Considering the papering and painting of the house done—the painting done very roughly from our point of view. Then the kitchen needed a new range and so we got the most expensive of its kind—expensive for America even—but the acknowledged solidity of English workmanship (which sometimes becomes clumsiness) is well in place here. The dinner-lift had been constructed for one flight, and was surprisingly dear, while the parquet floor in the drawing-room cost twenty-seven pounds where it would have cost fifteen pounds in America.
This brings me to a point on which I wish to lay great stress: the remarkable progress in America in all the applied and domestic arts within the last ten years, which leaves England far behind. Our English house was just old enough to be surprisingly ugly—it belongs to the early Victorian period. Without wishing to spend too much money in its decoration, we did feel that we ought to put away the funereal mantel-pieces and set up something more æsthetic.
Our architect—always obliging and never suggestive—took us to see wooden mantel-pieces, and we found them expensive and clumsy. In this strait my Englishman had an inspiration. "Buy them in New York"—we were just going over—"and you will find them prettier, better, and cheaper even if the freightage has to be added to the price."
I would not believe him because I also was still labouring under the delusion that England was cheap and America dear. However, we went to New York and there we bought three wooden mantels—six feet high and six feet wide—of the best quartered oak, of so simple and graceful a design that they are always noticed and admired. These three were packed, sent, and landed at our front door in London, and the price, all included, was not much more than we should have paid for the only one in London of which I approved. I feel convinced that there is a great market here for American wood-work as well as leather, iron, and glass, for with English excellence of workmanship they combine a taste which adapts the best to its own uses. It would revolutionise the decoration of English houses.
The American has the advantage that he is not conservative where that stands between him and progress. That something was good enough for his ancestors is no reason why it should satisfy him. Because they chose to freeze is no reason why he should. Somehow, one always comes back to the inadequate heating, for as I write, my face is flaming while a lively icicle penetrates my spine.
The carpets being now down, I sent to the warehouse for the eighty cases, and after a year again looked at my household goods. They were very skilfully unpacked, but (here is the difference between the English and the American workman) each one of the men expected a fee every time he moved a box for me. Every time I went to the warehouse to open a trunk one or two men had to be fee'd, and at the end it came to quite a little sum. In America, this would not have been expected, even for harder work done, and quite rightly, for the men were receiving proper wages, and I was paying the Storage Company liberally.
Our American furniture being cosmopolitan it was speedily at home in our English rooms; only these high studded rooms have such a way of devouring furniture! I thought piteously of that which I had rashly flung into the Boston auction-room, and when it came to replacing it, what did I find? That American furniture is much better and much cheaper. My soul yearned even for the big black chest of drawers which I had left behind, and it loathed the brand-new "art furniture," sticky with paste and varnish.
I demanded Chippendale and such—but, alas! their day is over, except for millionaires! Praed Street, Brompton Road, Great Portland Street, and Wardour Street should blush for the faked-up antiquities that ogle the passerby. I have no prejudice against modern furniture if it is good; nor do I love old furniture simply because it is old, but undoubtedly the old taste was artistic and simple, and workmen had plenty of leisure and used their hands. But when it comes to American or English machine-made furniture I prefer the American because, it is in better taste, is made of better wood, and is cheaper.
I paid twenty-four shillings apiece for painted pine chests of drawers for the servants. In New York I saw a pretty one, all of oak with brass handles, for thirteen shillings. That is only a sample. Perhaps it is ungenerous urging the importation of American wares that can, because of English free trade, undersell the English manufacturer, but it remains true that it can be done, and ought to be done, and competition will improve the home produce, and there is room for improvement.
Well, having finally got my dwelling into some kind of order, I and my new British and old American household goods proceeded to keep house together.
This brings me to the question of English and American domestic service. It is an article of faith that America being the home of the free (and independent) will before long have no servants, but only "mississes." It is not quite so bad, by any means. To be sure wages are much higher, but the American servant does twice the work of an English servant.
The average American family keeps two servants and a man who comes in twice a day to "tend" the furnace—the central stove which heats the entire house. The cook gets fifty pounds a year, the housemaid forty pounds, and the man, who gets neither food nor lodging, eighteen pounds. The total is one hundred and eight pounds, which includes the baking of all the bread and the doing of the weekly laundry for the entire house; the only additional expenses being for coal and soap.
Now for the wages in an English family of the same standing:—Cook thirty-five pounds, parlour-maid twenty-six pounds, housemaid twenty pounds, char-boy eight pounds, and fifty pounds to the laundry for work which is quite disgraceful. The sum total is one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, which does not include the feeding of an additional person, and a servant's board is a greater expense than her wages. Distinctly the economy is on the American side.
That the servant business is a trade was a fact impressed on me for the first time by my very intelligent English cook. Each English servant has her trade which she knows and she declines to meddle with what she does not know, for which reason the dividing lines are rather strictly laid down. It was something I had to learn so as not to call on one servant to do the duties of another. Our American servants are more liberal, but now I realise that a good English servant is not so much an amateur as an American; but unless you wish to be unpleasantly enlightened as mistress, you must learn her line of duty well.
To keep house one must have servants, and in a strange place the first problem is how to get them. Supposing no friend can recommend you one, you are reduced either to advertising or the registry office. Registry offices, through which the majority of sufferers get their "help," riot in ungodly prosperity. They have managers and clerks, like a bank and, like other corporations, they have no souls. If you are a meek lady they snub you, and if you are undecided they give you bad advice. At any rate the unscrupulous ones, and there are plenty of these, take your fee whether you get a servant or not.
