CHAPTER III A HOTEL PORTER
The Highlands, Orange County, N. Y.,
Tuesday, 25 August, 1891.
I am now a hotel porter. More strictly, I have just resigned my position, and with the net proceeds of three weeks' wages, which amount to four dollars and two cents, I am ready to make a fresh start in the early morning. The leisure of this last evening at the hotel I shall give to the task of summing up the fragmentary notes which I have made in such chance hours of rest as were to be had in a service which has kept me on duty from five o'clock in the morning until eleven at night.
Why I have lingered here so long I scarcely know. The time has flown with amazing swiftness. I soon found my new job easily within my powers, as compared with the last one, and I have felt a certain restful security which has held me here for longer than I meant to stay. But I am ready enough to set out now, and I feel again a "yearning for the large excitement" that comes of life upon the open highway, and the chances of a living earned by the work of my hands.
I am not twenty miles beyond my last station at Highland Falls. It was raining when I left Mrs. Flaherty's home, and she pleaded with me to stay; but I had nothing with which to pay for further entertainment, and I certainly had not the courage to return to the job on the old Academic building. And so we parted, Mrs. Flaherty standing with arms akimbo in the open door of her cottage, a final protest against so rash a venture as her last word, while I lifted my hat to her and to Minnie, who peered at me from the shadow of the passage behind her mother.
It must be owned that the prospect was not encouraging to my new departure. At intervals of less than a mile, sometimes, I was driven to seek refuge from the rain. The mountain-road was soft with mud, and a secure footing was a fruitless search. In the hot air the heavy dampness added to the discomfort of walking. Only in a general way I knew that the road would lead me eventually over the Highlands to Middletown, which lies in my westward course. The beauty of the country was lost upon me, for the mountain was cloaked in a heavy fog, and all that rose visible were short, succeeding sections of muddy road, bordered with forests of oak and hickory-nut and chestnut, with matted weeds growing thick to the wagon-tracks, and clumps of blackberry bushes standing here and there along the lines of tottering stone walls and wooden fences.
In the middle of the noon hour I reached Forest-of-Dean Mines. A general supply store stands on the roadside. It was thronged with Italian laborers. I waited in its shelter until the one-o'clock whistle recalled the men to their work, and then I made terms with an Italian boy, who was left in charge, for a five-cent dinner. The child spoke English with perfect readiness. Almost concealed behind the counter, he looked wonderfully important and business-like as he reached up to apply the weights and fixed his great black eyes shrewdly upon the oscillations of the balance. For five cents he agreed to give me two ounces of cheese and six soda-crackers.
This proved a hopelessly inadequate dinner, and by the middle of the afternoon I was painfully hungry. It must have been between the hours of three and four when, on a stretch of level road, I met a tall, over-grown negro youth with a bucket of sour milk in each hand, which was plainly destined for a pig-pen that I had passed but a few yards back. Looming dimly in the fog behind him, I could see the outlines of a large frame structure with lightly built verandas engirding it. I asked the youth what it was, and learned that it was a hotel, the "—— House."
'Did he think that I could get a job there?' He was doubtful of that, but advised my seeing the "boss," whom I should find in the office. The office was deserted when I entered it. Some men were playing billiards in the larger room beyond, which, with the office, forms the ground floor of a building detached from the main hotel, but joined by a veranda on the upper story.
I sat down, and began to dry my feet at a slow fire which burned in an iron stove. Presently there came in a tall man, straight of figure, with black eyes and hair and mustache and an uncommonly dark complexion. I rose with an inquiry for the proprietor, and he sat down with the assurance that he was the man. There were two definite requests in my mind. I meant to apply first for a job; but, expecting nothing of a permanent character, I resolved to ask work for the remaining afternoon for the sake of food and a night's shelter from the rain. To my surprise, instead of the negative I expected to my first request, I found some encouragement in the proprietor's manner. He owned to the need of a porter until the arrival, in a few days, of the man who had been engaged for that position. I declared my willingness to serve and to begin work on the moment. He pointed out that he did not know me, and that he was not in the habit of engaging servants whom he did not know. 'Besides, there was not much for the porter to do, and for his services he was paid at the rate of eight dollars a month and his board.' I was ready with a plea for a trial, if only for a single day, and presently the proprietor consented.
