Diantha had never liked Mr. Thaddler; she did not like that kind of man in general, nor his manner toward her in particular. Moreover he was the husband of Mrs. Thaddler. She did not know that he was still the largest owner in the town’s best grocery store, and when that store offered her special terms for her exclusive trade, she accepted the proposition thankfully.
She told Ross about it, as a matter well within his knowledge, if not his liking, and he was mildly interested. “I am much alarmed at this new venture,” he wrote, “but you must get your experience. I wish I could save you. As to the groceries, those are wholesale rates, nearly; they’ll make enough on it. Yours is a large order you see, and steady.”
When she opened her “Business Men’s Lunch” Mr. Thaddler had a still better opportunity. He had a reputation as a high flyer, and had really intended to sacrifice himself on the altar of friendship by patronizing and praising this “undertaking” at any cost to his palate; but no sacrifice was needed.
Diantha’s group of day workers had their early breakfast and departed, taking each her neat lunch-pail, — they ate nothing of their employers; — and both kitchen and dining room would have stood idle till supper time. But the young manager knew she must work her plant for all it was worth, and speedily opened the dining room with the side entrance as a “Caffeteria,” with the larger one as a sort of meeting place; papers and magazines on the tables.
From the counter you took what you liked, and seated yourself, and your friends, at one of the many small tables or in the flat-armed chairs in the big room, or on the broad piazza; and as this gave good food, cheapness, a chance for a comfortable seat and talk and a smoke, if one had time, it was largely patronized.
Mr. Thaddler, as an experienced bon vivant, despised sandwiches. “Picnicky makeshifts” he called them,— “railroad rations”— “bread and leavings,” and when he saw these piles on piles of sandwiches, listed only as “No. 1,” “No. 2” “No. 3,” and so on, his benevolent intention wavered. But he pulled himself together and took a plateful, assorted.
“Come on, Porne,” he said, “we’ll play it’s a Sunday school picnic,” and he drew himself a cup of coffee, finding hot milk, cream and sugar crystals at hand. “I never saw a cheap joint where you could fix it yourself, before,” he said, — and suspiciously tasted the mixture.
“By jing! That’s coffee!” he cried in surprise. “There’s no scum on the milk, and the cream’s cream! Five cents! She won’t get rich on this.”
Then he applied himself to his “No. 1” sandwich, and his determined expression gave way to one of pleasure. “Why that’s bread — real bread! I believe she made it herself!”
She did in truth, — she and Julianna with Hector as general assistant. The big oven was filled several times every morning: the fresh rolls disappeared at breakfast and supper, the fresh bread was packed in the lunch pails, and the stale bread was even now melting away in large bites behind the smiling mouths and mustaches of many men. Perfect bread, excellent butter, and “What’s the filling I’d like to know?” More than one inquiring-minded patron split his sandwich to add sight to taste, but few could be sure of the flavorsome contents, fatless, gritless, smooth and even, covering the entire surface, the last mouthful as perfect as the first. Some were familiar, some new, all were delicious.
The six sandwiches were five cents, the cup of coffee five, and the little “drop cakes,” sweet and spicy, were two for five. Every man spent fifteen cents, some of them more; and many took away small cakes in paper bags, if there were any left.
“I don’t see how you can do it, and make a profit,” urged Mr. Eltwood, making a pastorial call. “They are so good you know!”
Diantha smiled cheerfully. “That’s because all your ideas are based on what we call ‘domestic economy,’ which is domestic waste. I buy in large quantities at wholesale rates, and my cook with her little helper, the two maids, and my own share of the work, of course, provides for the lot. Of course one has to know how.”
“Whenever did you find — or did you create? — those heavenly sandwiches?” he asked.
“I have to thank my laundress for part of that success,” she said. “She’s a Dane, and it appears that the Danes are so fond of sandwiches that, in large establishments, they have a ‘sandwich kitchen’ to prepare them. It is quite a bit of work, but they are good and inexpensive. There is no limit to the variety.”