It seems as if a certain amount of honesty should obtain even in this business, and I protest against paying five shillings for the mere joy of talking to a stately female, the presiding goddess in the generally ill-ventilated temple, who pockets my money and, as soon as my fee is safe, takes no further earthly interest in me. The methods of English registry offices seem to me the brazenest kind of piracy. Why don't English women rebel? Are they not the daughters and wives of grumblers, and probably the mothers also? However, fate was kind to me, and I got three servants, two of good village families, while the superior cook was the legacy of a brilliant woman, a good deal of whose wisdom I have since had at second-hand.
In the economy of the universe I know that there is a serving class, but we people of New England are not glib in the use of the word "servant." Do we not (in the country) call them "helps" when the expression is base flattery? Here, class distinctions have put the matter on a practical footing—servants are servants and recognise themselves as such, and have that outward and visible sign of well-trained domestics which the Irish girl, direct from her paternal pig-sty, scorns in New York.
"You must not think," said my intelligent cook, "that we don't have our feelings as much as you." There it was, and she put herself as a matter of course on quite a different plane of human beings; the American servant, on the other hand, would consider herself of the same class, but ill-used by circumstances. A clever woman once said to me, "You can't expect all the Christian virtues in the kitchen for five dollars a week!" But we do! Perhaps the most precious gift I received when I left Boston was this advice: "Don't see too much."
Servants are like children; to keep them under control you must impress them. They object to a mistress who is too clever with her hands, but they like her praise. An American servant does not lose respect for a mistress who, if necessary, can "lend a hand," but the English servant sees in such readiness a distinct loss of dignity. Many a time have my American servants seen me on the top of a step-ladder doing something that required more intelligence than strength, and they have respected my power to "do." Here something keeps me from the top of the step-ladder—instinct probably.
An American treats her servants more considerately than an Englishwoman. I am conscious of saving my servants too much; often (I confess it with shame) I run down a flight or two to meet them, and there is no doubt that the more I do the more unwilling and ungrateful they become.
With three English servants, besides a boy (not to speak of the laundry), now doing the work of two American servants, I proceed. I have mentioned a vital and nearly fatal subject—the laundry. In London it is awful but inevitable, and one cannot wonder any more at the stupendous dirt of the lower classes. Are their things ever washed, and if so who pays? After much observation I have decided that they make up by a liberal use of starch what they lack in soap and water and "elbow-grease."
Language fails an American direct from the land of clear skies, sunshine and soap and water, when she contemplates the harrowing results of steam laundries. Really the most expensive of luxuries in London is to keep clean! When on Sunday afternoons one sees in Kensington Gardens a poor infant with a terribly starched and dirty cap on its head (in the form of a muffin), enveloped in an equally dirty and starched cape, and carried by a small girl in fearfully starched and dingy petticoats, one recognises maternal pride which rises superior to London dirt.
I am the client of a "model" laundry which sends our linen back a delicate pearl-grey. We call it affectionately the "muddle" laundry, and it costs us one pound a week to keep up to the pearl-grey standard. I wish we could go back to the days of chain-armour! What remedy? There is none, except country laundries for the rich and great, and starch for the poor! The only result of soft coal and dire necessity is the excellence and cheapness of the cleansing establishments, without which the long-suffering householder would indeed sit in sackcloth and ashes!
The one aim in furnishing our little house has been to keep the rooms free from all unnecessary draperies, which are merely traps for dust. It is hard for me to curb my feminine taste, which runs to sofa cushions and Oriental nooks lighted by Venetian lamps, but the exigencies of the London climate make me strictly Colonial (New England Colonial), and I can look into every corner—blessed privilege. The laundry being an accepted evil, one institution I willingly proclaim cheap—the scrub-woman who gets half a crown a day. Why don't all English scrub-women emigrate to the States in a body? They would get from six to eight shillings a day, overtime overpay.
Coming to the details of housekeeping. The custom here is that tradesmen call for orders. That also obtains in America, but many ladies there go to the markets and select and order for themselves, which is distinctly more economical. Here, as the result of inadequate storage room, the expense of ice, and the by no means common use of the ice-box, there is not much food kept in the house. Now the laying-in of a good supply once or twice a week, if the mistress understands ordering and goes where she pleases, is undoubtedly cheaper than a daily ordering of driblets. It is the same with groceries, and these should be kept under lock and key! To the American that is not only an impossibility, it is nearly an insult, and I know of not a single American housekeeper who weighs out the groceries and other articles to be used week by week. It seems to start the mutual relationship of mistress and maid on a basis of suspicion.
A tabulated list of values is useless where prices fluctuate. I simply compare the differences as I have found them in my own little housekeeping. Meat, with the exception of fillet and sirloin, is dearer here, and so is poultry. Groceries average about the same, but coffee and flour are dearer. So are butter and eggs. Milk is the same, but tea, dear to the English heart, is so cheap that one can undermine one's nervous system at a very small expense. Vegetables are good and cheap, but there is little variety, while fruit is dear.
How one does miss the ordinary cheap, good fruits, the California grapes and the Concords with their clusters of deep blue berries, a five-pound basket of which only costs a shilling. These were first grown in the old New England town that Emerson made famous. As for apples, pears and peaches, they are among the cheap fruits over the sea, and I maintain their superiority to their English kin.
What oranges equal the Floridas? The "forbidden-fruit" and the "grape-fruit," are only just making their conquering way into the English shops. If, as it is claimed, the one is the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, Eve is nearly justified!
