The cook does all the talking, whilst the other looks nervous and uncomfortable. He moves uneasily from one foot to the other, gives now and then a short, dry cough, all signs of that species of nervousness that a man feels when some important question is going to be decided. He hangs his head, and his black, piercing eyes seem absorbed in his contemplation of the ground, but in the meanwhile he is reading your character and figuring up in his own mind how much he is going to make and whether he is likely to get on with you.
The cook seems to be in the happiest of moods. His face is wreathed in smiles, and his speech is adorned with Oriental similes that excite poetic thoughts in your mind, if it is capable of such. He knows that you are in want of a boy, he says. Boys are difficult to be got: they are at a premium just now. Good capable ones are not to be obtained at any price, but as good luck would have it, here is one that has just turned up, a very paragon in his way, and one that would suit the master down to the ground.
You look at the man with a critical eye, but you get but very little out of that sphinx-looking face of his. Does he understand his work? you weakly ask the cook, more for something to say than for any hope of obtaining any exact knowledge about the man before you. “Certainly he does,” he replies, with a toss of his head in the air and a wave of his right hand as though he had just demonstrated a problem in Euclid, and was ending with the triumphant formula, Q.E.D.
After some further questioning, you ask the cook if he is prepared to stand security for the man and be responsible for his honesty. He is evidently ready to do so, for he at once strikes an attitude, slaps his breast with his open palm, and with gleaming eyes and impassioned look he says, “This is my affair; I will guarantee the man that he is a good and a safe one, and you may accept him as a servant without any fear.”
You are satisfied, and you at once take him on. The cook is also pleased, for the man will have to pay him the heavy percentage of one-half of his month’s salary for the service he has just rendered him.
The servant question is a most interesting one for watching the play of thought and the subtle and unexpected ways in which the Yellow brain works. It is at times a very irritating one, and is apt to give one distorted views of the whole Chinese race, and to cause one to make sweeping statements about the general incapacity of the whole nation. In one’s saner moments one will freely confess that the home servants are on the whole less obliging and more exacting than the same class out here. There is besides the ludicrous element in the Chinese, that always takes off the edge of almost any unpleasantness. Even when one is most annoyed there is something so funny about the way in which a Chinaman acts, that one’s anger is most likely to explode in laughter. There is one thing highly in their favour, and that is their great love and tenderness for children. Taking them all in all, any one who has had large experience of the servants in China can honestly declare that on the whole they are a faithful and satisfactory class of people.
CHAPTER VI
THE ADAPTABILITY AND TENACITY OF PURPOSE OF THE CHINESE