world in general for whatever time one spends with them. They see such
an unending procession of human beings that, from the remarks of
smoking-room stewards, I have felt that, for them, the individual has
almost ceased to exist and is instinctively pigeonholed, as a type. They
seem to be able to take a man’s measure at a glance, and they usually
take it with astonishing accuracy. I don’t mean that their appraisal
begins and ends with the probable amount of the gentleman’s tip; they
are far from being as avaricious as they are supposed to be. They know
whether he will be exigent or easy to please, whether he will have
consideration for them, or keep them needlessly running back and forth
from a half-consciousness that it is within his right, according to the
manner in which the world is arranged, to do so. They know at once
whether he will regard them as a mere machine, or a natural enemy, or a
servant with several almost human attributes, or a human being who
chances, for the time, to be acting in the capacity of one who serves.
Those, broadly speaking, are the four ways in which servants are usually
looked upon. Personally, I never can quite comprehend the point of view
that does not see a servant in the fashion I have mentioned last. And
yet, judging from remarks that are made to one by both women and men
about their servants, and from the testimony of those engaged in this
form of labor, this manner of appreciating the servant class does not
seem to be a usual one.
Many persons I know actually employ, in speaking to a servant, an
entirely different tone of voice from the one they make use of
habitually. In giving an order, or asking a question, the sounds
ordinarily produced by their vocal chords undergo a sudden and entire
change; they become dry, hard, metallic, and as impersonal as the human
voice can sound. It is not that they are angry or irritated, or have
hard hearts; it is merely because they are speaking to a servant, and
for some reason, altogether obscure to me, this proceeding necessitates
a difference in vocal pitch, key and inflection. Several persons of
whom I am, for many reasons, extremely fond, have developed this
characteristic to such an extent that I have long since avoided dining
with them, meeting them in clubs, or, in fact, having any relations with
them that involve the presence of a so-called “inferior.” I find it too
embarrassing, too mortifying; I always have an all but irresistible
desire to exclaim to the patient, well-mannered human being who is
endeavoring to make us comfortable: “Please don’t mind him, or feel
badly about it. He isn’t at all the insufferable ass he sounds like.”
Long observation has convinced me that this fashion--it seems to be more
a fashion, after all, than anything else--is not nearly as prevalent in
the West as it is in the East. With but few exceptions, the men at the
club I most frequent in the West speak to the servants in their ordinary
tone of voice; the same natural and courteous tone they would adopt in
speaking to anyone else. Just what this proves, I can’t quite make up my
mind. It might mean that in the West we are rather more human and
kindly, or it might, perhaps, mean that we have not become so accustomed
to that unfathomable stratum of the race known as English servants.
English servants in nowise resemble the servants of other countries. The
status of everyone of them is definitely fixed; I feel sure it appears
somewhere in that unwritten constitution of England about which one
hears and reads so much. They seem to be a class apart, a caste. Their
outlines are defined with the most absolute exactitude. They never merge
or melt or even temporarily fade into other and different outlines. They
are what they are, and they know it and accept it. About them has grown
up a conventional manner of treating them, of thinking about them, and
alluding to them. It isn’t exactly a cruel manner. It is the manner to
which I have referred; one from which every personal, sympathetic,
genial quality has been carefully eliminated; one in which the necessary
words are reduced to their simplest, most direct and unadorned minimum.
“Good” English servants not only do not mind this, they are used to it
and expect it. The part they play in life includes being verbally kicked
for so much a year. It is because of the greater prevalence in the East
of English butlers and footmen, I am sometimes inclined to believe, that
one more often hears the “correct” tone in speaking to a servant in New
York and Boston, than one does in the cities of the West.
But there are other ways of making servants “know their place” of which
we in the West are by no means guiltless. One woman of my acquaintance
invariably refuses to engage a maid who possesses that all but
indispensable appurtenance known as a “gentleman friend.” Another, for
some cryptic reason, never allows a servant to take a trunk upstairs.
