Van Bibber’s man Walters was
the envy and admiration of his friends. He was
English, of course, and he had been trained in the
household of the Marquis Bendinot, and had travelled,
in his younger days, as the valet of young Lord Upton.
He was now rather well on in years, although it would
have been impossible to say just how old he was.
Walters had a dignified and repellent air about him,
and he brushed his hair in such a way as to conceal
his baldness.
And when a smirking, slavish youth
with red cheeks and awkward gestures turned up in
Van Bibber’s livery, his friends were naturally
surprised, and asked how he had come to lose Walters.
Van Bibber could not say exactly, at least he could
not rightly tell whether he had dismissed Walters
or Walters had dismissed himself. The facts of
the unfortunate separation were like this:
Van Bibber gave a great many dinners
during the course of the season at Delmonico’s,
dinners hardly formal enough to require a private
room, and yet too important to allow of his running
the risk of keeping his guests standing in the hall
waiting for a vacant table. So he conceived the
idea of sending Walters over about half-past six to
keep a table for him. As everybody knows, you
can hold a table yourself at Delmonico’s for
any length of time until the other guests arrive,
but the rule is very strict about servants. Because,
as the head waiter will tell you, if servants were
allowed to reserve a table during the big rush at
seven o’clock, why not messenger boys? And
it would certainly never do to have half a dozen large
tables securely held by minute messengers while the
hungry and impatient waited their turn at the door.
But Walters looked as much like a
gentleman as did many of the diners; and when he seated
himself at the largest table and told the waiter to
serve for a party of eight or ten; he did it with such
an air that the head waiter came over himself and
took the orders. Walters knew quite as much about
ordering a dinner as did his master; and when Van Bibber
was too tired to make out the menu, Walters would look
over the card himself and order the proper wines and
side dishes; and with such a carelessly severe air
and in such a masterly manner did he discharge this
high function that the waiters looked upon him with
much respect.
But respect even from your equals
and the satisfaction of having your fellow-servants
mistake you for a member of the Few Hundred are not
enough. Walters wanted more. He wanted the
further satisfaction of enjoying the delicious dishes
he had ordered; of sitting as a coequal with the people
for whom he had kept a place; of completing the deception
he practised only up to the point where it became most
interesting.
It certainly was trying to have to
rise with a subservient and unobtrusive bow and glide
out unnoticed by the real guests when they arrived;
to have to relinquish the feast just when the feast
should begin. It would not be pleasant, certainly,
to sit for an hour at a big empty table, ordering
dishes fit only for epicures, and then, just as the
waiters bore down with the Little Neck clams, so nicely
iced and so cool and bitter-looking, to have to rise
and go out into the street to a table d’hote
around the corner.
This was Walters’s state of
mind when Mr. Van Bibber told him for the hundredth
time to keep a table for him for three at Delmonico’s.
Walters wrapped his severe figure in a frock-coat and
brushed his hair, and allowed himself the dignity
of a walking-stick. He would have liked to act
as a substitute in an evening dress-suit, but Van
Bibber would not have allowed it. So Walters walked
over to Delmonico’s and took a table near a
window, and said that the other gentlemen would arrive
later. Then he looked at his watch and ordered
the dinner. It was just the sort of dinner he
would have ordered had he ordered it for himself at
some one else’s expense. He suggested Little
Neck clams first, with chablis, and pea-soup,
and caviare on toast, before the oyster crabs, with
Johannisberger Cabinet; then an entree of calves’
brains and rice; then no roast, but a bird, cold asparagus
with French dressing, Camembert cheese, and Turkish
coffee. As there were to be no women, he omitted
the sweets and added three other wines to follow the
white wine. It struck him as a particularly well-chosen
dinner, and the longer he sat and thought about it
the more he wished he were to test its excellence.
And then the people all around him were so bright
and happy, and seemed to be enjoying what they had
ordered with such a refinement of zest that he felt
he would give a great deal could he just sit there
as one of them for a brief hour.
At that moment the servant deferentially
handed him a note which a messenger boy had brought.
It said:
“Dinner off called out
town send clothes and things after me to
Young’s Boston.
Van Bibber.”
Walter rose involuntarily, and then
sat still to think about it. He would have to
countermand the dinner which he had ordered over half
an hour before, and he would have to explain who he
was to those other servants who had always regarded
him as such a great gentleman. It was very hard.
And then Walters was tempted.
He was a very good servant, and he knew his place
as only an English servant can, and he had always accepted
it, but to-night he was tempted and he fell.
He met the waiter’s anxious look with a grave
smile.
“The other gentlemen will not
be with me to-night,” he said, glancing at the
note. “But I will dine here as I intended.
You can serve for one.”
That was perhaps the proudest night
in the history of Walters. He had always felt
that he was born out of his proper sphere, and to-night
he was assured of it. He was a little nervous
at first, lest some of Van Bibber’s friends
should come in and recognize him; but as the dinner
progressed and the warm odor of the dishes touched
his sense, and the rich wines ran through his veins,
and the women around him smiled and bent and moved
like beautiful birds of beautiful plumage, he became
content, grandly content; and he half closed his eyes
and imagined he was giving a dinner to everybody in
the place. Vain and idle thoughts came to him
and went again, and he eyed the others about him calmly
and with polite courtesy, as they did him, and he felt
that if he must later pay for this moment it was worth
the paying.
Then he gave the waiter a couple of
dollars out of his own pocket and wrote Van Bibber’s
name on the check, and walked in state into the cafe,
where he ordered a green mint and a heavy, black, and
expensive cigar, and seated himself at the window,
where he felt that he should always have sat if the
fates had been just. The smoke hung in light
clouds about him, and the lights shone and glistened
on the white cloths and the broad shirt-fronts of
the smart young men and distinguished foreign-looking
older men at the surrounding tables.
And then, in the midst of his dreamings,
he heard the soft, careless drawl of his master, which
sounded at that time and in that place like the awful
voice of a condemning judge. Van Bibber pulled
out a chair and dropped into it. His side was
towards Walters, so that he did not see him.
He had some men with him, and he was explaining how
he had missed his train and had come back to find
that one of the party had eaten the dinner without
him, and he wondered who it could be; and then turning
easily in his seat he saw Walters with the green mint
and the cigar, trembling behind a copy of the London
Graphic.
“Walters!” said Van Bibber, “what
are you doing here?”
Walters looked his guilt and rose
stiffly. He began with a feeble “If you
please, sir ”
“Go back to my rooms and wait
for me there,” said Van Bibber, who was too
decent a fellow to scold a servant in public.
Walters rose and left the half-finished
cigar and the mint with the ice melting in it on the
table. His one evening of sublimity was over,
and he walked away, bending before the glance of his
young master and the smiles of his master’s
friends.
When Van Bibber came back he found
on his dressing-table a note from Walters stating
that he could not, of course, expect to remain longer
in his service, and that he left behind him the twenty-eight
dollars which the dinner had cost.
“If he had only gone off with
all my waistcoats and scarf-pins, I’d have liked
it better,” said Van Bibber, “than his
leaving me cash for infernal dinner. Why, a servant
like Walters is worth twenty-eight-dollar dinners twice
a day.”