90
JASCHA KESSLER
would begin aITlvmg by twelve o'clock, for a price. He sighed,
deeply, as he locked up once more, and headed upstairs to find
Gruber and to vindicate his efficiency as the steward, even under
such an unexpected, crowding and pushing, unkind, almost unfair
tide of fate.
Now the ldbby was crowded with those random groups of every
age, standing around after a too-full dinner to recover breath. In
their colorful Saturday night summer-sports and semiformal-play
clothes and flushed by the sun, they were like proud and besotted
kine of Bashan, and Acker felt ashamed for his white face shadowed
with black beard, his bald brow streaked with poor strands of hair
unthic~ened
by
salty
water, and his gray working clothes, crumpled
and creased and sweatpatched in their service. With his eyes cast
meekly down, he sidled along the back wall to the desk, hunting
Gruber by ear. The man was apparently not anywhere in the lobby,
where he certainly ought to have stationed himself, as any proper
manager would have done, seeing to it his guests could see him and
talk to him in case they might want something-which the type of
nuisances who frequent houses like the Metropole usually did: give
them pinkest salmon steak, and why not swordfish? give jellied
cold pike, and why not poached whitefish? Give, give, give; still
there is no end to their want! Neither was Gruber on the blued
concrete veranda-call this the
grande piazza du Metropole?–
where he saw only a number of the incompetent young and
the
childishly senescent rocking every which ways in the last dusky light.
Surely the globes could have been switched on by now so that
people shouldn't have to congregate in that arid, airless, dead
lobby? Acker went round the side of the building toward the pallid
rocky garden they called a patio. Noone was there,
if
you didn't
count Seymour that loutish children's waiter; and Seymour, Acker
noticed, was, as usual, sitting and eating, on either knee a full nap–
kin spread out, and the slit-eyed buffoon transferring bones–
chickenbones, chopbones, fishbones-from the one to the other
as
he stripped them. Also, there was a gallon can
by
his foot, from
which Acker saw him extract half a dripping peach with his fingers.
What a greedy thing! It occurred to him that that sort of gallon
can was an item Seymour rightfully should have no access to, but
then, it was customary for the children's waiters to eat as
their
per-
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