All trunks must be unpacked and repacked downstairs. I don’t know why;
neither do they. It is merely one of her edicts, and it has contributed
not a little to the local “servant problem.”
For the employer’s view of the local “servant problem” I have never been
able to feel the slightest sympathy, as I can imagine no proposition
more naïvely selfish. The problem, as far as I can formulate it, seems
to consist of the fact that many persons in the world are disinclined to
give up their liberty, and to consecrate their entire lives to the whims
and mandates of some tiresome woman who yearns to underpay them. How
otherwise admirable women resent having to remunerate their cooks! I
know they do, because I have frequently heard them as much as say so.
Looked at honestly, the whole problem resolves itself into just this:
servants are a luxury. Any one of us could make beds, dust, scrub, wait
on the table, open the front door, wash clothes, and cook. (As a matter
of fact, I have done, at various times, all of these things with
complete success.) But for one reason or another we prefer to have
somebody else do them for us. We could do them ourselves, but we desire
the luxury of a servant, or of half a dozen servants. Yet most persons
seem to be distinctly reluctant to part with the amount of money a
servant can once a month command. They complain bitterly that wages are
becoming higher. Why shouldn’t wages become higher if parlor maids and
cooks can command them? Servants, I repeat, are a luxury. They do
something for us that we could do ourselves, but don’t wish to. We deny
ourselves other luxuries when we can’t afford them; why not deny
ourselves servants if we can’t conveniently pay the wages they are
entitled to? It is an odd fact that we don’t. Instead, we pay the wages
and then complain and lament and get together and discuss “the servant
problem.”
A cook, who had lived for several years with a family of my
acquaintance, abruptly left them because another household offered her a
dollar a month more. In my opinion, her action was quite right. Why
shouldn’t she have done so? A dollar is, after all, a dollar. But the
family she left, a kind, almost intelligent family, at that, has never
ceased to talk of what they call her “ingratitude.” I confess I am
unable to see it. Like millions of other American families, they seem to
think that to drudge under the same roof with them was a privilege, but
if one pauses to examine the situation, it really wasn’t.
I wish I had space enough in which to recall some of the servants I have
known best, beginning, at a very early age, with one German and three
French governesses, continuing with dear Mrs. Chester, who took care of
my rooms when I was in college, and about whom I have written minutely
and affectionately elsewhere; of Miss Shedd, the washwoman, to whom I
left in my will the photograph of a Madonna she greatly admired, but who
happened to die before I did, recounting, it gave me pleasure to be
told, my various virtues in her last delirium; of the Madrassi servant I
had in India, who, for no particular reason, used to burst into tears
once a week, and declare that I was his “father and mother”; of the Jap,
who looked down on me because he was a “Master,” whereas I was only a
“Bachelor,” of Arts; of Aunt Nancy, who died last winter, after
continuous, unbroken service in our family for seventy-seven years (the
last fifteen or twenty years, I confess, did not include occupation
other than keeping alive on rye whisky and pipefuls of cut plug
tobacco); of the marvelous servant in a popular Paris restaurant, whose
only function was “to pacify the guests.” Although dressed as a waiter,
he never actually waited. He, instead, drifted about from table to table
engaging one in conversation, soothing the complainers, lulling the
impatient. He was tall and thin with a long, intelligent nose. Balzac
would have immortalized him. He had a genius for tiding over the
irritation of red-faced men in a hurry. When he saw that one had almost
reached the point of explosion, he would saunter up to the table and
begin to talk. In a few seconds the impatient, red-faced man would be
proclaiming his opinion on some burning question of the day, and before
he had finished, his belated order would be served.
Like everyone else, I have ideas for some five hundred books and fifty
plays. One of the books will be called “Servants.”
