The most difficult thing for a stranger to learn is that impalpable line between the different servants' duties. If one does not enumerate what one expects of them when they are hired, afterwards it is too late. They have, however, a rough sense of honour and they generally do what they agree to.
According to the very common American custom, our house is furnished with speaking-tubes, and these nearly lost me a very superior cook. She was so superior that I was more polite to her than to any other human being; only when I was quite sure she could not hear, then did I call her by her pet name, Lady Macbeth. As I was looking timidly through the larder one morning she gave me notice. I never had a servant who had such lovely kitchen manners; her unfailing impudence was veneered by the most perfect propriety. "It's the speaking-tubes; I've nothing else to complain of; but I won't be talked to through the tubes. It's against my dignity to have other servants listen."
This time I pacified her, but later on I hurt her beyond forgiveness; I had sent the housemaid to call her one morning when she was very late. On my usual kitchen visit I found Lady Macbeth palpitating with rage—she, a "cook-housekeeper," called by the housemaid; she gave notice at once, and I realised then that there is no such snob as a servant, and there is nothing more unyielding than kitchen etiquette.
The terrors of etiquette below stairs! There once strayed into my employ a housemaid whose career, hitherto, had been confined to lodging-houses. Upstairs she always looked frightened, and her face had a great attraction for "smuts"; but she was very willing and very incompetent. It is my experience that the willing are mostly incompetent. It was in the reign of Lady Macbeth, a tall, fair person, with blonde eyes and a cast-iron jaw.
"It is not for me to ask Madam to send Muggins away, but the rest of us will go if Muggins stays. I don't know where she has lived-out before, but she drinks out of her saucer and does not even know that we expect her to be down in our sitting-room at half-past four, dressed in her black, and ready to pour out the servants' tea." Of course, I gave Muggins notice, recognising that the lodging-house was her proper sphere, and in the month that followed I knew she suffered martyrdom. She used to wipe her eyes stealthily, and as she was not proud I showed her some sympathy.
"They ain't nice to me downstairs like you are, Ma'am," she sobbed, "though I'm doing my best. Cook says she won't wipe up the dishes for the likes of me."
"Never mind, Muggins; you'll be going soon and, after all, you have learnt a good deal here," I consoled her.
"I wish," said Muggins, "I was dead." Thus I discovered in Muggins an unexpected and interesting note of tragedy, but she melted away as they all do; one does not remember them as individuals but as materialised qualities, good or bad. However, some months after, I again encountered Muggins, looking like a bad imitation of a very middle-class young lady, in a huge hat like a cart-wheel, nodding with plumes, beside her an underdone youth, a bowler on the back of his head, so as to show the fine, bold sweep of his shiny black hair.
Muggins's smile showed that she had learnt a thing or two. Never more would she drink tea out of a saucer, nor plunge her knife into a mouth which, when we first met, was guiltless of front teeth. Now I at once recognised the gloss of six brand-new "store teeth." On the strength of what she had learnt in my service she had graduated to higher spheres, where she could afford the luxury of a young man with whom to "walk out." It seems a servant's aim and ambition is to set up a young man with whom she walks out—the final goal being rarely matrimony; it only means speechless strolls through Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens, or the joyous revels at Earl's Court, if "she" stands treat.
Oddly enough, the English lover of the lower class is always speechless but very affectionate in public. The American of the same class is publicly prudish. It is, therefore, rather startling, as a blushing stranger, to see the loving couples that emerge out of the leafy paths of Kensington Gardens, clasping each other's waists, holding hands, or engaged in other miscellaneous fondling, which is probably the safety-valve that nature provides for those whose general and business expression is a total blank.