XVIIPHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM
All the way to King Pharaoh’s house I kept wondering how I should enter the presence of decayed royalty. More modern monarchs, I knew from my reportorial experience, were frequently regular fellows whom it was perfectly safe to offer to shake hands with and perhaps, after a brief acquaintance, to slap on the back and ask for the loan of a cigarette or the “makin’s.” But the thought of conversing with a four-thousand-year-old personage who had retired from the king business, yet retained his former notions of dignity and grandeur, filled me with awe. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when in response to my ring at the front door it slowly opened about half an inch, as if someone were trying to peek out and size up the visitor, and then a moment later it was thrown back and a commanding figure, who I knew from his pictures was none other than Pharaoh himself, stood in the doorway with a smile of welcome.
“Come right in,” he exclaimed. “I wasafraid at first you might be a walking delegate of the Dish-Breakers’ Union.” And there stood the erstwhile mighty monarch clad in a long blue-checked apron, the kind that pins up over the shoulders with a couple of thing-a-ma-jigs and comes ’way down below the belt. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and he had the general appearance of a cross between a chauffeur who had been digging in the garden and a butler who had taken an automobile apart and was now trying to put the pieces back again.
“Your Majesty,” I began, with a low obeisance, but that was as far as I got with my speech of introduction.
“Come right out in the kitchen,” he interrupted affably, “and we can have a chat while I’m doing up my dishes. I understand you want to interview me on the servant problem. You’ve come to the right shop. I can talk feelingly on the subject. In the course of forty-five centuries of experience I’ve hit all the high spots, from the time when I had fifteen hundred cooks and chambermaids in the house and six hundred charioteers in the royal garage down to the cruel present, when I’m reduced to doing my own work. The servant problem! I’ve solved it. I could send you out of here so chock full of information about it that youcouldn’t walk straight. Have a smoke? Mrs. Pharaoh objects to my smoking a pipe and washing the china at the same time (she complained at dinner of a decided flavor of nicotine in the soup) but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t light up while I’m finishing the job. Then, after I manicure the knives and forks, massage the sink, and take a brief and exhilarating spin around the dining room with my new six-cylinder carpet sweeper, I’ll have nothing to do but fix the oatmeal for tomorrow morning, in the jackpot or whatever you call it, put it on to boil and I’ll be at your service.
“Yes, it may seem to you like considerable of a comedown,” said his former majesty when we were comfortably settled in armchairs in the library, “but during the last few days, since I let the sole remaining servant go, I’ve been experiencing the first real peace I’ve known in just four thousand five hundred and sixty-two years. Quite a long time when you come to think of it. You ask me to define the servant problem and then comment upon it. Let me tell you some of our recent troubles with ‘domestic assistants.’ That’s what they want to be called nowadays. Oh, yes, we have servants up here. This isn’t exactly heaven, you know. Somebody has said that voyaging on the sea of matrimony is all right until the cook wantsto be captain. Well, our cooks have all wanted to be commanders-in-chief with the pay, pretty near, of active admirals. And among them they’ve mighty near wrecked the ship. The next to the last we got, No. 19, promised to be the light of our existence. The light went out one night and never came back. Her testimonials said she was a very good cook. They must have been referring exclusively to her moral character. Her successor was described as ‘a perfect treasure’, but, according to the proverb, ‘Riches take wings,’ and she was no exception. In her case, however, it was just as well. She claimed to have cooked ten years for John D. Rockefeller. And it did not occur to us until later that Mr. Rockefeller is a chronic sufferer from dyspepsia.
