Manners and Social Usages - Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (mobile ebook reader TXT) 📗

have no such position in America

as they have in England: that they must make their own beds, wash

their own clothing, and eat with the other servants. They must be

first-rate hair-dressers, good packers of trunks, and understand

dressmaking and fine starching, and be amiable, willing, and

pleasant. A woman who combines these qualifications commands very

high wages, and expects, as her perquisite, her mistress’s cast-off

dresses.

 

French maids are in great demand, as they have a natural taste in

all things pertaining to dress and the toilet, but they are apt to

be untruthful and treacherous. If a lady can get a peasant girl from

some rural district, she will find her a most useful and valuable

maid after she has been taught.

 

Many ladies educate some clever girl who has been maid for the

position of housekeeper, and such a person, who can be trusted to

hire an assistant, becomes invaluable. She often accomplishes all

the dressmaking and sewing for the household, and her salary of

thirty dollars a month is well earned.

 

As the duties of a lady’s-maid, where there are young ladies,

include attending them in the streets and to parties, she should be

a person of unquestioned respectability. The maid should bring up

the hot water for her ladies, and an early cup of tea, prepare their

bath, assist at their toilet, put their clothes away, be ready to

aid in every change of dress, put out their various dresses for

riding, dining, walking, and for afternoon tea, dress their hair for

dinner, and be ready to find for them their gloves, shoes, and other

belongings.

 

A maid can be, and generally is, the most disagreeable of creatures;

but some ladies have the tact to make good servants out of most

unpromising materials.

 

The maid, if she does not accompany her mistress to a party and wait

for her in the dressing-room, should await her arrival at home,

assist her to undress, comb and brush her hair, and get ready the

bath. She should also have a cup of hot tea or chocolate in

readiness for her. She must keep her clothes in order, sew new

ruffles in her dresses, and do all the millinery and dressmaking

required of her.

 

Very often the maid is required to attend to the bric-�-brac and

pretty ornaments of the mantel, to keep fresh flowers in the

drawing-room or bedroom, and, above all, to wash the pet dog. As

almost all women are fond of dogs, this is not a disagreeable duty

to a French maid, and she gives Fifine his bath without grumbling.

But if she be expected to speak French to the children, she

sometimes rebels, particularly if she and the nurse should not be

good friends.

 

A lady, in hiring a maid, should specify the extra duties she will

be required to perform, and thus give her the option of refusing the

situation. If she accepts it, she must be made strictly to account

for any neglect or omission of her work. A maid with an indulgent

mistress is free in the evenings, after eight o’clock, and every

Sunday afternoon.

 

In families where there are many children, two nurses are frequently

required—a head nurse and an assistant.

 

The nursery governess is much oftener employed now in this country

than in former years. This position is often filled by well-mannered

and well-educated young women, who are the daughters of poor men,

and obliged to earn their own living. These young women, if they are

good and amiable, are invaluable to their mistresses. They perform

the duties of a nurse, wash and dress the children, eat with them

and teach them, the nursery-maid doing the coarse, rough work of the

nursery. If a good nursery governess can be found, she is worth her

weight in gold to her employer. She should not cat with the

servants; there should be a separate table for her and her charges.

This meal is prepared by the kitchen-maid, who is a very important

functionary, almost an under-cook, as the chief cook in such an

establishment as we are describing is absorbed in the composition of

the grand dishes and dinners.

 

The kitchen-maid should be a good plain-cook, and clever in making

the dishes suitable for children. Much of the elementary cooking for

the dining-room, such as the foundation for sauces and soups, and

the roasted and boiled joints, is required of her, and she also

cooks the servants’ dinner, which should be an entirely different

meal from that served in the dining-room. Nine meals a day are

usually cooked in a family living in this manner—breakfast for

servants, children, and the master and mistress, three; children’s

dinner, servants’ dinner, and luncheon, another three; and the grand

dinner at seven, the children’s tea, and the servants’ supper, the

remaining three.

 

Where two footmen are in attendance, the head footman attends the

door, waits on his mistress when she drives out, carries notes,

assists the butler, lays the table and clears it, and washes glass,

china, and silver. The under-footman rises at six, makes fires,

cleans boots, trims and cleans the lamps, opens the shutters and the

front-door, sweeps down the steps, and, indeed, does the rougher

part of the work before the other servants begin their daily duties.

Each should be without mustache, clean shaven, and clad in neat

livery. His linen and white neck-tie should be, when he appears to

wait on the family at table or in any capacity, immaculate.

 

The servants’ meals should be punctual and plenteous, although not

luxurious. It is a bad plan to feed servants on the luxuries of the

master’s table, but a good cook will be able to compound dishes for

the kitchen that will be savory and palatable.

 

CHAPTER XLIX. MANNERS.—A STUDY FOR THE AWKWARD AND THE SHY.

