GARD'Sattentions to Elsa continued intermittently, and as if detached, on their unadvancing course. He had, however, reached the stage of playing piano duets with her. This is always hopeful. Occasionally they rambled through Schubert's little Vienna love waltzes and other selections that could top off an evening with melodies of a sprightly and sentimental nature. He felt he was becoming acquainted with her in a way he otherwise could not. She was more cheerful at these times, exhilarated by the music.
He had learned a large part of his playing by ear. Reading at sight was a fresh experience. She corrected his fingering while helping fill out his conversational vocabulary. It was certainly most agreeable to have Fräulein take his fingers in her warm, plump,flexible hand with conscientious authority and show him the method of the Dresden Conservatoire.
Think of a young and lustrous miss being able to instruct him like a veteran! He had never considered American girls in such a light—had never expected to learn anything of profitable skill from them. Elsa, for her part, regarded it as a curious and amusing experience to watch this tall man playing like a boy. The musical Germans she knew were adept at some instrument.
He formed the habit of addingen, or its variants, to the English equivalent of the German word he could not think of, and she seemed to be struck by this as a very original fashion of eliciting information. On one occasion at the piano they heard the entrance bell below clang, announcing a visitor, and Gard, hastening to disappear upstairs, exclaimed:
"Wir müssen—wir müssen—stopfen!"
The word for stop would not come to him. Fräulein blushed and snickered and ran off to tell her mother about Herr Kirtley and his German. He was frightened. What absurdity had he uttered? He got to his dictionary as soon as he could and found he had said—We must darn stockings!
The incident nearly always put Elsa in good humor. She doubtless considered Yankees an odd folk. How could they expect to become civilized with their rudimentary attainments? Must he not be seeming to her a sort of freak?...
But, for the most part, she continued to hold him aloof, and he concluded the reason lay in the mystery which shadowed her young life and to which he could trace no clue. What could it frankly be that sent her to her room and to Heine? The beginning of the answer seemed to come at last in the form of a youth who suddenly soared in at Villa Elsa.
Herr Friedrich von Tielitz-Leibach was a composer and a music director. He was the son of a neighbor who had moved away, and the musical Buchers doted on him as one with a shining future. Kirtley had often heard them refer to Friedrich as to so many of their friends of whom he knew nothing.
When Friedrich called, at very rare intervals, it was always a wonderful day. The steady, stolid routine of the home became perturbed, gladdened. He was a German of Hungarian extraction, and the Magyar blood gave him a dash and sparkle. He was tall, very thin, with the intellectual look that black-rimmed glasses produce. His eyes harmonized in color with the black shock of tossing hair that set off a distinguished appearance. And, like a traditional votary of music, he wore a great black cloak swinging around him with an operatic air, giving the impression that he was just going to or coming from the theater.
Highly agitated, gilded with flattery, readily acquainted, he bubbled over promptly in confidences and intimate allusions. He was ever brimming with the freshest gossip of himself and his exalted career; and his personal experiences, he assumed, were bound to be unique and entertaining.
Making friends with everyone, he insisted on calling on Gard up in the attic room, pleased to welcome such an "excellent person"—as he had heard downstairs—to the fold of the family. But did they not lead such dull, stagnant, imbecile lives, moored here in this stodgy, out-of-the-world suburb, where so many idiots live who wonder how the world can come to an end when it's round? Friedrichtruly hoped Herr Kirtley would not be bored to death.
To-day the musician had finished with his final military examination and was at last free from ever having to serve. He made a diverting story of it and had hastened to the Villa to recount the congratulatory news.
"I had to report this morning for military service, just having got back to Dresden. So I went to the Platz and there sat an officer as big as a hogshead. And I hope not as full. He began treating me as if I were a truant school boy. 'Stand up! Sit down! Stand up again!' So the examination commenced. I knew I was not fit for the army. I did not want to go. I hate it. But they were after me. He said:
"'Take off your glasses!' I removed them. He said:
"'What is that letter off there?' Mein Gott! it looked as far off as Pillnitz. It was my left eye out of which I had seen nothing since I was a baby.
"'I see nothing,' I said. He yelled:
"'You can!' Then I said:
"'I can't!' Then he roared out:
"'Why can't you?'
"'Because I am blind in it!' He glared at me as if I were a perjurer.
"'It is blind and you can see nothing out of it?'
