next door. She had been a nice country girl, but London and the job
butler had proved her destruction. Area railings and bolts were as
nothing to them. The area bell was for ever ringing, and when, by
highest command, it remained unanswered, then did the job butler make a
constant practice of ringing the front-door bell at unearthly hours,
until finally the police had to interfere. Then, soured by the course of
true love running so far from smooth, the job butler broke in one night
and took things. Whether the loving housemaid was a party to the
burglary was not proved, but she was discharged at a moment's notice,
and it was then that she applied to me.
"I couldn't let you take her with eyes closed," said this true
philanthropist, and so I declined the young burglar's assistant.
In another article I have compared English and American servants.
Briefly repeated, the American servant will do twice the work of an
English servant, nor are her rules cast-iron. She is open to reason,
accepts new methods, and is not conservative. Conservatism, to a certain
point, wherever found, represents a caution that is wisdom; but the
conservatism of servants rests on colossal ignorance, the result of
experience gathered from innumerable "ladies," many quite as ignorant as
their servants. In these progressive days they keep them too short a
time to care to teach them anything, and are mostly glad enough to
"muddle along" any way. Never have servants been treated so well as now
and never have they as a rule been so bad.
The world, in spite of its Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Rothschilds, is
made up of people with modest incomes, and it is these who suffer most
keenly under the mistaken aspiration of the servant class. The
impossibility of getting servants, makes them resigned to put up with
unbearable shortcomings, for complaints result in immediate notice being
given, and, after all, a bad servant is better than no servant. So the
servant never learns, and takes her faults to the next sufferer.
The head of one of the most trustworthy of the London registry offices
told me that the decadence of servants had its rise during the first
Jubilee of Queen Victoria. There was such an influx of strangers in
London that country servants were imported at huge wages, while, on the
other hand, innumerable London servants threw up their situations simply
"to see the fun." Since then, she affirmed, they have become a restless
lot, changing from one place to the other without reason, except for the
sake of excitement, and generally demanding big establishments, less
work, and increasing wages. I have heard more complaints of servants in
England in a few years than in my whole life in America.
The country servants' Mecca is London, and no sooner have they reached
it than they join that restless procession with the japanned tin trunks.
What becomes of them? Where do they finally go with their false
standards and blank faces! Those awful blank faces, as impenetrable as
that of the Egyptian Sphinx.
Servants can be divided into two classes: those that aspire to serve the
nobility, and the others who circulate among the middle-classes. The
outward and visible distinctions of the former are the perfection of
menial smartness, the women's starched apron-bows cocked to an
impertinent angle, and their faces a blank. On the other hand, the
middle-class servant never really succeeds to a blank face, which is the
result of years of practice, and sometimes she even smiles. Also her
apron is often put on in a hurry, and much starch brazens out holes;
besides, her face invites "smuts."
Then there is a kind of manservant who revolves in boarding-houses and
among certain kinds of distracted families, who is too awful to
contemplate. Those fatal, ill-fitting evening clothes that shine with
age and grease. He mostly comes from foreign parts, and, instead of
presenting to the spectator a blank wall of a face, he stares at you in
agonised misapprehension. As a foreigner, he is naturally despised by
his British fellow servants. Has not the Englishman a perfectly natural
conviction that Divine Providence is a British institution, and that the
heavenly language is English?
The rest of the world (with the exception in these days of Americans) he
labels as foreigners, and foreigners he either tolerates, overlooks, or
despises. His main attitude is one of amiable indifference, which is,
indeed, his little weakness, for it blinds him to the possible strength
of what he does not consider worth guarding against. I asked a
distinguished Englishman if he often went abroad. "No," he said, quite
without humour, "I hate meeting so many foreigners."
It is this British attitude which so endears him to the world at large,
already exasperated by a little way he has of appropriating to himself
nice, big slices of the earth. His enemies quite forget how he promptly
turns these nice, big slices into civilised lands, which he throws open
to the rest of the world. It is, possibly, as compensation, that the
world turns over to him its surplus hungry and idle population, who
gather up English pennies with which they later on return to their
various fatherlands, where they at once join the army of the bitter
Anglophobes. And is not the dingy foreign servant one of the innumerable
birds of prey that fill their poor, starved stomachs with English
victuals? No wonder the English are so unpopular!
