that this gentleman had soaked through, or
was a Moslem either. He had, as he informed me, been all over the world.
But it was not his fez, or his jaundiced complexion, or his fret-work,
or his languages, or his travels that marked him out for me at the time.
It was the simple fact that he was my first foreigner. In spite of my
having come in upon him, forced myself upon him as it were, he gave me
the impression of being the aggressor. I felt myself throwing up
defences against him. It is popular to gibe at the Englishman's
taciturnity abroad. There is a reason. The foreigner, not the best nor
the aristocratic foreigner perhaps, but the common run of him, act like
amiable invaders. They take possession of us, of our language, our
idioms, our games, our clothes, our machinery, ideas, everything. They
nod and smile and say knowingly 'How are you. All right, eh?' and assume
an intimacy you don't permit with your own family. This young chap in
the fez had other points, but at the outset I had the most extraordinary
sensation of leaning against the door of my soul, trying to keep him
out. I don't suppose it struck him that way. I dare say he thought me
rather subdued and untidy. He was very hospitable, asking me to 'take a
seat' at his bench, and showing me his fret-work. He told me he never
wasted any time, as that was the way to succeed. 'If at first you don't
succeed, try, try again,' he sang with the accents all on the wrong
syllables. He was very proud of this aphorism, evidently thinking it the
secret of our imperial race. And he told me his history. He was born in
Damascus, he said, so he knew Arabic. His father emigrated to Bolivia,
so he spoke Spanish. Then they pulled up stakes and went to New Zealand,
where he learned English. For some mysterious reason they again took
ship and came to the Cameroons, where he learned German. His family was
now in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he
himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to
England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have
often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any
language they really know, which language do they think in? They always
seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the
Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end.
They never seem to do anything with their marvelous accumulation of
languages and knowledge