Yes, there are many good things in America and at reasonable prices. One has only to think of the divine "sweet corn" and "squash" and "sweet potatoes," and even the modest white bean from which all New England makes its national dish of "pork and beans."
Fish there is in great variety in London, but that also I find dear. How is it possible for me to live in a land where lobsters and oysters are a luxury and not a necessity? Only a housekeeper knows what a refuge they are in trouble—when an unexpected visitor turns up. Is not the "oyster stew" (a soup of milk and oysters) an American national dish? But it could only reach perfection in that blessed land where to eat oysters is not to suck a copper key, and where they exist in regal profusion. I look with scorn at the measly, little lobsters for each of which the fishmonger demands three ridiculous shillings instead of one shilling and three pence. My heart longs for lobsterà la Newburgtill I remember that it takes three of these poor creatures to make the dish—nine shillings! So I continue to yearn and keep my nine shillings.
I cannot, however, leave the subject without expressing my admiration for the beauty of the English fish shops and butcher shops. To see a fish shop in London is to see a trade haloed with poetry. If I were a fishmonger I would sit among my stock-in-trade and be inspired. The fishmonger is an artist, he constructs pictures of still-life which would have been revelations to the greatest of Dutch masters. In America our fish shops are devoid of poetry—the only compensation being to see the mountainous piles of oysters, ready to be opened, and innumerable great red lobsters.
To one item of American economy I wish to return with added stress; that is, the baking of bread in each house. This household-bread, if well made, is delicious, substantial, and economical. Usually the cook bakes twice a week, and besides that she is expected to have ready for breakfast either fresh baked "biscuits" (scones), "muffins," or "pop-overs." The yearly allowance of flour for each person is one barrel, and one reckons the expense to be about half what bread costs here. The English "double-decker" is a fearful and wonderful production that errs on the side of heaviness, just as the American baker's bread errs on the side of frivolous lightness, and nourishes like froth.
Whenever Americans proclaim the cheapness of a visit to London one finds without exception that they live here as they would not dream of living at home. Were they to take lodgings there in the same economic manner, they could live quite as cheaply.
Another inexpensive commodity—which becomes very expensive in the end—is cabs. There is no doubt that they are cheap, and the fatal result is that they are used to an extent which makes them a serious item of expense to a family of moderate means. In America we pay two shillings each for a short drive in that stately vehicle called a "hack," and the price is prohibitive for an average family except on "occasions." So cab fares are not a serious item in domestic expenses.
From experience, I believe that America has a very unmerited reputation for expense. Live well, even if not ostentatiously, in London, and it costs fully as much as in New York or Boston. One does not judge by millionaires or beggars, for both are independent of statistics, but by the middle classes. Houses are here singularly devoid of comforts, and, taking the same income, I should say a middle-class American family could live there as cheaply as here, but with more comfort; and when it comes to schooling for children, an item to which I have not alluded, with infinitely greater advantages.
In writing down these desultory reflections, I have been actuated by the thought that what I have learned may be of use to some puzzled American creature, who, having married an Englishman, proposes to live in England with only American standards to guide her. She must not believe, as I was told, that an American income will go one-third farther here. It does not. She must be prepared to accept other methods, even if, secretly, she modifies them a little to suit her American notions; but she must not boast, for her well-meaning efforts will, at best, be regarded with good-natured tolerance.
How I wish I could clap a big, stolid, conservative, frost-bitten English matron into a snug American house, with a furnace, and heaps of closet (cupboard) room, and all sorts of bells and lifts and telephones, and then force her to tell me the absolute, unvarnished truth! What would she say?
In conclusion, I wonder if I, as an exiled American sister, might make a plea to my American brethren? It is that when they send their wedding invitations, as well as others, printed on their swellest "Tiffany" paper, they will kindly put on enough postage. Why should one have to pay five-pence on each joyful occasion? On some, bristling with pasteboard, I have even had to pay tenpence,—why add this pang to exile?
My superior cook had just given me notice, and I felt that the bottom had dropped out of the universe. She was an ancient retainer, according to twentieth-century standard, for she had been with me three months.
Her claim to fame rested on her once having cooked for Lord Kitchener. Whenever we had a trifling difference of opinion, which was seldom, because I didn't dare, she always retorted that she had cooked for Lord Kitchener, and, of course, I realised that I was but an unworthy successor to that great man. I suffered a good deal from his lordship in those days, and fervently pray that Fate will not throw in my blameless path either his parlour-maid or his laundress.
I had felt so safe, for cook lured me on with false hopes: she offered to make marmalade, and she demanded a cat. This was tantamount to staying for ever. She made the marmalade, and we scoured the neighbourhood for a cat.
It may be a digression, but I really must remark here on the scarcity of any particular commodity of which one happens to stand in need. If the world can be said to be overstocked by any one article it really might be said to be cats; but had we been in search of a Koh-i-noor it could not have been more hopeless. We waited three months for a cat to be made to order, so to speak, and the very day his godmother left—we named him in honour of our departed cook—he appeared in the person of a long, lank, rattailed, ignominious tabby, on whom food made no earthly impression. His name is Boxer—Mister Boxer.
There is a great daily paper in London in whose columns the nobility and gentry clamour for what the Americans delicately call "help." I have myself pressed into four alluring lines a statement of the advantages I had to offer, and have received no reply. I have answered thirty-five advertising parlour-maids, enclosing stamped envelopes, and have had no reply. My cook having retired from the scene, and there being nothing left to remind me of her but Mister Boxer, I again sought solace in those delusive columns.
