“Well, about Florence. It’s got a lot of buildings and things in it, and some of them look rather nice; they’re higher too than the buildings in Sydney. Clinch and me got sick of mooning about with Olly, and there was one of the waiters, a real good sort, going to a place five miles off to see some races, so you bet we went too. But the horses were as smashed-up as the buildings are—not a goer in the lot, so it wasn’t much fun. Australia could put them up to a thing or two on racing, my word.
“I get awfully sick of only hearing this blessed German talked. We’ve settled down in this town now for three months, and even the slaveys here jabber it. Young Clinch is only eight, but I feel I can talk to him all day and all night just because he doesn’t jabber-jabber
. I’m getting pretty smart at it myself though; you have to, or go hungry here, they’re such a blessed set of idiots. You don’t know how I wanted some bull’s-eyes one day, and do you think I could make any of the thick heads in three shops understand? They all kept telling me to go to the butcher’s. When I come back I’ll have to get three pounds of them straight off to make up.
[257]
]“Aunt Helene’s awfully queer; she’s as old as anything you know, and yet she’s always doing lessons and things. I go for a walk with her every day, and she makes me do the jabber, and does it herself all the time, so sometimes I don’t talk much. But she does,—all the questions and answers in the Conversation-book, and I know she goes into the shops and buys things just so she can ask for them in German.
“Yesterday it was such a lark; we were mooning up and down the street and a horse backed on to the pavement, and she bolted into the first shop,—she’s the nervousest woman I ever saw,—bar those little donkeys Phyl and Dolly. Well, she likes to be dignified too, so when the shop-walker johnnie came up to her she pretended she’d just come in to buy something. Well, every time she speaks to any one, this is her regular jabber, only I’m saying it in English, the other stuff is too hard to spell. ‘Guten morgen’ (that means good-morning). ‘It is a cold wind. Winter draws near. It freezes. It has frozen last night.’ The shop-walker johnnie says, ‘Ja, es ist schönes wetter’ (that means, yes, it is very fine weather)—of course he doesn’t understand what she has been saying. Then he says, ‘Be seated, Frau’ (once she got her hair off and said, ‘Fraulein, gefalligst’).
“Then she says, ‘Show me, if you please,—she’s got that part very pat,—das gloves, des ribbons, dem lace,’
[258] ]or whatever she wants. Only this was a man’s shop, and there were only shirts and trousers or things about. Well, I thought I’d help her out of a hole; I knew she didn’t want anything at a shop like that, but I thought she wouldn’t like to go out without buying something after bolting in like she did. So I told her she’d better get me some trousers, I wanted some. Well, she got so red I thought she must have forgotten the word for them, so I pointed to some tweed stuff on the counter, and then pointed at my legs, and a man at a counter understood in a jiffy, and began to get some down. But Aunt turned round and walked out of the shop, and I had to follow, of course, and the shop-people must have thought we were cracked. What do you think it was? It wasn’t that she’d forgotten the word for trousers, but I know now she’d have rather died than have said it. ‘Never refer to such horrible things in a mixed assembly, Alfred,’ she said. I’m always treading on her corns, but how on earth was I to know trousers weren’t proper?
“She’s as finicky as that over everything; after I’ve been in her room for an hour I just rush out on the hill and shout, and howl, and roll about, you get so bottled up. She’s not much to look at, her hair’s any colour, and her eyes are lightish blue, and she always looks as ill as anything. She’s not a bit like that likeness of mother. She’s always getting new dresses, really spiffing ones, all silk things with roses [259] ]and flowers worked all over them, and lace things and everything; jolly greedy of her never to have sent mother any.
“This is what we do all day. Well, we’re not at a hotel now, Grandfather’s tired of them; this is a private sort of a house in the suburbs, only you pay them for keeping you. Well, every one gets up at six except Grandfather, and we have some sort of meal—you can’t call it breakfast. There’s no cloth, only a table and a box of sugar on it, and a tray full of hot rolls and a big pot of coffee. We just go and help ourselves, and then Aunt Helene settles down and plays the hideousest and hardest things on the piano for two mortal hours, and I moon round the garden and lark with the fellow who cleans the boots, an awfully nice fellow. Then I hear her saying in her squeaky, proper little voice, ‘To me if you please the young Herr Alfred send, Elizabeth.’ And sometimes the young Herr Alfred hides so he can’t be sent, but sometimes he goes, she looks so lonely plugging along up the hill by herself. Well, we lug along for about an hour, and plug into churches and lug into ruins and plug along the river,—it’s called the Rhine. And then we plug back, and now we’ve come to an agreement that if I jabber going, she talks English coming back. So coming back I talk the most; only she doesn’t seem to like to hear about all of you, so I can’t think of much to say.
“Then when you get in there’s another meal, about [260] ]ten—you can’t call this breakfast either, no porridge or eggs or anything decent, only fruit and little cakes and stupid things. Grandfather is up then, and we go out in an old rattle-your-bones for miles and see things. Then there’s mittagessen when you get back—that’s dinner. It’s not so bad ’cause you needn’t eat just what they do. They have raw ham and raw smoked fish stuffed with vegetables, raw herrings and salad. There’s soup and meat and proper things like we have, but in between the meat courses the slaveys hand round some mad thing like pancakes or ices. Sometimes they have pigeons or partridges, and then they hand round an ass of a dish of boiled apricots or plums, and the Germaners, not us, you bet, take some on their plate with the game, and put lettuce on that, and oil and sugar on that, and then fall to and eat it. We all have a salt-cellar each, but they don’t put spoons in them, you’re expected to help yourself with your knife. Do you remember dropping on to me for that, old mother?—I can see just where I was sitting at the table; Dolly was dreaming away over her meat and wouldn’t pass the salt, and I leaned across her to get some on my knife. It was haricot mutton for dinner, I remember, and there was Queen’s Pudding after, and Phyl served it and gave me the pyramid piece of icing, and Freddie got tears in his eyes because he wanted it. I hate them having things to eat here like we did at home; there was a big sago pudding the other day, [261] ]and it made me feel as funny as anything to look at it, you all seemed so far away.