As a matter of fact this lunch business paid well, and led to larger things.
The girl’s methods were simple and so organized as to make one hand wash the other. Her house had some twenty-odd bedrooms, full accommodations for kitchen and laundry work on a large scale, big dining, dancing, and reception rooms, and broad shady piazzas on the sides. Its position on a corner near the business part of the little city, and at the foot of the hill crowned with so many millionaires and near millionaires as could get land there, offered many advantages, and every one was taken.
The main part of the undertaking was a House Worker’s Union; a group of thirty girls, picked and trained. These, previously working out as servants, had received six dollars a week “and found.” They now worked an agreed number of hours, were paid on a basis by the hour or day, and “found” themselves. Each had her own room, and the broad porches and ball room were theirs, except when engaged for dances and meetings of one sort and another.
It was a stirring year’s work, hard but exciting, and the only difficulty which really worried Diantha was the same that worried the average housewife — the accounts.
CHAPTER XI. THE POWER OF THE SCREW.
Your car is too big for one person to stir —
Your chauffeur is a little man, too;
Yet he lifts that machine, does the little chauffeur,
By the power of a gentle jackscrew.
Diantha worked.
For all her employees she demanded a ten-hour day, she worked fourteen; rising at six and not getting to bed till eleven, when her charges were all safely in their rooms for the night.
They were all up at five-thirty or thereabouts, breakfasting at six, and the girls off in time to reach their various places by seven. Their day was from 7 A. M. to 8.30 P. M., with half an hour out, from 11.30 to twelve, for their lunch; and three hours, between 2.20 and 5.30, for their own time, including their tea. Then they worked again from 5.30 to 8.30, on the dinner and the dishes, and then they came home to a pleasant nine o’clock supper, and had all hour to dance or rest before the 10.30 bell for bed time.
Special friends and “cousins” often came home with them, and frequently shared the supper — for a quarter — and the dance for nothing.
It was no light matter in the first place to keep twenty girls contented with such a regime, and working with the steady excellence required, and in the second place to keep twenty employers contented with them. There were failures on both sides; half a dozen families gave up the plan, and it took time to replace them; and three girls had to be asked to resign before the year was over. But most of them had been in training in the summer, and had listened for months to Diantha’s earnest talks to the clubs, with good results.
“Remember we are not doing this for ourselves alone,” she would say to them. “Our experiment is going to make this kind of work easier for all home workers everywhere. You may not like it at first, but neither did you like the old way. It will grow easier as we get used to it; and we must keep the rules, because we made them!”
She laboriously composed a neat little circular, distributed it widely, and kept a pile in her lunch room for people to take.
It read thus:
UNION HOUSE
Food and Service.
General Housework by the week..... $10.00
General Housework by the day....... $2.00
Ten hours work a day, and furnish their own food.
Additional labor by the hour....... $.20
Special service for entertainments, maids and waitresses,
by the h
our..........$.25
Catering for entertainments.
Delicacies for invalids.
Lunches packed and delivered.
Caffeteria... 12 to 2
What annoyed the young manager most was the uncertainty and irregularity involved in her work, the facts varying considerably from her calculations.
In the house all ran smoothly. Solemn Mrs. Thorvald did the laundry work for thirty-five — by the aid of her husband and a big mangle for the “flat work.” The girls’ washing was limited. “You have to be reasonable about it,” Diantha had explained to them. “Your fifty cents covers a dozen pieces — no more. If you want more you have to pay more, just as your employers do for your extra time.”
This last often happened. No one on the face of it could ask more than ten hours of the swift, steady work given by the girls at but a fraction over 14 cents an hour. Yet many times the housekeeper was anxious for more labor on special days; and the girls, unaccustomed to the three free hours in the afternoon, were quite willing to furnish it, thus adding somewhat to their cash returns.
