Chapter XII · DUTCH CORRESPONDENCE.

The gentleman from the Bevolkings Register Bureau had left his umbrella behind him in his hurried departure that Thursday morning, so I sent it back to him with a polite note. It would have been easy to write the polite note in English, but that would never do. After my success in carrying on a long conversation in Dutch I felt that a lapse into English would be a confession of weakness.

My reputation as a linguist could only be maintained by a real Dutch letter. Now the phrase book gave but little light on the vast subject of correspondence. Except a brief note acknowledging the arrival of a ton of coals, and a still briefer note accepting, in the third person, a formal invitation to dinner, there was nothing about letter-writing in the volume.

DIERBARE HOOGEDELGESTRENGE.

It was not easy to find any phrases out of these epistles suitable for working in to my note about the umbrella.

They were valuable as examples, merely for the general rhythm and style, as it were, and then only to a slight extent. As my missive was of a genre quite distinct from these models, I felt justified in composing it in my own way.

I wrote the letter first in English; then set about translating it, as elegantly as I could, into Dutch.

Here is the English—quite friendly, you see.

Dear Sir,

As you left your umbrella behind on Thursday morning when you did me the honour to call, I beg to send it to you by bearer, in the hope that it may reach you safely without delay.

Trusting that its absence may have occasioned you no inconvenience, I remain, dear sir,

Very truly yours Jack O’Neill.

As a beginning, the phrase-book gave Hooggeachte Heer and Hoogedelgestrenge Heer, and many more very official-looking titles. It gave ‘mijnheer’ for ‘sir’; but for ‘dear sir’ nothing at all.

HET BY MIJ EENE VISITE AFLEGGEN.

Seeing, however, that dear was lief or dierbaar, I could easily make out a form of friendly address:—‘Dierbare mijnheer’ or briefly ‘Dierbaar.’

It was a toss up, indeed whether to take the stiff title Hooggeachte Heer (for Hoogedelgestrenge Heer seemed too much of a good thing for a note about an umbrella) or this more affectionate but somewhat doubtful Dierbaar!

I finally decided on a combination, one at the beginning and one at the end.

I sailed along quite comfortably until I arrived at his ‘doing me the honour to call’. This required hammering out; and when I had tortured myself a long time over it, here is what I got: ‘wanneer gij mij vereerdet door het bij mij eene visite afleggen’. Dreadfully round-about, you perceive! So I just fell back upon brevity, and trusted to luck to carry me safely through. ‘Op mij te roepen’, sounded terse and likely; and I chose it to avoid worse pitfalls with door and the infinitive.

As ‘I beg’ had a brusque ring, I made it a trifle mellower and more courteous by the helpful and familiar ‘verschoon mij’. ‘Verschoon mij, dat ik bedel,’ I could not improve on that.

But the proper division of ‘overhandigen’ into its component parts was not easy.

VERTROUWELIJK OR WAARACHTIG.

To get the right ‘hang’ of this sentence, I forcibly detached the ‘over’, and dragged this harmless voorzetsel well forward so as not to impede the action of its own particular verb, when you got so far. This much improved the rhythm; and I gave myself some freedom in the phrasing to keep up the style.

Indeed, after all, two or three bits of phrases could be worked in. ‘Goedige aanblikken’ caught my eye somewhere. I was delighted to have a kind of equivalent for kind regards; and eschewing the temptation to deviate into ‘zuiverlijk’ for sincerely, or ‘vertrouwelijk’ for faithfully, I finished with simple directness using ‘waarachtig’ for truly. This I afterwards thought of changing to waarempeltjes as being less formal.

Finally, to give a neat turn to the whole, I dropped in a sentence from the conversation-manual, so as to refer with a light but artistic touch to the broiling weather.

THE FINISHED PRODUCT.

Thus the finished product assumed the following form:

Hooggeachte Heer!

Aangezien dat gij in mijn zaal laatsten Donderdag morgen Uwen regenscherm vergegeten hebt, op den datum dat gij mij de eer deedt om op mij te roepen, en visite af te leggen, verschoon mij dat ik bedel het geabandoneerde voorwerp beleefd over aan UEdele te handigen door den drager dezes briefs.

Ik bemerkt niet eerstelijk dat de regenscherm de Uwe was; dus ik vertrouw dat gij wilt pardoneeren al het verdriet dat zijne afwezigheid veroorzaakt hebben moge.

Hoe heerlijk dat het gunstige weer van gisteren en onlangs gestadig blijft! Ik hoop van harte dat U ervan heerlijk geniet.

Koesterende den hoop dat de regenscherm zonder oponthoud U goed en wel zal bereiken,

Ik blijf, Dierbaar, met goedige aanblikken, waarachtig de Uwe, Jack O’Neill.