"And now I was getting out of patience with this blockhead. Blind and can't see out of it! They put the blockheads in the army because there is no other place for them. I think that must be the reason why there are more synonyms for blockhead in the German language than in any other—we have the largest army. I said:
"'Of course I can't see anything out of it because it's blind, you—— ' I was just on the point of adding 'fool' when I stopped myself in time. It was the military—the augustmilitary. One must hold his peace before the magnificent military. He thought I was cheating about my eye because I did not want to march to Moscow, to Paris. And I don't want to march to Moscow or Paris. They're so far.
"So this stupidKerltook me over to a higher officer and still another. They sat there as stiff and self-complacent as wooden saints in a plaster church. They too shouted at me They were so suspicious, although I had neverhad the pleasure of meeting any of them before.
"'You say you are blind in one eye and can't see out of it?'
"I screamed, 'No, no, no!' They thought I might be going insane. They examined my eye, my glasses, and tried all kinds of tests to try to fool my poor eye. But it remained my faithful friend, and they were mad. And I was just as mad and ready to shriek at them—'Blind! Blind! Blind!' I was losing half a day for nothing over their stupidities.
"Then theDummkopfenbegan to enter it up on their official blotters. That seemed to take forever too. I was nearly exhausted. They solemnly wrote me down as blind in one eye and cannot see out of it. And at last, Gott sei Dank! they let me go, glowering at me as if they were still sure I was somehow tricking them. And here I am—alive!"
Friedrich's ludicrous recital, embellished by a hundred gestures and poses, had raised a guffaw even in Villa Elsa.
GARDdiscovered that such mockery or berating of military officials, with whom the ordinary public came in servile contact, was rather common in Germany in spite of the universal adoration of the army.
Intermixed with Friedrich's take-off were his moments of "the grand manner," appropriate to a musical director who is born to command fickle or imperious singers and musicians. He was naturally an actor. His refreshing mimicries amused Gard. Against the bovine background of the Villa Elsa circle, he stood out in relief as an enlivening figure with flitting phases of elegance.
He was clever, talented. He spun off a lot of new music at the piano, much of it coming from his own pen. Elsa hung absorbed over the wing of the instrument. Friedrich, ofabout Kirtley's age but adequately equipped and ambitious, was aspiring to some one of the dignified thrones in the musical kingdom of Germany. Gard was only just hatching out as a man. He was essentially but a lad grown up. Von Tielitz showed already a wholly developed maturity. German instruction again versus American education!
Friedrich was better versed in English than the Bucher children. He paid two calls on Gard that first day. Talking Anglo-Saxon was good practice. On the second call he discharged a missile that struck Kirtley near the heart, and gave him a feeling of faintness.
"Don't you like Elsa?" Von Tielitz whipped out with no preamble. "She is really a nice girl, a very nice girl. Her family thinks we are to marry. Well, perhaps. I don't know. Sometimes I think yes. Sometimes I think no. There are so many others, don't you know. But I think we will marry as soon as I get my Kapellmeistership. We are always such good friends. She used to sit on my lap before I went away. O! we areverygood friends. But now I am not so much in Dresden and, my dear Mr. Kirtley, my poor Kapellmeistership does not come along. Itis most aggravating, as you say in English. I get so discouraged."
He brightened again.
"They tell me you and Elsa have been playing duos. Such good training. Very agreeable. We used to play together also. A nice girl to rub one's knees against under the piano—oh,
"I am Titania the blond,Titania, of the air!"
Friedrich twittered gayly the lines from "Mignon." Then he abruptly changed.
"But I have now so little time for serious maidens. Ach Himmel! How I am driven by going here and going there! One says this to me, another says that to me, and my head gets all in a whirl."
So he wandered on with his mixtures ofnonchalance, condescension and, above all, his ebullient self-esteem that flowed over on to everyone to the point of deluging them. When he went away, it was with such a warm invitation to call upon him the next week that Kirtley could not but accept. Besides, here was opened up a novel and suggestive line ofbehavior from the standpoint of the German young man of the world.
Gard was left with confused feelings that drooped their wings in displeasure if not distress. So there was a rival, and of long standing, on the little rosy sea of his romance! And this was he. Was it a wonder that Elsa had "spells"? Here was a true heart-breaker. Just the type to play havoc with a girl. What place was there left for the mild, unpretending Gard? And still she deserved far better than Von Tielitz. Perhaps it was this feeling that added to her unhappiness. His vulgarity! To talk as Von Tielitz did about one who might become his wife, and to a stranger, was a new form of German brutality. It steadied and deepened Gard's admiration for her. Who ever heard a young Yankee speak like this about his serious sweetheart? However raw he may be, there is a certain sacred respect at the bottom of his language about her—his bearing toward her.