MRS. WHITE’S
This morning I read in the paper of the death of Mrs. White, and the
short, inadequate paragraph startled me, not exactly because Mrs. White
was dead, but rather because until yesterday afternoon she was alive. I
had assumed that the good lady (how I wish I could remember just when I
left off hating her and began to think of her as a good lady!) had died
years ago and there was something grotesque and uncanny in her suddenly
up and dying again out of a blue sky, so to speak. It was very much as
if someone should pop out of an old tomb in a cemetery, take a hasty
look around and then pop in again. If I had not long ago ceased to feel
bitterly about her, I should have told myself that it was just like Mrs.
White, that she was not a sincere woman, that she had never inspired me
with confidence. But water has been flowing under the bridge for
thirty-two years since my tears used to flow at Mrs. White’s, and it so
long ago eroded my bitterness that I now cannot recall when it was I
last had any. Had I been asked yesterday how old Mrs. White would be by
this time, I should have answered very conservatively for fear of
seeming to exaggerate, “About a hundred and ninety-six,” and the paper
tells me she “passed away” in her seventy-first year. Good heavens--then
when I knew her and regarded her as a senile monster with a gizzard of
granite, she must really have been a nice-looking young woman of
thirty-eight. How very strange.
Whenever I begin to think of Mrs. White’s I have an unusually
uncontrollable desire to write my memoirs. I’m sure I don’t know why I
have always so longed to write my memoirs. Perhaps it is because I know
that memoirs, however inane, are the only form of literature that is
absolutely sure of getting itself read. Then, too, they must be so easy
to produce. They don’t have to be by anybody in particular, and they
present no technical difficulties whatever. They have to begin
somewhere, but one need never be bothered by wondering how they ought to
end. They don’t end, they merely stop. Very often indeed they refuse to
do even that. Madame de Genlis, for instance, after minutely covering
the ground in her “Souvenirs,” trimmed a new pen and, without pausing to
separate herself into chapters or to take breath, dashed off eight obese
volumes of “Mémoires.” Like all works of this nature, they are
“perfectly fascinating” and are still read, but there is no reason
whatever why I shouldn’t produce eight volumes just as twaddlesome. For
beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the
manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an
interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time
meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. These
conditions are extremely difficult to avoid. They arise quite naturally
after one has taken the first costly and fatally easy step of being
born at all. Seventy years afterward every period of the world’s history
is intensely interesting and nowadays it is quite impossible for the
modest, the retiring, the obscure, to evade the overtures of the
celebrated. The manner in which they lie in wait for us unknown ones,
hunt us down, in fact, is pathetic but brazen. They infest otherwise
restful and pleasant clubs, they pervade dinners, they hang on the edge
of evening parties, demanding to be met and talked to when one would
rather dance or look on. They are always cropping out or “butting in” to
the interruption of one’s satisfactory routine, just as the marvels of
the Yellowstone Park impose upon the placid, smiling face of nature.
When they happen to be royal, they ruin health-resorts, make good hotels
uninhabitable, render null and void the printed schedules of railways.
One summer in Paris I spent most of five weeks in vainly endeavoring to
dodge the Shah of Persia. I hardly ever went anywhere that he and his
gentlemen in waiting didn’t arrive a few minutes later and upset my
plans for the day. On account of him a brutal and licentious soldiery
has driven me from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the Pantheon with
drawn swords, and shoved me around and around the foyers of most of the
music halls, but later on I shall, no doubt, refer to him thus: “When
not long afterward I was greatly shocked by the news of this
pleasure-loving but beneficent ruler’s assassination, I recalled his
vivacious, oriental, if at times somewhat drowsy personality with
genuine regret.” (Sunlight and Shadows of My Long Life, Vol. VI, p.
982.) And a year ago in South America, where I naïvely supposed that I
should certainly be safe, I had scarcely set foot within the city limits
of Buenos Aires before I was, metaphorically speaking, drugged,
sandbagged and introduced to Mr. William Jennings Bryan. In his
pseudo-presidential frock coat and square-toed kid shoes he looked
precisely like a portrait of himself on the front page of _Puck_ after
it has been fingered for a week in a barber shop.
