twice a day to "tend" the furnace--the central stove which heats the
entire house. The cook gets fifty pounds a year, the housemaid forty
pounds, and the man, who gets neither food nor lodging, eighteen pounds.
The total is one hundred and eight pounds, which includes the baking of
all the bread and the doing of the weekly laundry for the entire house;
the only additional expenses being for coal and soap.
Now for the wages in an English family of the same standing:--Cook
thirty-five pounds, parlour-maid twenty-six pounds, housemaid twenty
pounds, char-boy eight pounds, and fifty pounds to the laundry for work
which is quite disgraceful. The sum total is one hundred and thirty-nine
pounds, which does not include the feeding of an additional person, and
a servant's board is a greater expense than her wages. Distinctly the
economy is on the American side.
That the servant business is a trade was a fact impressed on me for the
first time by my very intelligent English cook. Each English servant has
her trade which she knows and she declines to meddle with what she does
not know, for which reason the dividing lines are rather strictly laid
down. It was something I had to learn so as not to call on one servant
to do the duties of another. Our American servants are more liberal, but
now I realise that a good English servant is not so much an amateur as
an American; but unless you wish to be unpleasantly enlightened as
mistress, you must learn her line of duty well.
To keep house one must have servants, and in a strange place the first
problem is how to get them. Supposing no friend can recommend you one,
you are reduced either to advertising or the registry office. Registry
offices, through which the majority of sufferers get their "help," riot
in ungodly prosperity. They have managers and clerks, like a bank and,
like other corporations, they have no souls. If you are a meek lady
they snub you, and if you are undecided they give you bad advice. At any
rate the unscrupulous ones, and there are plenty of these, take your fee
whether you get a servant or not.
It seems as if a certain amount of honesty should obtain even in this
business, and I protest against paying five shillings for the mere joy
of talking to a stately female, the presiding goddess in the generally
ill-ventilated temple, who pockets my money and, as soon as my fee is
safe, takes no further earthly interest in me. The methods of English
registry offices seem to me the brazenest kind of piracy. Why don't
English women rebel? Are they not the daughters and wives of grumblers,
and probably the mothers also? However, fate was kind to me, and I got
three servants, two of good village families, while the superior cook
was the legacy of a brilliant woman, a good deal of whose wisdom I have
since had at second-hand.
In the economy of the universe I know that there is a serving class, but
we people of New England are not glib in the use of the word "servant."
Do we not (in the country) call them "helps" when the expression is
base flattery? Here, class distinctions have put the matter on a
practical footing--servants are servants and recognise themselves as
such, and have that outward and visible sign of well-trained domestics
which the Irish girl, direct from her paternal pig-sty, scorns in New
York.
"You must not think," said my intelligent cook, "that we don't have our
feelings as much as you." There it was, and she put herself as a matter
of course on quite a different plane of human beings; the American
servant, on the other hand, would consider herself of the same class,
but ill-used by circumstances. A clever woman once said to me, "You
can't expect all the Christian virtues in the kitchen for five dollars a
week!" But we do! Perhaps the most precious gift I received when I left
Boston was this advice: "Don't see too much."
Servants are like children; to keep them under control you must impress
them. They object to a mistress who is too clever with her hands, but
they like her praise. An American servant does not lose respect for a
mistress who, if necessary, can "lend a hand," but the English servant
sees in such readiness a distinct loss of dignity. Many a time have my
American servants seen me on the top of a step-ladder doing something
that required more intelligence than strength, and they have respected
my power to "do." Here something keeps me from the top of the
step-ladder--instinct probably.
An American treats her servants more considerately than an Englishwoman.
I am conscious of saving my servants too much; often (I confess it with
shame) I run down a flight or two to meet them, and there is no doubt
that the more I do the more unwilling and ungrateful they become.
