Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870

Excerpt

CHAPTER XI.—(Continued.)

BLADAMS ushered in two waiters—one Irish and one German—who wore that look of blended long-suffering and extreme weariness of everything eatable, which, in this country, seems inevitably characteristic of the least personal agency in the serving of meals. (There may be lands in which the not essentially revolting art of cookery can be practiced without engendering irritable gloom in the bosoms of its practitioners, and the spreading of tables does not necessarily entail upon the actors therein a despondency almost sinister; but the American kitchen is the home of beings who never laugh, save in that sardonic bitterness of spirit which grimly mocks the climax of human endurance in the burning of the soup; and the waiter of the American dining-room can scarcely place a dish upon the board without making it eloquent of a blighted existence.) Having dashed the stews upon the reading-table before the fire, and rescued a drowning fly[1] from one of them with his least appetizing thumb-nail, the melancholy Irish attendant polished the spoons with his pocket-handkerchief and hurled them on either side of the plates. Perceiving that his German associate, in listlessly throwing the mugs of ale upon the table, had spilled some of the liquid, he hurriedly wiped the stain away with EDWIN DROOD'S worsted muffler, and dried the sides of the glasses upon the napkin intended for Mr. DIBBLE'S use. There was something of the wild resources of despair, too, in this man's frequent ghostly dispatch of the German after articles forgotten in the first trip, such as another cracker, the cover of the pepper-cruet, the salt, and one more pinch of butter; and so greatly did his apparent dejection of soul increase as each supplementary luxury arrived and was recklessly slammed into its place, that, upon finally retiring from the room with his associate, his utter hopelessness of aspect gave little suggestion of the future proud political preferment to which, by virtue of his low estate and foreign birth, he was assuredly destined.

[Footnote 1: In anticipation of any critical objection to the introduction of a living fly in December, the Adapter begs leave to suspect than an anachronism is always legitimate in a work of fiction when a point is to be made. Thus, in Chapter VIII of the inimitable "NICHOLAS NICKLEBY," Mr. SQUEERS tells NICHOLAS that morning has come, "and ready iced, too;" and that "the pump's froze," while, only a few pages later, in the same chapter, one of Mr. SQUEERS' scholars is spoken of as "weeding the garden."]

The whole scene had been a reproachful commentary upon the stiff American system of discouraging waiters from making remarks upon the weather, inquiring the cost of one's new coat, conferring with one upon the general prospects of his business for the season, or from indulging in any of the various light conversational diversions whereby barbers, Fulton street tailors, and other depressed gymnasts, are occasionally and wholesomely relieved from the misery of brooding over their equally dispiriting avocations....