Read Ebook: The book of Martha by Dowdall Mrs John Augustus Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 648 lines and 50097 words, and 13 pages

"Why, so it was, m'm; I am sorry. I remember now, I hadn't any chutney by me, and I knew master wouldn't fancy curry without a bit o' chutney so I just made a nice haricot instead."

"And what about the fried fish?" I asked. "And the pudding?"

"Ah," said Ruth, "yes'm, we shall want a nice frying-pan. The one I have isn't near large enough to do a nice bit of fish and it's not the right shape. A nice enamel one the next time you are going into town if you can be troubled to remember."

Now in these days if I wanted the meals I have described I should begin:

"How about the mutton, Ruth? What are you going to do with that?"

"Well, I think, m'm, a haricot would be as nice as anything."

"Quite so. And I suppose we shall be obliged to have fish for dinner."

"Yes'm--fried fish I suppose?"

"Some nice little fillets I think master likes, m'm."

"Yes, Ruth, fish, cutlets, and a pudding. I suppose a batter pudding would take too many eggs?"

"Oh, no, m'm, not at all. I could manage with two nicely."

"Very well then; that will do beautifully. We always like your batter puddings so much better than those they have at Buckingham Palace; they are so much lighter, and that jam sauce you make is a dream. And, by the way" , "we must have another curry some day; Admiral Tobasco said he had never met one to touch yours that night."

"Would you care to have the mutton curried to-day, m'm, as a change from the haricot?"

"Oh, yes, Ruth, that would be delightful. What a good idea."

But it takes years to learn.

New dishes are acquired in the same way. This is what the novice does:

"Beef what, m'm?"

I read the recipe, while Ruth turns away in silence and begins sweeping up the hearth.

"Well, Ruth, what do you think of it?"

"Oh, just as you please'm, of course."

"It is quite easy, isn't it?"

There is a sudden convulsion amongst the fire-irons, and Ruth turns round wiping her eyes.

"Of course, it must be as you like, m'm. It's your place to give orders, I know, but I'm afraid I shall never give satisfaction the way I am. My mother'd tell you--and indeed I'd sooner she came and spoke to you herself--that I never had no training in fancy dishes, and all you asked for was a good plain cook, which I am, as her ladyship said herself when I left. Of course, you'd very likely not know, being a young lady and having no experience in such things, that we poor girls have to make our own way, and to be respectable is as much as we can hope for, and that I always have been, and I'd sooner starve than take a place where I couldn't do my duty, and I think it would be better if you were to get some one more experienced; I haven't been feeling at all settled lately, the way things have been"--and so on.

If by chance your mind's ribs are made of steel and your sympathies of spun granite, as some women's are, this network of unintelligible wrath will have no power to ensnare you, but the average woman takes years to unwind herself from the thraldom of female hysteria--and then she wriggles out of it by guile.

"Ruth," I say now, "we had a lovely dish at the club last night. They made a great fuss about it, and said only an expert could cook it, but I believe that your clever brain could find out what it is made of. It looked like--" and then I describe it.

"I don't know whether it is quite that," I say thoughtfully, "but we might look in one of the cookery books and see whether there is anything like it to start on."

Then I turn up the recipe for the dish and suggest that we should try that, and see how it turns out; perhaps, I add, that she need not trouble to make scones that afternoon and that the cold tart will do for dinner.

As regards their pervasiveness and their power, it is a remarkable fact that although most of the inmates of a house know what the master wants, and a few know what the mistress wants, and nobody knows what the housemaid wants, yet every one knows what the cook wants. If the cook is satisfied the whole house works smoothly; if not, an atmosphere of awe and discomfort pervades everywhere, meals are partaken of in silence or in a sort of nervous bravado, no bells are rung, people fetch their own boots, and are courteous to one another about the toast sooner than ask for more. And this omnipotent creature in the stripes and a collar that will not fasten before ten in the morning is, as I have said, moody and capricious to the last degree. She says it is the range, but it is not really. Left to myself, as I have been sometimes, I can spend weeks without having a word with the range. In fact, his commonplace obedience to rules has often bored me sadly, and I have wished that he would, just for once, heat up on his own initiative and never mind the flues, or even that he would get in a temper and smoke when all was well and the dampers regulated to perfection.

But sometimes he and cook cannot hit it off. I may go down, for instance, at the proper time, neither too early nor too late, and be met by a smell that even a very old skunk would find trying.

"My dear Ruth," I say, "is it the milk again or what?"

"It boiled over," says Ruth, looking outraged and insulted, "although I only left it for a minute. I never saw such heat in my life."

"How extremely tiresome," I say, frowning at the range. Really he might have been more tactful on this day when I wanted a special souffl? for luncheon. "I wonder whether the man did anything to it the last time he was here?" I say very loudly and distinctly; and then becoming innocent and diffident I suggest, "You don't think shutting down that damper a little might help, do you?"