He rose, and at once began to instruct me in my duty. Standing on the threshold between the office and billiard-room, he pointed to the bare floors, and explained that they must be scrubbed every morning. He then indicated the score or more of oil-lamps with which the rooms were lighted, and said that these must be kept clean and filled. Next he opened a door from the office into a small room in which was a cot. That was to be my sleeping-place, and he showed me, in one corner, buckets and a mop and a broom, which were intended for the porter's use. Quite abruptly he asked to see my hat, and, wondering at the request, I showed him the stained black felt with ragged holes in the crown. "That won't do," he said, and with the word he took down from a peg a porter's cloth cap with a patent-leather visor, and bade me wear it at my work. It was much too small, but by dint of holding my head with care I could keep it on; thus balancing the cap as best I could, and with the broom in hand, I followed my employer for further instructions. He led the way to the verandas, and explained that they must be swept each morning before the guests are up, and again in the afternoon, at the hour when they are least in use. They were nearly deserted now, and the proprietor told me to begin my work by sweeping them, and then he left me.
I could have danced with sheer delight. Not if I had deliberately planned it could I have effected a better arrangement. It fitted my needs exactly. A change to lighter work for a time was almost a necessity; for my hands were much blistered and torn, and they refused to heal under the friction of my last employment. And then—and my spirits rose buoyantly to this idea—here was a chance to see something of domestic service, and such another, under conditions so favorable, might not offer in all my journey across the continent.
"This morning," I thought to myself, "I was a roving laborer in search of work and with but ten cents in my pocket; now I am a hotel porter, with bed and board assured and an open field for observation, and some certainty of a surplus, regardless of the weather, when I quit the job, although, at its present rate, my daily wage is a fraction less than twenty-seven cents."
As I swept the verandas my plans began to form themselves with exciting interest. "Here is clearly a splendid opportunity. I have been frankly told that a porter is already engaged, and is on his way, and that my occupancy of office is simply for the interregnum. Plainly, if I can give evidence, in the meantime, of usefulness such that, when the regular porter comes, I shall be continued in some employment about the hotel, that will be a distinct achievement; and it will not be without a bearing upon the practical question as to what a penniless man may do for himself in the way of winning permanent employment that offers chances of promotion." I resolved to bend all my energies to that.
When the verandas were swept, I returned to the office and billiard-room, and began to study the field. The floors were sadly in need of scrubbing; many of the lamp chimneys were smoked, and all were far from clean; the windows of both rooms were much weather-stained; and the paint on the woodwork could be improved by a thorough washing. I then went over the grounds, and found the walks in disorder, and the lawns matted and strewn with litter.
I lit the lamps at nightfall, and awaited a summons to supper. While in the region of the kitchen I noticed that an extra hand might often prove of service there. Back in my own domain for the evening, I found my offices in demand in attendance upon the billiard and pool tables.
By eleven o'clock the house was still, and I was at liberty to go to bed. Among the furniture in the office was an alarm-clock. This I wound up, and set for a quarter to five.
The morning was splendidly bright. When I stepped out upon the veranda the sun had already cleared the tops of the wooded Highlands, and, with the radiance reflected from infinite rain-drops in the forests, there rolled from their "gorgeous gloom" the "sweet after showers, ambrosial air." In no direction was the outlook wide; but the air gleamed in the sunlight with the crystal clearness which gives its peculiar quality to our autumn, and which so early as August can be had only at considerable altitudes.
But the scrubbing awaited me, and was a task of much uncertainty. In the kitchen I filled my buckets with water—cold water, I am sorry to say. I threw wide open the doors and windows, and first sprinkled the floors, as I had seen shopkeepers do, and then swept them thoroughly. I tried to apply the water by means of a mop with a long wooden handle; but failing completely in that, I detached the handle, and getting down on my knees, I went carefully over the surface with the mop in hand. Frequently I changed the water, and when the scrubbing was done I looked the damp floors over with immense satisfaction.