The English servant requires to be studied. The world's other servants
are mere amateurs, the English servant has a trade. As an American, I
proceeded to treat mine _à l'Americaine_, and I made my first blunder. A
sensible American is, if not friends with her servants, at least
friendly. The Englishwoman, if she is sensible, presents to her servants
a surface of perfect indifference, and then she has peace, for the
English servant despises a considerate and kindly mistress as not
knowing her place.
The most difficult thing for a stranger to learn is that impalpable line
between the different servants' duties. If one does not enumerate what
one expects of them when they are hired, afterwards it is too late. They
have, however, a rough sense of honour and they generally do what they
agree to.
According to the very common American custom, our house is furnished
with speaking-tubes, and these nearly lost me a very superior cook. She
was so superior that I was more polite to her than to any other human
being; only when I was quite sure she could not hear, then did I call
her by her pet name, Lady Macbeth. As I was looking timidly through the
larder one morning she gave me notice. I never had a servant who had
such lovely kitchen manners; her unfailing impudence was veneered by the
most perfect propriety. "It's the speaking-tubes; I've nothing else to
complain of; but I won't be talked to through the tubes. It's against my
dignity to have other servants listen."
This time I pacified her, but later on I hurt her beyond forgiveness; I
had sent the housemaid to call her one morning when she was very late.
On my usual kitchen visit I found Lady Macbeth palpitating with
rage--she, a "cook-housekeeper," called by the housemaid; she gave
notice at once, and I realised then that there is no such snob as a
servant, and there is nothing more unyielding than kitchen etiquette.
The terrors of etiquette below stairs! There once strayed into my employ
a housemaid whose career, hitherto, had been confined to lodging-houses.
Upstairs she always looked frightened, and her face had a great
attraction for "smuts"; but she was very willing and very incompetent.
It is my experience that the willing are mostly incompetent. It was in
the reign of Lady Macbeth, a tall, fair person, with blonde eyes and a
cast-iron jaw.
"It is not for me to ask Madam to send Muggins away, but the rest of us
will go if Muggins stays. I don't know where she has lived-out before,
but she drinks out of her saucer and does not even know that we expect
her to be down in our sitting-room at half-past four, dressed in her
black, and ready to pour out the servants' tea." Of course, I gave
Muggins notice, recognising that the lodging-house was her proper
sphere, and in the month that followed I knew she suffered martyrdom.
She used to wipe her eyes stealthily, and as she was not proud I showed
her some sympathy.
"They ain't nice to me downstairs like you are, Ma'am," she sobbed,
"though I'm doing my best. Cook says she won't wipe up the dishes for
the likes of me."
"Never mind, Muggins; you'll be going soon and, after all, you have
learnt a good deal here," I consoled her.
"I wish," said Muggins, "I was dead." Thus I discovered in Muggins an
unexpected and interesting note of tragedy, but she melted away as they
all do; one does not remember them as individuals but as materialised
qualities, good or bad. However, some months after, I again encountered
Muggins, looking like a bad imitation of a very middle-class young lady,
in a huge hat like a cart-wheel, nodding with plumes, beside her an
underdone youth, a bowler on the back of his head, so as to show the
fine, bold sweep of his shiny black hair.
Muggins's smile showed that she had learnt a thing or two. Never more
would she drink tea out of a saucer, nor plunge her knife into a mouth
which, when we first met, was guiltless of front teeth. Now I at once
recognised the gloss of six brand-new "store teeth." On the strength of
what she had learnt in my service she had graduated to higher spheres,
where she could afford the luxury of a young man with whom to "walk
out." It seems a servant's aim and ambition is to set up a young man
with whom she walks out--the final goal being rarely matrimony; it only
means speechless strolls through Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens, or
the joyous revels at Earl's Court, if "she" stands treat.