They had a dressmaking class at the club afternoons, and as Union House boasted a good sewing machine, many of them spent the free hours in enlarging their wardrobes. Some amused themselves with light reading, a few studied, others met and walked outside. The sense of honest leisure grew upon them, with its broadening influence; and among her thirty Diantha found four or five who were able and ambitious, and willing to work heartily for the further development of the business.
Her two housemaids were specially selected. When the girls were out of the house these two maids washed the breakfast dishes with marvelous speed, and then helped Diantha prepare for the lunch. This was a large undertaking, and all three of them, as well as Julianna and Hector worked at it until some six or eight hundred sandwiches were ready, and two or three hundred little cakes.
Diantha had her own lunch, and then sat at the receipt of custom during the lunch hour, making change and ordering fresh supplies as fast as needed.
The two housemaids had a long day, but so arranged that it made but ten hours work, and they had much available time of their own. They had to be at work at 5:30 to set the table for six o’clock breakfast, and then they were at it steadily, with the dining rooms to “do,” and the lunch to get ready, until 11:30, when they had an hour to eat and rest. From 12:30 to 4 o’clock they were busy with the lunch cups, the bed-rooms, and setting the table for dinner; but after that they had four hours to themselves, until the nine o’clock supper was over, and once more they washed dishes for half an hour. The caffeteria used only cups and spoons; the sandwiches and cakes were served on paper plates.
In the hand-cart methods of small housekeeping it is impossible to exact the swift precision of such work, but not in the standardized tasks and regular hours of such an establishment as this.
Diantha religiously kept her hour at noon, and tried to keep the three in the afternoon; but the employer and manager cannot take irresponsible rest as can the employee. She felt like a most inexperienced captain on a totally new species of ship, and her paper plans looked very weak sometimes, as bills turned out to be larger than she had allowed for, or her patronage unaccountably dwindled. But if the difficulties were great, the girl’s courage was greater. “It is simply a big piece of work,” she assured herself, “and may be a long one, but there never was anything better worth doing. Every new business has difficulties, I mustn’t think of them. I must just push and push and push — a little more every day.”
And then she would draw on all her powers to reason with, laugh at, and persuade some dissatisfied girl; or, hardest of all, to bring in a new one to fill a vacancy.
She enjoyed the details of her lunch business, and studied it carefully; planning for a restaurant a little later. Her bread was baked in long cylindrical closed pans, and cut by machinery into thin even slices, not a crust wasted; for they were ground into crumbs and used in the cooking.
The filling for her sandwiches was made from fish, flesh, and fowl; from cheese and jelly and fruit and vegetables; and so named or numbered that the general favorites were gradually determined.
Mr. Thaddler chatted with her over the counter, as far as she would allow it, and discoursed more fully with his friends on the verandah.
“Porne,” he said, “where’d that girl come from anyway? She’s a genius, that’s what she is; a regular genius.”
“She’s all that,” said Mr. Porne, “and a benefactor to humanity thrown in. I wish she’d start her food delivery, though. I’m tired of those two Swedes already. O — come from? Up in Jopalez, Inca County, I believe.”
“New England stock I bet,” said Mr. Thaddler. “Its a damn shame the way the women go on about her.”
“Not all of them, surely,” protested Mr. Porne.
“No, not all of ‘em, — but enough of ’em to make mischief, you may be sure. Women are the devil, sometimes.”
Mr. Porne smiled without answer, and Mr. Thaddler went sulking away — a bag of cakes bulging in his pocket.
The little wooden hotel in Jopalez boasted an extra visitor a few days later. A big red faced man, who strolled about among the tradesmen, tried the barber’s shop, loafed in the post office, hired a rig and traversed the length and breadth of the town, and who called on Mrs. Warden, talking real estate with her most politely in spite of her protestation and the scornful looks of the four daughters; who bought tobacco and matches in the grocery store, and sat on the piazza thereof to smoke, as did other gentlemen of leisure.
