In the course of time, Muggins was succeeded by Jane; Jane of the Madonna face, a voice like a summer breeze, and her work divine. I basked in unaccustomed joy until, unfortunately, one morning I asked her to send off an important telegram for me. "No," she said, in her sweet voice, "I won't go out this filthy morning." In the afternoon I so far regained my scattered senses as to call up Jane and give her notice. For an instant she turned white, then she recovered herself.
"I beg your pardon, Madam," she said, with respectful effrontery, "I shall not take your notice. Servants do not need to take any notice after noon."
"All the same you have had your notice; but I will, if you wish, repeat it to-morrow morning," I said, rather amused.
The next morning I had barely set my foot in the dining-room when Jane flew in, "I wish to give you notice, Ma'am," she cried, in a gasp. I recognised that I was defeated, for by some menial code of honour she felt that she could tell her next lady that she had given me notice. Whether the custom is legal or not, registry offices are not agreed, but I am now careful to give notice before noon.
The restlessness of the English servants, fanned by the Board Schools and higher aspirations towards department stores, has produced the temporary servant. She flits from one distressed family to the other, and is at anyone's beck and call at a moment's notice; nor does she harrow her lady's feelings by staying that awful last month, when having done her worst she is invulnerable.
She has, of course, her disadvantages, along with her advantages. She takes naturally no earthly interest in her place (but none of them do!) for she flits like a grubby butterfly from one area to the other; she is, however, usually quite competent. Her example, on the other hand, is bad, for she gets high wages, a varied existence, and plenty of holidays, and, being temporary and independent, she does not work too hard.
There is really nothing so fatal as aspirations in the wrong place; to them we owe the servant problem. Now, the average man will sniff at the servant problem and, unless he has a great, broad mind, he will say to the partner of some of his joys and all of his sorrows, "You don't know how to treat your servants. My clerks don't bother me."
As if that were the same thing at all! Men's places are easily filled, and the average man is so anchored by domestic ties that he thinks several times before he gives warning, as indeed would a servant if she had a family depending on her earnings. But a servant usually has no ties. Her clothes are in her tin trunk, and her hopes in the registry office; thus, accompanied by the one and protected by the other, she goes on her winding way. If she had an idle or sick husband and half-a-dozen children to support, her attitude towards service would be less lofty.
Coming often from very poor homes, it is a curious fact that servants are always extravagant, at any rate with other people's belongings. Lady Macbeth, under whose dominion I languished for over three years, once confessed to me that she prided herself on her economy, which, she said, proved her to be of a different class from other servants.
Once, in a gracious moment, she also told me she preferred being a good cook rather than a poor nursery governess who, in the delicate and unwritten code of service, is on a higher social scale, hovering, I believe on the outskirts of the lady pinnacle. She was kind enough to add that she would rather cook for some one she could look up to than teach a lot of stupid young ones. I was highly flattered, and so was the other member of my family, and we tried hard to live up to her good opinion. But no man is a hero to his valet, and she never repeated the compliment.