Oddly enough, the English lover of the lower class is always speechless
but very affectionate in public. The American of the same class is
publicly prudish. It is, therefore, rather startling, as a blushing
stranger, to see the loving couples that emerge out of the leafy paths
of Kensington Gardens, clasping each other's waists, holding hands, or
engaged in other miscellaneous fondling, which is probably the
safety-valve that nature provides for those whose general and business
expression is a total blank.
In the course of time, Muggins was succeeded by Jane; Jane of the
Madonna face, a voice like a summer breeze, and her work divine. I
basked in unaccustomed joy until, unfortunately, one morning I asked
her to send off an important telegram for me. "No," she said, in her
sweet voice, "I won't go out this filthy morning." In the afternoon I so
far regained my scattered senses as to call up Jane and give her notice.
For an instant she turned white, then she recovered herself.
"I beg your pardon, Madam," she said, with respectful effrontery, "I
shall not take your notice. Servants do not need to take any notice
after noon."
"All the same you have had your notice; but I will, if you wish, repeat
it to-morrow morning," I said, rather amused.
The next morning I had barely set my foot in the dining-room when Jane
flew in, "I wish to give you notice, Ma'am," she cried, in a gasp. I
recognised that I was defeated, for by some menial code of honour she
felt that she could tell her next lady that she had given me notice.
Whether the custom is legal or not, registry offices are not agreed, but
I am now careful to give notice before noon.
The restlessness of the English servants, fanned by the Board Schools
and higher aspirations towards department stores, has produced the
temporary servant. She flits from one distressed family to the other,
and is at anyone's beck and call at a moment's notice; nor does she
harrow her lady's feelings by staying that awful last month, when having
done her worst she is invulnerable.
She has, of course, her disadvantages, along with her advantages. She
takes naturally no earthly interest in her place (but none of them do!)
for she flits like a grubby butterfly from one area to the other; she
is, however, usually quite competent. Her example, on the other hand, is
bad, for she gets high wages, a varied existence, and plenty of
holidays, and, being temporary and independent, she does not work too
hard.
There is really nothing so fatal as aspirations in the wrong place; to
them we owe the servant problem. Now, the average man will sniff at the
servant problem and, unless he has a great, broad mind, he will say to
the partner of some of his joys and all of his sorrows, "You don't know
how to treat your servants. My clerks don't bother me."
As if that were the same thing at all! Men's places are easily filled,
and the average man is so anchored by domestic ties that he thinks
several times before he gives warning, as indeed would a servant if she
had a family depending on her earnings. But a servant usually has no
ties. Her clothes are in her tin trunk, and her hopes in the registry
office; thus, accompanied by the one and protected by the other, she
goes on her winding way. If she had an idle or sick husband and
half-a-dozen children to support, her attitude towards service would be
less lofty.
Coming often from very poor homes, it is a curious fact that servants
are always extravagant, at any rate with other people's belongings. Lady
Macbeth, under whose dominion I languished for over three years, once
confessed to me that she prided herself on her economy, which, she said,
proved her to be of a different class from other servants.
Once, in a gracious moment, she also told me she preferred being a good
cook rather than a poor nursery governess who, in the delicate and
unwritten code of service, is on a higher social scale, hovering, I
believe on the outskirts of the lady pinnacle. She was kind enough to
add that she would rather cook for some one she could look up to than
teach a lot of stupid young ones. I was highly flattered, and so was the
other member of my family, and we tried hard to live up to her good
opinion. But no man is a hero to his valet, and she never repeated the
compliment.
It is unfortunately true that domestic troubles, like rheumatism,
toothache, and sea-sickness, from which one can suffer untold agonies,
never arouse a proper sympathy. A man takes his business seriously
enough, but he never takes his wife's housekeeping seriously.
