Live and Let Live

Front matter

LIVE AND LET LIVE

OR,

DOMESTIC SERVICE ILLUSTRATED

Preface

PREFACE.

the writer of the following pages begs her readers will have the kindness to remember that her business has been to illustrate the failures of one party in the contract between employers and employed, and that, therefore, she may appear to be insensible, but certainly is not, to the manifold trials and discouragements of the mistress of a family in her relation to her domestics. These trials are rendered very general by the facilities for changing service, and the almost necessary dependance on foreign and uninstructed people. These very trials and circumstances peculiar to our domestic life make it imperative upon American mothers to qualify their daughters to superintend their domestics, and to prepare the future housewife for the exigences that await her; as emergencies constantly occur where the lady must perform the primitive offices of women, or her family must be comfortless. Our young ladies are taught French, Italian, drawing, music, &c.; and let them be; these are the ornaments and luxuries of education; but let not the necessaries be omitted—the staff of domestic life sacrificed.

I cannot hope that this little volume will do much for its momentous subject. But I shall be satisfied if it rouses more active minds than mine to reflection upon the duties and capabilities of mistresses of families; if it quicken some sleeping consciences; if it make any feel their duties and obligations to their "inferiors in position;" if, in short, it incite even a few of my young countrywomen to a zealous devotion to "home missions."

New-York, June 9, 1837.

Chapter I. Sin the Parent of Want

CHAPTER I.

SIN THE PARENT OF WANT

It was one of the coldest days felt in New-York, during the winter of 182–, that a baker's cart made its accustomed halt before a door in Church-street. It was driven by Charles Lovett, the baker's son, whose ruddy cheeks, quick movement, and beaming eye bespoke health, industry, and a happy temper. This latter attribute seemed somewhat too severely tested by the tardiness of his customer, for in vain had he whistled, clapped his hands, stamped, and repeated his usual cry of "Hurry! hurry!" He at last leaped from his cart on to the broken step of the wretched dwelling, when the upper half of the door was slowly opened, and a thinly-clad girl appeared, who, in answer to his prepared question, "Why, what ails you? are you all asleep?" replied, "Mother does not wish any bread this morning."

"Don't wish any! then she's easily served;" and, thus huffily answering, he was turning away, when another look at the girl touched his kind heart. "Tell me honestly," he added, "what is the reason your mother don't wish the bread."

The little girl's voice was choked, and the tears gushed from her eyes as she answered, "She has not a shilling to pay for it."

"That's blamed hard this cold morning, besides being tough—but take the loaf—we can trust you."

"No—mother had rather not—father is sick, and it takes all she can earn, every penny, to buy things for him and Jemmie."

"Well, take it for a gift, then," said the boy; "I'll speak to my father about it;" and, thrusting the loaf into her hands, he jumped into his cart and rattled off. For a month after Charles Lovett called daily at that house of want, and left a shilling loaf. This is no fiction, but one of those beautiful facts that deserve to be rescued from obscurity.

The little girl ran up to her mother's apartment, a back-room on the second floor. "Lucy, my child!" exclaimed her mother, reprovingly, on seeing the loaf of bread. Lucy explained in a low voice, to avoid her father overhearing her, who was lying ill in his bed. Mrs. Lee brushed away a tear. "Did not I always tell you so, mother?" asked Lucy.

"Tell me what?"

"I mean, did not I tell you that boy always looked so kind, and spoke so civil! I knew he was good." Children have an instinct as infallible as a chymical test in detecting the presence of certain qualities.

Mrs. Lee prepared some toast and tea for her husband and a little deformed boy in the cradle, and then sat down with her three girls to a breakfast on rye-mush.

