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This is scandalously late. The aborigines will be along saying 'Morgen! instead of 'Nabben'! if we stay here much longer. Good-night." "You will give me your new address as soon as you have found a satisfactory home?" "Never fear! I probably shall be pestering you with telephone calls, urging you to have pity upon me in my loneliness. Now goodnight again.
I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly, and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me in the act. When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little and shrugged his shoulders and said: "Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried.
"Thank God for your gift of laughter," Von Gerhard said, and took my hand in his for one brief moment before he turned and walked away. Quite prosaically I opened the big front door at Knapfs' to find Herr Knapf standing in the hallway with his: "Nabben', Frau Orme." And there was the sane and soothing scent of Wienerschnitzel and spluttering things in the air.
"What's prachtful?" I ask, startled. "The chicken?" "Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?" I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist, and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"
The apparently bodiless head thrust itself forward a bit, disclosing an apologetically smiling face, with high check bones that glistened with friendliness and scrubbing. "Nabben', Fraulein," said the head. "Nabben'," I replied, more mystified than ever. "Howdy do! Is there anything " The head thrust itself forward still more, showing a pair of plump shoulders as its support.
My soul went out to her as I recalled the shining cheek-bones, and the apron, and the chickens stewed in butter. I would have given a year out of my life to have heard that good-natured, "Nabben'." One aborigine had been wont to emphasize his after-dinner arguments with a toothpick brandished fiercely between thumb and finger. The brandisher had always annoyed me.
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