"He suggested that we should try her on a lunch, and we did. Thank goodness, we only had four of his chums, or I should have died of mortification. After all, a clever man is sometimes duller than the dullest woman.
"How she cooked! It was appalling! Our parlour-maid, who has lovely manners, served a series of horrors as if they were a feast for the gods. After luncheon I found cook had broken my best cut-glass salad bowl, and two old Worcester plates, and then finished off with nervous prostration on the kitchen floor. He and I dined out that night; we had had too much of the comforts of home.
"The next morning the housemaid appeared with joy in her usually blank eyes, and said cook had gone and taken her boxes. At first I thought she had gone to High Mass. But no, she had really gone with her heavy tin trunk and the three bandboxes. How she got them down at midnight over four creaking flights of stairs without being heard, we shall never know, but she did. We found out afterwards that the Honourable Mrs. Smith had had this paragon just one month, and then she was anxious to get rid of her in a hurry; so she advertised. It was cruel, wasn't it? Really, you know, it is wicked of you to complain when a servant has been faithful to you for twenty-six years."
My friend, who had been made cynical through suffering, said her cook wouldn't have been faithful if she could have got a better place.
The servant problem is indeed a very sore subject and singularly serious in England. For this there are two reasons: class distinctions, and also because so many more servants are needed here to do a given amount of work than anywhere else. Of course, a great leisured class means also a great serving class, and this serving class is useless for others, because it has been brought up to false standards of expenditure and to a good deal of idleness. Take this class out of the supply, and also the ever-increasing numbers to whom the smattering of Board School education has taught just enough to make them good for very little, so that in their proper pride they prefer to pass the weary years in cheap department stores or starve on factory wages. Then it is very conceivable that the servant supply does not equal the demand.
The result is that the registry offices do a thriving trade in sending out all sorts of undesirable and ignorant human beings to be thorns in the flesh of unsuspecting housekeepers.
There is something so pathetically reckless in our everyday life! How little we know of the servants we take into our intimate lives out of this terrible London with its vices and crimes, discovered and undiscovered. Recommendations are simply the blind leading the blind. The worst servant I ever had came with a glowing personal character.
Why will not women tell the truth! Perhaps it is characteristic of the weaker vessel to be more tactful, to put it delicately, than men. The lack of truth is partly a desire not to be bothered and partly a rather spiteful wish that the other woman may find out for herself, and also a cowardly fear to do a poor girl an ill turn. I rejoice to say that I found one honest woman who prevented my taking a burglar's assistant to my heart. But she was more than a woman, for she was also a physician. When a woman takes to a man's profession she at the same time takes on something of a man's virtues.
To this lady I went for a personal character of an ideal housemaid, who said she had left her last place because the lady would not permit a "follower." Thinking I might not be so bigoted in regard to followers, human nature being human nature, I was prepared for an area romance, but not for a shilling shocker.
The ideal, so the lady told me honestly, was beloved by a job butler next door. She had been a nice country girl, but London and the job butler had proved her destruction. Area railings and bolts were as nothing to them. The area bell was for ever ringing, and when, by highest command, it remained unanswered, then did the job butler make a constant practice of ringing the front-door bell at unearthly hours, until finally the police had to interfere. Then, soured by the course of true love running so far from smooth, the job butler broke in one night and took things. Whether the loving housemaid was a party to the burglary was not proved, but she was discharged at a moment's notice, and it was then that she applied to me.