The parents of Lucy Lee, our humble heroine, were married some fifteen years before our story begins. Richard Lee was then a young lawyer in a country town in New England. His wife had no near kindred, but she had been kindly cared for, and well nurtured in the family of a distant relation; and having a small fortune and a good education, in the best sense of the word, that is, having had her faculties well developed and prepared for the uses of life, she had a rational prospect of prosperity and happiness. Her husband was an only son, who had talents, ardent feelings, amiable manners, and a small but sufficient fortune to begin life upon in a country where the current sets to prosperity. Such a beginning would have secured pecuniary independence, unless singular misfortune had intervened, or vice had appeared to counteract and destroy the operation of the laws of Providence. Vice it was. Six months after her marriage, Mrs. Lee discovered that her husband was in the habit of intemperate drinking. How the seeds of this habit were sown in his childhood, by his parents' foolish indulgence of the cravings of his appetite for whatever tasted good—how appetite, combining with the selfishness that is nurtured by low animal gratifications, obtained so early the mastery over his better nature, it is not our purpose to describe. We would only add this to the thousand examples before the eyes of parents, to admonish them that to secure to the future man temperance and health, the child's appetites must be subdued to obedience.

When Mrs. Lee discovered her husband's weakness, she was inexperienced and hopeful. She remonstrated and supplicated, he promised and she believed. For years they went on, he sinning and she sheltering him and enduring in silence. But love and fidelity have no shelter broad enough to conceal such habits—they betray themselves—Richard Lee forfeited the confidence of the community. He lost his business, and his property melted away. He moved from place to place, and finally went to the city of New-York, where, during one of those episodical reforms that occur in every drunkard's life, he resolved to turn over a new leaf. He obtained copying from a prosperous lawyer who had been a college contemporary. For a while the stimulus of a new position operated favorably and the wants of his family were supplied by his labor. But excess soon followed abstinence. Returning home late in a cold evening from a grog-shop, he fell on the ice, broke his leg, and lay exposed to the inclemency of the weather till rescued and conveyed to his home by a watchman. A long and fatal illness followed.

Chapter II. The Least of Two Evils

CHAPTER II.

THE LEAST OF TWO EVILS.

It was a few days previous to the timely benefaction of the baker's son that Lee broke his leg. After he was disabled, his family subsisted on the avails of work which his wife obtained from a slop-shop. Her time was nearly consumed in attendance on her exacting husband. She had no friends in the city—not an acquaintance even, excepting her husband's employer, and he was not of a character to overcome her natural reluctance to make known the extreme degradation of her condition. Want—starvation—stared her in the face; still she would not incur a debt, even for a loaf of bread, that she saw no possibility of paying. "Lucy," she had said to her child, "we can beg if we must, but we will not take bread that we cannot pay for." The poorest, even, have some means of education when they can give such a practical lesson in integrity.

It had now become necessary to take some measures to obtain subsistence. Mrs. Lee was not the woman to sit with her hands folded, and repeat "that bitter and perplexed 'what shall I do!' " She applied at a Venetian blind-factory, and obtained for her two youngest girls, the one eleven, the other nine, the sewing of the worsted stays to the blinds, by which they earned $1 50 per week; and this in the intervals of their daily school. She had a plan for Lucy, but this she would not put into execution without her father's concurrence, which she foresaw it would be no easy matter to obtain. Lucy had always been his darling. She was his first-born. She was pretty; and having in his more fortunate days given her some advantages of education, he looked forward to a time when she might, by that prize which is always in a pretty woman's lottery, a fortunate marriage, regain the place in society forfeited by his misconduct.

The children were asleep. Lee, wretched and restless, was tossing on his bed, calling at every moment his patient wife from the garment which she was making by a dim light to earn one shilling. The air of the room was scarcely tempered by the single stick of wood in the stove, and all this misery was the consequence of a base indulgence in a low appetite. But the poor man paid the severest penalty in his own person. Who that looked upon his grisled hair, his bloated face, his bloodshot eyes, and his stiffened and trembling limbs, could have recognised him who, fifteen years before, was one of the most promising young lawyers of Massachusetts?

After expressing a wish for this and that, and complaining of the cold, "What in Heaven's name are we to do?" he said. "Has Barton never sent to inquire after me?"

"No—he probably does not know where we live."

