his holiday season is bad for advertisements,” Miss Latimer decided. “I fear you must give another trial to registry offices. Other methods take time, especially private recommendations among shopkeepers or acquaintances—which is the best. You have only a week in which to make your arrangements. But do not go again to great registry offices, which let down their nets in wide waters, and catch many queer fish. I know a little quiet registry about midway between this house and my lodgings. Not a big professional place, my dear, but a shop. I suppose the registry is little more than an adjunct to the shop. But when I pass, I see a great many young women going in and out.”
“Should I have to go there to meet them?” asked Lucy, with a look of repugnance.
“Oh, dear, no,” Miss Latimer answered. “That is not done save in the big offices, unless an appointment is desired by some mistress from the country. Young women who seem likely to suit are sent to wait upon you in your house. If you decide on this, you can go there and give instructions to-morrow morning; I can keep house and look after Hugh during your absence. I wish I could give you better advice, but I think you must avail yourself of this for the present urgent necessity.”
Lucy accepted the counsel. She found the address Miss Latimer gave her. It was in one of the long roads which skirt the centre of London—roads which were rural once, and where, here and there, a garden still lingers isolated among the shops which have been built over its neighbours. Lucy’s destination was one of these shops set out with servants’ caps, aprons, small haberdashery wares, stationery, and a few cheap books. On the little counter was a big desk laden with ledgers and festooned with files of letters, and behind the desk stood an elderly woman. She had an air of old-fashioned gentility about her. She wore no cap, but her glossy, waving hair, unmingled with silver, hung in two or three curls and was done up in a crisp little knot behind. Her brown merino gown was severely simple and well kept, with no frill or ornament whatever, save an out-of-date embroidered collar, fastened by an “In Memoriam” brooch. There was nothing frowsy about this woman, nothing unctuous or self-indulgent in her thin sharp face, nor servile or fawning in her rather abrupt manner. Lucy was prepossessed by her, because she was so unlike the official at the big registry office.
This alert person had little encouragement to give. “Generals” were said to be few and far between. She asked Lucy searching questions about the situation she had to offer, saying that the young women would expect her to tell them all about it before they walked so far. She said that it would not recommend the place to most of them that it was very quiet; they generally thought that meant a “particular,” fidgety mistress, and “they didn’t mind a little more work if they could get the more of their own way.” Lucy said she would prefer an elderly woman, as she would be left much alone in the house. But the alert person shook her head, saying that in nine cases out of ten an elderly woman who would take such a place would drink—a statement which Lucy, after her recent experience, was not prepared to deny. The alert person promised “to do her best.” The fee for putting Mrs. Challoner’s name on her “book” would be only one shilling; she would go on sending girls till Mrs. Challoner was “suited,” when there would be another charge of four shillings.
Lucy walked home, feeling that she and the post she had to offer were at a terrible discount. As she watched the half-starved, slipshod, ill-clad girls who were carrying packages in and out of various small “home” manufacturing premises in the district through which her journey lay, she wondered bitterly what had gone wrong with domestic service, that its wholesome food, snug shelter, and respectability were rejected in favour of this tramping, trailing drudgery. She knew enough of social conditions to know that few of those girls earned wages higher than her servant’s salary, while these had to provide everything out of their earnings, and her maid had to buy only her clothes, and had plenty of leisure to make and mend them. This proved that no mere increase of wages will bring back the tide of female labour to the haven of domestic service. It has already voluntarily ebbed away to decreased emoluments.
This actually comforted Lucy a little. For though she was already paying all the wage her means could honestly afford, yet she had begun to reflect bitterly that, between the two registry offices, she had already laid out six shillings in less than two months, not to mention “deterioration of household stock” in burnt napery and other kitchen damages, still less to consider the wear and tear of her own nerves and the loss of her own time. If she was to go on paying and losing at this rate, she had realised that it would come to the same thing as offering twenty or twenty-two pounds a year.
But as she saw those squalid workgirls, it was borne in upon her that the form of labour she wanted had become scarce at any price, and that at any wage she might find the same heart-breaking disappointment.
Lucy gazed curiously at the crowds of young women who lounged or hurried past her. By the signboards on the forlorn houses behind the decaying gardens, she could guess the callings of the crowd. There were tailoresses, hat-sewers, cardboard-box makers, artificial florists. Looking at them, Lucy could not wish that any of them should change her mind and seek the vacant place in the kitchen. From their appearance most of them had been living poorly on sedentary work for years, and whatever they might have been at the beginning, they were sallow and haggard now. No signs of self-respect were visible on their raiment, though there was a pitiful display of draggled plumes, and sham jewellery worn over garments which seemed to have been bought third-hand, and boots such as one often sees thrown away on road-sides. Such strength as they had was clearly the strange perverted strength that resists bad atmospheres and monotonous misery, but few indeed had any sign of the wholesome vigour that is needed for honest household work.