With three English servants, besides a boy (not to speak of the
laundry), now doing the work of two American servants, I proceed. I have
mentioned a vital and nearly fatal subject--the laundry. In London it is
awful but inevitable, and one cannot wonder any more at the stupendous
dirt of the lower classes. Are their things ever washed, and if so who
pays? After much observation I have decided that they make up by a
liberal use of starch what they lack in soap and water and
"elbow-grease."
Language fails an American direct from the land of clear skies, sunshine
and soap and water, when she contemplates the harrowing results of steam
laundries. Really the most expensive of luxuries in London is to keep
clean! When on Sunday afternoons one sees in Kensington Gardens a poor
infant with a terribly starched and dirty cap on its head (in the form
of a muffin), enveloped in an equally dirty and starched cape, and
carried by a small girl in fearfully starched and dingy petticoats, one
recognises maternal pride which rises superior to London dirt.
I am the client of a "model" laundry which sends our linen back a
delicate pearl-grey. We call it affectionately the "muddle" laundry, and
it costs us one pound a week to keep up to the pearl-grey standard. I
wish we could go back to the days of chain-armour! What remedy? There is
none, except country laundries for the rich and great, and starch for
the poor! The only result of soft coal and dire necessity is the
excellence and cheapness of the cleansing establishments, without which
the long-suffering householder would indeed sit in sackcloth and ashes!
The one aim in furnishing our little house has been to keep the rooms
free from all unnecessary draperies, which are merely traps for dust. It
is hard for me to curb my feminine taste, which runs to sofa cushions
and Oriental nooks lighted by Venetian lamps, but the exigencies of the
London climate make me strictly Colonial (New England Colonial), and I
can look into every corner--blessed privilege. The laundry being an
accepted evil, one institution I willingly proclaim cheap--the
scrub-woman who gets half a crown a day. Why don't all English
scrub-women emigrate to the States in a body? They would get from six to
eight shillings a day, overtime overpay.
Coming to the details of housekeeping. The custom here is that tradesmen
call for orders. That also obtains in America, but many ladies there go
to the markets and select and order for themselves, which is distinctly
more economical. Here, as the result of inadequate storage room, the
expense of ice, and the by no means common use of the ice-box, there is
not much food kept in the house. Now the laying-in of a good supply once
or twice a week, if the mistress understands ordering and goes where she
pleases, is undoubtedly cheaper than a daily ordering of driblets. It is
the same with groceries, and these should be kept under lock and key! To
the American that is not only an impossibility, it is nearly an insult,
and I know of not a single American housekeeper who weighs out the
groceries and other articles to be used week by week. It seems to start
the mutual relationship of mistress and maid on a basis of suspicion.
A tabulated list of values is useless where prices fluctuate. I simply
compare the differences as I have found them in my own little
housekeeping. Meat, with the exception of fillet and sirloin, is dearer
here, and so is poultry. Groceries average about the same, but coffee
and flour are dearer. So are butter and eggs. Milk is the same, but tea,
dear to the English heart, is so cheap that one can undermine one's
nervous system at a very small expense. Vegetables are good and cheap,
but there is little variety, while fruit is dear.
How one does miss the ordinary cheap, good fruits, the California grapes
and the Concords with their clusters of deep blue berries, a five-pound
basket of which only costs a shilling. These were first grown in the old
New England town that Emerson made famous. As for apples, pears and
peaches, they are among the cheap fruits over the sea, and I maintain
their superiority to their English kin.
What oranges equal the Floridas? The "forbidden-fruit" and the
"grape-fruit," are only just making their conquering way into the
English shops. If, as it is claimed, the one is the forbidden fruit of
the Garden of Eden, Eve is nearly justified!
Yes, there are many good things in America and at reasonable prices. One
has only to think of the divine "sweet corn" and "squash" and "sweet
potatoes," and even the modest white bean from which all New England
makes its national dish of "pork and beans."
Fish there is in great variety in London, but that also I find dear.
