CHAPTER X
[Patience and the Waiter.]
The slowest waiter I know is the British railway refreshment-room waiter.
His very breathing--regular, harmonious, penetrating, instinct as it is with all the better attributes of a well-preserved grandfather's clock--conveys suggestion of dignity and peace. He is a huge, impressive person. There emanates from him an atmosphere of Lotusland. The otherwise unattractive refreshment-room becomes an oasis of repose amid the turmoil of a fretful world. All things conspire to aid him: the ancient joints, ranged side by side like corpses in a morgue, each one decently hidden under its white muslin shroud, whispering of death and decay; the dish of dead flies, thoughtfully placed in the centre of the table; the framed advertisements extolling the virtues of heavy beers and stouts, of weird champagnes, emanating from haunted-looking chateaux, situate-- if one may judge from the illustration--in the midst of desert lands; the sleep-inviting buzz of the bluebottles.
The spirit of the place steals over you. On entering, with a quarter of an hour to spare, your idea was a cutlet and a glass of claret. In the face of the refreshment-room waiter, the notion appears frivolous, not to say un-English. You order cold beef and pickles, with a pint of bitter in a tankard. To win the British waiter's approval, you must always order beer in a tankard. The British waiter, in his ideals, is mediaeval. There is a Shakespearean touch about a tankard. A soapy potato will, of course, be added. Afterwards a ton of cheese and a basin of rabbit's food floating in water (the British salad) will be placed before you. You will work steadily through the whole, anticipating the somnolence that will subsequently fall upon you with a certain amount of satisfaction. It will serve to dispel the last lingering regret at the reflection that you will miss your appointment, and suffer thereby serious inconvenience if not positive loss. These things are of the world-- the noisy, tiresome world you have left without.
To the English traveller, the foreign waiter in the earlier stages of his career is a burden and a trial. When he is complete--when he really can talk English I rejoice in him. When I object to him is when his English is worse than my French or German, and when he will, for his own educational purposes, insist, nevertheless, that the conversation shall be entirely in English. I would he came to me some other time. I would so much rather make it after dinner or, say, the next morning. I hate giving lessons during meal times.
Besides, to a man with feeble digestion, this sort of thing can lead to trouble. One waiter I met at an hotel in Dijon knew very little English--about as much as a poll parrot. The moment I entered the salle-a-manger he started to his feet.
"Ah! You English!" he cried.
"Well, what about us?" I answered. It was during the period of the Boer War. I took it he was about to denounce the English nation generally. I was looking for something to throw at him.
"You English--you Englishman, yes," he repeated.
And then I understood he had merely intended a question. I owned up that I was, and accused him in turn of being a Frenchman. He admitted it. Introductions, as it were, thus over, I thought I would order dinner. I ordered it in French. I am not bragging of my French, I never wanted to learn French. Even as a boy, it was more the idea of others than of myself. I learnt as little as possible. But I have learnt enough to live in places where they can't, or won't, speak anything else. Left to myself, I could have enjoyed a very satisfactory dinner. I was tired with a long day's journey, and hungry. They cook well at this hotel. I had been looking forward to my dinner for hours and hours. I had sat down in my imagination to a consomme bisque, sole au gratin, a poulet saute, and an omelette au fromage.
[Waiterkind in the making.]
It is wrong to let one's mind dwell upon carnal delights; I see that now. At the time I was mad about it. The fool would not even listen to me. He had got it into his garlic-sodden brain that all Englishmen live on beef, and nothing but beef. He swept aside all my suggestions as though they had been the prattlings of a foolish child.
"You haf nice biftek. Not at all done. Yes?"
"No, I don't," I answered. "I don't want what the cook of a French provincial hotel calls a biftek. I want something to eat. I want--" Apparently, he understood neither English nor French.
"Yes, yes," he interrupted cheerfully, "with pottitoes."
"With what?" I asked. I thought for the moment he was suggesting potted pigs' feet in the nearest English he could get to it.
"Pottito," he repeated; "boil pottito. Yes? And pell hell."
I felt like telling him to go there; I suppose he meant "pale ale." It took me about five minutes to get that beefsteak out of his head. By the time I had done it, I did not care what I had for dinner. I took pot-du-jour and veal. He added, on his own initiative, a thing that looked like a poultice. I did not try the taste of it. He explained it was "plum poodeen." I fancy he had made it himself.
This fellow