"What have I done," I cried in anguish, "that all cooks should avoid me?"
Just then my dearest friend was announced; at least, she is as dear as distance will permit in London.
"What's happened?" she asked at once.
I explained mournfully that cook had gone.
"Whenever we had company she always said it wasn't Lord Kitchener, though I never said it was."
"I wish to goodness," and my friend flung herself into the nearest chair, "that my cook would go."
For a moment I gasped; it sounded so audacious.
"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 advertisement 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 passed 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 title. 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 glasses.
"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 nobility 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 passed 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 whenHeasked me to marry him, for the paragon had chosen me out of one hundred and sixty-five ladies, exclusive of twenty of the nobility.
"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 japanned tin trunk.
"Hesuggested 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 gods. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-glass salad bowl, and two old Worcester plates, and then finished off with nervous prostration on the kitchen floor.Heand 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 Mass. 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: class 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 class means also a great serving class, and this serving class is useless for others, because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to a good deal of idleness. Take this class 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 pass 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 assistant 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 shilling 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 assistant.
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 class. 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 japanned 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 classes: those that aspire to serve the nobility, and the others who circulate among the middle-classes. The outward and visible distinctions of the former are the perfection of menial smartness, the women's starched apron-bows cocked to an impertinent angle, and their faces a blank. On the other hand, the middle-class servant never really succeeds to a blank face, which is the result of years of practice, and sometimes she even smiles. Also her apron is often put on in a hurry, and much starch brazens out holes; besides, her face invites "smuts."
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 shine 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 institution, 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 attitude 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 attitude 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 mineà 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 snob 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 "smuts"; 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-class 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 shiny 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 class is always speechless but very affectionate in public. The American of the same class is publicly prudish. It is, therefore, rather startling, as a blushing 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.
The restlessness of the English servants, fanned by the Board Schools and higher aspirations towards department stores, has produced the temporary servant. She flits from one distressed family to the other, and is at anyone's beck and call at a moment's notice; nor does she harrow her lady's feelings by staying that awful last month, when having done her worst she is invulnerable.
She has, of course, her disadvantages, along with her advantages. She takes naturally no earthly interest in her place (but none of them do!) for she flits like a grubby butterfly from one area to the other; she is, however, usually quite competent. Her example, on the other hand, is bad, for she gets high wages, a varied existence, and plenty of holidays, and, being temporary and independent, she does not work too hard.
There is really nothing so fatal as aspirations in the wrong place; to them we owe the servant problem. Now, the average man will sniff at the servant problem and, unless he has a great, broad mind, he will say to the partner of some of his joys and all of his sorrows, "You don't know how to treat your servants. My clerks don't bother me."
As if that were the same thing at all! Men's places are easily filled, and the average man is so anchored by domestic ties that he thinks several times before he gives warning, as indeed would a servant if she had a family depending on her earnings. But a servant usually has no ties. Her clothes are in her tin trunk, and her hopes in the registry office; thus, accompanied by the one and protected by the other, she goes on her winding way. If she had an idle or sick husband and half-a-dozen children to support, her attitude towards service would be less lofty.
Coming often from very poor homes, it is a curious fact that servants are always extravagant, at any rate with other people's belongings. Lady Macbeth, under whose dominion I languished for over three years, once confessed to me that she prided herself on her economy, which, she said, proved her to be of a different class from other servants.
Once, in a gracious moment, she also told me she preferred being a good cook rather than a poor nursery governess who, in the delicate and unwritten code of service, is on a higher social scale, hovering, I believe on the outskirts of the lady pinnacle. She was kind enough to add that she would rather cook for some one she could look up to than teach a lot of stupid young ones. I was highly flattered, and so was the other member of my family, and we tried hard to live up to her good opinion. But no man is a hero to his valet, and she never repeated the compliment.
It is unfortunately true that domestic troubles, like rheumatism, toothache, and sea-sickness, from which one can suffer untold agonies, never arouse a proper sympathy. A man takes his business seriously enough, but he never takes his wife's housekeeping seriously.
"What in the world do you do all day long?" is his kindly, scornful cry; as if there were nothing to do! Yet it is that which gives women grey hairs and nervous prostration, and forms an endless topic of conversation among those who would gladly avoid the subject. It requires cast-iron, steel-bound nerves to confront rebellion in the kitchen, simply because of the terror of going from bad to worse. That awful pilgrimage to the registry office, those hideous interviews, that terrible month of probation—your probation as well as hers. I defy two women to get together and not talk "servants" before the end of the conversation. Not even intellect will save you the flight to that inferno, the Registry Office.
There is one figure the dramatist of the future will never again be able to employ, and that is the ancient retainer. Never again will he follow his unfortunate master and mistress into exile, or lay down his life for them, or give up to them his humble earnings. Not only will the species be extinct, but the very tradition of it will have passed away.
The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will be left to do unaided will be to make love; and yet, possibly, that also is another form of electricity. At any rate, the ancient retainer is doomed, and it is the ancient retainer's fault. He has shown his decreasing interest in the family, so no wonder the family takes no further interest in him. Job servants supply his place, and in illness a trained nurse does as well, if not much better.
Alas, it is a materialistic, utilitarian age and, if they did but know it, neither master nor servant can afford to stifle what remains of loyalty and affection. There are some things for which money will not pay, strange though it may seem in these days when everything has its price. The life which cultivates no feeling but indifference is to be deplored both for master and man.