Ruth pushes in the damper, muttering something about "must have hot water for washing up," although the water is already bubbling and roaring in the cylinder--but there, she is a good girl, and you can't have everything. Only, I do wish sometimes that the range had rather more tact and less common sense.

Talking of ranges reminds me that there are days when she says it is impossible to keep the range clean. Those are the days when she boils everything at full gallop so that it slops over with a horrid frittering noise and the smell gets even into my hair-brushes. I suppose that there are cooks who have a sense of smell, but they probably die very young and leave only those who cook from memory. One question often puzzles me. Does a good chef ever go near the scullery? Can real art survive within fifty yards of that thing which feels like seaweed and looks like a tennis net? or that tangle of greasy grey wire that speeds the departing and welcomes the coming occupant of a saucepan? Can nightingales' tongues be prepared at a zinc table where pink and grey rabbit-skins, potato peelings, white of egg, and the clammy skeletons of fish are gathered together in reckless confusion?

I suppose Ruth thinks that because we are but dust she had better go on building us up.

The worst thing about housemaids is their restlessness. Their passion for traveling about from one room to another becomes at last a sort of nervous disease. I have already described my discomfort in the constant traffic of Elizabeth Tique's small house, and the excellent plans I made to ensure solitude and peace in my own. But does anyone suppose for a moment that one single-handed mistress can check the migratory instincts of a full-grown housemaid, any more than she could impede the perpetual silent passage of a tortoise from the artichoke bed to the hot-house and round by the rhododendrons?

I worked hard at the problem for some years. When we are young and hopeful it is quite easy to imagine that we are altering the facts of Nature. We talk glibly about our schemes for reforming drunkards, of the likelihood of the British working man becoming interested in art, and so on. In the same way I saw no difficulty then in the idea of persuading a housemaid to finish one room at a time. I spoke very nicely about it at first. I said:

"Clara, I wish that you would begin one room at a time and then finish it, instead of going about doing little bits of things in each. It makes you so ubiquitous."

"I beg pardon, m'm?"

"So here, there, and everywhere," I explained. "Of course it is very nice to have you so active, but now, for instance, why couldn't you finish my sitting-room or my bedroom? I don't mind which, so long as I could have somewhere to write. You chased me about this morning as if I were a hen that wanted to sit at the wrong time. You know I hate having my legs dusted."

"I was going to do the windows, m'm, as soon as you went out."

"But, Clara, you know quite well that if I went out I should find you in the first shop I went to, polishing the grocer's nose or something--"

"Beg pardon, m'm?"

It was useless to explain further. I made a schedule of work for Clara in which each portion of her day was mapped out in such a way that she would be continuously in one place for at least an hour at a time. I might as well have made a time-table for the weather. I have heard that there are mistresses who make schedules for their servants and get them followed: but whether these people achieve their results by hypnotism or force I do not know. I have been able now and again to arrest the disease in Clara for a short time, but I do not believe that there is any permanent cure for ubiquity in housemaids.

"Yes, Clara," I reply sarcastically, "I have no doubt that your master is at this moment playing 'hunt the thimble' in his office and cutting out paper boats with my scissors and manuscript. As for my book, probably the cat has taken it back to the library to be changed."

Clara becomes huffy, and says she "hasn't an idea, 'm sure."

"I know you haven't," say I, "I don't want you to have ideas. I want you to have eyesight, and a memory, and a little self-control. Why cannot you leave things where they are? Or, if you must put something away, why not those crumbs under the table or those empty envelopes or the mouldy paste that I used last week?"

I have heard of kittens being blind for some days after birth, but it is my own discovery that housemaids are blind for some hours after they get up.

I do not know how it is, but I get more tired of my own face and the housemaid's than of anything else on earth. Probably no criminal feels more imprisoned with his warder than a woman can feel shut up in her own house with one or two servants; and she is so much the worse off that there is no free future to look forward to. A very unusual touch of sympathy occurs in a modern play where the writer makes his heroine retire to an empty room to have a bad headache in peace. Before she has had time to crumble into a comfortable ruin on the sofa, there is a knock at the door and in comes a housemaid armed with a tin and some little fidgety bits of rag to "polish the taps in Miss Iris's bathroom."

The public would surely be touched if they realised the fact that there is often no spot in her own house where the daughter of woman may lay a tear unobserved. Some women do not want to cry; they have nothing to fear from Sarah Ann. But to those who do, this constant espionage becomes a positive torture.

There are few things that I envy men so much as their leisure for getting on with their work. They have offices, studies, studios, in which they spend weary hours in a nerve-racking pursuit of guineas, or the appropriate word, or an elusive idea, but they are generally doing one thing at a time. They are not harassed by incessant irruptions from other workers bursting with irrelevant information about their underclothing or the state of the weather, nor are they pestered with foolish conundrums about weights and measures and the kind of subjects that "Old Moore's Almanac" deals with so willingly. It is always possible to slam one's door and lock it, but who really feels comfortable under the stigma of peculiarity? The comment which follows unusual conduct is in itself a violation of privacy, and so far from being alone, the offender is merely isolated the better to be observed.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet