Part 2

I worked hard at the problem for some years. When we are young and hopeful it is quite easy to imagine that we are altering the facts of Nature. We talk glibly about our schemes for reforming drunkards, of the likelihood of the British working man becoming interested in art, and so on. In the same way I saw no difficulty then in the idea of persuading a housemaid to finish one room at a time. I spoke very nicely about it at first. I said:

“Clara, I wish that you would begin one room at a time and then finish it, instead of going about doing little bits of things in each. It makes you so ubiquitous.”

“I beg pardon, m’m?”

“So here, there, and everywhere,” I explained. “Of course it is very nice to have you so active, but now, for instance, why couldn’t you finish my sitting-room or my bedroom? I don’t mind which, so long as I could have somewhere to write. You chased me about this morning as if I were a hen that wanted to sit at the wrong time. You know I hate having my legs dusted.”

“I was going to do the windows, m’m, as soon as you went out.”

“But, Clara, you know quite well that if I went out I should find you in the first shop I went to, polishing the grocer’s nose or something--”

“Beg pardon, m’m?”

It was useless to explain further. I made a schedule of work for Clara in which each portion of her day was mapped out in such a way that she would be continuously in one place for at least an hour at a time. I might as well have made a time-table for the weather. I have heard that there are mistresses who make schedules for their servants and get them followed: but whether these people achieve their results by hypnotism or force I do not know. I have been able now and again to arrest the disease in Clara for a short time, but I do not believe that there is any permanent cure for ubiquity in housemaids.

Another infirmity to which all of them are subject is morning blindness. When I go to bed at night my sitting-room is often far from tidy. I leave, perhaps, a thimble, scissors, a cherished pen, sheets of manuscript, some books, and a parcel or two on the table. By the time Clara has made her mouse-like exit next morning my table is as clear as a baby’s conscience. I hunt about muttering bad words for some minutes and then ring the bell. But no, Clara has seen nothing. She never puts anything away: perhaps master has had them----

“Yes, Clara,” I reply sarcastically, “I have no doubt that your master is at this moment playing ‘hunt the thimble’ in his office and cutting out paper boats with my scissors and manuscript. As for my book, probably the cat has taken it back to the library to be changed.”

Clara becomes huffy, and says she “hasn’t an idea, ’m sure.”

“I know you haven’t,” say I, “I don’t want you to have ideas. I want you to have eyesight, and a memory, and a little self-control. Why cannot you leave things where they are? Or, if you must put something away, why not those crumbs under the table or those empty envelopes or the mouldy paste that I used last week?”

I have heard of kittens being blind for some days after birth, but it is my own discovery that housemaids are blind for some hours after they get up.

I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid’s than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to “polish the taps in Miss Iris’s bathroom.”

The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture.

There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that “Old Moore’s Almanac” deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one’s door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed.

I do not mind ordering things--it isn’t that; nor do I mind thinking about them--thinking quite hard. It is “seeing about” them that turns my blood to vitriol and my heart to dynamite.

Is a general in command of forces expected to see that his subalterns put on their clothes right side out? When he orders a charge does he find his men seated facing their horses’ tails? Does the captain of a ship put out to sea only to be told when he has crossed the Bar that “the wheel has come off in the mate’s ’and,” and that there is no more grease for the engines? And yet I believe that is the kind of thing that would happen if a mistress and her servants started out to discover America.

It is rarely that a servant in a small house considers herself responsible for anything. It is thought discreditable to the mistress alone if the house is dirty and the meals badly served; and yet she has seldom the skill or the leisure to give point to her criticisms by setting a working example to those under her orders.

And the poor creature must learn so many trades. It is not enough that I strain my brains to bursting-point in order to think out new forms of nourishment for James, but I must learn the anatomy and the personal habits of the creatures he devours, conduct post-mortem examinations to discover whether they died too soon or not soon enough, whether they had eaten too much or not eaten enough, taken too much exercise or led too sedentary a life. I must be perpetually on the look-out to circumvent the countless ruses which Satan suggests to half a dozen intelligent tradesmen. I must know exactly in what combination the things I have bought will best amalgamate in James’s inside, and I must then somehow convey my knowledge through the tough skull of my cook. When at last I have got both food and ideas safely lodged in her keeping I must find the dish on which she is to serve it, and, worst of all, besiege her incessantly with alarm clocks and gongs to ensure its appearance at the right time.

