Short Fiction P. G. Wodehouse (good books to read in english .txt) 📖

the other was me. Jules came from Paris, and he was the greatest cook you ever seen. And me⁠—well, I was just come from ten years as waiter at the Guelph, and I won’t conceal it from you that I gave the place a tone. I gave Soho something to think about over its chop, believe me. It was a comedown in the world for me, maybe, after the Guelph, but what I said to myself was that, when you get a tip in Soho, it may be only tuppence, but you keep it; whereas at the Guelph about ninety-nine hundredths of it goes to helping to maintain some blooming head waiter in the style to which he has been accustomed. It was through my kind of harping on that fact that me and the Guelph parted company. The head waiter complained to the management the day I called him a fatheaded vampire.

Well, what with me and what with Jules, MacFarland’s⁠—it wasn’t Mac’s in them days⁠—began to get a move on. Old MacFarland, who knew a good man when he saw one and always treated me more like a brother than anything else, used to say to me, “Henry, if this keeps up, I’ll be able to send the boy to Oxford College”; until one day he changed it to, “Henry, I’m going to send the boy to Oxford College”; and next year, sure enough, off he went.

Katie was sixteen then, and she had just been given the cashier job, as a treat. She wanted to do something to help the old man, so he put her on a high chair behind a wire cage with a hole in it, and she gave the customers their change. And let me tell you, mister, that a man that wasn’t satisfied after he’d had me serve him a dinner cooked by Jules and then had a chat with Katie through the wire cage would have groused at Paradise. For she was pretty, was Katie, and getting prettier every day. I spoke to the boss about it. I said it was putting temptation in the girl’s way to set her up there right in the public eye, as it were. And he told me to hop it. So I hopped it.

Katie was wild about dancing. Nobody knew it till later, but all this while, it turned out, she was attending regular one of them schools. That was where she went to in the afternoons, when we all thought she was visiting girl friends. It all come out after, but she fooled us then. Girls are like monkeys when it comes to artfulness. She called me Uncle Bill, because she said the name Henry always reminded her of cold mutton. If it had been young Andy that had said it I’d have clumped him one; but he never said anything like that. Come to think of it, he never said anything much at all. He just thought a heap without opening his face.

So young Andy went off to college, and I said to him, “Now then, you young devil, you be a credit to us, or I’ll fetch you a clip when you come home.” And Katie said, “Oh, Andy, I shall miss you.” And Andy didn’t say nothing to me, and he didn’t say nothing to Katie, but he gave her a look, and later in the day I found her crying, and she said she’d got toothache, and I went round the corner to the chemist’s and brought her something for it.

It was in the middle of Andy’s second year at college that the old man had the stroke which put him out of business. He went down under it as if he’d been hit with an axe, and the doctor tells him he’ll never be able to leave his bed again.

So they sent for Andy, and he quit his college, and come back to London to look after the restaurant.

I was sorry for the kid. I told him so in a fatherly kind of way. And he just looked at me and says, “Thanks very much, Henry.”

“What must be must be,” I says. “Maybe, it’s all for the best. Maybe it’s better you’re here than in among all those young devils in your Oxford school what might be leading you astray.”

“If you would think less of me and more of your work, Henry,” he says, “perhaps that gentleman over there wouldn’t have to shout sixteen times for the waiter.”

Which, on looking into it, I found to be the case, and he went away without giving me no tip, which shows what you lose in a hard world by being sympathetic.

I’m bound to say that young Andy showed us all jolly quick that he hadn’t come home just to be an ornament about the place. There was exactly one boss in the restaurant, and it was him. It come a little hard at first to have to be respectful to a kid whose head you had spent many a happy hour clumping for his own good in the past; but he pretty soon showed me I could do it if I tried, and I done it. As for Jules and the two young fellers that had been taken on to help me owing to increase of business, they would jump through hoops and roll over if he just looked at them. He was a boy who liked his own way, was Andy, and, believe me, at MacFarland’s Restaurant he got it.

And then, when things had settled down into a steady jog, Katie took the bit in her teeth.

She done it quite quiet and unexpected one afternoon when there was only me and her and Andy in the place. And I don’t think either of them knew I was there, for I was taking an easy on a chair at the back, reading an evening paper.

She said, kind of quiet, “Oh, Andy.”

“Yes, darling,” he said.

And that was the first I knew that there