SHALL, I PASS IT ON?
"Me refrunce, mum!"
I look up, bewildered, from an essay to which I have just set the
caption--"Who is my Neighbor?"
"Me carackter, mum! Me stiffticket! You'll not be sending me away
without one, peticklerly as 'twas meself as give warnin'?"
She is ready for departure. Dressed in decent black for the brother
"who was drownded las' summer," she stands at the back of my desk,
one hand on her hip, and makes her demand. It is not a petition, but a
dispassionate statement of a case that has no other side.
She has been in my kitchen for six months as my nominal servitor. She
has drawn her wages punctually for that time. She "wants a change;"
her month is up; she is going out of my house, out of my employ, out
of my life. These things being true, Katy wants to take with her all
that pertains to her. One of these belongings is her "refrunce." From
her standpoint, I owe it to her as truly as I owed the sixteen dollars
I have just paid her.
I engaged Katy last May from a highly responsible intelligence office.
For and in consideration of a fee of three dollars, a lady-like agent,
with a smooth voice and demeanor, passed over "the girl" to me as she
might a brown paper parcel of moist sugar. She supplied, gratis, a
personal voucher for the woman I had engaged, having known her well
for five years. Katy had, moreover, a model "recommend," which she
unwrapped from a bit of newspaper that had kept it clean. The
chirography was the fashionable "long English;" the diction was good,
and the orthography faultless. Envelope and paper had evidently come
from a lady's davenport.
"This is to certify that Katherine Brady has lived in my family for
eleven months as cook. I have found her industrious, sober, neat,
honest and obliging. She also understands her business thoroughly. She
leaves me in consequence of my removal from the city.
(Mrs.) ... No ... West 57th St., New York City."
If the certificate had a fault, it was that the fit was too nearly
perfect. I had heard of references written to order by venal scribes,
and I consulted the city directory. Mr. ...'s office was in Wall
street, his residence No ... West 57th street. I called to see him,
found him in, and found him a gentleman. He had no doubt that all was
right. He believed the name of their latest cook was Katherine. They
called her "Katy." He knew that his wife was sorry to part with her,
and inferred that she was a worthy woman.
We, too, were leaving town, but only for the summer. Katy "liked the
country in hot weather. All the best fam'lies now-a-days had their
country-places."
It is not an easy matter to "change help" during a summer sojourn in a
cottage distant an hour and a half from town. The act involves one or
more railway journeys, much running about in hot streets, and much
hopeless ringing at dumb and dusty doors. This is the explanation of
Katy's six months' stay in my kitchen. In town, she would have been
dismissed at the end of the first week. She was a wretched cook, and a
worse laundress. Within an hour after she entered my door, the decent
black gown was exchanged for a dingy calico which she wore, without a
collar, and minus a majority of the buttons, all day long and every
day. She was "a settled girl"--owning to twenty-eight summers, and
having weathered forty winters. Her hair, streaked with gray, tumbled
down as persistently as Patience Riderhood's, and was uncomfortably
easy of identification in _ragout_ and muffins. Her slippers were down
at heel; her kitchen was never in order; her tins were black; her pots
were greasy; her range was dull; her floors unclean. Like all her
compeers, she "found the place harder nor she had been give to
onderstand, but was willin' to do her best, seein' she had come."
Her best was sometimes sour bread, sometimes burned biscuits,
generally weak, muddy coffee, always under-seasoned vegetables and
over-seasoned soup. By July 1, she developed a genius for quarreling
with the other servants that got up a domestic hurricane, and I told
her she must leave. She promptly burst into tears, and reminded me
that I "had engaged her for the sayson, an' what would a pore girl be
doin' in the empty city in the middle of the summer?
"An' whativer they may say o' me ways down-stairs, it's the timper of
a babby I have, an' would niver throw a harrd wurrd at a dog, let
alone a human. Whin they think me cross, it's only that I'm a bit
quoiet, an' who can wonder? thinkin' o' me pore brother as was
drownded las' summer, an' him niver out o' me moind!"
I weakly allowed her to stay upon promise of good and peaceable
behavior, and tried to make the best of her, as she had of the place.
One September day, just when the physician, called in to see a dear
young guest, had expressed his fear that she was sickening for a
serious illness, Katy gave warning. "Her feelin's would not allow her
to stay in a house where there was sickness. It always reminded her of
her pore, dear brother what was drownded las' summer, an' a sick
pairson made a quare lot o' extra work, even when it was considered in
the wages. She'd be lavin' that day week, her month bein' up then."
Happily, the threatening of illness was a false alarm, but Katy is
going. The city is filling up, and many "best families" must re-open
their town-houses in time for the school terms. She looks as happy at
the prospect of a return to area-gossip and Sunday flirtation as I
feel at getting rid of her. I have made with her a farewell round of
pantries, refrigerator, and cellar. Valuable articles are
missing--notably two solid silver tablespoons and a dozen fine
napkins. At the back of the barn a pile of brushwood masks a Monte
Testaccio of china and cut-glass. Dirt is in every corner;
glass-towels have been degraded into dish and floor-cloths; saucepans
are burned into holes; tops are lacking to pots and pails.
For all this there is no redress. When I made a stand upon the "case
of spoons," as being old family silver, the housemaid declared that
Katy had used them often to stir soup and porridge, and Katy retorted
with gusts of brine and brogue that she "wouldn't be accountable for
things that didn't belong to her business."
Altogether, my amiable willingness that she should take her leave
without shaking more dust from her feet upon an already burdened
household, had become impatient desire by the time I counted out her
wages. Yet, here she stands, grim as the sphinx, fixed as Fate, with
the inexorable requisition, "Me refrunce, mum!"
