A Vicious Circle

IF Dante had asked me to suggest a circle of Hell deeper, blacker, and more completely outside the pole of possible redemption than any he has pictured, and one that reproduced a scene with which most women of to-day are familiar, I should unhesitatingly have selected an Intelligence Office — that tertible centre of human traffic, where the secrets of all hearts are exposed, and where dignity and truth find no admittance.

When lovely woman stoops to the folly of visiting this modern equivalent of the slave-mart, there is no art that can wash her guilt away. She leaves the Intelligence Department degraded and debased; after investigating the characters of others, she feels that she has lost her own. (By the way, what a bit of retributive justice it would be if every lady had to be given a recommendation by her departing maid, and to have a written certificate stating her to be honest, neat, and good-tempered, and to possess the other excellent qualities that are as important in mist ress as in maid. Social reformers should turn their attention to this domestic inequality.)

Nothing but devotion to an elderly cook-less aunt would have induced me to become an Intelligence-Office seeker; but family feeling turned my steps to the door of degradation, bearing the laconic label ‘Domestic Agency.’

My first glimpse of cosy little tête-àtêtes dotting the bleak apartment here and there led me to think that I was at a feminine tea-party, so eager was the buzz of voices, raised for the most part in cheerful monologues, occasionally punctuated by unenthusiastic replies. To be sure, in glancing at some of the groups, it was a little difficult to separate the sheep from the goats; but in a few minutes my eye grew accustomed to subtle differences of dress, the interviewers being for the most part less modishly attired than the interviewed. I was glad to see that the lady in charge of the establishment was busy with a successful deal in cook-broking, so that I was permitted to sit on the side lines and enjoy what seemed like an incarnation of those questionable shapes of housemaids and domestic helpers invoked by the art of Miss Beatrice Herford. Some broken bits of conversation that fell on my ears were such priceless treasures of human and inhuman relations, that I jotted them down in my shopping-list while trying to assume the detached expression of one whose absent mind is in a department store.

‘No, I have no children at all,’ I heard an evident spinster proclaim; ‘in fact, I have n’t even a husband to mess up the house with cigar-ashes; just a canary — and the Catholic Church is only five minutes from the house. . . . Oh, you’re fond of children, are you? Well, that’s very fortunate, because my three little nieces spend the summer with me, and they’re always running into the kitchen to look for cookies. . . . Oh, you’re a Baptist? Well, the Baptist Church is even nearer than the Catholic.’

Here a harsh Irish voice on the other side of the room grated into my consciousness. ‘Sure the good cooks do be getting eighteen dollars a week, and how would you be supposin’ as I ’d go to a family like yours for fifteen? If it was at the beach you was livin’, and you offered me sixteen, may be I ’d take it an’ maybe I would n’t; but it’ll take more than fifteen dollars a week to get me to the mountains, so I’ll be lookin’ farther and farin’ better, I’ll be thinkin’.’

An old-fashioned housekeeper, of a type I had supposed obsolete, then attracted my attention. ‘I always lock up the remains every night,’ she was announcing rather in the manner of an undertaker, to an open-mouthed Finn, ‘and I lay out the fresh linen myself every Saturday night.’

At this lugubrious information, the frightened Finn shook her head violently, and rushed clumsily behind the screen that separated the would-be employers from the would-not-be employed.

Becoming fascinated by the resemblance in type between a sheep and a goat who were confronting each other from the edges of inhospitable chairs,

I watched two stout red females glaring at each other, and wondered if they themselves knew which was about to engage the other. Presumably warprofits had drawn the invisible line between them, and a few years ago they would have stood side by side and replied, ‘Yes marm,’ when both were asked the questions which one of them now had the privilege — granted by suddenly attained wealth — of putting to the other.

‘Of course, you will be expected to provide meals for my shofer,’the stoutest and reddest of these crimson ramblers was explaining in quite the grand manner; ‘and I insist, upon all my servants wearing caps.'

‘Ah, wise woman! That will be a distinguishing mark,’ I found myself murmuring, when a down-East voice broke in saying: ‘I ain’t no cook! I’m a general! And after my chores are done, I like to take the air in my car, — it’s one my brother gave me; he’s in the auto business, — so unless you can give space in your garage for Mr. Dodge, I shan’t be able to accomodate you.’