Elsa did not appear at meals for a day or two after Friedrich left. Kirtley was not encouraged by learning that this usually happened after a call from the composer. He thought it strange that the Frau, with all herplain speech and hardy lack of sentiment, still made no reference to her daughter's trouble. Marriage is to the Germans such an earth-to-earth affair, as Gard perceived, that he marveled she did not unbosom herself capaciously about what must be a mother's anxiety. But the Teuton daughter is like a glove that can be put on or cast off by the sovereign male. She is meant to be toughened, exposed to rude blasts, fortified, to be able to support the draft-mare burdens of Teuton wifehood.
GARDnow descended unwittingly into one of the darkest regions of German life, and one which foreign publics had persistently missed or voluntarily overlooked in their chorus of approbation of the race.
It is a familiar dictum that one can judge of a nation pretty fairly by the position and treatment of its women. Kirtley had never, in America, heard anything about Deutschland in this light. But he soon found in Saxony that this was only one of the numerous German topics on which little publicity was shed in his homeland in spite of the general emphasis laid on German preëminence. This emphasis was mainly a diffusion, through mere books of information, about achievements and an extraordinary condition of learned mentality. Of the actual inhabitants beyond the Rhine, ignorance was kept widespread. German femininity was assumed to be of a predominating excellence to match that of German masculinity.
No study of a people is indeed complete without an unglossed inquiry into its conduct toward its women and children. To say that the German's business traits are the same and as reputable as those of other races, is below the mark. In this secular domain he is compelled to deal and to act within the accepted formulæ of trade. To do otherwise would be to ostracize himself.
But he is in no such competition or is subject to no such exactions in his attitude toward his own women and children. With them he does as he pleases and his real nature stands forth. These truly vital matters have been passed over as if unnoticed by the world, as has been said, and still it wonders why it cannot learn what the German is—does not understand him. He is, perhaps more than anyone, what he is toward his own inferiors—toward those who are weaker and dependent.
The question of German womanhood and girlhood should not therefore be blinked by the earnest contemplator. It was not long before Gard was saying to himself that ifAmericans could be made to realize the status of womankind in Deutschland, they would not be so lured by the idea of sending their young folk thither for education. There would be a marked decline in their generous enthusiasm forallthings German. In what civilized land does woman lead less in lofty, sublimated power or put a fainter stamp on the talents of the race? German art, music, poetry, language, politics, education, all are distinctively masculine. The Teuton woman merely partakes of the life of man, the ideal. She does not assume to lead him. She would seem so far below par that, as Gard had seen, even flirtation scarcely exists in Deutschland. Flirtation is particularly a custom among equals.
When he returned Friedrich's visits as promised, he found him sharing the room of his friend Karl Messer. Messer was a successful architect who had already secured a Government commission while the equally youthful Kirtley—may it be repeated—had not begun real life and, according to the American plan, could do nothing very well. Those two room-mates and cronies were leading the typical Teuton existence of youths who combined proficient work with a frank sensuality accompanied, of course, by much imbibing in the German way. And it may be preliminarily noted that what explorations Gard afterward made in this great and seamy side of Teuton nature, likewise ended in a downward direction toward depths that he had scarcely thought possible in the educated human.
Von Tielitz and Messer had been at an uproarious ball the night before and were idling about, recuperating. They had accomplished the ruin there of two girls, which they looked upon as truly manly sport. Assuming that Kirtley, as must be the case with all young men, was equally interested with them in being satyrs, they lost no time in trying to entertain him with their adventures.
The pursuit of woman! In Germany this is not very difficult, as she is not visibly unhappy to consider herself the legitimate prey of the lordly sex. This idea runs naturally and powerfully throughout the Teuton scheme. It is not merely that the female is considered to have a price, but the price must be low, if not a cypher. To German women the triumphant male is a splendid creature. His acts are noble. To be hungry, thirsty, sensual are proper, and therefore candid, attributes in man. In order to subdue the earth, the race must be prolific, and to be prolific, desires must not be limited or weakened by pale Puritanisms. That men are normally uncleansed sewers from which the face need not be averted, was a conception Kirtley's senses had fallen somewhat foul of in the Bucher home. To what point this aspect was carried logically outside Villa Elsa, he was to realize in skirting the openly sensual sides.
The two Germans told of the various girls who had lived with them when in college. For the frank amatory life of the Teuton student begins early. Von Tielitz and Messer also boasted of their present-day mistresses who were so often changed for reasons of economy. The hilarious game, as Gard learned, was to obtain favors in exchange for nothing as far as possible. Trickery, lies, abuse, kicks, were employed to this purpose. Female chastity? A fable for the impotent. Consequently all was fair.