There is something which makes of labour a higher thing than a mere barter. If that something really existed, we would not have that ceaseless, perpetually changing procession with tin trunks; personally, I should not feel so much that I was keeping a boarding-house for strangers, whom I pay instead of their paying me. If any of the old spirit were still left, servants would not be sent adrift to shift for themselves when their best days are over, and we should still see that phenomenon, an old servant.
What becomes of old servants? It is a mystery. Some possibly become meek, and keep lodging-houses; others, meeker still, become caretakers. Can human imagination conjure up a more dismal fate? To be the companion of beetles and mice; to vegetate in a basement, gloomy with the abysmal gloom of London, and silent with the monumental silence of a deserted house!
Why not think of the possible future, that giddy, independent day, when to give notice, and feast on the consequent anguish, is a cool rapture? Once only I met an ex-parlour maid who rose superior to fate. She had become useful by the day. Then, unexpectedly, a subtle change came over her—she also aspired. She couldn't give warning, which would have been her natural outlet, but she felt that she owed something to her dignity before the other servants. From henceforth, she announced, she would really have to come in by the front door. I submitted, and the area steps know her no more.
It is a comfort not to be required to solve the problems of a future generation. I saw, however, yesterday, the thin end of the wedge in the form of a little red cart, in front of a house before which the usual "Sidewalk Committee," as they call it in America, was gathered, lazily critical. Rubber tubes led from the cart into the open windows of a room, and a gentleman, apparently of elegant leisure, in uniform, superintended proceedings. For a moment I suspected fire, but seeing the calm, unruffled, unsoiled, unwatered appearance of everything, it suddenly flashed through my mind that what I so often had predicted was being fulfilled. Science was solving the domestic problem!
If we can clean a house by air, without the presence of a servant, before long some great man will teach us to cook in the same way. Some day electricity will release us from bondage. A cook will then be as unnecessary as a 'bus horse. Then let the young person, who now aspires to the factory and the department stores, threaten; we shall not care. Indeed, then may come our sweet time of revenge, for the department stores will be undoubtedly overcrowded, and the young person with the yellow tin trunk will then join a different procession in the days of that happy millennium.
Gladly would I have shaken hands with the gentleman who was superintending the red cart, as the outward and visible promise of a new liberty, but I feared he might not understand.
If one might offer a suggestion to our great and glorious Republic across the sea in regard to any possible change in her coinage, it would be that, rather than the worthy lady with the Phrygian cap, it should bear the figure of the new "vacuum-cleaner," with its attendant Man; that represents something real, something up-to-date. The lady with the cap and stars is a myth, but what have we poor sufferers to do with myths? Let us, rather, give credit where credit is due.
The other day there was sent to me a voluminous list of the eminent scientists who are to lecture before the Royal Institution. As I read their famous names it did seem to me that if these giants of science would abstract their gaze from discovering new planets, new continents, new gases, and new rays, and would bring their mighty intellects to bear on what might be called kitchen science, the results would be incalculable.
Does not the old nursery wisdom declare, "Great oaks from little acorns grow?" Invent an electrical cook, an electrical parlour-maid, an electrical housemaid, and an electrical boy for the boots. Think of the peace that will enter our homes; think of the just retribution that will overtake those awful offices that pocket our fees and supply worse than nothing! Think of the joy of millions of crushed housekeepers who, for the first time in the history of the world, will be able to look a cook squarely in the face and give her warning! Surely that is an aim which should satisfy the greatest intellect, because the greatest intellect (presumably a man, a brother, a father, or a husband) demands to be fed, not only often, but well.
Columbus was undoubtedly a great man, and the product of his time; was he not the first to do that little egg trick, and did he not afterwards discover the United States of America? But his fame, mighty and enduring though it is, will pale before his, the product of our time, the product of our dire necessity, who will give to the world what is greater even than a new continent—and that is Peace.
The greatest man of the future will be the Columbus of the Kitchen.
I once met an Englishman in America who quite unconsciously explained to me the vital difference between English and American society.
He was so quiet, so gentlemanly, and so bored, and I had tried my best to say things. At last I cried in despair, "You Englishmen are so hard to entertain!" To which he replied, in slow surprise, "But we don't want to be entertained!" and that is it! And as man moulds the woman, and the woman makes society—therefore the English woman makes the society of which her Englishman approves, just as the American makes a society suitable for her "men folks."
Society is an elusive expression, and the human beings who constitute it are spread out in layers like the chocolate cake of our childhood, and every layer aspires to be the top one with the sugar frosting. In a kingdom the only ones who ever reach that sugar-coated eminence are of course the august reigning family besides a very precious and select few, who must be horribly bored at having reached an altitude where there is no need of further aspiration. After all, it does add a zest to life to triumph over one's dearest friends and snub them. Of course a reigning family has the superlative privilege of snubbing, but they have to take it out in that, for to them is denied the joy of "climbing."
In America we are still in the beginning of things, and society is less complex, though more so than formerly, as the unfortunate result of increasing wealth. There was a golden age in America, when different cities each required of its votaries different qualifications to enable them to enter what is called "Society." In those days, it is pleasant to testify, it was what a man had done, intellectually or morally, that opened to him the iron-bound gates of Boston. You might be shabby and poor, and rattle up to Society in an exceedingly inelegant vehicle called a "herdic" (which shot you out like coal), but you were welcome if you were literary or scientific, musician or philanthropist. Money looked on respectfully at the great and shabby, and was distinctly elbowed into a corner.