“This wasn’t home any more. It was getting to be a one-night lodging house for ‘domestic assistants.’ You mustn’t call ’em servants, you know, not since they’ve organized. And they certainly are sticklers for union rules, union hours, union wages. Why, our last laundress (excuse me, I should say ‘garment ablutionist’), refused to wash any except union underwear. Fact! And now I hear they’re agitating for the three-shift or platoon system, like the firemen, each set on duty eight hours. Well, the other day we reached a crisiswhen Cook 20 served notice that she’d quit unless we built an addition to the garage to accommodate her runabout, and threw in an extra allowance for gasoline. I decided to fire the whole bunch: the ‘upstairs girl’ (whom I’d often consigned to the lower regions), the waitress (who believed all things ought to come to her while waiting), and the cook (who was always getting everybody else into hot water, but wouldn’t put her own hands in). So I made a clean sweep (something we could never get any of the servants to do) and I’ve been walking delegate of the Husbands’ Labor Union, and ‘kitchen police’ myself, ever since. And it’s been as peaceful and quiet around here as the Sahara Desert. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since the day the business agent of the Children of Israel Pyramid Builders’ Union fell off the top of Cheops and they had to dig him out of the sand with a derrick.
“There are various ways of solving the so-called servant problem. Speaking from an experience of roughly four thousand years, I should say the best way is to do your own work. It is a lot less work in the long run. But if you are determined to have servants, then you must adopt the modern viewpoint, treat ’em like the high-priced specialists that they are and fix up a regular schedule providing that the mistressshall have at least one evening out a week and the use of the parlor on the nights the maids aren’t entertaining. Our last cook had ‘Wednesday’ engraved on her visiting cards (it was her receiving day), and when her cousin was released from the penitentiary after serving six months for petty larceny (he stole a Ford), she gave him a coming-out party that kept the neighborhood awake until three o’clock in the morning. I read somewhere the other day that under the modern system employers and servants are to treat each other as equals—but I don’t believe the servants will do it. They’re getting too proud for that. We made the experiment of having the cook sit with us at the dining table, but it didn’t work out very well. We were kept so busy waiting on her that we didn’t get half enough to eat and she criticized the way in which I took my soup. A better plan would be to have all the family eat at the second table.
“But speaking of servant troubles back in Egypt a few thousand years ago—those were the happy days. Suppose one of the palace cooks threatened to quit because she could get two kopecks more a week and every Sunday out from a lady on the next street. We just told her to pack up without waiting to get dinner; there were about forty-nine more cooks inthe kitchen. We had so many at one time that it took six to fry an egg. There was one disadvantage, we had the worst soup I ever tasted—too many cooks, you know—but there were lots of benefits from always having plenty of help. It’s true the kitchen on Saturday night looked like a convention of the Policemen’s Mutual Benefit Association, with all the cops calling on the girls, but it made us feel quite safe from burglars. The modern housewife is handicapped because she can’t exert her authority. If she has several servants she’s afraid to fire one because the rest might quit. And if she has only one she can’t fire her because she doesn’t know where she’d get another. Even administering a mild reprimand nowadays means that you’ll have to do your own washing. It’s rather different from the times when I was king and had a list of penalties hung up in the kitchen as a warning. Tough pie-crust meant three months in jail and the cook who burnt the toast was thrown to the crocodiles. I had three servants standing behind my chair at dinner—and nowadays servants won’t stand for anything. They trembled at my slightest frown—nowadays they give me the shake. Every time I passed they’d salaam and chant: ‘Preserve our gracious ruler.’ Today they’d be shouting: ‘Can the king!’
“And so I say times haven’t merely changed; they’re turned upside down. And the folk we used to call servants are on top. What are we to do? Why, if we want to be free and independent and rich and enjoy ourselves, we’ll beat ’em at their own game, we’ll join the Bread Molders’ Union or become kitchen chemists or garment ablutionists or general domestic aides-de-camp—the real successors of royalty. There are only two ways to solve the servant problem: do your own work or go out and do somebody’s else’s. I tell you—beg pardon, I smell something burning in the kitchen.”
Out we dashed, to find the helpless oatmeal suffering a martyr’s fate. Pharaoh contemplated the ruin for a moment and it inspired his parting word:
“Good-bye, young man, and perhaps if more people did their own work for a while they would learn, after all, to have some sympathy for servants. We can’t get along without ’em. The servant girl may be a perpetual conundrum, but civilization isn’t ready to give her up.”