The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1883-05-19
A SINGULAR SOCIAL STUDY.
The London Bar-Maid's FIirtations,
and the Hard Life She Leads.
Fine Clothes and Diamonds on Small Sal
ary-HOw She Traps Her Will
ing Victims.

not often. If she has been, she has usually
gotten bravely oyer it. Not but that she is
square enough for London, but she is bad
investment in the matrimonial market. where
there are more of her offering than is bid for.
She usually wears a black dress and short,
banged hair. A writer in the Wichita Times
says girl with her hair banged looks like an
unruly COW with a board over her face. Well,
fortunately the COW is behind the fence in
the London bar, and she don't butt it down
to increase the danger of the honestly thirsty
visitor who quaffs his slowly furnished
glass in enjoyment, harshly quail
fed with the pertness of the creature
who serves it. The bar-maid comes from
nobody knows where and conceals her re-
moval from active service in the same de-
scription OF mystery. She never looks happy
and her lot, like the policemen in the Pirates
of Penzance," is not a happy one. She will
not make haste, she will get the wrong drink
before the wrong drinker and the wrong
change before the man who never treats.
She is assumptive of a dignity that rests
upon her uneasily; free of language, which
she stabs with ungrammatical sentences and
tortures with approximations scornful of
hattery that does not elevate her to the first
place in the gallery of British beauties, re-
sentful of ordinary business culture, tardy in
service, impairment in reply and insolent in
demeanor. Well, she has cause. She is the
subject of conflicting treatments. One man
plaits her hair, another pulls it-metaphor-
ically, / mean. She is treated by some shall
low pated youth and bepimpied old men,
who deem themselves regular dogs, as a
queen and paid by her employer pittance
that makes death by slow starvation assume
the charming prospect of bloated luxury aud
pampered epicurianism.
But she is q human creature, and want to
tell you about her in plain fashion. She
is an important element in this curiousy-
constituted London society of ours, The
maximum salary for a bar-maid is twelve
shillings week. and her average time on
duty is thirteen hours day. Spiers d Pond,
who employ over 1000 girls, pay this sum
and exact this service, giving them free one
meal day and two black alapaea dresses a
year. They may not wear colors, but they
may wear diamonds How can they? Don't
ask me; but the other night in the Criterion
sat at table opposite a bar where there are
twelve bar-maids, and they all had diamonds,
some OF them great big solitaires. They
don't wear sealskin jackets or ulsters behind
the bar but lots of them have them, and to
see some of them in the stalls at the theater
is imposing. But the Criterion bar-mad is
not representative, nor are the handsome,
supercilious young women you meet at the
Grand Hotel, or at the principal rail- way sta
tons. Nor is she fairly represented at the
Gayety The Gayety is a great loafing place
for actors and the sort of well dressed, i'm
pecunious ready-to-drink young man, who
feels that not to visit the Gayety every day
Is 10 justify him in crying Diem perdi," like
Cesar
Sometimes he comes there in an extreme
condition OF continued although normal i'm
peeuniosity, He leans up against the edge
of the bar and says Good morning, dear"
The young woman replies according to her
character and her estimate of him. "a glass
of bitter" he adds laughingly. At the end
of half an hour he has been furnished the
glass. Atsome time during that interval,
having laid down two pence, he questions in
the softly uninterested query of youth
blase:
How is baby?'
Nicely. thank you," replies the anywhere
between-sixteen-and-th thirty five year-old in
FAINT.
And then the young man shells out, and
calls it life.
1t would be good thing for the bar-maid
If that we're all the kind of youth she had to
encounter Sometimes her customer has in
addition to this nature of desire to see life
a considerable sum of money.
Your night off dear?'
mo; tomorrow"
go to the theater?'
Eyes, if there's to be supper"
''Of course, there's to be supper"
but must have gloves"
''What sze?"
She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't say:
''Six and half, eight-button, please"
She goes to the theater with that young
man, she has supper with that young man.
and she wears gloves, too, but not six and a
half size. Fly young woman-she has
traded them or put them aside for future
sale of accumulated stock of the legitimate
tributes, which are an important factor in
her income.
CATCHING FORTUNES.
Now, it would astonish you if you could
know what sort of men come about these
women. The dwelling youth she must en-
dure, but she aims at better game and catches
1t in rich men of business and social position
who grow hopeful over drink or two and
court her assiduously, The record of her
career has been illumed with captves who
bore the quartered arms of the Hottest peer
age, and there are more bar-maids who have
been made my lady" than there have been
actresses. This is not strange, considering
the opportunities which the Young men
have. Spiers e. Pond have half a dozen
young women who have left their glasses and
napkins for the dignity of high life, and
may say with the same frankness and truth
that the record of the desertions
from their service is more fire.
quently marked by the absence of
better success for the poor creatures who
leave it. 1t was a casual talk with an en-
ployer of many bar-maids which led to this
letter, so in adding fact to impression, he
may be quoted as saving that of seventy-four
girls that entered his employ, one-ffth went
to pieces But" said he, my business is
peculiar" 1t is in four or five places largely
theatrical. As rule, the girl who seeks to
be bar-maid has aspirations toward the stage
She falls quickest to the prospect of a speedy
elevation to the estate of actress, and finds
no end of men who are ready to give her the
promise of that much-desired eminence. The
stage that she most frequently attains in such
case is the pave, and the theater of her life is
st. Johns Wood, Pimlico Leicester Square