Something grips at my heart as I recall those bygone days when, as a very young girl, with a bump of reverence as high as the Himalayas, I sat in the corner of a splendid, shabby Boston drawing-room, and watched the great men and women, whose genius has left its imprint on American history and literature. They talked to each other, like ordinary human beings, and refreshed themselves with cold coffee and heavy cake, which was passed by such of the younger generation as the wonderful hostess could press into service. It is remembering this wonderful hostess that I am impressed by the truth that entertaining is not a fine art, but genius; it is not acquired, it is inborn.
In this shabby old mansion, with its relics of a bygone splendour, I saw for the first time the greatest hostess it has ever been my good fortune to meet. She was neither beautiful, witty, nor young, but she had the subtle quality which made you at once at home in her genial presence; which made you feel that you were the one guest in whom she was interested, and this impression she made on everybody. Such was her magnetism that her spirit inspired every one, at least for the time being; a charming intercourse was the result, a geniality among her guests who, the very next day, in an overwhelming flood of shyness, would cut each other dead.
I have come to the conclusion that it is this abominable shyness which makes human beings so repellent to each other. It is one of the minor martyrdoms of existence resulting in an antagonistic attitude, not so much because one doubts the eligibility of the other, but rather that one doubts one's self. The agony of self-consciousness that surrounds one as with a thin coating of ice, out of which frosty prison one breathes ice. Did the other but know what one suffers!
It is often very difficult to distinguish between shyness and reserve, for one can be reserved without being shy, and one can be shy and in an excess of shyness frightfully unreserved. Though the English are rightly credited with having brought reserve and self-control—those characteristics of the highest civilization as well as the lowest—to the greatest mastery, yet some of their amazing silence and immobility I believe to be shyness. It is a comfort to think so because, when one's vivacious disposition occasionally hurls one against an icy obstacle, it pains.
The English self-control—the result of generations of self-controlled ancestors—makes heroes in the battlefield, but sometimes it also makes of its bravest officers but foolhardy leaders of men. On the other hand, the national pride to suppress emotion retaliates on nature in a perfectly legitimate way; the emotion one suppresses, like all unused functions, ends by weakening, then disappearing. Not that the English are without emotion, but compared to other nationalities, the average Englishman's emotions are not easily stirred. Self-control is a very inspiring quality, but it is not so wonderful when the nature exercising it is tuned to a low key. English supremacy is so great that English self-control is the fashion, but while an Englishman's self-control is the icy covering to a quiet, placid mountain; the control a Frenchman or an Italian assumes is the ice veneering a volcano.
Human nature is, to a certain extent, everywhere the same, and its simple and primal virtues are the same, only modified by race and climate. A man may be panic-stricken in disaster, not through cowardice, but because of uncontrolled imagination. No one will deny the superlative bravery of the French, but it is equally impossible to deny that in panics they sometimes lose their heads. In such circumstances the Frenchman does not show to the same advantage as the Englishman, not because of a lack of bravery, but because he possesses a fiery imagination. A Frenchman sees not only the present disaster, but he sees the results far into the dim future; the Englishman, with controlled imagination, if any, applies himself to a hurried view of the situation, and wastes no time on a thought of the future.
I knew an American of English descent who found himself in a burning German theatre one night. In the instant there was a panic, and a frantic woman clung to his arms and implored him to save her. He was very near-sighted, and in the confusion his eyeglasses had fallen off. "I certainly will," he said, reassuringly, "if you will just let me put on my glasses." Then he climbed upon the seat, calmly gauged a possible chance of escape, and rescued his companion and himself. Yet the imagination which in certain circumstances results in disaster, under others gives a man a charm which makes his companionship a delight.
We Americans are a composite race; we have the coolness of the English, as well as the nervous tension of multiples of races, exaggerated by that glowing air, which has been wittily called "free champagne." The warring of these various elements promises results that cannot be foreseen in a nation which boasts of being Anglo-Saxon, whatever that may mean.
Years ago I remember the wrecking of a little pleasure boat near a famous island on the coast of Maine, and with what heroism the young men of the party saved themselves; that is where the foreign element brought with it a too active imagination. Now the atmosphere and the foreign element in our blood make us a nervous, high-strung people, aggressively entertaining, and clamouring to be entertained.
In no way has the American invasion proved more triumphant than in the subtle change it is producing in the new generation of English girls. The English woman, like the clever antagonist she is, studies the skilful weapons with which the other has established her captivating supremacy, and is proceeding to use the same.
The new English girl has a charm and a vivacity, when she is not hampered by tradition, which must make the American girl look to her laurels. It will, of course, take her some time to let her spirit sparkle behind those statuesque features; still, she is undoubtedly on the road to vivacity. But the unbending and expressionless matron and immovable and monosyllabic young girl are still to the fore. A wintry smile on the matron's lips, enough to chill the most cordial guest, and the strangled remarks of the young girl and her slow, cold eyes, are the triumphant results of the nation of the self-controlled. Those cold eyes and that slow smile that have in them not the ghost of humour. To get behind the eyes and the smile, to discover some inward fire! Is there any? One looks with envy at those faces which, from the lowest up, possess that in common that it is impossible to penetrate into the real self.
It must be confessed that what might be called the national manner is not conducive to geniality of intercourse.
