having been mysteriously
robbed of all his trousers excepting the pair he was wearing, declared
to me his intention to “get out.” The reporter was shortly to take up
his suit-case and walk, and the gentleman of many shoes and
walking-sticks greeted me with the information that he had purchased a
water-front estate on the Sound.
It would seem that I should have been eagerly preparing to write the
story of Polly Preston. Certainly I would never be able to incorporate
in one novel all the material I had already accumulated. Yet I never was
farther from wishing to begin a book. It may have been the general
unrest caused by the war. Even now I can give no explanation for my
mental condition at that time. So, instead of returning to my own field,
I set out the following morning to get a new job.
Having secured all previous positions through the help-wanted columns of
the newspapers, I now determined to try employment agencies. My plan was
to register at an agency making a specialty of supplying domestic
servants, pay the required fee, and leave my three letters of
recommendation. These three letters! One, as stated, was given me by the
housekeeper of Sutton House. The other two I had used getting in at Sea
Foam—one written by Alice from her Washington City address, the other
written by myself in my own proper person. In it I had stated that Emily
Porter had been for twenty years in the service of my mother, and since
my mother’s death she had been in my employ.
After the writers of these letters were communicated with I expected, in
course of time, to get the refusal of a position in a private family—as
waitress, second girl, or chambermaid. That was as I expected the matter
to develop.
What happened? Within five minutes after I entered the agency, before I
had paid my fee or handed in my letters, two women were bidding for my
services. Both were expensively gowned, both lived in a
quasi-fashionable suburb of New York, and both wished me to come to her
at once as second maid, the difference between the two being that one
had children and the other dogs.
I elected the one with children. Instead of her waiting and
investigating my references she insisted on my accompanying her back
home, giving me three hours to meet her at the railroad-station. When I
saw her house I understood her hurry. Chaos! Dirty chaos at that. The
cook, Irish, of course, told me that five maids had come and gone during
the two previous weeks.
The house had fifteen rooms, two baths, a large cellar, two wide
porches, and two wider piazzas. There was a lot of shrubbery on the
place and several long brick walks. In the family there was a young-lady
daughter, the mother, the only son, two younger daughters, the father,
and a little girl of six. I name them in the order of their relative
importance.
The little girl, the mother once explained in the presence of the child,
was a mistake. On the birth of her son, having decided that four
children were enough, she determined to have no more—hence the
difference of ten years between her son and little Mistake.
Had these people been content to live in a house of eight rooms, and do
their own work with the assistance of a woman to do the laundry and the
heavier cooking, they would have, in all human probability, been a happy
family. They were good-natured, good-looking, and with sufficient traces
of good breeding to have made them attractive.
During the seven days that I remained with them I never got to my room,
which was in the garret and shared by the cook, before nine o’clock at
night. How I did work! I did everything from firing the furnace to
running ribbons in the underwear of the marriageable daughter.
For upward of two years it had been the chief ambition of the family to
marry off this eldest girl. When I came on the scene it had become, so
they all thought, a vital necessity. And I, succumbing to the atmosphere
around me, did my best to help along the match. The mother explained to
me that if they could only announce the engagement of this daughter the
maiden aunt, for whom she was named, would see to it that she had a
proper wedding and also pay the family debts.
The idea that these three grown girls, the youngest being past eighteen,
might work and earn their own living never seemed to enter their
mother’s head. The fact that they did not work, did not know how to do
anything more useful than to play tennis and golf, she proclaimed from
the housetops. Sad to relate, it was the literal truth. So far as I
could learn, neither of them had ever done so much as make a bed, dust a
room, or mend a garment. I never knew them to pick up a magazine, a
book, or a sofa-pillow, though they knew how to scatter them broadcast.
No, indeed, it was beneath their dignity to do anything to keep their
home comfortable or clean, yet they boasted of skill at tennis and their
golf score.
What a silly un-American idea it is that knocking a ball across country
is more ennobling than doing anything that tends to make a home
comfortable and happy! Will anybody deny that it takes more sense to
cook or serve a good dinner than it does to play a good game of golf?
Now I am not decrying the game of golf. Indeed, it appeals to me as a
very good way to get elderly and delicate persons, who take no interest
in nature, to exercise in the fresh air.