Sisters of their respected fellows were inferentially appraised and colloquially "hefted" as articles of social commerce ready to be knocked off matrimonially to the best bidder under the material rules of the GermanMitgiftsystem. Through the garish films of innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images of these daughters as if they were languishing to become mates and beating their breasts in their longing to become mothers. He had by no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.
Before Gard was to leave Deutschland he had to conclude that the German puts himself in the attitude of thinking of his women as sluttish and accordingly acting in that scale toward them. There is no great gilding to these fancies. Girls are small inspiration to him compared with what thepetites damesare to the amorous Frenchman. Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate, are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations of delicate refinement.
Kirtley thought he knew young men, yet this revolting capacity in them in Germany was proven to him to be not unnormal by its openness and by the dearth of any loud voices in rebuke. The German is conspicuously fullof animal spirits. He affects the mighty in physique. Exudations and emanations are frank and prominent functions.
Under the Kaiser the Berlin dame who rented rooms to the foreign student, offering them "with" or "without," meaning sometimes her own daughter in the bargain, considered herself respectable enough. More than this she acted in line with what appeared to be the purpose of acquiring a sympathetic control of the morals as well as the minds of the alien sojourner, the one being accompanied by a pandering to his lower nature with the doors of vice flagrantly ajar while the other armed his mentality with a Teutonized equipment and outlook. To sap the will, to galvanize the mind as from a German electric battery, palsied resistance to aggressive Germania. It was of a piece with that propaganda which the world was not to wake up to until almost too late.
These downright animal phases pointed the way logically, in Gard's mind, to that obscenity which is interwoven in the German civilization. He had first come across such evidence in leading comic journals. The drawings and jests that did not leave muchto be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It divorced him fromSimplicissimusandUlk, not that he was squeamish or a Miss Priscilla, but he saw no fun in that sort of thing.
He talked of it later with Anderson. Though there were pleasant delusions in Anderson's mind about Germany before he arrived, it was not his fault if few seemed to be left after his seven years. He bluntly defined the limited German wit and humor as characteristically born of the latrine.
Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the pornographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book. Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.
He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.
This ran through his mind:
"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it seems—everybody!"
THEGerman, in all this physical aspect, is not a little like an unabashed ape. Accordingly the foreigner in Deutschland is impressed by the popular worship of the wide-hipped female. The Teuton can leave little to be inferred but that he is more interested in the magnet of her developed hips than in the magic of her brain.
American women, with their slender waists and chaste frigidness born of Plymouth Rock, with their rulership in the home, their influence permeating conspicuously in matters of public interest out of the home, their entire freedom to be courted and married or let alone in unbounded respect—how long would these conditions have been permitted by the Gothic Kaiser if heedless America had fallen into his gradually tightening grip? Doubtless to his view Yankee women were treated too muchlike dolls. They are not breeders of soldiers, makers of kingdoms. They do not rear children for the State. What have they desirably in common with the disciplined Hausfrau who becomes the mother of the ruling future generations?Sheis properly the chattel of the Government.
And so it is not enough, as Gard recognized, for Frau or Fräulein to be massive of line and fond of being upholstered in dense colors in order to satisfy the general grossness of her male. It is not enough that she should be armed with strong hands, planted on large feet, and decorated in the German's favorite rococo manner of abounding breasts, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations.
"Big hips mean big women and big women mean big empires." The sex fecund, ardent for mating and offspring, is the type. And thus fatness, which obviously and indisputably fills out the picture, is a popular German female attribute. Von Tielitz and Messer made it plain that obesity and width of girth characterized the transient objects of their amours. And their allusions gave every evidence that the famous Naked Cult, to the fascinations of which Fräulein Wasserhaus, with her baredand redundant bosom, was yielding, had been claiming the German youth for its own.
Germany was recovering from this rage for nudity which had assumed some proportions. Starting from the only artistic section of the Empire, namely Bavaria, this cult had knocked even against the gloomy portals of the Pommeranian churches in the north. The Teuton had suddenly discovered that it was right and proper in his godship, as it was in the realm of the Greek deities, to go about naked. It was natural, healthful, and both beautiful and moral.
German men and women, in their divinity, should bathe, drink beer, dance together nude. What else did Grecian sculpture teach to these the modern Greeks—the true legatees of all that was Hellenic? What else did painting inculcate but the beauty of undraped couples wandering through landscapes? What more majestic spectacle than that of the Teuton father, mother and children going out for an afternoon promenade, clothed only in the ingenuous consciousness of their human greatness?
