Your quiet barmaid, who doesn’t dress up a bit, and only says “yes” and “no” when the customers talk to her, is generally slow and makes a lot of silly mistakes, and is afraid of a bit of hard work. She is the sort of girl who can’t take more than one order at once, and draws stout for the people who ask for whiskey, and opens lemonade and puts it into the brandy for gentlemen who have ordered a B. and S. We had one of these extra quiet girls once, and she nearly drove me mad. On Saturday nights, and at busy times, if I hadn’t been in the bar half the people would have gone away without being served. But it was while she was with us that we began to feel uncomfortable about the state of the till, and, after we’d sent her off, it was found out that she’d been giving too much change every night to a scamp of a fellow that had made her believe he was desperately in love with her.
Miss Measom was one of the best barmaids we ever had, as a barmaid; but she was much too flighty for me. I didn’t like her the first day I saw her in the bar. She was what Harry called “larky,” and in a quiet place like ours that sort of thing attracts more attention than it would in London.
But when I knew her better, I really began to like her, and thought that there wasn’t any harm in the girl. It was just her animal spirits. She was full of mischief, and had the merriest laugh I ever heard, and used to say the oddest things. What annoyed me at first was that some of the young fellows who used our house for the billiard room gave her a nickname. They called her “Tommy,” and she liked it. I didn’t. One evening I was in the bar and one of them said, “Tommy, give me another whiskey cold,” and I thought it wasn’t respectful to me, so I said, “That’s not Miss Measom’s name, Mr. Smith, and if you don’t mind I’d rather you didn’t call her by it.”
He was an impudent fellow, and he said, “Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs. Beckett,” and then he said, “May I have the honour of asking you for another whiskey cold, if you please, Miss Measom?” And then a lot of the young monkeys that were with him began “Miss Measom-ing” all over the place, and the grown-up men, who ought to have known better, did it too, and I was so indignant, I went out of the bar and left them at it.
It was Saturday evening, after the football, and that was always what Miss Measom used to call “a warm time,” because the young fellows in the club got excited, and they brought in the club that had come down to play them, and I was generally rather glad when it was time to shut up.
The night that this happened in the bar that I have told you about, after we’d shut, Miss Measom came to me and she said, “I hope you’re not cross with me, Mrs. Beckett. I can’t help them calling me Tommy, and they don’t mean any harm.” “I am cross, Miss Measom,” I said. “It doesn’t sound nice, and it isn’t the sort of thing for a place like ours. If you didn’t encourage them they wouldn’t do it.”
“I don’t encourage them—indeed I don’t!” said the girl; “but it’s no good my being nasty about it.”
I don’t know what I should have said; but Harry came in at the moment, and, hearing the conversation, he joined in and said he was sure Miss Measom couldn’t help it, and, after all, it was nothing, because young fellows would be young fellows, and you couldn’t expect them to behave in a bar as if they were in a chapel.
That put my back up, and I turned on Harry quite indignantly, for I didn’t like his taking the girl’s side against me.
I don’t know what possessed me to say it, but I said, “Oh, I know Miss Measom is a great favourite of yours; wouldn’t you like me to beg her pardon?”