For a person who cares for wild or growing things golf is impossible. I
cannot imagine Theodore Roosevelt wishing to become expert at golf. I
can imagine the number of balls he would have lost while watching a
bird, investigating a gopher hole, or studying a plant.
Besides, I have for a good many years had a pet theory—why Colonel
Roosevelt did not cultivate the game of golf. May he not have felt sure
that he could learn nothing from persons met on the links—rich idlers,
men who have “made their pile,” always hidebound conservatives and their
hangers-on? We all know that the most popular of our Presidents was
interested in workers in every field—eager to learn their opinion, to
get their point of view. Was he ever known to show interest in the mind
processes of an idler?
Yet, in spite of the so recent example of this most typical American,
mothers and fathers, American men and women, persist in bringing their
children up with the Old World prejudice against useful work. They may
spend any amount of time and energy on any work provided it is silly and
useless, but let it only become useful and at once it becomes a stigma,
a disgrace.
And so it was with this family. The three girls could all play a little
on the piano and sing a little with their kitten voices. Each was
ardently certain that she could drive an automobile if only her father
could be induced to buy one—poor silent, care-worn, overworked father!
He loved his wife and was very fond of his children, yet I think he used
to dread to come home and at the same time be afraid not to come.
When I told the cook of my intention to leave at the end of my first
week she called me a fool. She urged me to follow her example and stick
it out long enough to have something worth going to court about.
The mother and three daughters felt ill used when I announced my
departure. The eldest daughter remarked that she really didn’t see what
more a second girl would want—nobody ever interfered with me, they let
me have my own way. Her mother told me that I really must wait until
Saturday. Her husband never gave her money for the servants except on
Saturdays—it was then Tuesday. She gave me the use of the family
commutation ticket with the understanding that I was to deliver little
Mistake to her maiden aunt.
That enabled me to truthfully assure Alice and the hat-trimmer that the
experience had not cost me anything even though I had received no wages.
This time Alice said that instead of my looking like I had been buried
and dug up I looked as if I had been buried and had to scratch my way
out. Mrs. Wilkins agreed with her.
The next day was the end of our partnership. Alice, obeying her mother,
returned to her home. I accompanied her to the train, and received as
much advice as could be packed into fifteen minutes by a fast talker.
Though candor forces me to admit that most of it flowed out of one ear
as fast as it was driven into the other, a few pieces did reach my brain
and so lodged in the meshes of my memory. One of these lodgments was an
earnest request that I forsake the help-wanted column and confine myself
to reputable employment agencies. And Alice emphasized reputable.
Earlier in the winter, following Alice’s advice, I had tried an agency
which made a specialty of placing college graduates. I had registered,
paid my dollar, and been told they would communicate with me as soon as
anything along my line turned up. Now, on my way back to the
rooming-house, after watching Alice get aboard the train for Washington
City, I called again at this agency and reminded them of my application.
Much to my surprise, I learned that I was an unskilled worker in my own
line. Because I had never been a proofreader, sat in an editorial chair,
nor taught a class in story-writing I was unskilled. Neither my college
degree nor the fact that I had published several novels amounted to a
row of pins. H’m, I thought, why did you go to the trouble of changing
your name and otherwise sailing under false colors? As an unskilled
worker you are really in the class to which you belong.
From this agency I went to a “placement bureau,” the annex of a
semiphilanthropic organization whose specialty is “reduced gentlewomen.”
Here the charge was fifty cents for registration. When it came my turn
to be interviewed by the overdressed woman in charge, she earnestly
advised me to take a secretarial course at a particular school. She gave
me her personal card to the head of this school and assured me that she
had more demands for graduates from this school than she could possibly
fill that season. As I had overheard her give the same advice to three
other women I was not very much impressed. However, as I had come there
for advice I decided to see how far hers would take me.
At the school I learned that the shortest course was for six months, and
the lowest price was one hundred dollars. The head of the school
smilingly informed me that as I might not have to study English a
reduction, perhaps ten dollars, might be arranged for.
Returning to the “placement bureau,” I applied to the same overdressed
individual for part-time work that would give me my maintenance while I
was studying to become a secretary. She gave me cards of introduction to
the matron of two institutions.