“Ei! Gott!” cried my companion, “you got it? You are an American, then, a genuine American! It’s the test I always apply. He can tell an American at his first three words.”
“But why didn’t the crowd believe me?” I demanded.
“Ach!” burst out the youth, “Here in Cairo all the boys are Americans. We have Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Norwegians, all sorts in the union, and everyone is an ‘American’—except among the comrades. And not three of them ever saw the United States! It is because, of all the foreigners in Egypt, the Americans are the easiest and the most generous. Then you know what a bad reputation Germans have as beggars—all turning out on their Wanderjahre? The Germans here will help us. Yes! But how? By giving us a loaf of bread, or an old pair of shoes, or two piastres. Bah! But the Americans! They give pounds and whole suits, and they don’t ask to hear the whole story of your past life. Americans? Why, there are dozens of American missionaries, judges, merchants, engineers, and ei! Gott! the tourists! There’s your rich harvest, mein Freund! Why, a year I’ve been in Cairo learning English and picking the roosters. I’ve been up to see that greybeard four times! I dressed differently every time and practised every story for weeks until I got the accent right. Three times I got ten piastres, but the fourth he asked me questions, and, as I hadn’t practised the answers, I talked wild English and tangled myself up. Then I tried to get out of it by saying I was a Pennsylvania Dutchman. The old man started in on geography, and when I told him Pennsylvania was on the Gulf of Mexico he took his cane and chased me out. I’ve studied maps of the United States since then, though. He couldn’t catch me again. I know every city.”
“Yes,” he went on, as we turned into the now deserted Moosky, “all die Kunde try to be Americans. Aber Gott! The fools! They are too pig-headed ever to learn to talk English with an American accent. But you! Du glücklicher Kerl! You can live in Cairo until you grow a beard!”
I paid my lodging and followed the German up a narrow, winding stairway at the back of the shop. On the third story he pushed open a door much like the drop of a home-made rabbit trap, which gave admittance to a small room where four of six beds were already occupied. It needed only one long-drawn breath to prove that the “bedclothes” had not seen the washtub during several generations of “the boys,” and that a can of insect powder could be used to great advantage. But he who is both penniless and hypercritical should remain at home. I took the bed beside that of the German and was soon asleep.
I awoke next morning to find my guide of the night before sitting on his bed at a dry-goods box before the single window, sipping black coffee from a tin can and eating a boiled egg and a slab of bread with one hand, and slowly penning a letter with the other. Having seen enough of him already to be convinced that he was a man of considerable education, I was surprised to find that he wielded a pen with such apparent difficulty.
“It’s this English script that troubles me,” he remarked, as if in answer to my unexpressed question. “When you have written all your life in German script, it is hard to change.”
“Then you’re writing English?” I cried.
He motioned to the letter before him as he swallowed the last of the coffee:—“Of course! A man can’t eat if he doesn’t work. There’s a New York millionaire just come to town. His name is Leigh Hunt, and I’m writing to ask him for employment. He won’t have any, of course, but he may send me a pound or two. I found it too hard to learn to speak English without a foreign accent, so I write instead.”
He reached inside the box that served as table and tossed a dozen unstamped letters on my bed. All were addressed to Englishmen or Americans, among them people of international reputation.