But very few men are employed behind English bars, women filling those places. The London bar-maid is an institution to be studied. To begin with she must be pretty, for being pretty is a part of her qualifications. As her feet cannot be seen, owing to her standing behind the bar, she is generally pretty. Then they are required to dress well, and all in one establishment dress their hair alike. In one place the maids part their hair on one side, in another on the other, and in a third in the middle. They are alike in each shop.
They are required to make themselves pleasant to customers, for each one is expected to influence an amount of trade to the house. They are exceedingly free and easy damsels, without being positively indelicate, and there isn’t a cabman in the city who is so much a master of chaff as they are. They will wink and leer at you in the most free way possible, they will talk to the very verge of indelicacy if they think it will please you, and if they form another judgment of your tastes they will be as sedate as priests. These bar-maids were all born a great while ago, and have improved all their time.
They are not only expected to be pretty, but they must have the power of extracting drinks for themselves from the young or old fellows who delight to chaff with them. If the young fellow who is enjoying the delight of her conversation is not sufficiently prompt, the warning eye of the landlord or landlady intimates that she has wasted enough time upon him, and she simply asks him, when he has ordered a drink for himself, if he won’t treat her, and he always does. Per consequence by eleven at night the gentle maids are in a condition highly satisfactory to the house, for their drunkenness represents so much money in his till. He who serves the British public with drink would utilize the very soul of an employe to make money, man or woman.
As a rule the wife of the landlord of a popular drinking place takes personal charge of the bar, and she is a thousand times more cruel and grasping than her husband. When a woman does unsex herself, she can give a man points in wickedness that he never dreamed of. These wives are as eager to have liquor paid for for themselves as bar-maids, and the sharp eye they keep upon the girls to see that they swallow enough to make the business profitable is something wonderful.
They are invariably dressed very richly, with elaborate coiffures, and sparkling with diamonds. As the British young man prefers blonde hair to any other, the landladies are mostly of that persuasion. If they were born brunettes there are arts by which they can be changed, and besides wigs are very cheap in this country.
THE EDIBLES ON THE BARS.
The British woman drinks as much as the British man, and possibly more. I am not speaking of the low, degraded woman, but of the respectability. It is nothing singular to see women, respectable women, sitting in bars with their husbands and lovers, and the amount of stout and “brandy cold,” they make away with is something wonderful.
I was through the wonderful park at Richmond the other day. It was a holiday, and all London was out of the city in the parks. All the little roadside inns were filled with the populace, women and children being largely in the majority; and there was never a woman, no matter if she had a child at the breast, who did not have a monster pot of pewter filled either with porter or ale. And they gave it to their little children as freely as an American mother would milk.
The drinking house in London is, as a rule, especially for drinking. There are no free lunches, no nibbling bits, free on any bar. Nothing but liquids are sold. An American speculator conceived the brilliant idea of starting a bar with the addition of the American free lunch, with which to attract trade. It did attract altogether too much. In twenty minutes the lunch, which should have lasted all day, was gone, and the British public was indignant that it was not renewed. They pronounced the proprietor a swindle, and the speculation was a disastrous failure.
At some of the bars an attempt is made to take the curse off the liquor traffic by making some pretence of selling eatables. But the British public knows this is a sham, and resents it by never buying any comestibles at the counter. The British public scorns eating in such a place, and insists upon drinks. Indeed, the British public won’t eat at all as long as it can drink.