How Mrs. Singer Amuses Us All by Insisting on Having It

No apologies, Jim. If the Declaration of Independence who prepares your meals for you has packed up and gone, I don't need any explanations. I understand already. You can't ask me up to dinner because there isn't going to be any dinner. If you don't go out to a restaurant, you'll get a bite yourself while Mrs. Jim puts the children to bed. And then you'll spend the evening wondering where you can beg, borrow, abduct, hypnotize, or manufacture another cook.

I know all about it. The great sorrow has come upon you, and there's only one comfort—there are others. It falls upon all who try to get out of doing their own housework in New York. And I'll bet you were good enough to the last cook, too—only asked her for one night out a week, came to her meals promptly, didn't demand more than a fair living wage, and let her have the rest. Yes, of course you did. And you're going to let the next one have the best room and ring for her breakfast in the morning, aren't you? What? Draw the line at that? Well, Jim, I admire your nerve. You're one of the grand old rugged patriots who will not be trodden on. Why did your last cook leave, anyway?

Didn't like the kitchen, eh? And being in a flat you couldn't tear it out and rebuild it. Yes, I agree with you. The servant problem in New York is getting to be very serious. To-day you are gay and happy with luxury and comfort all about you, and to-morrow you are picking sardines out of a can with a fork for dinner. I am certainly glad I live in the country, where servant girls do not come on Monday with two trunks and go away early Thursday morning with three trunks and a bundle.

We have no servant problem in Homeburg. However, I exclude Mrs. Singer from this "we." There are only two servants in the whole town. Mrs. Singer has them. That is, she tries to have them. Mrs. Singer's attempt to have servants in a town which is full of hired girls is one of the things which make life worth living and talking about in Homeburg.

How do I know about it? Bless you, we all know about it. It's a public tragedy. Can't help ourselves. We've had four of Mrs. Singer's ex-servants in our house in six years, and they have all told their troubles. Mrs. Singer trains girls for the entire town. She's twice as good as a domestic science school, and she doesn't charge any tuition. She is devoting her life to the training up of perfect hired girls, and we revel in the results. It is ungrateful of us to blame her for taking away our hired girls, because, as a matter of fact, she is our greatest blessing. Right at this minute in Homeburg I know that two eager families are sitting around waiting for the latest Singer class in domestic science to graduate and come back to them for jobs. It ought to come most any time. The course rarely lasts over three months.

You see, Mrs. Singer isn't one of us. She came to Homeburg from a large city, and she brought her ideas with her. She's not the kind of a woman, either, who is going to cut those ideas down to fit Homeburg. Her plan is to change Homeburg over to fit her ideas. She's been working at it for fifteen years now, and I must say she's won out in several cases. Dress suits are now worn quite unblushingly, we have a country club half a mile from the post-office—that's the advantage of a small town, you can get away from the rush and bustle of the city into the sweet cool country in about four jumps—and no one thinks of serving a party dinner without salad any more. But she's fallen down on one thing. She can't keep servants. That problem has been too much for her. Mrs. Payley, her rival, has had the same hired girl for sixteen years or more; but Mrs. Singer scorns a hired girl. She must have servants, two of them, and while she has a remarkable constitution and has stood up for years under the fight, I don't see how she can keep it up much longer.

A hired girl in Homeburg is a very reasonable creature. We never have any trouble with them, and they have very little with us. We usually catch them green and wild, just off the steamer, and they come to us equipped with a thorough working knowledge of the Swedish language, and nothing else to speak of. Our wives take them in and teach them how to boil water, make beds, handle a broom, use clothespins, and all the simpler tricks of housework, to say nothing of an elementary knowledge of English, which they usually acquire in a month; and we pay this kind a couple of dollars a week, and they wash the clothes, take care of the furnace, and mow the lawn with great pleasure. They usually stay a year or so and then they go to Mrs. Singer's finishing school. They do not go because they are discontented, but because she offers them five dollars a week, which is a pretty fair-sized chunk of the earth to a young Swedish girl just learning to do a few loops and spirals in English and saving up the steamer fare to bring her sister over.

Mrs. Singer takes our nice, green, young hired girls, who are willing to do anything up to the capacity of a stout back, and she tries to make servants out of them. She gives them embroidered aprons and caps and makes them keep house her way. And after they have spent a couple of months making coffee to suit Mrs. Singer, and going over the mahogany to suit Mrs. Singer, and arranging the magazines on the table to suit Mrs. Singer, and taking up the breakfast to Miss Sally to suit Mrs. Singer, and going over the back hall again to suit Mrs. Singer, and keeping their mouths closed tightly all day to suit Mrs. Singer, and only going out on Thursday afternoons to suit Mrs. Singer, they sort of get tired of the job, and one after another they stop Mrs. Singer at a favorable moment and say these fatal words:

"Aye gass aye ent stay eny longer."