"It would be easy finding out—but people don't take pains to look up poor acquaintances. Barton is no worse than the rest of the world. Lord help us! we may as well come to it first as last. We shall starve or freeze to death here. Won't you stop that sewing? Every stitch of your needle goes through my nerves. You can't earn enough to save us from starvation. Send me to the alms-house—it makes little difference where one dies; and when I am gone you can manage to scramble on with the rest".

"No, Richard—no—we have gone through many a dark day together, and we will not separate till it pleases God to part us". Lee drew the sheet over his face. "We have a hard winter before us, and we must take measures accordingly. The first step should be to reduce the family. I am thinking of getting a place for Lucy."

"A place! what sort of a place?"

"A service-place."

"Good Heavens! you are not in earnest?"

"I am; and, if you will hear me patiently, you may think me right."

"Never, never—all the talking in the world won't persuade me to degrade Lucy to a servant."

Mrs. Lee thought of the degradation to which her husband's vice had reduced them, and she resolutely proceeded.

"We must have relief, and that immediately. I will not subject my children to being depraved by dependance on charity while they have the means of exertion—honest labour is never degrading."

"Certainly not to those who are used to it."

"Nor to those that need it, dear husband, as we do. It does not startle or frighten me in the least. I have been through all gradations from perfect competency to our present suffering state, and each degree—even ours—has its peculiar advantages and temptations, and its happiness too."

"Happiness!" echoed Lee.

His wife proceeded: "I can't but hope Lucy will find hers in a faithful performance of her duties. I can truly say I have often envied servants when I have heard the merry peals of laughter in the kitchen, and known what anxious hearts there were in the parlour."

"But what is all this to the purpose! Lucy shall never live in anybody's kitchen."

"It is much to the purpose", replied Mrs. Lee, judiciously answering to the first clause of his sentence, "to settle it in our minds that Lucy may be good and happy in any position".

"But, wife, consider—recollect how you and I were brought up."

"That is what I try to forget!"

"But you ought not voluntarily to put Lucy out to service!"

"Richard, you know I do not mean to reproach you; but I must say, that in our situation we have lost the power of voluntary action—we are under the stern coercion of necessity." Mrs. Lee now laid aside her work, and spoke, though with a tremulous voice, in a tone of decision she seldom assumed. "For the last week Lucy and I have lived on rye-mush. The bread you and the other children have eaten was given to us by the baker. I will not continue to subsist on his bounty while we have unemployed means of feeding ourselves. Lucy is nearly fourteen, old enough to get a place and earn wages. There will be one less to eat, and some help through this hard winter from her earnings".

"But how can you bear to think of making a mere servant-girl of Lucy?"

"The condition of servant-girls is no longer what it once was. They are not servants in the old sense of the word. Their relation to their employers is one of mutual advantage and mutual dependance. In a well-ordered family, a girl is fitting herself for the duties that belong to her sex. She is learning to fill honourably the station of a wife, mistress, and mother of a family."

"Oh, I grant you, in a well-ordered family! but where will you find such? and pray, how are you to know anything of the family you put her in—you have not an acquaintance in the city."

"No, not one—and this it is that perplexes and distresses me. It seems to me we never know the wants of a condition till we are placed in it ourselves. I remember joining in a laugh at the presumption of a servant, who, when asked for her references, asked them in return of the employer. Yet surely the knowledge should be mutual in such a contract."

"You are always refining, wife—what should be and what is in this world are wide apart, and you must submit to what is. I see," he added, after a pause and a groan, "what we are coming to—I never realized it before!"

Shame—shame to thee, Lee! This from a man conscious of having lived for fifteen years in the violation of the laws of temperance, to which are affixed such rewards and such dreadful penalties; who had broken his marriage vows, involving in mortification, hardship, and bitter sorrow her whom he had sworn to cherish and protect; who had not only neglected the duties of a Christian father, but foregone the instincts of a brute parent, and, depriving his children of their birthright in a prosperous land, had reduced them to the privations and slavery of extreme poverty. Yet this weak man revolted from putting his child to domestic service as the severest trial of his condition!

This was doubtless an extreme case of Lee. But was not his feeling a part of a very general false estimate of life, its positions, its trials, and its duties?

Chapter III. Looking for a Place

CHAPTER III.

looking for a place.

