After that I moved as if in the midst of a grand dream. Was I actually in a dormitory, at a college? Was it true that in a quarter of an hour I should be trying to wait on a group of real students?
The dining-hall was a squat wooden bungalow with a great many windows in it. The front hall floor bent under my weight as I crossed it. I unlatched one of the double doors and viewed the roomful of tables with the dull reflector lamps hanging above them. White jacketed students were busy with plates and plated silver cutlery. Brock, himself in glorious white, came down the room with a word of greeting. I was introduced to the student-waiters, was told that I was on trial only, and that I should be carefully watched, as there were many trained waiters among the students who coveted the position. Brock indicated two tables near the door, the farthest away from the kitchen of all the tables.
“You will wait on them,” he said. “There will be ten to a table. When they come in, before the blessing, they will stand behind their chairs. You must go around, find out what they want to drink; hot water, tea or cold water, then you must go to the other end of the room, get one of the trays and fill it with twenty cups. Then you must get them served just as soon as you can. You will find plenty of chores to do when they are seated.”
With a wild, thumping heart, and with a maximum of terror, I heard the first of the students enter the outer hall. Brock stood at the opposite end of the room, near the slides that connected with the kitchen, his finger on a Sunday-school bell. The students, well-dressed young men and women, swept past me, crowded me, stared at me, stood at my tables; went to the different parts of the room chattering, bantering, laughing, and accosting one another familiarly with such abandon and effect that I felt like an intruder. No one spoke to me. The young men and women at my two tables commented about something in a low murmur. They cast doubting looks toward me.
For a minute I was in a panic, then, because I was tall, I could see Brock’s eyes telling me to do something. I went through the crowded aisles, around my tables, saying to each person, in a trembling, very English way,
“Will you ’ave ’ot, cold water, or tea, please?”
I received eighteen orders for hot water and tea and two orders for cold water. I came out from the ordeal of having addressed so many students and went perspiring to the upper end of the room where the urns and trays were. I put the weighty cups and the thick glasses on a tray the size of an ordinary five o’clock tea table, filled them by twisting the tray under the spigots of the urns, and with the weighty load raised as high as my long arms could exalt it, pushed my way nervously down the aisle, past the students whose backs were turned to me, and conscious that all the inquisitive and critical eyes in the world were watching me to see how I should manage. I was very fortunate in being able to squirm my way to the lower end of the room and to reach the vicinity of my own tables without accident. It helped me, too, to hear the students singing a hymn. It took their minds off me, the green mill boy trying to wait on college tables! Thus encouraged, I tried a bold thing, which I saw the other waiters doing. As there were no stand tables to rest our trays upon, while steadying mine against my body as it lay on the palm of my hand, I took off a cup of hot water from the lowered tray, and tried to reach the cup around the waist of the young woman who had called for hot water. The balance would have been maintained had not the person next to me suddenly drawn back, jolted the tray from my hand, and sent the hot liquids streaming down the skirts and shoes of those in the vicinity. There followed, too, the crash and thump as the heavy cups clattered to the floor. The two glasses splintered into bits, and while the students were sitting down, I found myself growing more and more conspicuous until the seated throng looked up from every part of the room, to see me furiously red, with tears gathering, and with untold chagrin over the mishap.
I waited, among the ruin, for Brock to come to me, get me by the scruff of the neck, hurl me outside to say,
“Get back to the mill. What right have you to pretend to know how to act among cultured people? You’re too green!”
I imagined, too, that the students at my table must be delegating one of their number to go to the head waiter to say,