A ‘general’ indeed, I thought — used to issuing orders and to being obeyed.

My reporting work was interrupted at this point by the lady in charge saying to me, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ in the non-committal tone of one who was not sure whether I were myself a bird or a wildflower. I told a brief but moving tale of my invalid aunt, and her resort to a fireless cooker which had proved only a little less difficult than the cookless fire. The impassive brokeress glanced coldly at the intimate details of my aunt’s ménage, revealed by my reluctant lifting of the domestic curtain, and then said reprovingly, ‘Of course, if you have n’t a gas-stove as well as a range, you will find it very difficult to get a maid to stay with you; and the price you mention is absolutely unheard of nowadays. You can’t get anyone for less than sixteen dollars a week to take such a difficult place.’

‘ Difficult! ’ I exclaimed. ‘Surely I told you there was only one person in the family, and two maids to do what in the old days a general housework girl would have done for five dollars a week.’

A superior smile flickered over the features of the lady in charge of this Infernal Circle. ‘I will see if any of my women care to speak to you, but I hardly think they will be interested in less than sixteen dollars a week,’ she said; and, retiring behind the screen, presently emerged, followed by a very dressy person who swept me with a glance which ‘took me in’ completely, from the hole in my veil to my square heels and squarer toes. I had innocently imagined that I was to do the interviewing, but not at all — the inquisitor with the nodding ostrich-plumes put me through the third degree, and her hostile glare told me that I should be saved the embarrassment of telling her that she would not do.

Did my aunt keep a kitchen maid?

’No.’ (Sniffs)

Did the help have a private sittingroom?

‘No.’ (Grunts of contempt)

Did the cook go to church every Sunday, and have Sunday and Thursday afternoons and every evening free for her own engagements?

‘No.’

Suppressed scorn of me broke into articulate anger, which was contagious, and we both rose, scarlet with mutual dislike. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under the skin, and the consciousness of this subcutaneous resemblance completed my sense of humiliation.

‘I don’t think you will suit me at all,’ I was beginning; but her harsh laughter interrupted me. ‘No, nor I don’t think you’ll suit me either, nor you won’t suit nobody else,’ she said; and flounced off behind the screen.

My head swam, and disconnected snatches of dialogues going on around me continued to beat on my brain with incoherent, insistence.

’How many in the family?’

‘Yes, I have four or five children, but they often pay visits away.’

‘No, I can’t possibly give you twenty dollars a week. My husband’s a professor.’

’Do you have separate meals?’

‘I can’t work more than eight hours a day — just the same as them in other kinds of work does n’t.’

‘Yes, I’ll give you fifteen dollars a week, if you don’t mind turning down the beds the night the chambermaid is out.’

‘No, we have only one motor, but we often send the maids out for a drive.'

Then the key to the whole degrading business was uttered by an honest Irish voice, — a voice of the old school of oratory, — saying in a stage whisper, ‘Sure, if you don’t be tollin’ the boss, I’ll come to yez for tin dollars a week, and I’m a regular six-dollar-a-week cook! She tells me I ought to get sixteen, but I ain’t worth it, an’ I know it now, an’ you’ll know it soon.’

I rose and stood before the desk, and with wasted dignity took my leave instead of my cook, as I had once hoped.

‘I shall advise my aunt to continue to use the fireless cooker, or else to get a maid through some less intelligent but more helpful office.’ I said it in a tone that was meant to wither.

‘You’ll have to give sixteen a week,’ the old poll-parrot repeated, with the irritating iteration of Wordsworth’s little cottage-girl.

‘By the way,’ I asked, all guilelessly, ‘is your fee fixed, or do you receive a percentage of the wages?’

She looked daggers, but spoke none; and as I staggered down the stairs, the spirit of a crusader rose in my humiliated breast. My cook’s tour was over, but from the vicious circle of the Inferno I had visited I brought back the conviction that, until someone shall devise a scheme which brings women, whether employers or employed, more hope of freedom from Domestic Dictatorship, their husbands and brothers will rightly regard them as neither free nor equal (to them). Enfranchised women are in reality slaves — until this tyranny be overpast.