When the meal is sent up only half of my work is done. I have to keep an eye on the tools with which James is to eat it, otherwise they are liable to be blunt, sticky, or placed crookedly on the table. After this James eats his dinner in peace, whilst I make a mental note of Clara’s personal habits, her flowers to praise, or her weeds to blame, and either or both to loathe; her elaborate elegancies of manner, or the fact that she always forgets to hand the sauce before she goes back to stand on one leg by the sideboard and listen to our conversation. I have stopped that now and told her not to wait, which means that she goes off to the bedrooms between the courses and does not hear the bell.

I can hear the efficient female say scornfully that I should get servants who know their business; but she forgets that if she or I do not have to train our striped geese in the sweat of our brows it means that some other mother of a family has done it--or perished in the attempt--and that Sarah Ann has left to “better herself.” Also one of the most efficient characteristics of the efficient female is her powerful fascination for servants of the clockwork-mouse type whom I abhor. Their machinery has been made by people with different tastes from my own, and when I have found the key and wound them up they begin folding table-napkins into wine-glasses with horrid dexterity, or they play a sort of suburban Halma called “ladies first” when they hand the courses.

Clara’s migratory instincts, her ubiquitousness, and her morning blindness were a constant annoyance to me, yet I look lovingly back upon them now over the heads of a succession of young persons, all of whom had occupied positions of trust in the houses of the semi-educated. When Clara left me in order to marry a traveller in sewing machines I acquired a wonderful insight into the habits of the public dignitaries in our neighbourhood. I learned that the Mayoress of Pond never grudged the expense of paper mats under the fruit and preferred her sandwiches tied with pink ribbon. That Lady Knight believed in putting out Sir Donald’s clothes herself in the evening, and that it was not customary in the houses of the commercially great to clean the silver more than once a week “unless there was company.”

I once asked one of these Belles Brummells whether it was better form not to wash before dinner unless for a party of eight, and she replied gravely that it was a matter of taste, and did I wish hot water; she had no objection to bringing it.

* * * * *

NOTE.--I read this part aloud to the efficient female and she says that was not what she meant.

_CHAPTER IV_: TRADESMEN

The story of Mr. Jones’s sin, and how he failed to send the meat in time for luncheon, has been told. But it must not be supposed that this was the one sin of a lifetime, standing out clear and black against a white background of habitual punctuality. Nor was he a lonely serpent in an otherwise spotless Eden of tradesmen who walked with God. They were all Sons of Belial. If I could turn the whole lot of them into pillars of salt, and cheese, and mutton, and cabbage, and all the other dilatory and perverse ingredients of my daily life I would do it, and they might go on “never coming” as much as they liked. They might stay there all day making apologies and it would not matter to me. I should simply come and hack off the pieces I wanted and not listen to a word they said.

Of course, in one way, a shop answers the same purpose. But there is not the same pleasure in asking for a thing as there would be in hewing it off the person of one’s enemy. And, besides, the shops are always full of women who want to look at everything they buy.

Sometimes I have waited quite a long time while some silly creature with a long upper lip and a badly balanced hat fiddles about with two tins of mustard and explains why neither will do. When it comes to my turn and the shopman says: “Pepper, m’m; yes, m’m; I’ll just show it you,” and rushes off before I can catch him, it makes me so angry that I forget all the other things I wanted. I know all that there is to be said on the other side about the advantages of shopping oneself. It is not for nothing that I have encountered the efficient female on our own ground. But if I have been flattered she has had exercise, that is one thing! Some are born housekeepers, some achieve housekeeping, and some have the horrid thing thrust upon them.

They say seeing is believing, but somehow I find it impossible to believe in a tradesman even after I have seen him, and the few things I do believe about him I don’t like. The ego of the fishmonger, as well as that of his representative imp who scribbles his name daily on every available wall-space near the back door, is to me wholly uncongenial, and I dislike the exaggerated value he puts on the creatures whom he conjures from the deep.

“Nice plaice,” he says, handing me a thing all face, like a certain type of person who frequents concerts and goes on deputations and boards. It has a deep frill of some scaly substance round its small body, and at one end the frill becomes a regular flounce. “Eightpence a pound. I’ll fillet it nicely for you, m’m.”

