B. and I very nearly did ourselves a serious
internal injury, trying to express it. We slaved like cab-horses at
it - for about five minutes, and succeeded in conveying to the mind
of the waiter that we wanted to have a game at dominoes.
Then, like a beam of sunlight to a man lost in some dark, winding
cave, came to me the reflection that I had in my pocket a German
conversation book.
How stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Here had we been
racking our brains and our bodies, trying to explain our wants to an
uneducated German, while, all the time, there lay to our hands a
book specially written and prepared to assist people out of the very
difficulty into which we had fallen - a book carefully compiled with
the express object of enabling English travellers who, like
ourselves, only spoke German in a dilettante fashion, to make their
modest requirements known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out
of the country alive and uninjured.
I hastily snatched the book from my pocket, and commenced to search
for dialogues dealing with the great food question. There were
none!
There were lengthy and passionate "Conversations with a laundress"
about articles that I blush to remember. Some twenty pages of the
volume were devoted to silly dialogues between an extraordinarily
patient shoemaker and one of the most irritating and
constitutionally dissatisfied customers that an unfortunate shop-
keeper could possibly be cursed with; a customer who, after
twaddling for about forty minutes, and trying on, apparently, every
pair of boots in the place, calmly walks out with:
"Ah! well, I shall not purchase anything to-day. Good-morning!"
The shopkeeper's reply, by-the-by, is not given. It probably took
the form of a boot-jack, accompanied by phrases deemed useless for
the purposes of the Christian tourist.
There was really something remarkable about the exhaustiveness of
this "conversation at the shoemaker's." I should think the book
must have been written by someone who suffered from corns. I could
have gone to a German shoemaker with this book and have talked the
man's head off.
Then there were two pages of watery chatter "on meeting a friend in
the street" - "Good-morning, sir (or madam)." "I wish you a merry
Christmas." "How is your mother?" As if a man who hardly knew
enough German to keep body and soul together, would want to go about
asking after the health of a foreign person's mother.
There were also "conversations in the railway carriage,"
conversations between travelling lunatics, apparently, and dialogues
"during the passage." "How do you feel now?" "Pretty well as yet;
but I cannot say how long it will last." "Oh, what waves! I now
feel very unwell and shall go below. Ask for a basin for me."
Imagine a person who felt like that wanting to know the German for
it.
