Part 9

I refer to these ordinary activities of the American male child only because I feel as if I had been engaging in them yesterday morning instead of twenty-five years ago, and because, in spite of my photographic recollection, so many queer things have taken place. To begin with, whereas I still, in memory, am able to reëxperience the exquisite thrill I had when, at the age of thirteen, I would hold a giant firecracker in my hand until the last advisable fraction of a second. I now have a horror of giant firecrackers, or indeed of anything that noisily explodes with possible dire results. In Mexico, for instance, when my brother and I are making, on mule back, a journey in an isolated part of the country, he always insists on my carrying a revolver in a large, visible holster. Mexicans have a most erroneous idea that with a revolver all Americans have an accurate and deadly aim. My brother considers this a great moral support and declares that the idea ought to be encouraged. Well, I carry the revolver, but I don’t mind confessing that I am much more afraid of it than I am of anything else in Mexico. The dangerous implement keeps bumping against my hip, reminding me that it is there and that it might tear six large holes in me at any moment. It is always an immense relief to arrive somewhere and, in a gingerly fashion, take it off and put it on a table or a bureau. Yet twenty-five years ago, nothing could have made me feel so proud, so brave, so competent to face the entire world as a revolver bumping against my hip. The old feeling for the Fourth of July has simply gone, disappeared, evaporated in some inscrutable fashion. It now has become for me a day of genuine misery, unless I am happy enough to spend it where it is not “observed.” In addition to loathing the noise because I can’t help it, I more and more every year hate it because I am increasingly depressed by the knowledge of all the so easily preventable mutilations with which it is associated; I hate it because of the pain I have known it to inflict upon the sick and dying. Even many of the lower animals of my acquaintance, dogs and horses in particular, regularly once a year spend twenty-four hours of mental and physical agony on the Fourth of July. While trying to reassure an old dog who had crawled under a bed and collapsed with a nervous chill, while trying to calm the uncontrollable terror of a steady, sensible, intelligent horse, I have often fervently wished that there had been no Revolution and that we had remained a British colony.

Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious, pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair.

If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday.

And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation. It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous, humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

But Christmas itself! I mean the day we have made of it. It is really a terrible day unless, perhaps, you are pretending to relieve it with the children which some of us don’t possess. Just as I can recall delirious Fourths of July, I can recall Christmas days that were a scream of delight from energetic dawn until tired and sleepy midnight. The delicious, exciting smell of the pine tree, the feel of the “excelsior” in which the fragile ornaments were packed, the taste of those red and yellow animals made out of transparent candy, the taste of the little candles (for some strange, youthful reason we always purloined several of the candles and chewed them, even green ones, in secret. I can’t imagine now why they didn’t poison us), the thrilling effect of cotton batting spread on the floor at the tree’s base (there were always, of course, acres of real snow just outside the front door but it quite lacked the power to entrance possessed by a few square feet of cotton batting)--for years I haven’t smelled or tasted or seen any of these things. But how wonderful they used to be. Even the Christmas we spent at the ages of eight and five, in Gibraltar, and where our tree consisted of a small orange tree propped up in a slop jar, was the real thing. Every moment of it returns palpitating with the old Christmas sensation.

But now the day, aside from its real significance, to which apparently no great attention is paid, has, as far as I am concerned, lost all its old magic and charm. Of late years, when I have been sufficiently foolish to attempt to “make merry” on Christmas, I have found the twenty-fifth of December merely a memory that one can revive, but to which one may not give life or even a very successful, galvanic semblance of life. If, nowadays, I permitted Christmas to make any particular impression on me, which I don’t, it would, I fear, be chiefly an annoying impression that I ought to be spending more money than I can afford in order to give, to persons I take but little interest in, presents they don’t need. At any rate, that is the principal impression I seem to derive from the ante-Christmas conversation of most of my acquaintances who still conventionally observe the day.

In fact, the whole question of holidays had to be met and solved, and I rejoice in the fact that I have at last done it as successfully as have many other much more sensible people. It is the easier to do, I suppose, if circumstances have often necessitated one’s spending the more important days in an environment lacking the slightest suggestion of domesticity. I have spent Christmas in a hotel in Athens, in a hotel in Paris, on shipboard, on a railway train, in the desert of Sahara, in tropical countries where it was all but impossible to recall anything that remotely suggested the annual festival. Once I spent all of Christmas on the back of a lame mule.

This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is, I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say, a certain age, but it is worth it.

SERVANTS

Polite existence seems to be composed, in part, of a warp (or do I, perhaps, mean a woof?) of funny little pretensions and affectations, of rather meaningless standards and conventions, make-believes and poses. The polite world, broadly speaking, always seems to be divided into two classes; those who swallow it all whole, who believe in it, who practice and live up to it, and those who really don’t, but who pretend they do for fear of forfeiting the esteem of the others. We all know persons who quite simply have been born into the world with what might be called aristocratic temperaments and instincts. They do not affect it; they cannot help it; it is innate, and they automatically observe the conventions because they like to, because it is the line of least resistance. On the other hand, no end of us go through almost precisely the same motions, but without conviction, and, when we feel reasonably sure that we sha’n’t be found out, we relax and give a certain amount of free play to what happens to be our natures.

In few human relations does this fact seem to me to be more clearly revealed than in the attitude of the polite toward their servants. There is really, if one pauses to think about it, a tremendous amount of bunkum in the alleged relations between most of one’s acquaintances and the people who attend to their various needs. I don’t say all, because the sincere exceptions at once suggest themselves, but in the case of most I am inclined to believe that the matter is largely regulated by “what other people would think,” rather than by natural promptings--by human spontaneity. How often have I heard a woman or a man scornfully exclaim, “Servant’s gossip!” or, “She’s the sort of woman who listens to her servants!” The first great crime apparently is to take the slightest interest in the point of view, the ideas, the information or the conversation of one’s servants. Conventionally they are, none of them, supposed to have intelligence, integrity or the gift of being agreeable. Of course no end of people converse with their servants incessantly and derive from the proceeding much interest and amusement, but they very rarely admit it, and when they do, it is always in a deprecating, apologetic fashion calculated to impress you with the fact that the incident was quite out of the ordinary--which, secretly, I never believe it is. “Sometimes I let Mary Ann run on. For a maid she is really rather,” etc. For some, to me inscrutable, reason, hardly anybody admits that he ever talks to a servant on a basis of intellectual equality, and furthermore, hardly anybody ever admits, without in some way qualifying the admission, that a servant is good-looking; that he, or she, as the case may be, in different clothes and removed from the yoke of servitude, might be indistinguishable from the persons he serves, and in many instances much more charming in appearance.

“When Connor, the second man, is dressed up, he isn’t a bad-looking man at all. You might almost mistake him for something else,” I have had a fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were. The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it. If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing” to admit it.

Frankly, I like to talk to servants and always do when I feel conversationally inclined, and one of them is available. I extremely enjoy hearing what they have to say about their employment, their wages, their ambitions, the kind of treatment they receive from their employers and the characteristics of their employers. From servants I have learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant. And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most acute. From servants one learns how a striking variety of persons conduct themselves under almost all the circumstances to which human beings are subjected. It is, indeed, from them alone that one can find out about such matters; one’s personal experience, after all, is necessarily limited to so few intimate, human contacts and incidents. To talk frankly with intelligent servants is to receive a great light and to re-awaken the interest in one’s fellow-man that at times has a tendency to doze.

Stewards on ocean steamers invariably repay one with reflections on the 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