“Waarom zit ze te eten daar?” I asked.
“Om dat ze trek heeft!”
A snigger went round the company. Evidently that reply was of the nature of wit; and they expected something sparkling from me in return.
But I couldn’t sparkle.
THE SOCRATIC DIALOGUE.
“Trek” was unknown to me. Strange, how you can be bowled over by a simple word, if you’ve never heard it. Trekken—trok—getrokken, was familiar. That meant ‘to pull,’ ‘draw,’ or ‘wander’. “Trekschuit”—“trekpot”—“trekvogel”; I had them all labelled on my desk in the Hague. But “trek” itself, what was that exactly? Provided of course, the youth were grammatical,—which I very much doubted.
“Zij heeft getrokken,” however, when I tried it, only raised new difficulties. What then did she pull, and why?
‘Trekvogel’ was an alluring idea to follow up, in a town where Jan Olieslagers’ fame was universal: but common sense forbade my pursuing that line far.
The defects of my home-made Berlitz became painfully evident. It’s humiliating, when you have your 2000 new nouns at your fingers’ ends, and hundreds of old ones; and yet can’t understand the first thing a knecht says.
But the bystanders were growing impatient; so—to withdraw gracefully—I enquired, “wat is trek?”