Then some Homeburg family joyfully seizes on the deserter, and Mrs. Singer starts out all over again on the job of making a servant out of a hired girl.

I have to admire the woman for her eternal grit. She won't give up for a minute. She is going to run her house just so if she has to train up a million girls and lose them all. Half the time she has to do her own work, but I'll bet that when she has the luncheon ready she puts her little white lace napkin on her hair and comes in and announces it to herself in the proper style; and I'll bet, too, that she doesn't talk to herself while she is working in the kitchen, either. She says the way Homeburg women talk to their servants is disgraceful; that it lowers a servant's respect for her mistress. I'd give a lot to see Mrs. Singer looking at herself coldly in the glass after breakfast and giving herself orders for the day in a tone that would brook no familiarity whatever.

Our women-folks, who are familiar with the Singer residence, say that it is a beautiful thing full of monogrammed linen and embroidered towels and curtains that have to be washed as often as a white shirt, and that whenever they call they are pretty sure to find Mrs. Singer trying to teach some new and slightly dizzy second girl how to take care of the house without breaking off the edges.

You observe the fluency and ease with which I say "second girl." We all do in Homeburg. We're used to talking about second girls since Mrs. Singer has tried to keep one. As far as her experience has taught us, we are firmly convinced that having a second girl is like having mumps on the other side too. When Mrs. Singer isn't busy trying to teach her cook how to run the oven and the plate heater and serve the soup all at the same time, she is attempting to give a new second girl some inkling of the general ideas of her duties. Trouble is most of them are ten-second girls. They listen to the program in the Singer household and then they sprint for safety to some family where they will work twice as hard, but will give three times as much satisfaction. Then Mrs. Singer arms herself with the dust rag and clear-starch bowl, and subs on the job until she finds a new second girl—after which the cook gives up her job with a loud report, and Mr. Singer stays down-town for dinner at the Delmonico Hotel until the Singer house management is staved off the rocks again.

We feel sorry for the Singers and invite them out a good deal while they are hunting cooks. And they pay us back royally as soon as the household staff is fully recruited once more. We eat strange but delicious dishes made by a reluctant and mystified girl, plus Mrs. Singer's persuasiveness and will power; and said girl, still reluctant, and scared into the bargain, serves the dinner with a lace-edged apron and a napkin on her hair, Mrs. Singer egging her in loud whispers like the prompter in grand opera. Steering a green cook through a dinner party, and keeping up a merry conversation at the same time, calls for about as much social skill as anything I know of. I myself stand in awe of Mrs. Singer.

As for the rest of us—we have no servant problem, having no servants. And about the only hired girl problem we have is the following: "Shall the girl eat with the family or in the kitchen?" Mrs. Singer wished that on us. Ten years ago there was no question at all. The girl ate with the family, and waited on the table when something was needed which couldn't be reached. Then Mrs. Singer came to town and made her eat in the kitchen, since which time the question has raged with more or less fury and the whole town has chosen up sides on it. Half of us want the girl to eat in the kitchen, and the other half are invincibly democratic and have her at the table.

As for the girls, they are divided too. Half of the girls who come to see about places ask us: "Do I have to eat in the kitchen?" and the other half ask: "Do I have to eat with the family?" And of course it's just our luck that the people who wish to dine by themselves never can find girls who prefer the kitchen, and the people who insist on associating with their help usually lose them because said help has been spoiled somewhere else by being allowed to eat in the kitchen, far from the domestic squabbles and the children with the implacable appetite for spread bread.

But on the whole this problem doesn't bother us much, and our hired girls are a great comfort. They usually stay with us until they are married or retire from old age, and after they've been ten years in a house they're pretty much one of the family. The Payleys' girl has been with them sixteen years, as I said before, and when she wants to go to the opera-house to an entertainment, Wert Payley makes young DeLancey Payley take her. It's the only use he's found for DeLancey as yet. We keep out of the kitchen after supper, unless too strongly pressed by thirst, because usually from seven to ten some hardworking young Swedish man sits bolt upright in a straight-backed chair, his head against the wall, discussing romance and other subjects of interest with a scared, resolute expression. Usually this goes on for about three years before anything happens. Then the girl admits, with some hesitation, that she is going to get married, and our wife or mother, as the case may be, hustles around and helps make the trousseau and pick out the linen. The wedding takes place in the parlor, and about a year later the young Swedish-American citizen who arrives is named after whatever member of our family is the most convenient as to sex.

