Christine | Page 8

has everything in it that
a city ought to have,--public buildings, statues, fountains, parks, broad
streets; and it is about as comforting and lovable as the latest thing in
workhouses. It looks disinfected; it has just that kind of rather awful
cleanness.
At dinner they talk of its beauty and its perfections till I nearly go to
sleep. You know how oddly sleepy one gets when one isn't interested.
They've left off being silent now, and have gone to the other extreme,
and from not talking to me at all have jumped to talking to me all
together. They tell me over and over again that I'm in the most beautiful
city in the world. You never knew such eagerness and persistence as
these German boarders have when it comes to praising what is theirs,
and also when it comes to criticizing what isn't theirs. They're so funny
and personal. They say, for instance, London is too hideous for words,
and then they look at me defiantly, as though they had been insulting
some personal defect of mine and meant to brazen it out. They point
out the horrors of the slums to me as though the slums were on my face.
They tell me pityingly what they look like, what terrible blots and
deformities they are, and how I--they say England, but no one could
dream from their manner that it wasn't me--can never hope to be
regarded as fit for self-respecting European society while these spots
and sore places are not purged away.
The other day they assured me that England as a nation is really unfit
for any decent other nation to know politically, but they added, with
stiff bows in my direction, that sometimes the individual inhabitant of
that low-minded and materialistic country is not without amiability,
especially if he or she is by some miracle without the lofty, high-nosed
manner that as a rule so regrettably characterizes the unfortunate people.
"Sie sind so hochnasig," the bank clerk who sits opposite me had

shouted out, pointing an accusing finger at me; and for a moment I was
so startled that I thought something disastrous had happened to my
nose, and my anxious hand flew up to it. Then they laughed; and it was
after that that they made the speech conceding individual amiability
here and there.
I sit neatly in my chair while this sort of talk goes on--and it goes on at
every meal now that they have got over the preliminary stage of icy
coldness towards me--and I try to be sprightly, and bandy my six
German words about whenever they seem appropriate. Imagine your
poor Chris trying to be sprightly with eleven Germans--no, ten
Germans, for the eleventh is a Swede and doesn't say anything. And the
ten Germans, including Frau Berg, all fix their eyes reproachfully on
me while as one man they tell me how awful my country is. Do people
in London boarding houses tell the German boarders how awful
Germany is, I wonder? I don't believe they do. And I wish they would
leave me alone about the Boer war. I've tried to explain my extreme
youth at the time it was going on, but they still appear to hold me
directly responsible for it. The fingers that have been pointed at me
down that table on account of the Boer war! They raise them at me, and
shake them, and tell me of the terrible things the English did, and when
I ask them how they know, they say it was in the newspapers; and
when I ask them what newspapers, they say theirs; and when I ask them
how they know it was true, they say they know because it was in the
newspapers. So there we are, stuck. I take to English when the worst
comes to the worst, and they flounder in after me.
It is the funniest thing, their hostility to England, and the queer,
reluctant, and yet passionate admiration that goes With it. It is like
some girl who can't get a man she admires very much to notice her. He
stays indifferent, while she gets more exasperated the more indifferent
he stays; exasperated with the bitterness of thwarted love. One day at
dinner, when they had all been thumping away at me, this flashed
across me as the explanation, and I exclaimed in English, "Why, you're
in love with us!"
Twenty round eyes stared at me, sombrely at first, not understanding,
and then with horror slowly growing in them.
"In love with you? In love with England?" cried Frau Berg, the carving
knife suspended in the air while she stared at me. "_Nein, aber so

was_!" And she let down her heavy fists, knife and all, with a thud on
the table.
I thought