Until I was called to breakfast I spent the time in sweeping the verandas and clearing from the walks the twigs and dead leaves with which they were strewn after the rain. In no way was I prepared for the alarming surprise which was in store for me. When I returned to the office I stood aghast at the sight of the newly scrubbed floors. They were dry now, and were covered with fantastic designs. Every final movement of the mop was distinctly traceable in streaks of unmistakable dirt. And there was the proprietor at work at his desk, and he faintly noticed me as I entered. I stood expecting my discharge, with what fortitude I could summon, but receiving no further attention from my employer, I hurried back to the work on the walks and drives. During the dinner-hour I brought a broom to bear upon the coiling traceries on the floor, and succeeded in softening their bolder outlines.
But scrubbing proved a peculiarly difficult art. On the second morning I did all that I had done before, and then got buckets of clean hot water and a fresh mop; and on hands and knees I went over the floors, wiping them up with scrupulous care. The result was no better, once dry, and the designs in daubs of dirt were as fantastic as ever. On the third morning I tried still a new plan, but only with the result of effecting a change in the designs. I was learning to scrub by an empirical process, and the fourth venture approached success. Hot water and soap, and a scrub-brush vigorously applied, and then a final swabbing, left the floors comparatively clean, and free from the persistent mop-stains.
Only one more of my duties I found difficult of mastery. Like scrubbing the floors, washing the windows was full of surprises. From one of the house-maids I learned that clean, hot, soapy water was the prime necessity. I was delighted with the first result, for after the washing within and without, I had visions of the glass in a high state of clean transparency. But the sun had absorbed the water, and left stains of tenacious soap, when I came to the polishing, and after hours of labor I almost despaired of ever bringing the panes to a reasonably untarnished condition.
The work has varied so little in detail that the history of a single day is an epitome of the three weeks' service:
I am up at a little before five in the morning. The floors of the office and billiard-room are my first concern; and by the time these are scrubbed it is six o'clock. The chef early noticed my willingness to lend a hand in the kitchen, and he rewards me with a liberal supply of hot water every morning, and a cup of coffee and a slice of bread at six o'clock when he takes his own. Fortified in this way, I sweep the verandas and walks, and rake the drives and lawns until breakfast.
There is a curious, horizontal, social cleavage among the "help." I belong to the lower stratum. I first noticed the distinction at our meals. The negro head-waiter, and the pastry-cook, and the head-gardener, and the company of Irish maids, who do double duty as waitresses and house-maids, take their meals in the dining-room after the guests are served. The remnants of these two servings are then heaped upon a table in a long, low, dimly lighted room which intervenes between the kitchen and dining-room, and there we of the lowest class help ourselves. Our coterie consists of an English maid, a recent arrival from Liverpool, who serves as a dishwasher, three negro laundresses, two negro stable-boys and myself, with a varying element in two or three hired men, who drop in irregularly from the region of the barns.
Martha, the English maid, is chiefly in charge here, and she bravely tries to serve, and to bring some order out of the chaos; but the task is beyond her. We take places as we find them vacant, and each helps himself from what remains to be eaten of the fragments of the meal just ended. There is always a towering supply, but an abundance of a sort that deadens your appetite, like the blow of a sand-bag.
I reproached myself with fastidiousness at first, and imagined that to the other servants, who shared it, the fare was entirely palatable; and so I was surprised when, at a dinner early in my stay, one of the negro laundresses seized a plate heaped with scraps of meat, from which we had all been helping ourselves, and carried it out with the indignant remark that it was fit only for the dogs, adding, sententiously, as she disappeared through the door: "We are not dogs yet; we are supposed to be human." And back to her afternoon's work she went, although she had eaten only a morsel.
These meals were curiously solemn functions; scarcely a word was ever spoken. Martha was "cumbered about much serving," and very heroically she tried to impart some decent order to the meal, and a cheerfuller tone to the company. I never knew the cause of the sullen unsociability which possessed us, whether it was ill-humor born of the physical weariness from which all the servants seemed constantly to suffer as a result of the high pressure of work at the height of the season, or the revolting fare which often sent us unrested and unfed from our meals.
