“They must have their freedom, I suppose,” said Lucy to herself, dreamily repeating an axiom which she had often heard thrown down in scorn and contempt by irate matrons caught in the strait where she was now fixed.
Their freedom to do what? Freedom to toil at some soul-deadening task for eight or ten hours to earn a shilling—for the whole round of the clock to gain eighteenpence. Freedom to live crowded in noisome rooms among ever-shifting “neighbours,” to go untidy, to eat bad food ill-cooked. Freedom on Bank holidays with their rowdy crowds; freedom (when one is not too tired) to run about the gas-lit streets, or to sit in tobacco-reeking music-halls; freedom, in such dangerous proximity to the hospital, the casual ward, the pauper’s grave!
Lucy thought of what she understood by freedom. A life of useful labour, leisure for friendship, books, the joys of music and of pictures, of flowers and sunset skies, of wild wood and breezy shore.
And then she reflected. If it should be this kind of freedom that girls wanted—the sort of thing that Lucy herself meant by freedom—could she promise them that this was to be found in average domestic service any more than that other freedom for which the poor souls around her were willing to pay so dear?
“The matter has got out of joint somehow,” she thought. “New social ideals, both good and bad, have gained sway in these days, and I fear that the majority of the mistresses have tried to shut out both from influencing the ways of domestic service. The consequence is, the bad ideals have withdrawn the mass of girls from household life. I should not wonder but the mothers of most of these girls have been domestic servants. Yet what they have told their daughters (possibly quite as often in commendation and praise as in bitterness and warning) has not attracted the girls, because they are not living in the same world as their mothers lived, and they have picked up the fact that domestic service is, in the main, left stationary in the out-of-date sphere.”
Lucy knew that she had not got her own progressive ideas concerning domestic service in her own parents’ house. She had got suggestions when visiting in the houses of schoolfellows belonging to thoughtfully “advanced” families, and these suggestions had opened her eyes to see the connection between this department of human life and the teachings she found in the best books she came across. Miss Latimer herself had often been helpful. Also when once Lucy’s days of courtship and marriage had begun, there was a fresh humanity in all Charlie’s ways of looking at things, which permeated her mind, and carried away lingering prejudices and preconceptions as a sweet breeze blows away the stuffiness of long-closed chambers.
Lucy’s own mother, who had died two years before Lucy’s marriage, had been a matron of the old school, kind and considerate to her servants, as she would have been to her pony or her dog, but with far less consideration for their individuality than many sympathetic people give to that of their four-footed pets. She expected her maids to go to her place of worship. She would have been surprised ever to see them with a book, save on Sunday, and then only with books which she “lent” them. She allowed no variation in their household uniform, and in their “best” dresses she looked askance at a puff or a flounce. Their letters had to be addressed to their unprefixed names. No visitors were allowed. They had their regulated “hours off” once a week, and these were never diverged from, varied or exceeded. A request for an arrangement for a fortnight’s holiday would have been met by instant dismissal.
Even in those earlier days, when Lucy had never questioned the righteousness of these domestic methods, she had yet somehow got an uneasy consciousness that they were tottering to their fall. She could not tell how she had got that impression, whether from murmurs in the kitchen or from added tenacity in the hand laid on the domestic reins. The house had been handsome, well kept and comfortable; the service perfectly regulated and reasonably well paid, the conditions which long defer catastrophe whether in states or households. It had been as one of the last strongholds of an ancient régime still holding out, though outposts are fast falling.
Lucy’s father had not survived his wife many months. He had been counted a wealthy man, but there had been such a revolution in his special article of commerce that when he died his estate barely met his liabilities. Jem Brand, the young stockbroker, had received a small dowry with Florence when he married her. But after the father’s debts were paid, there was not a penny left for Lucy, who had thankfully utilised her natural gifts and the excellent training they had received by accepting the position of art teacher at the St. George’s Institute, which position she had filled for more than a year before her marriage.
Perhaps Lucy had grown more inclined to broader ways of thought and simpler ways of life, because they had brought its crowning joy into her own life. Charlie Challoner had met her first in her independent breadwinning capacity. He was wont to say that if he had known her as a rich man’s daughter he would not have dared to woo her, and it is quite certain that a young professional man, with all his way to make, and with neither family nor fortune to serve him, would have received scant welcome from either of Lucy’s parents.