Mrs. Lee having made up her mind that Lucy must go to service, tried to look upon the bright side of the necessity, and to present the brightest to her husband, but in her own secret heart she had bitter conflicts. She had, as we have said, no acquaintance in the city; she wanted not only a place for this pure, good little girl, who had never left the shelter of her mother's wing, but a good place, where the weaknesses of childhood would be considered; where its faults would be patiently borne with, forgiven, and corrected; where its ignorance would be instructed; where the employer would feel the responsibility, and the privilege, we may add, of training a young creature in virtue and religion, of converting a domestic to a friend. Do these palpable duties enter into the calculations of a majority of employers?

At the end of the week Mrs. Lee had saved two shillings; and having provided for her husband's comfort in her absence, placed her little lame boy within reach of his books and playthings, and given all necessary charges to the little girls, she set off with Lucy at twelve o'clock on her pilgrimage for a place. She entered a decent intelligence-office, paid the fee, and obtained a reference to Mrs. Oatley's, as a consequential man informed her, "one of the most fashionablest houses in Broadway."

"Can you tell me nothing else of the family?" inquired Mrs. Lee.

"Not I, woman—what else can you want to know?"

"If the place does not suit me, you will give me other references?"

"Certainly—we'll suit your slip of a girl to a place—there's no mistake about that."

Mrs. Lee sighed, left the office, and proceeded to the place. The house verified her informer's promise; everything in it and about it had a fashionable aspect. She was shown into Mrs. Oatley's bedroom, where that lady was sitting with a grown-up daughter. Both ladies, on learning their errand, surveyed the humble strangers from head to foot. Mrs. Lee the while, pale and exhausted with her long walk, was left standing as if in royal presence—and this in a land where we vaunt our equality and democratic institutions!

"Do you think she will answer our purpose, Anne?" asked the mother of the daughter.

"Nicely, mamma;" and then, in a lower but still audible tone, "she is a tidy lassie, and pretty too—just the thing to tend the door."

"She looks pale, I hope she is not sickly? I can't undertake a sickly child," said Mrs. Oatley, inquiringly.

"She is not in the least sickly, ma'am—she is paler than is natural to her just now."

"How does that happen?" It would have been a long and sad story to explain how that happened, and a hard one for Mrs. Lee to tell; she therefore evaded the question, "You will find her strong enough, ma'am, to perform any service you will require." Then followed the customary questions, to which Mrs. Lee replied, as she had predetermined, simply that she was a stranger in the city, and that she was compelled, by the wants consequent on her husband's protracted illness, to seek a place for her child.

"It's much the best thing for your child, good woman."

"That depends!" thought poor Mrs. Lee. She ventured to ask what service would be required of Lucy.

"Oh, the work I want her for is just nothing at all—merely to tend the door, bring up messages, and occasionally to run of errands—you could not find a better place for her—I'll give her four dollars a month."

"And if she is civil, &c., &c., &c.," said Miss Oatley, "she'll get plenty of presents."

"The wages are very liberal, ma'am," said Mrs. Lee, after a little hesitation, "but—"

"Oh, if you object, it is not worth talking about—it is a place very easy to supply."

"The only objection I have to make, ma'am, you will not perhaps think a very unreasonable one. My child must be qualifying herself for the future, and I fear the very light work she has here would rather unfit than fit her for the future."

"Oh, very well—as you please—a droll objection though—hey, Mary! There is no end to the whims and demands of servants nowadays—always something new! but it really is a little too much to expect to turn a gentleman's house into a school!"

Mrs. Lee felt her heart rising, but she struggled to keep it down, and asked, with the humility necessary to her forlorn condition, "if she might take till Monday to consider."

"No-on the whole, I don't think your girl would suit me-children that have never lived out are very apt to have their heads full of whims."

"Do let's go, mother," whispered Lucy. And they went without one kind word that would intimate they were beings of the same human family with the mistress of the mansion.