“‘Yes,’ he replied with the virile hand grasp that has changed the vote
of millions, ‘yes,’ he heartily agreed, ‘the days are hot in South
America but the nights are cool, and I always maintain that cool nights
are more than half the battle.’ Except for the sorcery of his voice and
the poignant pleasure he took in making my acquaintance, I think it was
this recurrent note of the man’s wholesome optimism that most profoundly
impressed me.” (Shadows and Sunlight of My Short Life, Vol. IX, p.
1024.) I left Buenos Aires at once and went to Montevideo, but literally
in less than fifteen minutes after I disembarked and strolled up to the
principal Plaza I absent-mindedly followed two fat gentlemen in evening
dress (it was three o’clock of a fine afternoon) into a public building
of some kind, and immediately found myself eating candied pineapple and
drinking Pan-American toasts in warm, sweet champagne, with the
President of Uruguay. The distinguished, the celebrated, the notorious,
the great--from one’s earliest years it is impossible to elude them.
Presidents! I shall devote sixty-five printed pages to them, beginning
with the summer evening when on an errand of mercy (a friend of mine had
robbed the till of a grocery store and had sent for me from the police
station) I became submerged in a sea of human faces that were waiting
for the President and Mrs. Cleveland, and lost in about five minutes a
new four-dollar straw hat, a scarf pin, the left sleeve of my coat (an
intoxicated patriot pulled it out by the roots and waved it) and nearly,
my eager, useful life. For a middle-aged woman clinging to a window
below which I was helplessly imbedded suddenly fainted and fell on me.
The crowd was so solidly packed that we were unable, for an eternity, to
stuff her into an interstice--to restore her right side up to the
perpendicular, and all the time we were doing our best to control her
arms and legs, and she was kicking noses off with her heels and gouging
eyes out with her thumbs, the people in the window were throwing, first
glassfuls, then pitcherfuls, and finally pailfuls of water on us, and
beseeching with paroxysms of mirth, “Won’t somebody _please_ bring a
little water; a lady has fainted.” As for writers, opera-singers,
bishops, actors, diplomatists, Napoleons of finance and members of the
nobility, they are always scuttling about nowadays. “It were a sorrow to
count them.” I shall make them say some of the most surprising things,
but in the case of persons who have died I shall write my memoirs
conscientiously throughout and record only the remarks they would have
enjoyed making but were unable to think of at the time.
My audience at the age of eight with His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, I have
always thought would open volume the first most auspiciously. One could
draw such a charming little picture of the ivory-white, ethereal old man
laying his hand for a moment on my shock of yellow hair and smiling
affectionately at my wondering, upturned face. I remember I held the
ends of his fingers and was beginning to examine his ring when someone
prodded me in the back and in a hoarse, agitated whisper, reminded me
to kiss it. I’m sure I could do all sorts of pleasant things with that
unearthly smile and tremulous blessing and sunny hair and upturned face,
but chronologically Mrs. White’s takes precedence, although even Mrs.
White’s is not the incident in my intellectual development that I first
remember. Sometime before then the detached, austere figure of a
beautiful woman became part of my consciousness and recollection and has
marvelously remained so ever since. She was at the Centennial Exhibition
of 1876 whither I was taken almost in the arms of a fond, and in that
instance foolish, grandmother. Gone, gone is the exhibition; I recall
nothing of it except a broad, hot walk in a park, bordered by gorgeous
flowers. But at the other end of it, no doubt in “Agricultural Hall,”
alone on a platform and surrounded by the ingenuous Americans of that
day, stood the woman. Jets of ice water played gently upon her soft and
gracefully molded limbs, for they were of butter and far from acclimated
to the debilitating atmosphere of Philadelphia in July. I loved that
oleomarginal morgue and screamed to be taken back to it whenever I was,
as I had to be from time to time, forcibly removed. I can’t now remember
the appearance at that time of anything or anybody else, even of the
grandmother who chaperoned us, but I should instantly recognize the
dear, long since melted work of art in any creamery of the world.
