“I know you haven’t,” say I, “I don’t want you to have ideas. I want you to have eyesight, and a memory, and a little self-control. Why cannot you leave things where they are? Or, if you must put something away, why not those crumbs under the table or those empty envelopes or the mouldy paste that I used last week?”
I have heard of kittens being blind for some days after birth, but it is my own discovery that housemaids are blind for some hours after they get up.
I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid’s than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to “polish the taps in Miss Iris’s bathroom.”
The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture.
There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that “Old Moore’s Almanac” deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one’s door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed.
I do not mind ordering things—it isn’t that; nor do I mind thinking about them—thinking quite hard. It is “seeing about” them that turns my blood to vitriol and my heart to dynamite.
Is a general in command of forces expected to see that his subalterns put on their clothes right side out? When he orders a charge does he find his men seated facing their horses’ tails? Does the captain of a ship put out to sea only to be told when he has crossed the Bar that “the wheel has come off in the mate’s ’and,” and that there is no more grease for the engines? And yet I believe that is the kind of thing that would happen if a mistress and her servants started out to discover America.
It is rarely that a servant in a small house considers herself responsible for anything. It is thought discreditable to the mistress alone if the house is dirty and the meals badly served; and yet she has seldom the skill or the leisure to give point to her criticisms by setting a working example to those under her orders.
And the poor creature must learn so many trades. It is not enough that I strain my brains to bursting-point in order to think out new forms of nourishment for James, but I must learn the anatomy and the personal habits of the creatures he devours, conduct post-mortem examinations to discover whether they died too soon or not soon enough, whether they had eaten too much or not eaten enough, taken too much exercise or led too sedentary a life. I must be perpetually on the look-out to circumvent the countless ruses which Satan suggests to half a dozen intelligent tradesmen. I must know exactly in what combination the things I have bought will best amalgamate in James’s inside, and I must then somehow convey my knowledge through the tough skull of my cook. When at last I have got both food and ideas safely lodged in her keeping I must find the dish on which she is to serve it, and, worst of all, besiege her incessantly with alarm clocks and gongs to ensure its appearance at the right time.
When the meal is sent up only half of my work is done. I have to keep an eye on the tools with which James is to eat it, otherwise they are liable to be blunt, sticky, or placed crookedly on the table. After this James eats his dinner in peace, whilst I make a mental note of Clara’s personal habits, her flowers to praise, or her weeds to blame, and either or both to loathe; her elaborate elegancies of manner, or the fact that she always forgets to hand the sauce before she goes back to stand on one leg by the sideboard and listen to our conversation. I have stopped that now and told her not to wait, which means that she goes off to the bedrooms between the courses and does not hear the bell.