By the time he has filleted away the face, and the frill, and the flounce, and half a square foot of backbone I am left with four elusive little rags that no amount of heavy breadcrumbing on Ruth’s part will make into a serviceable dish for a hungry man.

“I don’t think you are right in calling plaice a nice fish,” I said the first time this happened. “Haven’t you got anything with a little more body to it?”

He offered me turbot at two shillings a pound. There was certainly more of it, but it looked thoroughly wet through and uncomfortable, and he told me that the oily skin was the best part! There are all the smaller fish of course, but I cannot help watching James when he has anything with bones, it makes me as nervous as if I saw him eating a wet handkerchief full of pins.

And there is nothing like fish for “never coming.” If my own grandfather were a fishmonger and I saw him being chased up the street by a mad bull I should refuse to believe that he would “be there as soon as I was.” With butchers, too, I find that we pay for more than we either ask or desire. A leg of mutton with a hairy cloven hoof on the end (I still live in the hope of Mr. Jones lacing a neat boot on it some day when he thinks I am not looking and then saying it is a mistake he cannot account for) is an insult both to the living and to the dead. And there are tongues with a ton of salt in them. Mr. Jones weighs the tongue as it comes soaking from the tub and charges me for the heavy dripping mass of salt. He sends it to the house by the hands of a little boy who is fond of marbles, a keen spectator of football, and popular with his young associates. By the time Ruth gets the tongue on to her weighing machine it differs by several pounds from the little blood-stained hieroglyphic pinned to it. Mr. Jones explains this by the theory that it has “shrunk on the way from the shop.”

If I might bear a few of Mr. Jones’s misdeeds to the Judgment Seat they should lose none of their full weight by my loitering on the errand!

I think Ananias the greengrocer became prosperous and has such a nice large clean shop because he is so resourceful. I have never asked him any question which he could not answer satisfactorily, and the matter I speak of always seems to be one which he has already gone into very carefully on his own account. I asked him once why his potatoes were dark purple and full of holes, and he said that it was the time of year. But I was prepared for that and brought in a neat rejoinder.

“Yes,” I said, “that is the proper answer, I know, but how is it that I can get excellent ones in the shops lower down?”

“Ah, yes, m’m, _those_,” he replied; “of course we can get you _that_ sort of potato if you wish it, but I hardly think, if you knew the sort of places they come from, you’d fancy them. A very nice, cheap potato for the price, and has a nice appearance, but----”

He shook his head with an expression of such dark mystery that I let the potatoes alone. In fact, I had a moment’s vague wonder whether the other kind were grown in the hospitals or whether white slaves with maimed hands dug unceasingly for them in a distant rubber plantation.

Another day I asked him why his lettuces were a penny more than anyone else’s and whether he charged for the caterpillars sandwiched in them. He said that it was quite a mistake my having had the one with the caterpillar. He had noticed it at once when they were brought in, and had particularly told the young lady to destroy the lot. He was very glad I had mentioned it, and he could give me the best lettuces in the market for a penny halfpenny if I did not object to their having no hearts. He always sent those with hearts unless he was specially told otherwise by ladies who were obliged to consider trifles.

_CHAPTER V_: THE DINNER PARTY

For some weeks after I began housekeeping I had a feeling that all was not right with Ruth. She would not talk about food when I went to the kitchen, but somehow or other she always managed to bring in some remark about the people in the houses near us.

“Underdone, m’m? Yes, m’m, I quite understand,” she said one day in answer to a criticism of mine. “Speaking of which, m’m, do you happen to be acquainted with Raws, in Windermere Place?”

“Do you mean Colonel and Mrs. Raw?” I asked.

“Yes, m’m; the young person who lives with them as cook is sister to my young man, and I just happened to mention who you were, m’m, and how I was living with you. She was very pleased to think I was so well off, and asked if we were very busy just now.”

She made two or three more references to the great and good on whose cast-off legs of mutton we lived so happily (they had the loins and the shoulders, and we had the necks and legs, and, I regret to say, the tripe). At last she became more explicit.

“Hardly seems worth while making these fancy dishes just for you and master, does it, m’m?” she said despondingly. “It would be different if you were having company and we wanted to show what we _could_ do.”