"What could I say of you Katy?" I ask, miserably.
"What any leddy whatsomever, as _is_ a leddy, would say! What lots o'
other leddies, as leddylike as enny leddy could wish to be, ridin' in
their coaches an' livin' in houses tin times 's big as this, leddies as
had none but leddylike ways, has said!" is the tautological response.
"I've served yez, fair an' faithful, for six mont's, and it stan's to
rayson as I wouldn't 'a' been let to stay that long onder yer ruff if
so be I hadn't shuited yez."
She has me there, and she knows it. Inwardly, I retract some of the
hard things I have thought and said of Mrs. ... of No ... West
Fifty-seventh street. Having let the creature abide under her roof for
eleven months, she must justify herself for the act. She meant to
leave town, as I mean to go back to town, and, like me, truckled
weakly to expediency. Nevertheless, her weakness did me a real wrong.
_Shall I pass it on?_
This is the moral question I would sift from what my readers may
regard as trivial and commonplace details. The fact that my experience
is so common as to seem trite, is the most startling feature in the
case. Our American domestic service is a loosely woven web, full of
snarls and knots. It is time that the great national principle that
government must depend upon the consent of the governed, should be
studied and applied to the matter in hand. We, the wage-payers, are
the governed, and without our consent. The recent attempt to enforce
this retroverted law upon a grand scale, in calling a mighty railway
corporation to account for the discharge of a dozen or so out of
several thousand employes, is no stronger proof of this curious
reversal of positions than the demand of my whilom cook that I should
set my hand to a lie.
I caught her once in a falsehood so flagrant that I commended the rule
of truth-speaking to her moral sense, and asked how she reconciled the
sin with her knowledge of what was right.
Her answer was ready: "Oh, there's no sin in a lie that doesn't hurt
yer neighbor!"
Judged even by this easygoing principle, I should sin in penning the
reference without which Katy intimates that she will not withdraw her
foot from my house. She looms before me,--vulgar, determined,
irrational and ignorant,--the impersonation of the System under which
we cringe and groan.
"What would you do?" I ask a friend, who is a successful housewife.
She shrugs her shoulders.
"Oh, swim with the tide! Not to give the certificate will be
equivalent to boycotting yourself. The news of your contumacy will
spread like prairie fires. You will be baited and banned beyond
endurance."
"But--my duty to my neighbor?"
"Thanks to the prevailing rule in these affairs, your neighbor knows
how little a written reference is worth. She will satisfy the
proprieties by reading it, and form her own opinion of the girl. When
Katy has worn out her saucepans and patience, your successor in
misfortune will give her clean papers to the next place. It is a sort
of endless chain of suffering. Then, there is the humane side of the
question. A recommendation of some sort is a form most housewives
insist upon. You may be taking the bread out of a 'girl's' mouth by
denying her a scrap of paper."
Nevertheless, I shall not give Katy a reference. I have said to her in
plain but temperate terms:
"You are a poor cook. You are wasteful, dirty, ill-tempered and
impertinent. You have been a grievous trial and a money loss to me. I
am willing to write this down, together with the statement that you
are sober, strong and quick to learn, and that you would probably work
well under a stricter mistress than I have time to be."
She has informed me in _in_temperate terms, that "it is aisy to see
you are no leddy, an' fer the matter o' that, no Christian, ayther, or
you'd not put sech an insult on to an honest, harrd-wurkin' girrl as
has her livin' to git."
She pronounces furthermore, that she "was niver so put upon an' put
about in all her life afore as since into this house she come;" that
she "will have the law o' me for refusing her her rights." Finally,
and most intemperately, that "the Lord will dale with me for grindin'
the face of a pore, defenceless young cre'tur' as has had such a pile
o' throuble already. If her pore, dear brother what was drownded las'
summer was alive, I wouldn't dare trate her so cruel."
I stand fast, between breaths, to my resolution. I relate the true
history of the transaction to enforce my appeal to my fellow
housekeepers, all over the land, to join hands in a measure which
would, I am persuaded, go far toward rectifying a crooked system.
Let each housekeeper, in dismissing a servant, write out without
prejudice for or against the late employée, her claims to the confidence
of the next employer, and her faults,--in short, a veritable
"character." Let her pledge herself to her sister-housekeepers and to
her conscience, not to receive into her family one who cannot produce
satisfactory testimonials of her fitness for the place she seeks.
In England, a mistress who engages a maid without such credentials is
regarded as recreant to her order. In England, too, the former
mistress is held partly responsible for the mischief done, if she turn
loose upon other households a woman like Katherine Brady.
The proposed remedy for a crying and a growing evil is so simple that
some may doubt its practical efficacy. Yet the most casual thinker
must see the strength as well as the simplicity of a plan which would
make skill and fidelity in service the only road to success.
Self-interest, if nothing else, would stimulate our Katies and
Bridgets, our Dinahs and our Gretchens, to keep a place, if it were
not so wickedly easy to "make a change." Our kitchens are overrun and
ravaged by Arabs that become, every year, more despotic.
"Who would be free, herself must strike the blow." General liberty
from this bondage can only be achieved by determined and united
effort. The establishment in every community of a simple organization
under the name of The Housekeepers' Protective Union, that should have
but one article in its constitution, and that one be the pledge I have
indicated, would cover the whole ground, and effect within a year,
permanent reform. Shall not this appeal be the Alexander to cut the
Gordian knot which has, thus far, defied the dexterity and strength of
all who have wrestled with the problem?
Who will send me news of the formation of the first Chapter of the
H.P.U.?