Ross Warden occasionally leaned at the door jamb, with folded arms. He never could learn to be easily sociable with ranchmen and teamsters. Serve them he must, but chat with them he need not. The stout gentleman essayed some conversation, but did not get far. Ross was polite, but far from encouraging, and presently went home to supper, leaving a carrot-haired boy to wait upon his lingering customers.
“Nice young feller enough,” said the stout gentleman to himself, “but raised on ramrods. Never got ’em from those women folks of his, either. He has a row to hoe!” And he departed as he had come.
Mr. Eltwood turned out an unexpectedly useful friend to Diantha. He steered club meetings and “sociables” into her large rooms, and as people found how cheap and easy it was to give parties that way, they continued the habit. He brought his doctor friends to sample the lunch, and they tested the value of Diantha’s invalid cookery, and were more than pleased.
Hungry tourists were wholly without prejudice, and prized her lunches for their own sake. They descended upon the caffeteria in chattering swarms, some days, robbing the regular patrons of their food, and sent sudden orders for picnic lunches that broke in upon the routine hours of the place unmercifully.
But of all her patrons, the families of invalids appreciated Diantha’s work the most. Where a little shack or tent was all they could afford to live in, or where the tiny cottage was more than filled with the patient, attending relative, and nurse, this depot of supplies was a relief indeed.
A girl could be had for an hour or two; or two girls, together, with amazing speed, could put a small house in dainty order while the sick man lay in his hammock under the pepper trees; and be gone before he was fretting for his bed again. They lived upon her lunches; and from them, and other quarters, rose an increasing demand for regular cooked food.
“Why don’t you go into it at once?” urged Mrs. Weatherstone.
“I want to establish the day service first,” said Diantha. “It is a pretty big business I find, and I do get tired sometimes. I can’t afford to slip up, you know. I mean to take it up next fall, though.”
“All right. And look here; see that you begin in first rate shape. I’ve got some ideas of my own about those food containers.”
They discussed the matter more than once, Diantha most reluctant to take any assistance; Mrs. Weatherstone determined that she should.
“I feel like a big investor already,” she said. “I don’
t think even you realize the money there is in this thing! You are interested in establishing the working girls, and saving money and time for the housewives. I am interested in making money out of it — honestly! It would be such a triumph!”
“You’re very good—” Diantha hesitated.
“I’m not good. I’m most eagerly and selfishly interested. I’ve taken a new lease of life since knowing you, Diantha Bell! You see my father was a business man, and his father before him — I like it. There I was, with lots of money, and not an interest in life! Now? — why, there’s no end to this thing, Diantha! It’s one of the biggest businesses on earth — if not the biggest!”
“Yes — I know,” the girl answered. “But its slow work. I feel the weight of it more than I expected. There’s every reason to succeed, but there’s the combined sentiment of the whole world to lift — it’s as heavy as lead.”
“Heavy! Of course it’s heavy! The more fun to lift it! You’ll do it, Diantha, I know you will, with that steady, relentless push of yours. But the cooked food is going to be your biggest power, and you must let me start it right. Now you listen to me, and make Mrs. Thaddler eat her words!”
Mrs. Thaddler’s words would have proved rather poisonous, if eaten. She grew more antagonistic as the year advanced. Every fault that could be found in the undertaking she pounced upon and enlarged; every doubt that could be cast upon it she heavily piled up; and her opposition grew more rancorous as Mr. Thaddler enlarged in her hearing upon the excellence of Diantha’s lunches and the wonders of her management.
“She’s picked a bunch o’ winners in those girls of hers,” he declared to his friends. “They set out in the morning looking like a flock of sweet peas — in their pinks and whites and greens and vi’lets, — and do more work in an hour than the average slavey can do in three, I’m told.”
It was a pretty sight to see those girls start out. They had a sort of uniform, as far as a neat gingham dress went, with elbow sleeves, white ruffled, and a Dutch collar; a sort of cross between a nurses dress and that of “La Chocolataire;” but colors were left to taste. Each carried her apron and a cap that covered the hair while cooking and sweeping; but nothing that suggested the black and white livery of the regulation servant.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 13