Mrs. White’s was a parental mistake. Some children are born without the
kindergarten temperament, and when this happens the effort to develop it
is usually futile. Not that my mother consciously attempted to do so. A
short time ago I asked her why she had been guilty of sending me to Mrs.
White’s, of blighting even in the bud an originally fine mind, and she
was obliged to confess she didn’t know. There was in the act no high and
definite concept of education. I suspect her of motives as mixed as they
were worthy. By sending me to Mrs. White’s she could relieve the
household of my beloved but exhausting society for hours and hours and
hours at a time, she could “help Mrs. White along” and she could give
me the opportunity of learning “how to observe.” Mrs. White’s was the
first of Froebel’s infantile observatories to make its appearance in our
town and strange things were expected of it.
The prospectus said that “the busy baby fingers” were “trained from the
first to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality” which,
I was to find out, was merely a polite paraphrase of the good old
expression “unmitigated hell.” Every morning a dire conveyance locally
known as the “White Maria,” drawn by two rusty, long-haired bay ponies
and driven by Mr. White who was likewise long-haired, rusty and bay,
careened up to our door at half-past eight and shortly afterwards,
depending on the length of time it had taken to extricate me from the
banisters of the front stairs among which I had entangled my arms and
legs and between which I had thrust my head in order to render my
removal as difficult and painful as possible for all concerned, my
father would emerge from the house flushed, panting but triumphant with
me, screaming, kicking but defeated in his arms. He would then transport
me, still howling, to the White Maria, thrust me in, slam the door (it
opened at the back) and return to exclaim to my mother, “I really don’t
see how we can keep this up much longer.” Once inside the White Maria
the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with
the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a
veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked
shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents,
while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran
amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this
perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible
cheerfulness--the result of a severe sunstroke--and because he couldn’t
see it. As one of Mrs. White’s specialties was the observation of nature
in all its various, ever pleasing and instructive moods, the
superstructure of the White Maria was a kind of limousine of black
oilcloth that at any season of the year effectually shut out air, light,
the passing landscape and also Mr. White. The “precious freight” (as
Mrs. White called us) within could therefore dismember one another
undisturbed. After stopping at several more houses to recruit our spent
legions we finally arrived at the school, furious, tearful, disheveled,
hating life as we have never hated it since, and proceeded at once to
praise God in song and thank Him for our manifold and inscrutable
blessings.
“Oh, blesséd work,
Oh, blesséd play,
We thank thee for
Another day,”
was the mendacious refrain of every stanza. When sufficiently irritated
by anything I can still sometimes remember the tune. Later in the
morning we were supplied with round flat disks like poker chips and
again burst reluctantly into melody, exclaiming this time, as we shied
the disks into a basket on the floor,
“Did you ever, ever play
Skipping pebbles on the bay,
On the [something-or-other] water?”
Just what kind of water it was, I have never been able to recall. The
missing adjective has worried me for years. All over the world I have
lain awake at night skipping pebbles on the bay for hours and wondering
whether the water was “shining” or “glassy” or “rippling” or “placid” or
“deep blue.” Metrical exigencies of course insist that the name shall be
writ in water of two syllables and I have often cajoled myself into a
troubled sleep by almost deciding that this particular water must have
been “pretty.” But even “pretty” lacks the certain completely vapid
authenticity that ever eludes me.
The blesséd play was ghastly enough but the blesséd work was torture. I
was endowed with neither skill nor patience and at that time I could not
lose my shyness before strangers except when I lost my temper. The
public exhibition of my inability to “coördinate” was a daily anguish,
and I do not yet understand how I ever at last achieved the unspeakably
hideous mat of magenta and yellow paper that after the death of my
grandmother I found spotlessly preserved among her most cherished
possessions. But I not only did--I furthermore succeeded after days and
days of agony in constructing a useless, wobbly, altogether horrible
little house out of wire and dried peas. It was characteristic of Mrs.
White to select from the comprehensive inventory of the world’s possible
building materials, wire and dried peas.