The power a hostess has to blight a crowd of people with her own frost! There is the hostess who greets you as if she had never seen you before, and accepts your hand as if it were a slice of cold fish; there is the haughty hostess who shakes hands limply while she looks over your head at a superior guest; there is the vague hostess who smiles liberally, but sees you not; then there is the hostess with the surface geniality, who, with a hurried glance at you, gushes inquiries across you at the nearest man. There are as many varieties of hostesses as there are women, and they one and all drop you, and you merge into the army of starers, sometimes saved by an introduction to some other shipwrecked mariner with whom you escape to the tea-room.
The American fashion of dispensing afternoon tea is very pretty, and should be introduced here. Instead of leaving the serving of light refreshments to the servants, the American hostess chooses several of the prettiest girls she knows, and gives them the task of pouring out the tea, coffee, and chocolate at a centre table decorated with flowers, lighted candles, and all that coquettish art of which the American woman is past-mistress. The table should accommodate four girls, who, in their smartest party toilettes, are at once ornamental and useful, and the centre of attraction. They take away something of the stiffness which is inevitable among a crowd of people, many of whom are strangers to each other. Having to ask for a cup of tea from a pretty girl instead of a servant is pleasant, and generally leads to conversation, and it is considered the greatest compliment a hostess can confer if she asks you to "pour" for her. The more original the hostess, the more charming can she make her "teas," and what is usually a rather dreary function may be made entertaining and graceful.
The English hostess, ignoring her pretty chance, leaves the tea-table, if there are many guests, to her servants. I once invited an English girl to "pour" tea for me, and she discomfited me exceedingly by asking why I did not get the servants to do it! And I had meant to pay her a compliment!
What a social comfort a hat is! It gives one so much moral courage. It is less terrible to encounter society in a hat; one can take refuge in it from the coldest blast. But in the evening, garlanded with roses and deserted, so to speak, by God and man, society is a trial.
There is no greater martyrdom for the middle-aged than baring their shoulders to the bitter air and transporting them to an evening function. To shiver for an instant in the smile of the hostess, and then subside against the wall, while the young and ardent flirt about with members of the other sex; or if they don't flirt, they appear to, which is just as well. A very beautiful woman once confessed to me in a moment of sincerity that she would be ashamed to be seen talking to another woman at an evening party. "I would rather be with the most idiotic man, and look as if I were flirting hard, than talk to the most brilliant woman in the room. I always avoid women at parties."
It is not an age for conversation; our small-talk is soon exhausted, and for a woman to talk at length, labels her as a rock to be avoided. How can we havesalons, we who cannot converse? We are the products of the daily papers, and our conversation is like their familiar small-talk column. So we have to have artificial aids to entertaining.
We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so "cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and recited to than our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own experience, when some stray man and I have stood together speechless, no sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed to inundate us. The dumb man spoke as if by magic, and I, who hitherto had nothing to say, couldn't talk fast enough.
The divine arts are too good to be wasted in a twentieth century drawing-room! Such conversation as there is, is amply accompanied by the pianola and the gramophone. These two awful inventions are to music what the chromo is to painting. They make music as vulgar as machine-made lace.
My first experience of the pianola was at the Universal Provider's. It was Christmas time, and I was so tired and harassed that I stood quite still in the surging crowd, oblivious of the sharp elbows of my shopping sisters, oblivious of dust and microbes, only conscious that I was dizzy with fatigue. Suddenly through the crowd I heard the familiar strains of the great romantic polonaise of Chopin—the one introduced by the exquisiteAndante Spianato. It is a mediæval romance without words, of chivalry, tournaments, gallant cavaliers, and beautiful women; all this I heard in the piano department of the Universal Provider.
I couldn't understand it! What great artist could so far forget himself as to play this divine work for a passing, heedless, irritable crowd. I pushed my way past my sisters, and possibly used my elbows. As I came nearer I grew confused by something exasperatingly perfect in the sound. The humanity of a single false note was wanting. I reached the crowd about the piano—well, everybody has seen a pianola! An imitation artist (he had long fair hair) steered the music and pumped in the expression at the proper place, while the indefatigable instrument ejected miles of punctured paper.
Never did anything so get on my nerves! I nearly wept. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the pianola and other instruments of its kind are of American origin, and, like all American inventions, they are labour-saving. You can be a Paderewski while you wait, but, thank Heaven! no ingenious American has yet invented a mechanical Joachim!
The first modest invention, the grandparent of the pianola, was exhibited in Boston (America) years and years ago, and was a modest little box, with only a small appetite for punctured paper. One of the judges of the musical instruments at the exhibition showed me this curious music-box, to which, because of its ingenuity, they had decided to give a prize. Now the instrument has waxed greater and greater, and no one is safe from it, no, not if you go to the farthest desert or highest mountain. It graces afternoon teas, while the guests refresh themselves in stunned silence, or shriek at the top of their voices in vain rivalry, until they melt into the street, where the turmoil of cabs, carts, vans, and motors is soothing and peaceful by comparison.
For a stranger to penetrate into typical English social circles is often a blighting experience. If the hostess is a woman of the world, she comes to your assistance; but if she is the woman of an island, you find yourself stranded, unintroduced, and surrounded by more or less handsome and statuesque creatures, who would possibly be delighted to talk to you if you were introduced—or possibly not.
Oh, the debatable question of introduction! One sometimes thinks that in England people go into society just to avoid each other; at least so it would appear from the ardent way in which they decline to be introduced. Conventional smart English society does not introduce, and that sets the fashion.