We never entirely lose a good hired girl in Homeburg. They pass us on to their relatives when they are married, and come back to visit with great faithfulness. In this topsy-turvy Eldorado of ours where a man sometimes becomes rich before he really knows what anything larger than five dollars looks like, many of our girls draw prizes in the shape of good farmers and prosperous young merchants. But their heads aren't turned by it. They come around in their new automobiles and take us out riding, just as if we had money too. The wife of our mayor used to work for us, and when the electric light gang stuck a light where it would shine straight into our back porch, thus reducing the value of our house 105 per cent. as a place of employment for a nice, attractive girl in summers, I stepped over to the mayor's office and asked him if he remembered how he used to sit on that porch himself. He smiled once, winked twice, and three minutes afterward four men were on their way to relocate that pole.

If I have any criticism of the hired girls in our town, it is because they go to Europe too much. Now, of course, it's no worse for a hired girl to go to Europe for the summer than it is for any one else to indulge themselves in that way. But that's the irritating part. Nobody else goes. Outside of Mrs. Wert Payley and one or two school teachers, I don't suppose any Homeburg people have crossed the Atlantic. But half a dozen of our hired girls go every year. They leave late in the spring, and during the hot weary summer their mistresses toil patiently along keeping the job open if they can't find a substitute who will work for a few months, for the girls who go to Europe are usually pearls of great price and must be gotten back at all cost. I don't suppose anything is harder on the temper than to work over a hot kitchen stove all day in July, and then to sit down to supper, a damp and wilted mess of weariness, and read a souvenir card from your hired girl, said card depicting a cool and inviting Swedish meadow with snow-topped mountains in the distance.

Our girl has been to Europe three times. She has crossed on the Mauretania, the old Deutschland and the new Olympic. Two years from this summer she thinks she will try the Imperator. Often in the evening she tells us of the wonders of these great vessels—of the beauty of the sunset at sea, and of the smoke and noise and majesty of London. I suppose it indicates a jealous disposition, but it makes me mad sometimes to think that it takes practically all the money I can earn, working steadily and with two weeks off per year, to send that girl abroad.

Of course I don't mean it just that way. She doesn't get all of it. In fact she gets three dollars a week of it. Out of this she saves about three dollars and twenty-five cents because sometimes she gets a dollar extra for doing the washing. And when she goes to Europe for the summer on the same ship with the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it sounds more magnificent than it really is. She is on the same ship, but about eleven decks down, in a corner of the steerage close to the stern, where the smells are rich and undisturbed. And she doesn't visit ruins and art galleries in Europe, but a huge circle of loving relatives, who pass her around from farm to farm for months, while she does amateur business agent work for the steamship lines, talking up the wonders of America and—allow me to blush—the saintliness of her employers, and coming blithely back home in the fall with three or four old childhood chums for roommates.

Just the same, I envy our girls. I wish I could go to Europe in the steerage, not being able to go any other way.

It's a fortunate thing for us that our hired girls do go back home and proselyte for America, or else we would soon be jam up against the real thing in help problems. If, for any reason, the Swedish nation should cease contributing to Homeburg, we should have to do our own work. I often wonder at the things our American girls will do rather than to go on the fighting deck as commander of some one else's kitchen. Twenty-five of our girls go up to Paynesville every morning at six on the interurban and make cores in the rolling mills there all day. Carfare and board deducted, they get less than a good hired girl—and they don't go to Europe for the summers and never by any chance marry some rising young farmer who has made the first payment on a quarter section. Several of our middle-aged young ladies sew for a dollar a day and keep house by themselves. And there's Mary Smith, who has been a town problem. She's thirty-five and an orphan. She lives in a house about as large as a piano box and tries to scare away the wolf by selling flavoring extracts and taking orders for books. She's never more than two meals ahead of an embarrassing appetite. Every fall we dig down and buy her winter coal, and she hasn't bought any clothes for ten years. Some one gives her an ex-dress and Mary does her best to make it over, but she never looks much more enticing than a scarecrow in the result.

Mary's hands are red with chilblains in the winter, and the poorhouse yawns for her. But will she take a place as hired girl? Not she. Mary has her pride. She'll sell you things you don't want, which is as near begging as graft is to politics, and she'll wear second-hand clothes and take home cold bread pudding from the hotel—but she will not be a hired girl and go to Europe in the summer and marry into an automobile. Once she did consent to become Mrs. Singer's second girl. Mrs. Singer was desperate, and after a long defense Mary consented on condition that she be called the "up-stairs maid." But she only lasted three days. Mary could have drawn five dollars a week and Mrs. Singer's clothes, which would have fitted her. But Mary couldn't take orders—not that kind. She came back to take orders from us for a patent glass washtub or something of the kind—and we sighed wearily.