It is the vision of supper that will linger clearest in my memory. The long, reeking room seen faintly in the yellow light of one begrimed oil-lamp; the ceiling so low that I can easily reach it with my upstretched hand, and dotted over with innumerable flies. The room is a paradise for flies, which swarm most in our food that lies in ill-assorted heaps down the middle of a rough wooden table. Here we sit in chance order, black and white faces often alternating; the white ones livid in their vivid contrast with the background of the room's deep shadows, and the others ghastly visible in the general blackness from which gleam the whites of eyes. Sometimes the two stable-boys find seats together; and then they bid defiance to the general gloom, and are soon bubbling over with musical laughter, that rolls responsive to the least remark from either. It is interesting at such times to watch Martha's face. The nervous energy which is always struggling there against a look of utter weariness shines victorious now, in the light of a new hope that a better cheer has come at last to her table.
From breakfast I hurry back to the work of putting the grounds in order. The walks I sweep every morning, and then rake the drives and the lawns.
It was at this work that I early found convincing proof of the completeness of my social change. The lawns at certain hours are in the possession of nurse-maids and infants. I have never calculated the number of children in the hotel, but their ages apparently mark every stage of advance from a few weeks to as many years. My liking for children amounts to reverent devotion, and it gave me a shock, from which I have not recovered, to find that, unshaven and uncouth in workmen's clothes, I had become for them a bogey with whom their nurses frighten them into obedience, warning them in excited tones with "Here comes the man to take you away!"
It was at this work, too, that I once incurred the avowed displeasure of a guest. She was a beautiful Philistine, with a keenly penetrating twang and turns of speech that bespoke the regions of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. But she was remarkably handsome, tall and graceful, and of high-bred bearing and of a thoroughly aristocratic type. It must be confessed that whenever she was visible from my regions the section of the grounds which commanded a view of her, and was yet fairly beyond the sound of her voice, received assiduous attention from me; for she was highly remunerative to look at. I was sweeping a section of the walk immediately in front of the hotel. Unlike the work at West Point, a porter's duties do not preclude mental effort. Absorbed in thought and quite unconscious of my surroundings, I was suddenly recalled to them and to my station in life by nasal accents raised in strong reproof. I looked up in bewilderment, and saw confronting me the beautiful Philistine, holding a little child by each hand. Very straight she stood and bright-eyed, with her head thrown back, and an exquisite flush over her face, and her beautiful lips curled in anger, as she scolded me roundly for raising so much dust. I was unfamiliar with the etiquette of the situation, so I held my peace, and respectfully touched my cap, inwardly calling her the beauty that she was as she stood there, and ardently hoping that she would scold me more.
I HELD MY PEACE, AND RESPECTFULLY TOUCHED MY CAP,
INWARDLY CALLING HER THE BEAUTY THAT SHE WAS.
From the lawns I go to the kitchen, and offer my services to the chef. Usually he has ready for me a basket of potatoes to peel. In a little shed by the kitchen-door I sit and peel endlessly. The servants are flocking in and out through the open door in the fetid air. The heat is of the suffocating kind, in which the heavy air lies dead. It is nearing the dinner-hour, and everyone must work with almost a frenzy of effort. The high tension communicates itself to us all, and we feel the nervous strain upon our tempers. The hundred and one petty annoyances which cause the friction of household service prove too much, and the tension bursts into a furious quarrel between the Irish pastry-cook and the negro head-waiter. No one has time to heed them, but his storming oaths and her plaintive, whining key, maintained with provoking tenacity, whatever relief they bring to them, are far from soothing to the rest of us.
The maids are gathered from all parts of the hotel. Most of them have been on duty since six o'clock, and after the morning's work there now awaits them the rush of serving dinner. Want of sufficient sleep and utter physical weariness have drawn deep lines in their faces. Presently one of them, a slender young girl, sinks exhausted into a seat, and we hear her notion of the summum bonum: "Oh, I wish I was rich, and could swing all day in a hammock!" I follow the direction of her eyes. Across a wide stretch of lawn and in the shade of some clustering maples I see the gleam of a white dress rocking gently in a hammock, and I catch the flutter of a fan and the light on an open page.
