The Champagne Standard Part 5

"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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle. 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 gla.s.ses.

"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 n.o.bility 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.bility.

"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 j.a.panned 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 G.o.ds. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-gla.s.s 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 Ma.s.s. 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: cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s means also a great serving cla.s.s, and this serving cla.s.s is useless for others, because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to a good deal of idleness. Take this cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sistant 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 s.h.i.+lling shocker.

The ideal, so the lady told me honestly, was beloved by a job butler 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 a.s.sistant.

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 cla.s.s. 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 j.a.panned 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 cla.s.ses: those that aspire to serve the n.o.bility, and the others who circulate among the middle-cla.s.ses. The outward and visible distinctions of the former are the perfection of menial smartness, the women's starched ap.r.o.n-bows c.o.c.ked to an impertinent angle, and their faces a blank. On the other hand, the middle-cla.s.s servant never really succeeds to a blank face, which is the result of years of practice, and sometimes she even smiles. Also her ap.r.o.n is often put on in a hurry, and much starch brazens out holes; besides, her face invites "s.m.u.ts."

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 s.h.i.+ne 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 inst.i.tution, 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 _a 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 sn.o.b 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 "s.m.u.ts"; 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-cla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 cla.s.s is always speechless but very affectionate in public. The American of the same cla.s.s is publicly prudish. It is, therefore, rather startling, as a blus.h.i.+ng 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.