“Are you the Messrs. Schnider?”
“Ve are,” said the elder, promptly turning round. “Vat can we have ze pleasure of doing for you?”
“I am in the Police Department,” replied Mr. Hobbs, handing over his card, “and I have called for such information as you can give relative to the crime committed at your lodgings.”
“Ah! Dat vas vat I say to my brothers. Ve shall have some policemans round to ask us shoost nothings at all.”
“Did you know much of Mr. and Mrs. Booth?”
“No; ve knows very little. Ve sees them zometimes at dinner; ve speak to them English—ve love the language—but they not speak much to us, and they speak the English very padly. They do not understand what you call the idiom, so we get tired. Ve speak not much to them; ve fear to speak like them. Ah, Sydney is bad for the English language. Not like in Shermany; there they speak her particularly. I hear no good speaking in zis country. They learn the English like some parrots, not like in Shermany, vere ve learn at school. It is much shame to you.”
“Did you notice if Mr. and Mrs. Booth were friendly together? Did they have disputes? Was she a good wife?
“Not so good vife as we have in Shermany. There the frau, she stop home all ze day, do all ze work of ze home, and ze good man, when he have dinner, go to the beer garden and drink twenty, thirty bock, and when he come home a little bit what you call tipsy, the good frau she help him to bed, and not say one little word. Not like as here, vere the vife goes out to valk about half ze day. It was bad, very bad!”
“I am sorry to interrupt you, but what I wish to know is not about Germany, but about this business of the murder. Have you any reason to think Mrs. Booth had any ill-feeling towards her husband?”
“Ve know nothings, shoost nothings at all about zese peoples. They speak, I tell you, the English very padly, not like as in Shermany.”