It dawned on me then that Ruth was craving for morbid excitement. She longed to be at her wits’ end--that land of the leal where every true domestic servant loves to wallow and bemoan her lot. It was not long before she had her heart’s desire. People began to call, and when they began there was no stopping them. They came in barouches and in motors, on foot and in four-wheeled flys, from which the chaste kid boots of the elderly and the Parisian shoes of the rejuvenated descended in rich profusion. Clara found it more and more difficult to be dressed in time; in fact, when Mrs. Ajax and Mrs. Beehive took me first on their rounds and arrived at a quarter to three, it was Ruth, smutty and indignant, who opened the door.

I spoke severely to Clara afterwards, and found that it was her migratory instinct which had betrayed her again. She had been upstairs to get dressed, and had wandered off to the washhouse in the middle of her toilet to fetch a clean apron.

“Which reminds me, Clara,” I said. “Why does it take you so long to get tea when people call? You were three-quarters of an hour yesterday after I rang.”

“The kettle wouldn’t boil, m’m,” Clara replied.

She gave me the impression of having at last lost patience with her former accomplice, the kettle, and decided to “tell on him.”

“Oh,” I said, “you don’t think we had better have a man in to see about it, do you?”

Clara wavered for a moment between professional scorn of this suggestion and the irresistible bait I had thrown out. She hesitated and compromised.

“Well, m’m, it _ought_ to boil quicker; but perhaps next time Mr. Whistle is in the house we might get him to have a look at it; it may be too heavy a make.”

I regard this as Clara’s masterpiece.

But Ruth’s prayers were answered. The “neighbourhood” called, we dined out, and by and by we had to feed others in return.

James and I decided against the professional cook and “hired help,” so it remained to break the news to Ruth and Clara. I told them separately, on a bright morning in June when the little juicy lambs were hanging in clusters in the shops, and expectant peas burst through their pods in every market garden of our hospitable suburb. Ruth bore up wonderfully; in fact, after the first sob of terrified ecstasy I had very little trouble with her. But Clara cried a good deal, and was afraid that her waiting would not do justice either to herself or to me.

However, I told her how Napoleon had risen from quite a little chap to what he afterwards became, entirely by his own efforts; and I also reminded her of a famous judge in my own family who had once been an office boy. And then we all three began to “see about” one thing and another. I felt like an ophthalmic fly by the time we had done, with all its numerous eyes in a state of acute inflammation. I saw the stock for the soup. I saw the fish, and the paper it came in (which means a lot), I saw the sweetbreads, and wondered how James can be so fond of them. I saw the potatoes and the peas; that was nothing, really--half an eye did it, and the other half-eye caught the salad, just to be sure it was fresh. The tournedos of beef took an immense lot of seeing, and when they came up James saw them all over again, and they were not good. The efficient female has since explained to me why theirs are always perfect, but in my soul I believe that there is hanky-panky, if not plain swank about her fillets. Anyhow, some evil planet always shines on mine, so I have made up my mind now that Providence does not wish me to have fillets, and that He knows best, so we have saddle of mutton instead.

There was more brain-work and less inspection required for the pudding. When Ruth asked me if I would like to see the eggs, I said no, that was a question for the hen’s conscience, and one must leave something to somebody. Neither would I waste precious eyesight on the butter. I knew it was a lot, and the less seen about it the better. If I could have seen an ice-machine amongst our kitchen properties I should have felt less irritable. I know that the efficient female makes hers in something very simple--a biscuit tin or a boot, I forget which--but we were all too amateurish for these conjuring tricks. We have to get our rabbits out of shops like other people, and I would not trust an omelette made in James’s hat. We bought a machine at great expense, and when at last, wet to the knee and chilled to the bone, I hurried upstairs to dress, I saw with my last eye a vision of two alternatives--one, successive platefuls of congealed cream; the other, a petrified mass, bounding at the first touch of the spoon from end to end of our parquet floor. Which would it be?

I once read in the “Book of the Home” that the cook should lie down for a couple of hours before beginning the serious work of a dinner party. According to the author of the book all preparations should be made the day before; then, when the _generalissima_ is roused from her bed at 5 p.m., there is practically nothing to do except to put the heavy guns in the oven and pass a salamander over the light infantry. The key to the situation, the brainy part, the staff office, whatever you like to call it, lies in the sauce-boats, and the gods alone decide what goes on there.