In a race of beings so little modeled after the accepted lines of pulchritude, all this waslaughable. But to the German, condemned to a vise-like seriousness and to childlikeness, it became significant and weighty. It was such a grateful revelation not to have to dream of his loved ones through the unsatisfactory medium of German clothing.
With his customary excess of logic he plunged headlong into these ardent waves of the realm of Venus rising unimpeachably from the sea in her immortal bareness. He began to systematize this demonstration. Some of the political parties seemed to be in line to favor this revealment of another radical tenet. German philosophers made ready to seize upon it with huge mental biceps and labor to incorporate it beneficently into the Teuton pansophy. Even doctors of theology were said to view the novel dispensation through the blue spectacles of their didacticism, and to hesitate and stumble over the question of greeting these glad visions of a glad apocalypse. What was truer Protestantism than that there is the natural body as well as the spiritual body, and that it would be virtuous to behold outwardly the former as it was virtuous to recognize inwardly the latter?
The campaign became almost lively. Ofcourse the young Germans, whose fathers and mothers in their youth had raved over Wagner and thus shocked their elders, raved over a departure that linked such possibilities of frankness and loveliness so delectably together. The Von Tielitzes and Messers were in the seventh heaven.
But Germany, being a northern country ruled severely in the main by old men, was bound to feel in the end more comfortable in clothes. Climate governs male and female alike and shapes their habits to its own tyrannical mandates. The Teutons were doomed to suggest flannel. So a vast moral revulsion in the form of the much German clothedness finally rose up and overwhelmed the religion of Nudity—theNackt Kultur. Although the Teuton male likes to contemplate himself and be contemplated as candid Mother Nature made him, he could not adapt himself to the idea of his fleshy women appearing naked before a critical and commenting world. Momus had at last arrived in ancient Deutschland and was feared.
While the movement, which was presuming to cover Germany with sculptures of its heroes in complete undress, honored itself by suchfitting testimonials to their lordliness, Fritz curiously shrank before public statues depicting his fat housewife in like absence of attire. This was illogical besides being unsatisfactory to those who had insisted on worshipping the German female formal fresco. The vital point being thus dodged, there was left nothing interesting in the way of legs for the Naked Cult to stand on, and it dropped out of sight as suddenly as it had risen to view. Prejudice is Plebeian and blind and to the blind and Plebeian high art of course goes with low morals. The Plebs are always in the crushing majority. So the odd German mind jumped to the other extreme and for a few months got ashamed of little daughters going barefoot or playing with naked animal toys.
Gard had been able to warm up small sympathy for the modern military authors and iron and blood philosophers whom he found in vogue in Germany. On the other hand, cold water had unexpectedly been thrown on the retreating Goethes and Schillers whom he had come to venerate with grammar and lexicon. As the Germans were proving to be wide of what his anticipations had set as a mark, hehad begun a serious course of reading not only about the modern race but about its origins, curious to know of the early developments of this strange people who belonged to civilization yet was so considerably and constitutionally outside the realm of its Christian development.
In this study he became attracted to Charlemagne and that epoch. Of them he had learned little at college. Of course the Germans had "bagged" Charlemagne, as an Englishman would express it, in addition to their other seizures right and left in the face of an indulgent, even supine, world. But Gard discovered that while they had kept the puissant Carolingian snatched to their breasts, the chivalrous side of the great medieval evolution which ended in fostering the romantic ideal of womanhood in its chastity, daintiness and colorful spell, had never reached much east of his capital—Aix-la-Chapelle. His heroic size, his practical religious pretensions and assumptions, his campaigns to seize control of foreign lands—all such Carolingian features and manifestations were imitated and adopted as Germanmotifs, but the corresponding gallant exaltation of the gentler sex was not included.The polished courts of self-denying love, the Troubadours, the salons, the refining influences that gradually raised woman to her modern sovereignty of a graceful liberty and charm, never characterized Deutschland.
Besides, women becoming idols through his own sexual restraint compelled a self-sacrificing procedure that did not appeal to Fritz. To him those many feminizing influences had naught to do with strength in battle or in toil. They were dangerous, softening, and coddled the elements of defeat. He wanted work and fighting and children, always children, but with the lustful appetites of the undisputed male.
His Berthas and Gretchens, who had been exceptional figures in the warring camps of the ancient Teutons, were therefore only transferred into a similar yet menial relation in the housed home. And there they have typically remained—in its cook room and nursery. The fact that the Buchers, though coming, as they boasted, from one original, unmixed, stationary stock there in that middle spot of old Europe, had displayed themselves as social and political parvenus, led to Kirtley's reflecting:
"The German thinks of a wife as in the kitchen, while a wife appears to the Frenchman as in the salon, to the Briton, as in an English garden."
