A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water

and sets it down where you can get it by reaching for it. You

take it and say:

“How much?”–and she returns you, with elaborate indifference,

a beggar’s answer:

“NACH BELIEBE” (what you please.)

This thing of using the common beggar’s trick and the common

beggar’s shibboleth to put you on your liberality when you

were expecting a simple straightforward commercial transaction,

adds a little to your prospering sense of irritation.

You ignore her reply, and ask again:

“How much?”

–and she calmly, indifferently, repeats:

“NACH BELIEBE.”

You are getting angry, but you are trying not to show it;

you resolve to keep on asking your question till she changes

her answer, or at least her annoyingly indifferent manner.

Therefore, if your case be like mine, you two fools

stand there, and without perceptible emotion of any kind,

or any emphasis on any syllable, you look blandly into each

other’s eyes, and hold the following idiotic conversation:

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

“How much?”

“NACH BELIEBE.”

I do not know what another person would have done,

but at this point I gave up; that cast-iron indifference,

that tranquil contemptuousness, conquered me, and I struck

my colors. Now I knew she was used to receiving about a

penny from manly people who care nothing about the opinions

of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards;

but I laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her

reach and tried to shrivel her up with this sarcastic

speech:

“If it isn’t enough, will you stoop sufficiently from

your official dignity to say so?”

She did not shrivel. Without deigning to look at me at all,

she languidly lifted the coin and bit it!–to see if it

was good. Then she turned her back and placidly waddled

to her former roost again, tossing the money into an open

till as she went along. She was victor to the last,

you see.

I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they

are typical; her manners are the manners of a goodly

number of the Baden-Baden shopkeepers. The shopkeeper

there swindles you if he can, and insults you whether

he succeeds in swindling you or not. The keepers of

baths also take great and patient pains to insult you.

The frowsy woman who sat at the desk in the lobby

of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath tickets,

not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity

to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat

me out of a shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled

her to ten. Baden-Baden’s splendid gamblers are gone,

only her microscopic knaves remain.

An English gentleman who had been living there

several years, said:

“If you could disguise your nationality, you would not

find any insolence here. These shopkeepers detest the

English and despise the Americans; they are rude to both,

more especially to ladies of your nationality and mine.

If these go shopping without a gentleman or a man-servant,

they are tolerably sure to be subjected to petty insolences–

insolences of manner and tone, rather than word,

though words that are hard to bear are not always wanting.

I know of an instance where a shopkeeper tossed a coin back

to an American lady with the remark, snappishly uttered,

‘We don’t take French money here.’ And I know of a case

where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers,

‘Don’t you think you ask too much for this article?’

and he replied with the question, ‘Do you think you are

obliged to buy it?’ However, these people are not impolite

to Russians or Germans. And as to rank, they worship that,

for they have long been used to generals and nobles.

If you wish to see what abysses servility can descend,

present yourself before a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the

character of a Russian prince.”

It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud,

and snobbery, but the baths are good. I spoke with

many people, and they were all agreed in that. I had

the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three years,