Sometimes I am in the region of the kitchen during the dinner-hour itself. As an experience, I fancy that it is not unlike that of being behind the scenes in the course of the play. The kitchen and pantry are ill-ventilated, and are hot to suffocation. About a counter-like partition which separates the two rooms crowd the eager waitresses, rehearsing in shrill tones their orders to the chef and his assistant. There is a babel of voices striving to be heard, and a ceaseless clatter of dishes, and a hurrying to and fro. The chef is not a bad fellow, but his temper is rarely proof against the harassing annoyances incident upon serving a dinner, and he loses it in a torrent of oaths. The volume of noise increases until the height of dinner is reached and passed, and then it subsides, quite like a thunder-storm.
The afternoon's work keeps me, for the most part, in my own regions. The lamps must first be cleaned and filled, and then the billiard-tables brushed for the evening play, and there may remain unfinished work on the grounds, which claims me until it is time to sweep the verandas again.
When I am out of the office I must be careful that the doors and the windows are open, and my ears attentive to the bell; for I am porter and bell-boy in one.
A bell-boy is sometimes at a disadvantage. He is not supposed to explain, and circumstances may wrong him.
The bell rings. I run to the indicator, and then climb to the door that bears the corresponding number. A lady asks for a pitcher of ice-water. Unluckily the ice-chest is locked, and the key, I learn, is in the keeping of the head-waiter. After hasty search, I find that official seated on a rock in the shade behind the barn, conversing with some of the hands. He tells me that there is no ice in the chest, and advises my going to the ice-house. I do so with all possible speed, and am fortunate enough to find a piece of loose ice not far below the surface of saw-dust. Back to the kitchen I run with it, wash it, and chop it into fragments. But all this has taken time; it is very hot, and the lady, no doubt, is very thirsty. As I hand her the pitcher of water, her caustic acknowledgment expresses anything but gratitude.
The verandas are no sooner swept for the afternoon than the stage appears from the station. I must be in attendance to relieve the newly arrived guests of their lighter luggage and, with the help of one of the stable-boys, to carry their trunks to their rooms.
It was in such services as these that I met with an insuperable difficulty. Before I launched upon the enterprise of earning my living by manual labor I settled it with myself that I would shrink from no honest work, however menial, that might fall within the range of my experiment. I confess that, in my present avocation, when it came to the necessity of cleaning the cuspidors used by a tobacco-eating gentry, the task was accomplished only after hard setting of teeth, and much involuntary contraction of muscles. But I hasten to let fall a veil already too widely drawn from the hidden rites of a porter's service. The difficulty in point was of another kind, and had to do with tips. I was not unprepared for the emergency, for the proprietor had hinted, in our first conversation, with every mark of embarrassment, and with a tone of apology for the eight dollars a month, that that amount was sure to be supplemented by gratuities. It might have been different under other circumstances; but when I had seen the guests and noted the unmistakable marks of residence in cheap flats and low-rent suburban cottages, and realized the careful husbanding of funds and the close calculation which make a summer outing possible to them, their fees were some degrees beyond the possible to me.
In the case of the luggage, it was easy to bow acknowledgment and to decline in favor of Sam, the stable-boy, who, beaming with delight, stood ready to receive gifts to any amount, and who loved me warmly. But when I was alone with some guest in the act of a personal service, the situation created by a proffered fee proved embarrassing to us both, and was not to be relieved by bows and expressions of sincere appreciation.
The evening's duties are usually the lighting of the lamps at nightfall, and assorting the mail that comes in after supper, and attending the billiard and pool tables, and answering the bell-calls. Saturday afternoons and evenings are varied with industrious preparations for extra guests. This makes added demands upon us all, and the servants dread Sunday as bringing always the severest strain of the week. My own share of extra work is confined to Saturday afternoon and evening, when I put up cots, and carry bed-linen and blankets about, under the orders of the house-keeper, usually until midnight. And when I go to sleep at last it is on the hay in the barn, for my room is swept and garnished on Saturday and given up to a guest. It is no hardship to sleep on the hay, but, through knowledge gained from the scale of prices posted in the office, I can but understand what an admirable business arrangement it is for the proprietor to so utilize my room over Sunday. The added revenue which is thus yielded during my stay amounts to fifteen dollars, and as the total sum of my wages for the three weeks is five dollars and sixty-seven cents, the net returns to the proprietor in service and profit speak well for his management.
