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 pôt-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 is typical; you meet him everywhere abroad.  He translates your bill into English for you, calls ten centimes a penny, calculates twelve francs to the pound, and presses a handful of sous affectionately upon you as change for a napoleon.

The cheating waiter is common to all countries, though in Italy and Belgium he flourishes, perhaps, more than elsewhere.  But the British waiter, when detected, becomes surly—does not take it nicely.  The foreign waiter is amiable about it—bears no malice.  He is grieved, maybe, at your language, but that is because he is thinking of you—the possible effect of it upon your future.  To try and stop you, he offers you another four sous.  The story is told of a Frenchman who, not knowing the legal fare, adopted the plan of doling out pennies to a London cabman one at a time, continuing until the man looked satisfied.  Myself, I doubt the story.  From what I know of the London cabman, I can see him leaning down still, with out-stretched hand, the horse between the shafts long since dead, the cab chockfull of coppers, and yet no expression of satiety upon his face.

But the story would appear to have crossed the Channel, and to have commended itself to the foreign waiter—especially to the railway refreshment-room waiter.  He doles out sous to the traveller, one at a time, with the air of a man who is giving away the savings of a lifetime.  If, after five minutes or so, you still appear discontented he goes away quite suddenly.  You think he has gone to open another chest of half-pence, but when a quarter of an hour has passed and he does not reappear, you inquire about him amongst the other waiters.

A gloom at once falls upon them.  You have spoken of the very thing that has been troubling them.  He used to be a waiter here once—one might almost say until quite recently.  As to what has become of him—ah! there you have them.  If in the course of their chequered career they ever come across him, they will mention to him that you are waiting for him.  Meanwhile a stentorian-voiced official is shouting that your train is on the point of leaving.  You console yourself with the reflection that it might have been more.  It always might have been more; sometimes it is.