Jonathan and His Continent Part 34

After that, it is photographs. He plagues you to examine his alb.u.ms, the quality of which he vaunts with a zeal worthy of a better cause. You send him about his business, but not for long. He soon comes round again, bearing an armful of monthly magazines; and after that, with a pile of novels. Whether you have your eyes closed or not, he lays one or two on your lap, and rouses you to know if really you are not going to buy anything of him. Your blood rises, you feel at last as if it would be a relief to fling his merchandise at his head, or rather out of the window, with him after it. But, "patience!" you say to yourself. "After all, he must soon exhaust his stock-in-trade, and then I shall have peace." Vain illusion! Five minutes later he begins his rounds again with the apple and banana basket. This is too much, and you inwardly send him to destruction, with his apples, jujubes, travelling-caps, newspapers, books, and all his--stock-in-trade.

The Americans have the patience of angels. I have seen them, for five or six hours, refuse with the politest sign of the head the different articles of these ambulant bazaars. They seem to say: "That creature is very annoying, a terrible nuisance; but I suppose we must all get a living somehow."

Returning to Jacksonville from St. Augustine, I omitted to engage my place in the parlour-car, and was obliged to find a seat in the ordinary cars. The evil was not great, seeing that the journey takes but fifty minutes.

Besides the parlour-car, the train comprised three cars, two of which were already almost full. I installed myself in the third, which was empty.

Up comes the conductor.

"Come out; you can't travel in that car," he said.

"Why, pray?" I asked.

"Because it is the coloured people's car."

"And am I not as good as they?"

"I tell you you can't travel in this car."

"I am sorry, for once, that I am not coloured," I said to him; "it is much the cleanest of your carriages."

Going to the end of the last carriage, I found myself just in front of the apple, banana, jujubes, book, and cap store.

From my seat I was able to contemplate the activity of the commercial gentleman at the head of this department.

During the fifty minutes' ride, he was going and coming continually.

When his last tour of the train had been made, he put all the merchandise which he had not sold in place, took off his uniform, put on a black coat and hat, and fastened into his cravat a huge _diamond_ pin.

I looked on at the rapid metamorphosis with great interest. When his toilet was completed, he turned round and, seeing that I was looking at him, he threw me a patronising glance, eyeing me from head to foot. I thought he was about to say:

"What is it you want?"

"Well, business is looking up, eh?" I hazarded.

"Mind your own d---- business," he replied; and, turning on his heels, he departed.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

_Jonathan's Domestics.--Reduced d.u.c.h.esses.--Queer Ideas of Equality.--Unchivalrous Man.--The Ladies of the Feather-broom.--Mr. Vanderbilt's Cook.--Negroes.--Pompey's Wedding.--Where is my coat?--Kitchen Pianists.--"Punch's"

Caricatures Outdone by Reality.--A Lady seeks a Situation as Dishwasher.--Why it is Desirable not to Part with your Servants on Bad Terms._

Jonathan's domestics all appear to me to be reduced d.u.c.h.esses and n.o.blemen in livery.

When you speak to a man-servant, before replying he scans you from head to foot, and seems to say:

"Who may you be? Be careful how you talk to me! We are a free nation: all equals here, and I am as good as you, sir!"

And you feel inclined to say to him:

"I congratulate you, young man, upon living in a free country; but since we are all equals here, and I am civil to you, why on earth cannot you be civil to me?"

The fellow is lacking in logic.

The manner of the maid-servant is different; she wears a look of contempt and profound disgust: she seems to say with a sigh:

"How can men be such brutes as to allow women to work! What despicable creatures they are, to be sure!"

She moves about the room frowning, and as she goes out, darts at you a look full of vengeance. It is especially in the hotels of country towns that you observe the traits above mentioned.

To get an idea of the prodigious labour undertaken by an American servant-girl, one has but to see her at work _doing_ a room, feather-broom in hand.

The coal most used in America is the anthracite kind; it has its good qualities: it throws out great heat and burns for many hours; but it makes a quant.i.ty of light ashes, which cover the furniture of a room with a thick coating of dust every day.

Whenever I chanced to see the chambermaid in the morning shaking my curtains, and making a cloud of dust, enough to prevent one from seeing across the room, it was all I could do to refrain from calling out to her, "My good girl, you are giving yourself a great deal of trouble for nothing; don't meddle with the dust, it is better where it is." Thanks to the feather-broom, my parlour was always done in a twinkling; but before I dared go into it, I was obliged to wait until the dust had returned to its place again.

A day or two after this remarkable manner of dusting had attracted my attention, I came across the following in _Puck_:

Sarah is doing the drawing-room. Enters the mistress of the house, evidently fearing to be choked by the cloud of dust that fills the room.

"Sarah, what are you doing?"

"I'm dusting the room."

"I see. When you've finished, please to undust it."

Servants' wages range from 40 to 60 a year--I mean, of course, in good ordinary houses, and not in millionaire's mansions. Mr. C. Vanderbilt pays his chief cook two thousand pounds a year. I write the sum in letters that the reader may not exclaim, "Surely there is an error here; the printer has put one nought too many."

In spite of the enormously high wages they pay, the Americans have so much trouble in getting good servants that numbers of them are, so to speak, driven from their homes, and obliged to take refuge in hotels and apartment-houses.

Negro servants are the only ones at all deferential in manner, or who have a smile on their faces from time to time; but many people have an objection to them, and charge them with serious faults, such as finding things which are not lost, and breaking the monotony of life by dressing up in their employers' raiment when occasion offers.

An American of my acquaintance, upon going to his room one evening to dress for a dinner-party, found his dress-coat and waistcoat missing from the wardrobe. Guessing their whereabouts, he went upstairs, and there, in his negro-butler's room, were the missing garments. He rang for the culprit.

"Pompey, I have found my dress-clothes in your room. What is the meaning of it?"

"I forgot to put dem back, sah."

"You have had them on, you rascal?"

"Yes, sah."