But there is other evidence of good management, and in a quarter that appeals to me more. His treatment of the "help" is so uniformly fair. I do not like him; but, so far as I know, I am alone in my dislike among all the servants of the house; and I cannot fail to see that a feeling of personal loyalty is behind much of the patient, enduring service to which I have been witness. Only once was there an approach to a collision between us, and certainly I emerged from that in rather a ridiculous light.
It was but two or three evenings ago. Usually I have been able to eat at our table enough at least to deaden appetite, but on that evening I could eat nothing. As I passed through the pastry-kitchen on my way back to the office I saw a few pieces of corn-bread which were apparently to be thrown away. I asked the cook for some, and she readily told me to help myself. On a flagging near the kitchen-door I sat down to eat the bread, and the proprietor must have seen me there in the dim light. I had not finished when the negro head-waiter came upon me in much excitement. I belong to a lower order of service than he, but he treats me civilly, and there was nothing more than nervousness in his manner now.
"You mustn't get cheese from the pantry without leave," he was saying in high agitation.
I thought that he had gone mad, but he presently made clear that the proprietor had come to him with the complaint that I was eating cheese, which is kept in the pantry, and is not intended for the lower servants. The supper-table had upset me, and the corn-bread which caused the present trouble had been cold comfort. I was furiously angry now, hot and aglow with a passion of rage which at that moment was a splendid sensation. With great civility I thanked the head-waiter, and explained the mistake, and showed him a fragment of bread still in my hand, and then asked where I should find the proprietor. He had gone to the office, and I followed him there, scarcely conscious of touching the ground. It was close upon the mail-hour, and the office was crowded with guests. Near the stove stood the proprietor, and he saw me as I approached him. I was looking him full in the eyes when I told him, without introductory remarks, that if he had any further criticisms to offer upon my conduct he was at liberty to bring them directly to me. If I had had any sense of humor left I should have laughed then at his appearance, and have forestalled the ridiculous scene, in which, with a look of distressed embarrassment, he edged toward the door, and I followed, with my eyes on his, as I treated him to the most cynically patronizing sentences which I could frame, while the guests looked on in silence.
Once in the quiet of the veranda, he explained to me that, since he holds the head-waiter responsible in such matters, he had naturally complained to him, and added that he was sorry if any mistake had been made. I pointed out the mistake, and felt the fool that I was, and spent the evening in a long walk over the hills, returning only in time to lock up and put out the lights.
As a basis of comparison I have now the two short terms of service at West Point and here. I received employment at both places as almost any laborer might have done, and I found in them both the means of livelihood. But as a servant, I have found more than that. The man who had been engaged as porter appeared about a week after my arrival. He proved to be Martha's brother, and a newly landed immigrant. There was no mistaking the last fact. His peaked countenance, with surviving traces of ruddy color; his queer pot-hat, that rested on his ears; his bright woollen tippet, defying the heat; his baggy suit, which had doubtless served for day and night through all the voyage; his heavy boots—all proclaimed him the raw material of a new citizen. Nor could there be a doubt of his kinship with Martha. She stood with me awaiting the stage, directing eager glances down the carriage-drive and excitedly asking questions about its coming. She was the first to see it, and to recognize her brother on the seat with Sam, and she fluttered about in the unconcealed delight of affection, perfectly unconscious of everyone, until her arms were about her brother's neck, and she was leading him away to the kitchen.
Nothing was said to me about leaving; Martha's brother became her assistant as a dishwasher, and learned to lend a generally useful hand in the kitchen.
And so I had fairly won my place, and had open before me a way of promotion. Experience alone could disclose the value of the opening; but the "—— House" is a winter as well as a summer resort, and a porter's services are therefore in demand through the year. If efficient, intelligent labor could not eventually win higher and more responsible position in such an enterprise, and possibly gain, at last, an interest in the business, the case is surely exceptional.