"What a goose the woman is!" said Mrs. Oatley, as the door closed upon the disappointed applicants. Yet Mrs. Oatley was not a hard-hearted woman; she only had never considered the feelings and rights of her inferiors in position. Strange reverses and revelations would there be to the more favoured classes if an intrinsic graduating scale could be applied.

Mrs. Lee retraced her way to the intelligence-office. The man was civil, and looked over his list. "Mrs. Timson, Greenwich-street, boarding house, wants a girl from twelve to fifteen—the very thing, ma'am."

"No, sir. I cannot put my child into a boarding-house."

"Pshaw! must not be more nice than wise. If she's clever and handy—looks so," winking at Lucy, "she'll pick up plenty of presents."

"Please to give me another reference."

"Here's one in Grand-street and two in Bleeker-street. If one shoe pinches, another may fit. There's Mrs. Tom Clark, a lawyer's lady—there's her number, Grand-street. There's Mrs. Aaron Sadwell, her husband made a fortune last summer; and there's Mrs. Kidder, a fashionable shoemaker's wife—so there's a choice for you." To Mrs. Tom Clark's they first went. Mrs. Clarke, after a long interrogation, dismissed them, saying, she made it a rule never to take girls that had not lived out—they required too much teaching!

Mrs. Sadwell inquired if the child knew how to work, and Mrs. Lee, warned by her last experience, replied that she had herself taken great pains to teach her.

"Ah, well, then," said Mrs. Sadwell, "she'll not do. I shall have to unlearn her the ways of such sort of people as you, my good woman, and those of a gentleman's family are so different!"

As they went down Mrs. Sadwell's steps, Mrs. Lee, struggling to hide her emotions from her child, said, in a cheerful voice, "Well, Lucy, dear, we'll go next to Mrs. Kidder's; those who know what work is ought to have most consideration for their servant." And to Mrs. Kidder's, a full mile from the office, they went. The door was opened by a rude, dirty boy (Mrs. Kidder's eldest hope), who, running to the landing-places on the stairs, shouted, "Ma—I say, can't you come down—here's somebody after a place."

"Tell 'em to come up here, Lorenzo."

"Follow your nose, ma'am," called out the boy, "and go to where you hear the tum-tumin."

Mrs. Lee obeyed the direction; and passing an open parlour door, she saw two communicating apartments gaudily furnished. Lucy followed her mother, and, as she reached the bottom of the stairs, Mr. Lorenzo came sliding down on the baluster, and, as he landed beside her, he threw his arm round her neck, kissed her cheek, and ran shouting out of the house. Lucy, confounded, called, "Mother, mother!" and would have implored her to turn back; but Mrs. Lee was already at the turn of the stairs, where she had been met by a slatternly Irish girl, who had spilled half a basin of dirty water at her feet. Not being in the least aware of the impertinence offered to her child, she had sprung forward to avoid the inundation, and was already in the presence of Mrs. Kidder, who sat before the open door of the room whence proceeded the tum-tumin—that is to say, the notes of a cracked piano, whereon one of the Misses Kidder was thrumming. "You come from the intelligence-office, I take it?"

Before Mrs. Lee could reply, one of the half dozen children in the room shouted out, "Ma, mayn't Matilda give me my horse?"

"No, I say I won't, ’cause he snatched my slate yesterday."

"Come to me, Orlando—you're as dirty as a pig—here, blow your nose," taking his apron for the office. "Matilda, stop your noise, and go and comb out your hair—it looks like a hurra's nest-you're wanting a place for your girl, I suppose?"

"Not here!" thought poor Mrs. Lee; but she merely replied, "I am looking for one."

"Can she do all kinds of work?" Before Mrs. Lee could reply there was another outbreak from Orlando, who was now indeed Furioso, "Ma, shan't Anna Maria be still? she is putting pepper-corns into my ear."

"Come to me, Anna Maria." Anna Maria received a cuff from her mother, and went bawling back to her place. The young practitioner at the piano meanwhile proceeded. "Is your girl handy at work in general?" resumed Mrs. Kidder.

"She understands work, and is as capable as most girls of her age. She has always lived at home, and has been my only assistant."

"Well, you both look neat and clean, and that is a very good symptom."

