From the Angle of Seventeen

by Eden Phillpotts

It was like this: the waiter cruised round among the customers and collected orders for soup. Two men ordered ox-tail soup, three had mock-turtle soup, Mr. Blades decided for vegetable soup and I had pea-soup. Well, of course, that was far too much to shout down the tube, so the genius of a waiter said, “Two ox, three mocks, a veg, and a pea!” And there you were! In less than no time the various soups appeared, and the funniest thing of all to me was, that nobody saw anything funny about it. But I roared—I couldn’t help it, and much to my regret annoyed Mr. Blades, who told me not to play the fool where he was known. After a time I steadied down and made an ample meal; and afterwards it transpired that it was generally the custom of Mr. Blades to play a couple of games of dominoes with some of his friends, who lunched at the same place. But, though he promised to teach me, it was impossible that day owing to my being quite unsteadied and helpless and imbecile with laughing just at the end of the lunch.

It was, I need hardly say, the amazing waiter. He saw that he had frightfully amused me and perhaps thought he would get an extra tip for being so wonderful. Which he did do, for I gave him sixpence and made Mr. Blades angry again.

But the waiter deserved a pound, for when two men ordered Gorgonzola cheese and another man ordered a currant dumpling and three others wanted kidneys on toast, he excelled himself by screaming down to the kitchen these memorable words:

“Two Gorgons, a dump, and three kids!” Then he winked at me and I simply rolled about helplessly and wept with laughing. This must have been one of that glorious waiter’s greatest efforts, I think, because several other quite elderly men laughed too.

He was called “William,” and I knew him well in a week. He had a rich fund of humour, but was very honest and hard-working and a Londoner to the backbone. He hated foreign waiters and said that the glitter of his shiny hair was produced by a little fat from the grill well rubbed in every morning. No barber’s stuff could touch it, he said, and if it made him smell like a mutton chop, who thought the worse of him for that? He expected twopence after each luncheon, and if any stranger gave him less, he made screamingly funny remarks. In his evenings he waited at the banquets of the City Companies, which are the most stupendous feeds the world has ever known since Nero’s times; and at these dinners he often heard State and other secrets, which he said would have been worth a Jew’s eye to him if he had not been an honest man. He didn’t, of course, say these things as if they were meant to be true. Simple people no doubt would have believed them, but I soon got to notice that he accompanied many of his most remarkable statements with a wink, which disarmed criticism, as the saying is. He was a good man at heart and had a wife at home and also a lame daughter who would never walk; so, though one would not have thought it, he had his trials. In fact nearly everybody I met, when I got to know them, told me about distressing things which they hid from the world. Even Mr. Blades, who seemed to preserve the even tenor of his way with great skill, confessed to me that he had a brother very different from himself and evidently very inferior in every way. In fact it looked to me, though of course I never hinted at such a thing, that the brother of Mr. Blades must have been rapidly sinking into a shady customer of the deadliest sort.

Really for the moment, after I took to proper lunches, it seemed as if I was the only man in the office with no private worries.

VI

I found that the clerks at the Apollo Fire Office were much more interesting than the work, and I told Mr. Blades so on an occasion when with his usual great generosity he had given me some useful help, because I was behind-hand and had forgotten what I ought to have remembered. But that I should find the clerks more interesting than the work did not please Mr. Blades, and he thought badly of the idea.

“If you are going to be an insurance clerk, the first thing is to master the insurance business,” he said, very truly and wisely to me; and then it was that I told him of my great ambition to become an actor in the future. He instantly disapproved of it.

“There was a clerk in this office in the past, and he went on the stage and did well,” he admitted; “but he was exceptional in every way. He was older than you and had a very remarkably handsome face.”