Society knows too many people, and refuses to know more; and its young men, having at their command only two feet apiece, also refuse to be introduced, for they cannot extend the field of their activities. The young man's toil consists largely in duty dances, for the only way he can pay a worried mother for a dinner-party is by dancing with her daughter, who still hangs fire. So his path is not always strewn with roses. Still his is easier than the "gal's," for he can decline to be introduced to her, and he does this often with the little caprices and insolence of a society belle.
"Do let me introduce you to my cousin," said a generous young soul to her partner, "she is such a nice 'gal.'"
"Please don't; I should have to dance with her, and I am full up," replied the youth, and so it is. Not that all girls are so generous, far from it. It is the exception when they overstep the bounds and introduce an attractive girl to a young man. The result is that society is made up of cliques, wheels within wheels, and the cliques keep rigidly to themselves, and the loveliest young creatures outside languish against the wall, and no one takes pity on them.
Many are the complicated stratagems to introduce the young girl into the "smart set" of English society, and if the commander-in-chief ("mother") is not blessed with the best steel-covered nerves, she had better not undertake it. The commander-in-chief, of course a rich and great lady, borrows a list of unknown young men from other hostesses and invites them to her ball. Presumably grateful youths pay for this entertainment by dancing with the "gal," but not always.
After all, smart society is alike all over the world; like hotel cooking, it has no nationality. So America is ceasing to introduce, but this repression is not universal yet. All do not yet languish under self-inflicted boredom. A perfect American hostess makes her guests known to each other if they are strangers, and though fashion may protest, this is after all the only way to make a crowd of mutually unknown people comfortable and not awkward. People, except those of great ease of manner, will not speak to each other unless introduced, and to talk to some one without the faint guide-post of a name is not very interesting. You may be talking to a very dull stranger, and turn away bored, when, had you but known that he was a great and shining light, how interested you would have been, and how deftly you would have turned the conversation into the one channel the great one always loves—himself.
Possibly Americans overdo the introducing; they are rather apt to overdo everything; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation every few minutes by a vivacious hostess, than be stranded in a corner looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather effusive geniality.
The fundamental difference between the two nationalities is that Americans love strangers, and the English hate them. The Englishman looks with suspicion on any one he doesn't know, root and branch; the American loves him until he hears of something to his disadvantage, or until he gets tired of him—which happens.
The Englishman's aversion to strangers does not include the American, curiously enough. He does not call him a foreigner, and he likes him. He likes him partly because he really can't help it, and partly out of policy, and he looks charitably at his curious and original ways just as a big dog watches the gambols of a frolicsome puppy. He always remembers that that puppy is his puppy, and that some day he will grow into a big dog of his own breed, and—well, he respects the breed.
Not that the American man is in England as popular as the American woman; he is not. The charming American woman is the product of generations of hard-working fathers and husbands who have toiled for her, and toil for her, and the result is that in cultivation and attraction she has left her creator rather behind. When you add to this his strenuous habits of business life, in which "devil take the hindmost" is the motto, and a very confident belief in his own ability, and his country's unmistakable destiny to "whip the universe," it produces a rather aggressive personality. So he is not as popular as his charming women, because, also, he represents a prophecy which is not unlike a menace. Yet the big dog watches the gambols of the little dog with tolerant good-nature.
Another factor in favour of the American woman is that she can be charming on two continents—the Englishwoman still confines her efforts to one—and she can be charming in the language of the two greatest nations in the world. Is this not a magnificent opportunity for her social genius? Descended, usually, from all sorts of races, America makes her what she is, and then boastfully sends the perfected article across the water to the old countries to ally herself with the best or the worst of their aristocracy. That it is rarely the case of King Cophetua and the beggar-maid one admits; but, after all, everything has its price in this world, and coronets come dear, except, of course, to that one privileged class—the ladies of the variety theatres.
In speaking of the American man's aggressiveness, one does not wish to imply that the Englishman is not aggressive; far from it. There is no one so aggressive as an Englishman, but the difference is that the American is boastfully aggressive, and the Englishman quietly so, as one so sure of himself and his belongings that boasting is superfluous; which makes him all the more aggravating. The summit and climax of this aggravation is that the Englishman does not know that he is aggressive, and even resents it in his beloved Americans, and never suspects that his own want of popularity may be due to that same cause.
Years ago it was the Englishman who was the spoilt darling of nations; now he is making way for the American. But his early prestige was immense—it is still great, but it is a tempered greatness.
In those days when he went to America to harvest dollars (he rarely went for any other reason), he was received with a rapturous humility which was pathetic. We grovelled before him, we suffered his peculiar manners, which had they been our own we should sometimes have labelled as bad, as the eccentricities of a superior being. We were flattered when our resemblance to him was pointed out, and to increase it we created that particularly obnoxious type, the Anglicised American; for, like all imitations, it is the caricature of the most unpleasant features of a resemblance.
In those days we took him to our hearts, to our homes, and to our clubs, and when sometimes we came to London to enjoy his return civilities, we had to be satisfied with very modest crumbs of entertainment indeed. But perhaps the Englishman said, in the subtle French tongue, "Je paye de ma personne." That explains it.
We spoiled the errant Englishman most abominably; our idol got bad manners and a swelled head, and it always took him some time on his return to a nation that, after all, consists of Englishmen, to find his level again. The wife of a very distinguished man complained to me of the demoralised condition in which her husband—who had gone to America to lecture—had been sent back to her. "It will take me years to unspoil him," she cried. "It's all the fault of your women, who flatter them to death! And that is the reason," she added, with some bitterness, "that Englishmen think they are so charming and clever."