How is it possible for me to live in a land where lobsters and oysters
are a luxury and not a necessity? Only a housekeeper knows what a refuge
they are in trouble--when an unexpected visitor turns up. Is not the
"oyster stew" (a soup of milk and oysters) an American national dish?
But it could only reach perfection in that blessed land where to eat
oysters is not to suck a copper key, and where they exist in regal
profusion. I look with scorn at the measly, little lobsters for each of
which the fishmonger demands three ridiculous shillings instead of one
shilling and three pence. My heart longs for lobster _à la Newburg_ till
I remember that it takes three of these poor creatures to make the
dish--nine shillings! So I continue to yearn and keep my nine shillings.
I cannot, however, leave the subject without expressing my admiration
for the beauty of the English fish shops and butcher shops. To see a
fish shop in London is to see a trade haloed with poetry. If I were a
fishmonger I would sit among my stock-in-trade and be inspired. The
fishmonger is an artist, he constructs pictures of still-life which
would have been revelations to the greatest of Dutch masters. In
America our fish shops are devoid of poetry--the only compensation being
to see the mountainous piles of oysters, ready to be opened, and
innumerable great red lobsters.
To one item of American economy I wish to return with added stress; that
is, the baking of bread in each house. This household-bread, if well
made, is delicious, substantial, and economical. Usually the cook bakes
twice a week, and besides that she is expected to have ready for
breakfast either fresh baked "biscuits" (scones), "muffins," or
"pop-overs." The yearly allowance of flour for each person is one
barrel, and one reckons the expense to be about half what bread costs
here. The English "double-decker" is a fearful and wonderful production
that errs on the side of heaviness, just as the American baker's bread
errs on the side of frivolous lightness, and nourishes like froth.
Whenever Americans proclaim the cheapness of a visit to London one finds
without exception that they live here as they would not dream of living
at home. Were they to take lodgings there in the same economic manner,
they could live quite as cheaply.
Another inexpensive commodity--which becomes very expensive in the
end--is cabs. There is no doubt that they are cheap, and the fatal
result is that they are used to an extent which makes them a serious
item of expense to a family of moderate means. In America we pay two
shillings each for a short drive in that stately vehicle called a
"hack," and the price is prohibitive for an average family except on
"occasions." So cab fares are not a serious item in domestic expenses.
From experience, I believe that America has a very unmerited reputation
for expense. Live well, even if not ostentatiously, in London, and it
costs fully as much as in New York or Boston. One does not judge by
millionaires or beggars, for both are independent of statistics, but by
the middle classes. Houses are here singularly devoid of comforts, and,
taking the same income, I should say a middle-class American family
could live there as cheaply as here, but with more comfort; and when it
comes to schooling for children, an item to which I have not alluded,
with infinitely greater advantages.
In writing down these desultory reflections, I have been actuated by the
thought that what I have learned may be of use to some puzzled American
creature, who, having married an Englishman, proposes to live in England
with only American standards to guide her. She must not believe, as I
was told, that an American income will go one-third farther here. It
does not. She must be prepared to accept other methods, even if,
secretly, she modifies them a little to suit her American notions; but
she must not boast, for her well-meaning efforts will, at best, be
regarded with good-natured tolerance.
How I wish I could clap a big, stolid, conservative, frost-bitten
English matron into a snug American house, with a furnace, and heaps of
closet (cupboard) room, and all sorts of bells and lifts and telephones,
and then force her to tell me the absolute, unvarnished truth! What
would she say?
In conclusion, I wonder if I, as an exiled American sister, might make a
plea to my American brethren? It is that when they send their wedding
invitations, as well as others, printed on their swellest "Tiffany"
paper, they will kindly put on enough postage. Why should one have to
pay five-pence on each joyful occasion? On some, bristling with
pasteboard, I have even had to pay tenpence,--why add this pang to
exile?
_Kitchen Comedies_
My superior cook had just given me notice, and I felt that the bottom
had dropped out of the universe. She was an ancient retainer, according
to twentieth-century standard, for she had been with me three months.