So this gradual elevating of the sex toward an ethereal height in all respects, toward pure associations which, through the epochs of chaste saints, chivalry, gallantry, social freedom, were to uplift men by the graces of lofty feminine enchantment, took place westward of the Rhine. And Germany, if the sporadic Heine is excepted, had no Shelleys, no Chopins, and scarcely any of that rare, delightful perfume of human existence which western and southern mankind quite typically adores as the ultimate extract of beauty because it is associated with the spiritual elegance of womanhood....
On Kirtley's leaving that day, Von Tielitz and Messer showed themselves generously ready to share their amorous acquaintanceship. They insisted on his going with them sometime to the smallest, quaintest inn in Dresden where they were at present cultivating friendly relations with "Fritzi." In short petticoats she served the best hot sausages inSaxony. To an American student of life and language in Germany she was pictured as absolutely necessary. For, although originally from the Thuringian forest, she spoke the Saxon dialect "shockingly well."
Kirtley laughed it off as a part of the ribald fun.
The young Germans wound up their list of salutations with Der Tag!
"What do you mean by Der Tag?" he inquired. The others grinned significantly.
"Wait and see. It will be somethingkolossal." And they called out after him:
"Don't forget about Fritzi!"
That night Gard, laden with heavy feelings, tumbled into his German bed piled with its equatorial bolsters. Could Elsa marry a man like Friedrich? Ought she to be permitted to? Could she really love him? Wouldn't she be horrified if she knew fully about him? Or would she, like German women in general, seem to care little about the morals of her future mate? Likely, as Gard fancied, it was this knowledge of him that sent her now and then in evident unhappiness to her room.
She was a pure and very worth-while girl.He could not ignore that her healthful, productive example was a stimulus to him. It would be a sturdy prop in his long sensitive, susceptible physical recovery—and afterward. Was it really not a kind ofdutyto try to save her from sharing the fate of Von Tielitz, and win her if he could?
THEAmericanization of the Bucher home Kirtley naturally thought beyond all attempts. Its detestation of the low-born Yankee, with only his sorry millions, seemed too deeply planted there, especially in the brain and bosom of the Frau. Could Villa Elsa have been transferred to the United States, such a viewpoint might perhaps have been altered after a time. But this representative boorish German family, stuck here on the rainy banks of the mid-continent Elbe and so rooted and clamorous in the presumption that they and their kind were eclipsing the earth—how impossible of any conversion?
Gard had at first the idea of getting together some American statistics and showing the Buchers a few facts. Then he saw this was hopeless. They accepted nothing that did not come through their own official channels. Andwhy should he waste time on these obscure people? Why should he undertake to upset their racial happiness? Nobody, least of all he, could change their attitude about the upstart Yankee and his upstart dollars. The Buchers held themselves too far above mere money and its filth.
But the miracle was, nevertheless, to be accomplished, at least for awhile, in a manner as simple as it was unlooked for. And this was what happened.
One day, soon after Gard's disillusioning call on Von Tielitz, he was grubbing in his attic among the ninth century roots of the future super-luxuriant Teuton forest, when he heard Tekla's woodchopper feet pounding their way upstairs. A card was thrust in. James Alexander Deming, Erie, Pa. Well, of all the world! The next moment he was there in the room, talkative, airy, sunny, dressed with the obvious American consciousness of having just left the hands of his fashionable tailor and haberdasher. Every section of his black hair and tiny black mustache was plastered down as always in correct position.
Making himself right at home with his newly acquired cosmopolitanism, Jim explained how he was already settled in Dresden for the winter.
"You knew that the more I saw of this old Germany, the more I liked it. My governor wrote me I could stay if I would try to learn something and I thought of you. I said to myself, 'Kirtley is a serious sort of chap. If I light down near him, it will be easier to learn this confounded language they have got over here, and I will be able to shine with it in Erie, Pay, and do the old folks proud.'
"So I've got a teacher and a grammar and also a dictionary so big I can't find anything in it—all ready to loop the loop. But first, of course, I must run out and see you and see how you are getting on, swimming in beer. Nothing is too good for us Americans, you know, so my room in the hotel is right by the royal palace where I can see the Crown Prince with his sword fall off his horse every morning at ten. Gad, won't it be something to talk about when I get back to good old Pennsylwanee?"
Deming's "old man" was possessed of wealth derived from oil wells. But although Jim's pockets had always been stuffed with money, he had never been able to get throughhigh school or enter college. Hang it all, he didn't take to books like Kirtley and all such intellectual boys. It was the fault of his dad and mam. They had petted and spoiled him—an only child. It was too bad, but shucks, he wasn't going to let it interfere with his happiness. So it was money here and money there, and a host of friends who, like Gard, could not help being fond of him.