"What in the world do you do all day long?" is his kindly, scornful cry;
as if there were nothing to do! Yet it is that which gives women grey
hairs and nervous prostration, and forms an endless topic of
conversation among those who would gladly avoid the subject. It requires
cast-iron, steel-bound nerves to confront rebellion in the kitchen,
simply because of the terror of going from bad to worse. That awful
pilgrimage to the registry office, those hideous interviews, that
terrible month of probation--your probation as well as hers. I defy two
women to get together and not talk "servants" before the end of the
conversation. Not even intellect will save you the flight to that
inferno, the Registry Office.
There is one figure the dramatist of the future will never again be able
to employ, and that is the ancient retainer. Never again will he follow
his unfortunate master and mistress into exile, or lay down his life for
them, or give up to them his humble earnings. Not only will the species
be extinct, but the very tradition of it will have passed away.
The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by
electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and
mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will be left to do
unaided will be to make love; and yet, possibly, that also is another
form of electricity. At any rate, the ancient retainer is doomed, and it
is the ancient retainer's fault. He has shown his decreasing interest in
the family, so no wonder the family takes no further interest in him.
Job servants supply his place, and in illness a trained nurse does as
well, if not much better.
Alas, it is a materialistic, utilitarian age and, if they did but know
it, neither master nor servant can afford to stifle what remains of
loyalty and affection. There are some things for which money will not
pay, strange though it may seem in these days when everything has its
price. The life which cultivates no feeling but indifference is to be
deplored both for master and man.
There is something which makes of labour a higher thing than a mere
barter. If that something really existed, we would not have that
ceaseless, perpetually changing procession with tin trunks; personally,
I should not feel so much that I was keeping a boarding-house for
strangers, whom I pay instead of their paying me. If any of the old
spirit were still left, servants would not be sent adrift to shift for
themselves when their best days are over, and we should still see that
phenomenon, an old servant.
What becomes of old servants? It is a mystery. Some possibly become
meek, and keep lodging-houses; others, meeker still, become caretakers.
Can human imagination conjure up a more dismal fate? To be the companion
of beetles and mice; to vegetate in a basement, gloomy with the abysmal
gloom of London, and silent with the monumental silence of a deserted
house!
Why not think of the possible future, that giddy, independent day, when
to give notice, and feast on the consequent anguish, is a cool rapture?
Once only I met an ex-parlour maid who rose superior to fate. She had
become useful by the day. Then, unexpectedly, a subtle change came over
her--she also aspired. She couldn't give warning, which would have been
her natural outlet, but she felt that she owed something to her dignity
before the other servants. From henceforth, she announced, she would
really have to come in by the front door. I submitted, and the area
steps know her no more.
It is a comfort not to be required to solve the problems of a future
generation. I saw, however, yesterday, the thin end of the wedge in the
form of a little red cart, in front of a house before which the usual
"Sidewalk Committee," as they call it in America, was gathered, lazily
critical. Rubber tubes led from the cart into the open windows of a
room, and a gentleman, apparently of elegant leisure, in uniform,
superintended proceedings. For a moment I suspected fire, but seeing the
calm, unruffled, unsoiled, unwatered appearance of everything, it
suddenly flashed through my mind that what I so often had predicted was
being fulfilled. Science was solving the domestic problem!
If we can clean a house by air, without the presence of a servant,
before long some great man will teach us to cook in the same way. Some
day electricity will release us from bondage. A cook will then be as
unnecessary as a 'bus horse. Then let the young person, who now aspires
to the factory and the department stores, threaten; we shall not care.
Indeed, then may come our sweet time of revenge, for the department
stores will be undoubtedly overcrowded, and the young person with the
yellow tin trunk will then join a different procession in the days of
that happy millennium.
Gladly would I have shaken hands with the gentleman who was
superintending the red cart, as the outward and visible promise of a
new liberty, but I feared he might not understand.
If one might offer a suggestion to our great and glorious Republic
across the sea in regard to any possible change in her coinage, it would
be that, rather than the worthy lady with the Phrygian cap, it should
bear the figure of the new "vacuum-cleaner," with its attendant Man;
that represents something real, something up-to-date. The lady with the
cap and stars is a myth, but what have we poor sufferers to do with
myths? Let us, rather, give credit where credit is due.