Her claim to fame rested on her once having cooked for Lord Kitchener.
Whenever we had a trifling difference of opinion, which was seldom,
because I didn't dare, she always retorted that she had cooked for Lord
Kitchener, and, of course, I realised that I was but an unworthy
successor to that great man. I suffered a good deal from his lordship in
those days, and fervently pray that Fate will not throw in my blameless
path either his parlour-maid or his laundress.
I had felt so safe, for cook lured me on with false hopes: she offered
to make marmalade, and she demanded a cat. This was tantamount to
staying for ever. She made the marmalade, and we scoured the
neighbourhood for a cat.
It may be a digression, but I really must remark here on the scarcity of
any particular commodity of which one happens to stand in need. If the
world can be said to be overstocked by any one article it really might
be said to be cats; but had we been in search of a Koh-i-noor it could
not have been more hopeless. We waited three months for a cat to be made
to order, so to speak, and the very day his godmother left--we named him
in honour of our departed cook--he appeared in the person of a long,
lank, rattailed, ignominious tabby, on whom food made no earthly
impression. His name is Boxer--Mister Boxer.
There is a great daily paper in London in whose columns the nobility and
gentry clamour for what the Americans delicately call "help." I have
myself pressed into four alluring lines a statement of the advantages I
had to offer, and have received no reply. I have answered thirty-five
advertising parlour-maids, enclosing stamped envelopes, and have had no
reply. My cook having retired from the scene, and there being nothing
left to remind me of her but Mister Boxer, I again sought solace in
those delusive columns.
"What have I done," I cried in anguish, "that all cooks should avoid
me?"
Just then my dearest friend was announced; at least, she is as dear as
distance will permit in London.
"What's happened?" she asked at once.
I explained mournfully that cook had gone.
"Whenever we had company she always said it wasn't Lord Kitchener,
though I never said it was."
"I wish to goodness," and my friend flung herself into the nearest
chair, "that my cook would go."
For a moment I gasped; it sounded so audacious.
"Give me a new cook every week," she cried, "but deliver me from eating
the same cooking for twenty-six years, as we have done. Adolphus says he
has eaten four thousand French pancakes filled with raspberry jam, in
that time, and that he'll die if he eats another one. I don't blame
him," she added gloomily, "but what are we to do? I've urged her to
better herself, but she won't. She quarrels with every servant who comes
into the house; she's as deaf as a post, and she cooks abominably unless
we have a dinner-party. If we weren't poor I'd pension her off; but we
can't afford it," and she gave a bounce of resignation. "So don't talk
to me of ancient family retainers; I'm sick of them!"
"You don't know what you are talking about," I said solemnly. "Listen to
me. Last week I read an advertisement put in by a lady for her cook who
was leaving--a cook with all the Christian virtues. I decided to answer
it at once, but then I remembered the thirty-five who never replied to
my letters. Just then He came down, placid and smiling--you know his
way--and I explained to him that an Honourable Mrs. Smith was
advertising for a place for her cook, in whom she took a personal
interest.
"'My dear,' he said, 'don't write! Hire an ambulance and fetch her back,
for a cook so recommended cannot be long for this world.'
"I took his advice and flew there in a hansom, and I was so excited
that I forgot to watch the horse's ears. It was ten o'clock when I
reached the Honourable Mrs. Smith's, and it was just like a smart 'at
home.' At first I thought we had gone to the wrong house. Five ladies
were going in, and I passed six in the hall. There were several
reception-rooms and not a chair without a lady. A perplexed, willowy
creature without a hat, who turned out to be the Honourable Mrs. Smith,
led me to a seat under an imitation palm-tree, and said it was dreadful
and that she would never do it again. Her cook had received forty-five
letters and twenty wires; and fifteen messenger-boys and thirty-two
ladies had called.
"There were twenty letters from persons of title. Of course, I thought
of Lord Kitchener, and felt it useless to stay, but as I had come the
Honourable Mrs. Smith advised me to wait; she was very civil.
