With this, having more immediately practical questions
before them, they dropped the subject, to bend their
entire attention upon the dress; and when the lunch-gong
sounded downstairs Alice was still sketching repairs
and alterations. She continued to sketch them,
not heeding the summons.
“I suppose we’d better go down to lunch,”
Mrs. Adams said, absently. “She’s
at the gong again.” “In a minute,
mama. Now about the sleeves——”
And she went on with her planning. Unfortunately
the gong was inexpressive of the mood of the person
who beat upon it. It consisted of three little
metal bowls upon a string; they were unequal in size,
and, upon being tapped with a padded stick, gave forth
vibrations almost musically pleasant. It was
Alice who had substituted this contrivance for the
brass “dinner-bell” in use throughout
her childhood; and neither she nor the others of her
family realized that the substitution of sweeter sounds
had made the life of that household more difficult.
In spite of dismaying increases in wages, the Adamses
still strove to keep a cook; and, as they were unable
to pay the higher rates demanded by a good one, what
they usually had was a whimsical coloured woman of
nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a person
the old-fashioned “dinner-bell” was satisfying;
life could instantly be made intolerable for any one
dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was capable
of every desirable profanity and left nothing bottled
up in the breast of the ringer. But the chamois-covered
stick might whack upon Alice’s little Chinese
bowls for a considerable length of time and produce
no great effect of urgency upon a hearer, nor any other
effect, except fury in the cook. The ironical
impossibility of expressing indignation otherwise
than by sounds of gentle harmony proved exasperating;
the cook was apt to become surcharged, so that explosive
resignations, never rare, were somewhat more frequent
after the introduction of the gong.
Mrs. Adams took this increased frequency to be only
another manifestation of the inexplicable new difficulties
that beset all housekeeping. You paid a cook
double what you had paid one a few years before; and
the cook knew half as much of cookery, and had no
gratitude. The more you gave these people, it
seemed, the worse they behaved—a condition
not to be remedied by simply giving them less, because
you couldn’t even get the worst unless you paid
her what she demanded. Nevertheless, Mrs. Adams
remained fitfully an optimist in the matter.
Brought up by her mother to speak of a female cook
as “the girl,” she had been instructed
by Alice to drop that definition in favour of one not
an improvement in accuracy: “the maid.”
Almost always, during the first day or so after every
cook came, Mrs. Adams would say, at intervals, with
an air of triumph: “I believe—of
course it’s a little soon to be sure—but
I do really believe this new maid is the treasure
we’ve been looking for so long!” Much in
the same way that Alice dreamed of a mysterious perfect
mate for whom she “waited,” her mother
had a fairy theory that hidden somewhere in the universe
there was the treasure, the perfect “maid,”
who would come and cook in the Adamses’ kitchen,
not four days or four weeks, but forever.