It is the change in external conditions and its bearing upon me as a human worker which have most impressed me, in contrast with my first experience.
I worked for nine hours and a quarter at West Point, and had, at the end of the day's labor, if the weather had been good, eighty-five cents above actual living expenses. Here I have usually worked from five o'clock in the morning until eleven at night, at all manner of menial drudgery, and have gone to bed in the comfortable assurance that, in addition to food and shelter, I have earned twenty-six cents and a fraction. And yet, as a matter of choice, purely with reference to the conditions under which the work is done, I should infinitely prefer a week of my present duties to a single day at such labor as that at West Point.
The work here is specific, and it is mine, to be done as I best can. Responsibility and initiative and personal pride enter here, and render the eighteen hours of this work incomparably shorter than the nine hours of my last. It is true that it partakes of the character of much household service, in that it is ever doing and is never done; but there is a feeling of accomplishment in the fact of getting my quarters clean and the grounds in order, and in keeping them so, although it be at the cost of labor always repeated and never ended.
Perhaps it is because I am still haunted by the thought of the cruel bondage of unskilled labor, under which men exhaust their powers of body and mind and soul at work that, in the very conditions of its doing, seems to harden them into slaves, instead of strengthening them into men, that I fail to feel keenly the want of time that I can call my own. I have an independence of vastly better sort in having work which I can call my own, and which I can do with some human pleasure and interest and profit in its performance, however hard it may be.
Slender as is my acquaintance with either, I yet see, with perfect certainty, that the standard of character is higher in this company of servants than among the gang of unskilled laborers. Other causes may have a share in this result, but the efficient cause is clear in the better moral atmosphere in which the work is done. I do not know how conscious is the feeling of unity of interest with their employer, or of copartnery with one another in labor, or of personal responsibility; but all these motives must play a part in effecting the successful accomplishment of the house-work, with its intricacies and interdependencies which render constant personal oversight impossible. Of course the proprietor has much trouble with the "help," and there are frequent changes among them; but the body of the company remains the same, and some of the servants have been here for several seasons.
Certainly one is obliged to look elsewhere than to wages for a cause of better work as showing a finer moral fibre, if I may judge from my twenty-six cents a day. I dare say that mine is the minimum wage. The chef told me that he gets sixty dollars a month, and I fancy that his is the maximum sum. It is purely a guess, but I venture it, that the average among us would not exceed five dollars a week. Five dollars a week above the necessaries of life will buy much among the commonest proletariat. Under certain conditions that, or even a less sum, might buy industrious and almost continuous effort for fourteen or eighteen hours a day, but not, I fancy, in the present economic condition of household servants in this country. There must be other causes to account for that.
The want of time which is at one's own command is the commonest objection urged against domestic service as accounting for the ready choice of harder work with far less of creature comfort, but with definite limits and entire disposing of the rest of one's day. Stronger than this, I fancy, as an objection, is a social disability which attaches to service, and under the sway of which a house-maid has not the prospect of so good a marriage, socially considered, as a factory girl, who earns a scanty living, but is subject to no one's command outside of the factory gates.
The strength of social conventions is a force to be reckoned with among the working classes. It may seem that below the standing of folk gentle by birth and breeding there are no social standards or social barriers of serious strength. I begin to suspect that distinctions are as clearly made on one side of that line as the other. Very certain I am that the upper servants here and the nurses and house-maids are removed from us of the clothes-washing and dish-washing and floor-scrubbing fraternity by a very considerable social gulf.
A course of eighteen hours of continuous daily duty soon gives one a surprising relish for the pleasure of doing as you please. I know now something of the delight of a "Sunday off." I got my first leave of absence one afternoon when I was allowed to go to the village of Central Valley to have my boots mended. Not since I was a small boy at boarding-school have I felt the same vivid pleasure in going freely forth, knowing that, for the time, I was my own master; and when I returned to the hotel, it was very much with the school-boy's feeling of passing again under the yoke.