"No!" said the offensive father, without taking the cigar from his mouth.
"But you are the hotel-keeper at any rate?" I asked in a disagreeable state of uncertainty.
"Yes," came the answer just as curtly, as though he wanted to say, "Are you through soon now? Then we'll go to sleep again."
"But are you not then the father of Juffrouw Van Vianen, who lives in this house?"
"No!" said the man. "She has no father. She's a foundling."
I could have embraced the unsightly boor. His indelicate communication seemed to me the happiest compliment and the gladdest tidings that I could have expected from him. He could not know that his brutal rudeness, which he in Dutch fashion seemed to take for lusty candor, something like "I won't be bothered talking around the subject" - that this rudeness was for me a blessing. The advantage of not being descended from him he would indeed hardly be able to appreciate. I breathed more freely; it was one of the loveliest moments of this lovely day. The word "foundling" was for me like an opening blind in a dark chamber of boorishness and provincialism, suddenly revealing a vista of distant, mistily romantic perspectives. To be sure I had comforted myself with the thought that the race can, at any time and anywhere, bring forth geniuses through atavism; thus also in the family of a Dutch provincial hotel-keeper, a womanly genius of noble grace, charm and distinction; but this was after all much sweeter solace. With a foundling one could presuppose noble ancestors of any nationality. I too now found it unnecessary to talk longer around the subject.
"Then would you kindly tell Juffrouw Van Vianen that there is someone who urgently desires to speak to her?"
The cigar now fell from the gaping mouth and the solitary eye also opened perceptibly wider like that of a hippopotamus emerging from the water. I was scrutinized a while.
"Urgently?" he growled, as though such a thing were most improbable and also improper.
"Yes, urgently."