The other day there was sent to me a voluminous list of the eminent
scientists who are to lecture before the Royal Institution. As I read
their famous names it did seem to me that if these giants of science
would abstract their gaze from discovering new planets, new continents,
new gases, and new rays, and would bring their mighty intellects to bear
on what might be called kitchen science, the results would be
incalculable.
Does not the old nursery wisdom declare, "Great oaks from little acorns
grow?" Invent an electrical cook, an electrical parlour-maid, an
electrical housemaid, and an electrical boy for the boots. Think of the
peace that will enter our homes; think of the just retribution that will
overtake those awful offices that pocket our fees and supply worse than
nothing! Think of the joy of millions of crushed housekeepers who, for
the first time in the history of the world, will be able to look a cook
squarely in the face and give her warning! Surely that is an aim which
should satisfy the greatest intellect, because the greatest intellect
(presumably a man, a brother, a father, or a husband) demands to be fed,
not only often, but well.
Columbus was undoubtedly a great man, and the product of his time; was
he not the first to do that little egg trick, and did he not afterwards
discover the United States of America? But his fame, mighty and enduring
though it is, will pale before his, the product of our time, the product
of our dire necessity, who will give to the world what is greater even
than a new continent--and that is Peace.
The greatest man of the future will be the Columbus of the Kitchen.
_Entertaining_
I once met an Englishman in America who quite unconsciously explained to
me the vital difference between English and American society.
He was so quiet, so gentlemanly, and so bored, and I had tried my best
to say things. At last I cried in despair, "You Englishmen are so hard
to entertain!" To which he replied, in slow surprise, "But we don't want
to be entertained!" and that is it! And as man moulds the woman, and the
woman makes society--therefore the English woman makes the society of
which her Englishman approves, just as the American makes a society
suitable for her "men folks."
Society is an elusive expression, and the human beings who constitute it
are spread out in layers like the chocolate cake of our childhood, and
every layer aspires to be the top one with the sugar frosting. In a
kingdom the only ones who ever reach that sugar-coated eminence are of
course the august reigning family besides a very precious and select
few, who must be horribly bored at having reached an altitude where
there is no need of further aspiration. After all, it does add a zest to
life to triumph over one's dearest friends and snub them. Of course a
reigning family has the superlative privilege of snubbing, but they have
to take it out in that, for to them is denied the joy of "climbing."
In America we are still in the beginning of things, and society is less
complex, though more so than formerly, as the unfortunate result of
increasing wealth. There was a golden age in America, when different
cities each required of its votaries different qualifications to enable
them to enter what is called "Society." In those days, it is pleasant to
testify, it was what a man had done, intellectually or morally, that
opened to him the iron-bound gates of Boston. You might be shabby and
poor, and rattle up to Society in an exceedingly inelegant vehicle
called a "herdic" (which shot you out like coal), but you were welcome
if you were literary or scientific, musician or philanthropist. Money
looked on respectfully at the great and shabby, and was distinctly
elbowed into a corner.
Something grips at my heart as I recall those bygone days when, as a
very young girl, with a bump of reverence as high as the Himalayas, I
sat in the corner of a splendid, shabby Boston drawing-room, and watched
the great men and women, whose genius has left its imprint on American
history and literature. They talked to each other, like ordinary human
beings, and refreshed themselves with cold coffee and heavy cake, which
was passed by such of the younger generation as the wonderful hostess
could press into service. It is remembering this wonderful hostess that
I am impressed by the truth that entertaining is not a fine art, but
genius; it is not acquired, it is inborn.
In this shabby old mansion, with its relics of a bygone splendour, I saw
for the first time the greatest hostess it has ever been my good fortune
to meet. She was neither beautiful, witty, nor young, but she had the
subtle quality which made you at once at home in her genial presence;
which made you feel that you were the one guest in whom she was
interested, and this impression she made on everybody. Such was her
magnetism that her spirit inspired every one, at least for the time
being; a charming intercourse was the result, a geniality among her
guests who, the very next day, in an overwhelming flood of shyness,
would cut each other dead.