Jim had seen the Kaiser and quaffed out of the largest hogshead on the Rhine. He had been at a duel at Heidelberg where the chap with a cut through his cheek asked for a mug of beer and blew the beer out through the gash. He had swum in Lake Starnberg where Ludwig II had drowned himself; had seen the café in Munich where the celebrated Naked Culture was said to have originated; had bribed his way into the villa at Mayerling where Rudolph of Austria and Marie had ended that mysterious night of fatality. In short, he had done Germany pretty thoroughly.
When, by his insistent questionings, he learned about the comfortable and illuminating German home where Kirtley had installed himself, and that there was a fine, seriousyoung lady in it with a harvest of straw-colored hair, he soon confessed, after all, to his disappointments.
"Kirtley, you are always a lucky dog. Here you are with nice Dutch people, in the social swim, absorbing German to beat the band. All I see is chambermaids who shout at me some kind of devilish dialect that a fellow can't understand. And my chambermaid and I are just at present at outs. I told her this morning she was the tallest woman I ever saw. A little of her went such a long ways. As she don't know any English words, that is the only thing we have agreed about. She said, Ja wohl! This going to balls and cafés as I'm doing is all right for local color and all that, but it would tickle dad a lot if I knew a quiet, decent, respectable German family. And I want to know a nice, sober German girl who has got yellow, chorus-girl hair and will steady a fellow down. The proper study of young man is young woman. I haven't been able to meet any young ladies in this country. Sometimes I think they have only wenches. And I want some of the classic Gayty and Schiller stuff too that you can get here in Loschwitz."
This urgent idea did not appear auspiciousto Gard. If Deming got the run of Villa Elsa, he would unsettle things, interfere with his own work. Jim was a good boy but he played hob with study. And he was just the kind of flashy, ignorant Yankee who would prove to Villa Elsa what it claimed about the race. He would disgust the Buchers with his showy superficiality and dolessness. Mere money, everlasting money. More than all he would complicate the situation with Fräulein. He might upset her somehow, and at least discover his own secret feelings toward her—feelings that had become more distraught after the Von Tielitz revelation. In a word, everything would be helter-skelter.
After Jim had called twice, bent upon becoming intimate with the Buchers, Gard, as he thought, conceived a clever maneuver. He took Deming over to call on Fräulein Wasserhaus. Here was an earnest young woman, lolling on the gate with plenty of time on her hands, dying for a man. She could teach Deming everything he wanted to know. She was not antagonistic to Americans as were the Buchers. On the contrary she was aching to clasp some one of them in her pudgy arms.
But this stratagem proved a flat failure.When they came away from her abode, Jim took on a worried look and lit a cigarette.
"Say, see here, old chap. Are you trying to make fun of me? Is this a joke? I don't want a walrus, thirty years old, with ragbag clothes that fit her a foot off. She has a gait like an ice wagon. Why, she couldn't get a job as window-washer in the street car shops of Erie, Pay."
DEMING'Scampaign against the terrible German language was unable to advance perceptibly beyond the stage of preparations. These were somewhat elaborate, especially from the standpoint of expense. He had a multiplicity of instructors and grammars. If they had been placed side by side they might have reached from the Green Vault to the Zwinger.
He blamed these agencies of instruction. His "professors" he generally picked up at the Stadt Gotha where he played billiards. While these parties were fair with the ivories, they could not seem to knock any caroms of German around the cushions of Jim's brain.
His daily routine was like this: At ten, his lesson in Dutch. Teacher would come. Great show of hospitality. There must be somethingto drink. The preceptor must try one of the fancy pipes, of which Deming had collected a large array in Germany. He would be feeling knocked in this morning, having been up late consuming numerous bocks in amicable emulation of the local prowess. He had not got around to his lesson and had concluded he did not think much of his present grammar. Herr Preceptor would suggest procuring another which would strew roses no doubt along the thorny path. Capital idea. Of course they must then wait for the new grammar.
Adjournment at eleven to the café for billiards. Deming was a good wielder of the cue. He said the Germans were too be-spectacled and blear-eyed to play well and by three o'clock he had usually won quite a number of marks. This was making "easy money." It went toward paying for his evening's entertainment and was good economy. His pleasure account would not look so large to his governor. At three, to his hotel for afternoon dress. Evenings it was some other form of diversion. Home at all hours.
