The gait of an old waiter can best be described as gingery. It is a kind of gouty shuffle, painful, rheumatic, and yet expertly nimble, too, as if the man has learned by every process of experience to save his feet. It is the nimbleness that comes from years of “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” or of “Oui, monsieur. Je viens. Toute de suite.” It is the gait of service, of despatch, of incessant haste to be about one’s orders, and somehow the whole soul and mind and character of the waiter is in it.
If one wishes an instant insight into the emotional and spiritual differences between the race of waiters and the race of policemen, all one needs to do is to observe the gaits of each. Compare a waiter as he approaches a table at the peremptory command of an impatient customer, and a policeman, whether in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin, as he approaches the scene of a disorder or accident. A man is lying stretched out on the pavement, let us say: he has had a heart attack, or has been struck by a motor-car, or has been assaulted and beaten by thugs. People are standing round in a circle. Watch the policeman as he comes up. Does he hurry? Does he rush to the scene? Does he come forward with the quick, shuffling, eager, and solicitous movement of the waiter? He does not. He advances deliberately, ponderously, with a heavy and flat-footed tread, taking the scene in slowly as he approaches, with an appraising and unrelenting look. He is coming not to take orders but to give them. He is coming to assume command of the situation, to investigate, to disperse the crowd, to do the talking, and not to be talked to. His whole bearing expresses a certain primitive brutality of vested authority, as well as all the other related mental and spiritual qualities that proceed from the exercise of licensed power. And in all these things which issue from his own peculiar vision of life and of the world, he is almost the exact reverse of the waiter.
Since this is true, can anyone doubt that waiters and policemen belong to separate races? Does it not follow that a French waiter is more closely akin to a German waiter than to a French gendarme?
Mynheer Bendien had attracted George’s interest from the first. It was not merely that he was Dutch. That fact was unmistakable. He had a Halsian floridity, a Halsian heartiness and gusto, a Halsian heaviness—a kind of Dutch grossness that is quite different from German grossness in that it is mixed with a certain delicacy, or rather smallness. This delicacy or smallness is most often evident in the expression and shape of the mouth. So, now, with Mynheer Bendien. His lip was full and pouting, but also a little prim and smug. It was the characteristic Dutch lip—the lip of a small and cautious people, with a very good notion about which side their bread is buttered on. In any town throughout Holland one can see them behind the shuttered windows of their beautiful and delicate houses—see them quietly and privily enjoying the very best of everything and smacking those full, pouting, sensual little lips together.
Holland is a wonderful little country, and the Dutch are a wonderful little people. Just the same it is a little country, they are a little people, and George did not like little countries or little people. For in the look of those little, fat, wet, pouting mouths there is also something cautious and self-satisfied, something that kept nicely out of war in 1914 while its neighbours were bleeding to death, something that feathered its nest and fattened its purse at the expense of dying men, something that maintained itself beautifully clean, beautifully prim, and beautifully content to live very quietly and simply in those charming, beautiful houses, without any show or fuss whatever upon the best of everything.