 

It is a comfort to those of us who have felt the cold perspiration

start on the brow, at the prospect of entering an unaccustomed

sphere, to remember that the best men and women whom the world has

known have been, in their day, afflicted with shyness. Indeed, it is

to the past that we must refer when the terrible disease seizes us,

when the tongue becomes dry in the mouth, the hands tremble, and the

knees knock together.

 

Who does not pity the trembling boy when, on the evening of his

first party, he succumbs to this dreadful malady? The color comes in

spots on his face, and his hands are cold and clammy. He sits down

on the stairs and wishes he were dead. A strange sensation is

running down his back. “Come, Peter, cheer up,” his mother says, not

daring to tell him how she sympathizes with him. He is afraid to be

afraid, he is ashamed to be ashamed. Nothing can equal this moment

of agony. The whole room looks black before him as some chipper

little girl, who knows not the meaning of the word “embarrassment,”

comes to greet him. He crawls off to the friendly shelter of a group

of boys, and sees the “craven of the playground, the dunce of the

school,” with a wonderful self-possession, lead off in the german

with the prettiest girl. As he grows older, and becomes the young

man whose duty it is to go to dinners and afternoon parties, this

terrible weakness will again overcome him. He has done well at

college, can make a very good speech at the club suppers, but at the

door of a parlor he feels himself a drivelling idiot. He assumes a

courage, if he has it not, and dashes into a room (which is full of

people) as he would attack a forlorn hope. There is safety in

numbers, and he retires to a corner.

 

When he goes to a tea-party a battery of feminine eyes gazes at him

with a critical perception of his youth and rawness. Knowing that he

ought to be supremely graceful and serene, he stumbles over a

footstool, and hears a suppressed giggle. He reaches his hostess,

and wishes she were the “cannon’s mouth,” in order that his

sufferings might be ended; but she is not. His agony is to last the

whole evening. Tea-parties are eternal: they never end; they are

like the old-fashioned ideas of a future state of torment—they grow

hotter and more stifling. As the evening advances towards eternity

he upsets the cream-jug. He summons all his will-power, or he would

run away. No; retreat is impossible. One must die at the post of

duty. He thinks of all the formulas of courage—“None but the brave

deserve the fair,” “He either fears his fate too much, or his

deserts are small,” “There is no such coward as self-consciousness,”

etc. But these maxima are of no avail. His feet are feet of clay,

not good to stand on, only good to stumble with. His hands are cold,

tremulous, and useless. There is a very disagreeable feeling in the

back of his neck, and a spinning sensation about the brain. A queer

rumbling seizes his ears. He has heard that “conscience makes

cowards of us all.” What mortal sin has he committed? His moral

sense answers back, “None. You are only that poor creature, a

bashful youth.” And he bravely calls on all his nerves, muscles, and

brains to help him through this ordeal. He sees the pitying eyes of

the woman to whom he is talking turn away from his countenance (on

which he knows that all his miserable shyness has written itself in

legible characters). “And this humiliation, too?” he asks of

himself, as she brings him the usual refuge of the awkward—a

portfolio of photographs to look at. Women are seldom troubled, at

the age at which men suffer, with bashfulness or awkwardness. It is

as if Nature thus compensated the weaker vessel. Cruel are those

women, however, and most to be reprobated, who laugh at a bashful

man!

 

The sufferings of a shy man would fill a volume. It is a nervous

seizure for which no part of his organization is to blame; he cannot

reason it away, he can only crush it by enduring it: “To bear is to

conquer our Fate.” Some men, finding the play not worth the candle,

give up society and the world; others go on, suffer, and come out

cool veterans who fear no tea-party, however overwhelming it may be.

 

It is the proper province of parents to have their children taught

all the accomplishments of the body, that they, like the ancient

Greeks, may know that every muscle will obey the brain. A shy,

awkward boy should be trained in dancing, fencing, boxing; he should

be instructed in music, elocution, and public speaking; he should be

sent into society, whatever it may cost him at first, as certainly

as he should be sent to the dentist’s. His present sufferings may

save him from lifelong annoyance.

 

To the very best men—the most learned, the most graceful, the most

eloquent, the most successful—has come at some one time or other

the dreadful agony of bashfulness. Indeed, it is the higher order of

man being that it most surely attacks; it is the precursor of many

excellences, and, like the knight’s vigil, if patiently and bravely

borne, the knight is twice the hero. It is this recollection, which

can alone assuage the sufferer, that he should always carry with

him. He should remember that the compound which he calls himself is

of all things most mixed.

 

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”

Two antagonistic races—it may be his Grandfather Brown and his

Grandmother Williams—are struggling in him for the mastery; and

their exceedingly opposite natures are pulling his arms and legs

asunder. He has to harmonize this antagonism before he becomes