"Now, you know my three rules: I won't have mixed religions in the
kitchen because of squabbles; I won't take a servant out of a 'flat';
and I don't want one who wears glasses.
"When the paragon and I met under the imitation palm, I found she was
all I did not want. She questioned me severely, and said that she was a
Roman Catholic. I felt that the religion of a being for whom twenty of
the nobility were clamouring was no concern of mine, and I was surprised
when she asked me to leave my address. So little did I aspire to the
paragon that I did not even ask if she could cook. I passed ladies still
arriving, and I was so melancholy that I went home in a 'bus.
"The next morning I had a letter, and I can truly say I never was so
flattered in my life, not even when HE asked me to marry him, for the
paragon had chosen me out of one hundred and sixty-five ladies,
exclusive of twenty of the nobility.
"To be sure, she went against all my principles and I did not even know
if she could cook; but she had chosen me!
"So she arrived in company of three cardboard bonnet-boxes and a
japanned tin trunk.
"HE suggested that we should try her on a lunch, and we did. Thank
goodness, we only had four of his chums, or I should have died of
mortification. After all, a clever man is sometimes duller than the
dullest woman.
"How she cooked! It was appalling! Our parlour-maid, who has lovely
manners, served a series of horrors as if they were a feast for the
gods. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-glass salad
bowl, and two old Worcester plates, and then finished off with nervous
prostration on the kitchen floor. HE and I dined out that night; we had
had too much of the comforts of home.
"The next morning the housemaid appeared with joy in her usually blank
eyes, and said cook had gone and taken her boxes. At first I thought she
had gone to High Mass. But no, she had really gone with her heavy tin
trunk and the three bandboxes. How she got them down at midnight over
four creaking flights of stairs without being heard, we shall never
know, but she did. We found out afterwards that the Honourable Mrs.
Smith had had this paragon just one month, and then she was anxious to
get rid of her in a hurry; so she advertised. It was cruel, wasn't it?
Really, you know, it is wicked of you to complain when a servant has
been faithful to you for twenty-six years."
My friend, who had been made cynical through suffering, said her cook
wouldn't have been faithful if she could have got a better place.
The servant problem is indeed a very sore subject and singularly serious
in England. For this there are two reasons: class distinctions, and also
because so many more servants are needed here to do a given amount of
work than anywhere else. Of course, a great leisured class means also a
great serving class, and this serving class is useless for others,
because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to
a good deal of idleness. Take this class out of the supply, and also the
ever-increasing numbers to whom the smattering of Board School education
has taught just enough to make them good for very little, so that in
their proper pride they prefer to pass the weary years in cheap
department stores or starve on factory wages. Then it is very
conceivable that the servant supply does not equal the demand.
The result is that the registry offices do a thriving trade in sending
out all sorts of undesirable and ignorant human beings to be thorns in
the flesh of unsuspecting housekeepers.
There is something so pathetically reckless in our everyday life! How
little we know of the servants we take into our intimate lives out of
this terrible London with its vices and crimes, discovered and
undiscovered. Recommendations are simply the blind leading the blind.
The worst servant I ever had came with a glowing personal character.
Why will not women tell the truth! Perhaps it is characteristic of the
weaker vessel to be more tactful, to put it delicately, than men. The
lack of truth is partly a desire not to be bothered and partly a rather
spiteful wish that the other woman may find out for herself, and also a
cowardly fear to do a poor girl an ill turn. I rejoice to say that I
found one honest woman who prevented my taking a burglar's assistant to
my heart. But she was more than a woman, for she was also a physician.
When a woman takes to a man's profession she at the same time takes on
something of a man's virtues.
To this lady I went for a personal character of an ideal housemaid, who
said she had left her last place because the lady would not permit a
"follower." Thinking I might not be so bigoted in regard to followers,
human nature being human nature, I was prepared for an area romance, but
not for a shilling shocker.