In a town, however, such as Arad I did not anticipate that there would exist one miserable, imbecile, uneducated incompetent—who, alas, only knows my opinion of him through a far too polite interpreter—who spoke only his own language, and that this one disreputable outcast and disgrace to an educated nation should cross my path.
I arrived in Arad—a town of about sixty thousand people, lying near the Roumanian border—at about 2 a.m. I had not slept for over thirty-six hours, and I was so tired that I would have shared a bed with a Roumanian peasant. Can I say more?
At the nearest hotel I pulled myself together and demanded, in what was, under the circumstances, very tolerable German, a bedroom. There was no difficulty about this; there was a room vacant. Gladly I filled in particulars of myself on the Police Form as the law demands.
"Are you an Austrian or a German?" inquired the porter.
I glanced at him sharply; I was in no mood for sarcasm. Besides, if it came to that, his German wasn't of much account. But no; his face was gravity itself; courteous curiosity was its only expression. I pointed—I had no mind to risk my reputation as a linguist by further speech—to the form I had just filled in.
"London," he read. "So, ein Englander?"
"Ja," said I.
I got into bed at 2.30 a.m., and immediately fell last asleep.