This was his day of study, of which his hopeful parents learned the promising side. Someone advised him that if he did not try so hard to master German, it would come easier. But he experimented with this plan for a week and told Gard:
"When you don't bone over the blamed language, it's surprising how much you don't know about it. It still takes me an hour and a half to hold a five minutes' conversation."
In two months he was thumbing page ten of the grammar, but he had seized upon a good many slang phrases, supercharged ejaculations. Though the undercurrent of his discouragement about his progress was considerable, it interfered little with his acquainting him proficiently with the restaurant world of Dresden. He saw and heard what was going on in those quarters, and through him Kirtley learned of that phase of German character and habits.
In view of everything, there had finally been no decent, reasonable way for Gard but to let Deming, professedly zealous of knowing German and seeing Teuton home life, into the Bucher circle. Aware that Jim was quite innocent enough morally, Gard avoided introducing him to Von Tielitz and Messer whosedepravities might prove harmful. But Deming at last met the former at Loschwitz and the two became friends just before Friedrich left in quest of another Kapellmeistership. The friction or explosion Gard rather expected between them over Fräulein did not occur. While he had dreaded such a happening for Jim's sake, it might have cleared the atmosphere pleasantly for his own. But Friedrich was delighted that Herr Deming showed his old neighbors, the Buchers, such munificent courtesies, and Jim thought Von Tielitz the most brilliant chap he had ever known.
Kirtley waited with fear, with trembling and also with some hopeful interest, for the fireworks resulting from Deming's induction to Villa Elsa. And they promptly began to soar, for Jim had, in his way, all the American speed, and proceeded to overwhelm the household with his attentions. It was a case of swift enthusiasm about the whole family. Unlike Kirtley he did not care how many of the members accompanied the Fräulein and him. All were welcome. Though he openly displayed his fascination about the Fräulein, ithad none of that tender sentiment which Gard was dissembling before his friend. Nevertheless it appeared to be a violent case of love at first sight, and before the first sight.
Kirtley dropped out of the running. He excused himself by the necessity of burying himself deeper in his books on Teuton origins and traits. In a brief week the Buchers had forgotten him. All was Herr Deming—the wonderful Herr Deming—the fortunate youth who was bringing the witchery of good luck into the drab home. It was Herr Deming morning, noon and night.
There were theater parties, suppers on Brühl Terrace, plans for the next dance. Jim spread it on thick, and the dutiful, docile Elsa was swept along with the rest, although with a reserve in evocation as became the modesty of a maiden who was manifestly the pivotal center of all this vertiginous attraction and activity. The Buchers suddenly evinced a great and favorable curiosity about America. Their attitude toward it was revolutionized. They plied Gard with questions. What was living like there? It must be most desirable. Gard came across convenient hand books of knowledge, inconvenient encyclopedias andatlases, lying here and there in the house, with pages opened freely at the United States. Frau Bucher became vociferous in praise of the advantages of the Yankee fashion of courtship over the slow, economical, dull, German process of match-making.
The household was overturned. Its affairs got dreadfully behind. Mother was mightily absorbed in getting out and fixing up imposing old dresses, laces, wraps, that were heirlooms or dated from her bridal days of a quarter of a century before. Elsa's lessons in etching and her methodical hours for perfecting her manifold talents, became badly confused.
The great thing was driving at the fashionable hour in the Grosse Garten. This was what the Buchers had never dreamed of. In the winter only the royal and very aristocratic families drove there. The common people, who might extravagantly expend a few marks to indulge in this pastime of nobility in summer, were frozen out of it in winter. Hot drinks in beer halls were then more to their taste.
But many an afternoon at four Deming, with his two ladies overdressed for the occasion in the dowdy German manner, occupying a handsome, heated limousine decorated with a conspicuous mirror and with Parma violets gently disengaging a delicate perfume, fell in right behind the king's household if possible, and toured the park in stately measure, being numbered, no doubt, by the open-mouthed beholder on the sidewalk, among the social elect in Saxony.
Elsa was as good as engaged, as good as married. In her mother's eyes, bloodshot with all this glory of excitement, her daughter was already dwelling in a palace in that amazing city of Erie, in that splendid commonwealth of Pennsylvania, of whose double fame she had never before heard. For, of course, Deming sang constantly of the wonders of his native haunts, where wealth flowed out of the ground and the trolley system was the best in the world.
Thus the Americanization of Villa Elsa was accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. No more did Gard hear of the Yankee pigs. No more did he hear of the disgusting Yankee billions. Germany and America in union would form the blessed state which would command the globe, and the two excelling peoples, byintermarrying, would produce a race too far ahead and above Frau Bucher's hoarse vocabulary to admit of much more than her Ach Himmels and Ach Gotts.