第30章

You return to your books in the wrong temper, the water trickles down your nose, runs in rivulets down your back.Until you have finally flung the towel out of the window and rubbed yourself dry, work is impossible.The strong tea always gave me indigestion, and made me sleepy.Until I had got over the effects of the tea, attempts at study were useless.

[Because he's so damned clever.]

But the thing that still irritates me most against the hero of the popular novel is the ease with which he learns a modern foreign language.Were he a German waiter, a Swiss barber, or a Polish photographer, I would not envy him; these people do not have to learn a language.My idea is that they boil down a dictionary, and take two table-spoonsful each night before going to bed.By the time the bottle is finished they have the language well into their system.

But he is not.He is just an ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don't believe in him.I walk about for years with dictionaries in my pocket.Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen gesticulate and rave at me for months.I hide myself in lonely places, repeating idioms to myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they will come readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do.And, after all this, I don't seem to know very much.This irritating ass, who has never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on the Continent.I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated psychological argument with French or German savants.It appears--the author had forgotten to mention it before--that one summer a French, or German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be, came to live in the hero's street: thus it is that the hero is able to talk fluently in the native language of that unhappy refugee.

I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying.

The heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic.For some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set fire to the house.He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine's coldness; maybe it was with some idea of warming her.Escape by way of the staircase was impossible.Each time the poor girl opened the door a flame came in and nearly burned her hair off.It seemed to have been waiting for her.

"Thank God!" said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet, "that I was brought up a wire walker."Without a moment's hesitation she opened the attic window and took the nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.

In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once upon a time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk.I have met refugees myself.The only thing they have ever taught me is not to leave my brandy flask about.

[And, finally, because I don't believe he's true.]

I don't believe in these heroes and heroines that cannot keep quiet in a foreign language they have taught themselves in an old-world library.My fixed idea is that they muddle along like the rest of us, surprised that so few people understand them, begging everyone they meet not to talk so quickly.These brilliant conversations with foreign philosophers! These passionate interviews with foreign countesses! They fancy they have had them.

I crossed once with an English lady from Boulogne to Folkestone.At Folkestone a little French girl--anxious about her train--asked us a simple question.My companion replied to it with an ease that astonished herself.The little French girl vanished; my companion sighed.

"It's so odd," said my companion, "but I seem to know quite a lot of French the moment I get back to England."