I
SMITH flashed upon me unexpectedly in Berlin. It was nearly a year ago, just before the summer invasion of tourists, and I was reading the letters of a belated mail over my coffee, when I was aroused by an unmistakable American voice demanding water. I turned and beheld, in a sunny alcove at the end of the restaurant, my old friend Smith who had dropped his newspaper for the purpose of arraigning a frightened and obtuse waiter for his inability to grasp the idea that persons in ordinary health, and reasonably sane, do, at times, use water as a beverage. It was not merely the alarmed waiter and all his tribe that Smith execrated: he swept Prussia and the German Empire into the limbo of lost nations. Mrs. Smith begged him to be calm, offering the plausible suggestion that the waiter couldn’t understand a word of English. She appealed to a third member of the breakfast party, a young lady, whose identity had puzzled me for a moment. It seemed incredible that this could be the Smiths’ Fanny, whom I had dandled on my knee in old times,—and yet a second glance convinced me that the young person was no unlikely realization of the promise of the Fanny who had ranged our old neighborhood at “home” and appalled us, even at five, by her direct and pointed utterances. If the child may be mother to the woman, this was that identical Fanny. I should have known it from the cool fashion in which she dominated the situation, addressing the relieved waiter in his own tongue, with the result that he fled precipitately in search of water—and ice, if any, indeed, were obtainable—for the refreshment of these eccentric Americans.
When I crossed to their table I found Smith still growling while he tried to find his lost place in the New York stock market in his London newspaper. My appearance was the occasion for a full recital of his wrongs, in that amusing hyperbole which is so refreshing in all the Smiths I know. He begged me to survey the table, that I might enjoy his triumph in having been able to surmount local prejudice and procure for himself what he called a breakfast of civilized food. The continental breakfast was to him an odious thing: he announced his intention of exposing it; he meant to publish its iniquity to the world and drive it out of business. Mrs. Smith laughed nervously. She appeared anxious and distraught and I was smitten with pity for her. But there was a twinkle in Miss Smith’s eye, a smile about her pretty lips, that discounted heavily the paternal fury. She communicated, with a glance, a sense of her own attitude toward her father’s indignation: it did not matter a particle; it was merely funny, that was all, that her father, who demanded and commanded all things on his own soil, should here be helpless to obtain a drop of cold water with which to slake his thirst when every one knew that he could have bought the hotel itself with a scratch of the pen. When Smith asked me to account for the prevalence of hydrophobia in Europe it was really for the joy of hearing his daughter laugh. And it is well worth anyone’s while to evoke laughter from Fanny. For Fanny is one of the prettiest girls in the world, one of the cleverest, one of the most interesting and amusing.