“Legally robbed of eferything of value—ofersea colonies, merchant ships, naval ships, most of the bullion that their monies backed, their heafy industries und mining, denied credit universally und with their monies worthless—the defeated were left with only starvation and despair on national scales. Und just as the despair of millions of Russians bred Bolshevism, Mr. O’Shea, so the soul-deep despair of the cruelly used Germanic peoples has bred its own brand of fanaticism, a variety efery bit as dangerous to individuals and to nations as is the Russian variety.
“But the true horror of our group, Mr. O’Shea, is that Americans like you seem blissfully unaware of just how close to worldwide war we coming are. This is why the dissemination of our digest so important is, for very few Americans speak any of the languages but English, so necessary it is to translate the other important languages into English, hoping that what they read in our digest will cause them to take from the sand their heads in time.”
Milo’s first day of work at the office of Dr. Osterreich’s group revealed to him and the others there that he spoke at least two other languages, Ukrainian and Modern Greek, at least six regional dialects of German, three of French and the variant of the Dutch language known as Afrikaans and still spoken only in the Union of South Africa. But that first day also revealed to him that was he to get any meaningful amount of work done each day, it would have to be at someplace other than in that office.
All of the other eleven men and women in the office had immigrated within the last decade from various European lands. One man and two women were White Russians and were jokingly called “the old non-nobility” because they had been in America longest. In addition, there were an Austrian, two Germans, a Pole, two French ladies, a Hollander and a Neapolitan Italian. Milo had met a few of them before when Osterreich had brought them to his hospital room to try to determine just how well he spoke certain foreign languages with which the psychiatrist, himself, was no more than peripherally familiar, and of course those whom he had not met had heard of him from their coworkers and from Dr. Osterreich.
The staff all were bubblingly curious, and none of them seemed to believe that he truly could recall none of his past life. The two Russian ladies seemed to firmly believe him to be a Russian nobleman of some degree who had found it prudent to bury his past lest agents of Josef Stalin find and kill him; the Russian man, on the other hand, was working under the firm assumption that Milo was a Trotskyite on the run or possibly a Cossack officer who had left Russia with his regiment’s payroll in gold.
All of the others had their own opinions as to Milo’s true identity, most of them wildly speculative if not downright romantic, and they constantly harassed him with questions to the point that he elected to do all future work either at the boardinghouse or in the enforced tranquillity of the public library.
He soon found the library a good choice, for frequently he came across words in various languages of which he did not know the exact meaning. Reference books and dictionaries available at the library gave him not only the meanings he sought but also seemed to give him something else of a puzzling nature to ponder.
II
“Ach, mein freund Milo, I do not at all odd find this matter,” Osterreich said, shaking his head and smiling. “Most of these words and phrases of general conversation are not.” He flicked away the list that Milo had meticulously written out. “If, as suspect I strongly do, you mastered your multiplicity of tongues through living amongst people of those tongues rather than more formally, it fully understandable is that many modern words and technical terms of narrow usage you would not have learned. Do not to further trouble yourself with regard to such trifles.
“You are doing good work, very good work, incidentally. The translations are most precise, yet without meaning of the original languages losing. Where do you work? At the O’Shea house?”
“No,” replied Milo, “at the public library. It’s always quiet, and there’s reference books available there, as well. I tried to do it all at your office, but decided after one day that I’d never get the first article finished in less than a week, not with all the interruptions.
“What did you tell these people about me, Sam? The Russians think I’m Russian, the French and the Germans seem to think I’m German, and everyone there is clearly of the opinion that I’m lying about my inability to recall my past, that I’m on the run from one government or another, a spy or an international crook.”
Osterreich sighed. “I know, I know, Milo. Of these fanciful suppositions some of them haf broached to me, too. I told them only the truth, that an amnesiac you are following probable neural damage which from a blow to the skull resulted. More recently, of their consummate silliness I haf chided them; how much good my vords to them did, I know not, howefer.”
He sighed again. “I had had hopes that to work around so many people to jog your memories to the surface it might. But this work you do so well is of great importance, and if you do it best alone, so be it.
“But to other matters: how goes your life at the O’Shea domicile?”
“The Convent of Saint Maggie?” answered Milo. “That’s what the neighbors called it before I moved in, I hear.”
Osterreich wrinkled his brows in puzzlement. “She is so religious, then?”
Milo laughed. “No, Sam, she had all females in the house, with the sole exception of Pat—two daughters, two or three female servants and five to seven female boarders in residence. The neighbors don’t appear to like the idea of a boardinghouse in their neighborhood. I guess they would all have preferred that Maggie sink into genteel poverty rather than manage to survive and hold her own the way she did. She’s a fighter, that woman. I admire her.”
“And what of the others, there, Milo? What of them do you think, eh?”
“Pat O’Shea,” Milo chuckled, “if he had his way, would long since have had me and everybody else in the house—excepting only Maggie, his daughters and the servants—in some branch of the armed services, having already gotten both of his sons and one of Maggie’s former boarders so persuaded. He keeps working on me, of course, using every excuse he can think of to get me to enlist in the Army of the United States of America. Were you twenty years younger, no doubt he’d have been after you, too.
“As for the rest of the household, I see most of them only at dinner and, sometimes, at breakfast. Those nurses who work the night shift sleep during a good part of the day, and those who work the day shift, as does Maggie, have to be on the floor at seven a.m. and so leave at a godawful hour of the morning. Fanny Duncan hasn’t been around for two weeks now, or nearly that; she’s on private duty at the home of some wealthy people up near Evanston, living there to be near the patient at all times.
“The cook is a widow about sixty, and Irish, like Maggie herself. I’ve been polishing my Irish Gaelic on her, learning new words … and that brings us back to my list there, Sam. She, the cook, Rosaleen O’Farrell, says that I speak an Irish dialect that she’s not heard since she was a child, in Ireland, and then only from her rather aged grandmother.”