"A competent judge!" thought Mrs. Lee, as she looked at the carpet saturated with grease, the defaced furniture, and the filthy persons of the un-combed, unwashed mother and children.

"I want," continued Mrs. Kidder, "a girl that's handy in assisting about cooking—that can make up beds, and sweep out rooms, and set tables, and wait and tend when the girls have company, and understands washing dishes, and cleaning knives, and is handy at ironing, and helping the girls clear-starch; washing I calculate to hire; but I have concluded not to keep any steady help but a young girl—you can't depend on them Irish, and husband thinks, and so do I, the wages is too much."

Mrs. Lee saw Lucy's eye turning with most earnest appeal to her, and she was thinking how civilly to break off a treaty to which she was from the first determined not to accede, when they were again interrupted, this time by the entrance of the eldest Miss Kidder, followed by a milliner's girl with a bandbox, which was immediately opened, and two hats displayed for the mother's inspection. "Oh, ma, do say I may have this one," said the young lady; " it's only seven dollars and a half; Madame l'Epine asked ten at first, but she said it was so becoming to me it was a pity I should not have it! Oh, is not it a love? Madame says it's just like Mrs. ——," mentioning a name well known in the fashionable world and the milliner's world, and thence handed down to the humblest devotee to feathers and flowers in the city. Do say yes, ma."

The hat was tried on, and gave the daughter to the mother's eye so decidedly the air of bon ton, that the desired "Yes" was promptly spoken. This matter settled, Mrs. Kidder turned to Lucy. "Well, child, if you are a mind to come and do your best, I'll give you three dollars a month, and that is more than such a child as you can possibly earn."

"My child cannot undertake the work you expect from her for any wages," said Mrs. Lee.

"Oh, very well! very well! there are enough that will." Mrs. Lee was scarcely out of the room before the mother and young ladies vituperated the whole race of servants, who, they said, expected to do nothing and be paid for it; and Mrs. Kidder finished by saying she thought three dollars generous wages; at any rate, she could not afford to pay more. And she could not, and pay seven dollars and a half for a dress hat. Alas! the justice that is concerned in giving a fair and adequate reward to labour, is incompatible with the expensive gratification of vanity.

Mrs. Lee was not encouraged by the result of her inquiries thus far; but long trials had taught her patience; and when Lucy said, as they left the Kidders' door, "Oh, mother, let me go home and starve with you!" she replied in a cheerful tone, "One swallow does not make a summer, Lucy, nor one frost a winter."

"But, mother, you will be so tired! — and it's so dreadful to you to be talked to so by people that don't know you!"

"I am a little tired, Lucy, but that a night's rest will cure. And as to being talked to, as you call it, in this way, there are good uses in it. It gives me a realizing sense of some of the trials endured by those whose lot is a menial condition that I never had before. It is good for us, for a little while at least, to take the place of our fellow-creatures, and feel the weight of their burdens. And after all, my child, it is quite as well to be the humble, disdained, and questioned place-seeker, as those who so thoughtlessly pain us. Oh, what opportunities are lost for want of a little consideration! If these women had known what a comfort a kind word, fitly spoken, would have been to us, they would not have treated us in a way to shock you. We must try not to think too harsh , Lucy, of our fellow-creatures when they do wrong."

"Well, I shall try, mother—but I feel first, and afterward you make me think—what shall I do when I am away from you?"

Again our poor pilgrims retraced their way to the office, and received from the man, who seemed no way surprised at these repeated demands, three more references. One to Mrs. Louis, in Barclay-street, and that being nearest, thither Mrs. Lee went. Mrs. Louis's establishment indicated the wealth of the proprietor. A servant announced Mrs. Lee to her lady. "Do, Ellen," said Mrs. Louis, looking up from the "last new novel," and addressing her seamstress, "go down and speak to her—I can't be bothered."

Ellen returned with a most favourable report, to which her mistress, as she did not lift her eyes from her book, could have given but half an ear. When Ellen stopped talking, she said, "She'll do, no doubt, but I can't speak to her now—tell her to call again in an hour or two."