Book: Villa Elsa

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"Tell him it was a harmless little social affair that a few of us
fellows and girls got up. We will never do it again. I did not know
it would be any offense. Tell him I was only doing what I would do
in my own country. There we can get together and dance a little any
time without disturbing the nation." He wanted to add that the
United States was not like police-ridden Germany where it almost
seemed that a chap couldn't tie his shoe without permission from the
Kaiser. Prudence refrained him.

"Cotillion Coterie. That's French," translated the Ober-Offizier on
the bench, gravely illuminated. An assistant suggested that _sec_
might, in fact, refer to champagne. That would be French too.

"When did you leave France the last time?" the other demanded in a
hoarse, triumphant tone.

"Never been in France," returned Jim in a loud voice.

"Never been in France and yet you use French fluently."

"Tell him I don't know a word of French. I didn't know that was
especially French. With us it's just dancing language--everybody
uses it. Tell him"--Jim added encouragingly--"tell him I never knew
a Frenchman in my life."

"This is evidently a French affair as well as English," commented
the officer. "Anglo-French. Reaches out."

"What are they saying?" anxiously asked Deming of his intermediary.

On learning the new and extensive ramifications into which the
sportive CCC was leading him, he threw up his hands before he
thought and exclaimed, "Oh, my God!" It expressed his disgusted
confirmation of Mr. Anderson's assertion--"What egregious asses such
Germans can be!"--and also his _own_ alarm over his situation. When
would he get back to America at this rate? It was going to cost
money to escape from this scrape, and how would his governor and
mother feel about it? A few months in a political prison with rats
and vermin crawling over him seemed ahead instead of the jolly
summer he had planned. He cursed under his breath the member of the
CCC who had carelessly let his card get away from his clutches.

But a greater surprise awaited him. It revealed an example of the
tremendous thoroughness and immense detail that were the pride of
the Teuton bureaucracy. Deming was taken off his feet. The chief
held up a little battered sheet.

"Have you always paid your bills in Germany?"

"Yes, I have, sir," returned Jim, wondering at this strange turn,
but fully sure of himself on this ground.

"Untruth. Why did you not pay for three candles left in your room at
Karlsruhe? Here is the unreceipted slip."

"Because I did not use them. I did not want them. I left them on the
mantel."

"And here is a balance due on your laundry bill at Hamburg--twelve
cents--unpaid. How do you explain that?" A torn and dirty washing
schedule was handed down to him to refresh his memory.

"I didn't know I owed any balance," argued Jim to his spokesman.
"Tell him it was not presented to me. Tell him I will be only too
glad to pay anything I owe. I always pay what I owe." The examiner
gingerly took up a crumpled napkin, brown from an overturned
_demi-tasse_.

"August sixteenth, you spilled coffee on your napkin at
lunch--half-past twelve. And you went away from the Hotel
Bellevue--Bavaria--without making it good. What have you to
say to that?" The sorry cloth was held up contemptuously for
Jim's inspection and for the edification of the duly pained
official audience, most of whom, however, doubtless made no
use of such an article in their daily lives.

"I never heard anything about it!" cried Deming. "In my country
such things are thrown in. Nothing said about them. But tell him
I'll pay it--I'll pay anything--everything. How much is it?"

"Twenty-five cents, the bill claims."

"What is the total?" And Jim began digging in his pockets while
holding up his head testily. He had never before been accused of
hotel-beating. But payment did not yet appear to be in order. He
stared at the mass of files and papers before his cross-questioner.
He realized that his whole record in Germany lay there. The Imperial
Service had traced him like bloodhounds. Due to his frequent
irritated displays of proud American independence on his tour, the
bill of small grievances, now accumulated, no doubt assumed
troublesome proportions when exposed in its formidable length. Three
hours had been consumed, accounted for in part by the necessity of
an interpreter. As meal time was at hand Deming was commanded to
appear the next morning at nine to have his testimony taken at
length.

He departed, his buoyant nature rising once more in partial relief.
True to his Yankee instincts he now concluded they were only after
the money he owed.

"They want to scare me to make me pay up," he said to himself. "They
are afraid they won't get it. I'll pay the little two or three
dollars and that will end the matter. These blamed Germans with
their ten cents and twenty-five cents! What a system of government
to be bothering with these idiotic trifles!"

He sought distraction in several games of billiards followed by
dinner at his favorite cafe. When he returned to his room late that
night he found that his effects had been ransacked by two
detectives. Fully incensed by this high-handed procedure he
determined to place his inalienable rights in the hands of a lawyer
the first thing after the early morning meeting.

The taking of his testimony was a proceeding held in a small side
apartment before an elderly crotchety underling who pretended to
understand English and French, but whose thick-wittedness seemed
monumental. The slowness and dullness indicated a whole summer's
programme of this preposterous horseplay. Everything was being
written down in detail in long hand in the form of questions and
answers. All Deming's candles, soiled linen, stained napkins and
what-not, reported from all directions of the Empire, began to be
raked over. There were green, yellow, red, blue telegrams from half
the German States. Harassed by this muck and by the leering taunts
of the old party, Jim was glad to find, at the noon hour, that the
session was postponed to the second day after.

As he was leaving the room, another offensive inquiry about an
absurdity caused him suddenly to remember Mr. Anderson's advice. And
in one immortal moment in his existence he rose to a sublime height
of moral courage.

"Go to hell!" he shot back. And as he saw the clumsy servitor
beginning to pen "Answer: Go to h----" in his great book, Jim
slipped out.

He briskly hunted a lawyer to whom he related all the circumstances,
winding up elatedly with the last remark.

"Did they write that down too?"

"Yes."

The attorney was at first convulsed, familiar with Teuton naivete.
Then he dubiously shook his head. To Jim's unexpected discomfort the
affair was regarded seriously. If he had not ejaculated this
affront, something could be done. But now he had been guilty of what
the Germans might rightfully construe as a voluntary indignity
offered to the Imperial Secret Service in the performance of its
highly responsible duties. If he wanted to avoid important trouble,
the only simple and effective course would be to quit the country.
He could leave that night and in not many hours would be in Russia
and beyond German control.

And so Jim Deming made a hasty and unceremonious exit from the
Deutschland he had been so fond of, without having time to salute
any of his many friends good-by. He had to send them a line of
farewell from St. Petersburg.

"Here you have German bureaucracy in its full flower and odor,"
remarked Anderson as he recounted the affair to Kirtley. "It
flourishes to a great extent by exaggerating mole hills into
mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not
enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do.
It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more
extensive it is, the more entrenched he is. It is official dry rot
which is part of the price the people pay for having themselves
governed. It is national graft. But while our American forms of
graft at least stimulate individual cleverness among our
compatriots, this German form tends to reduce its recipients to the
level of donkeys, as seen in the Deming case."

Gard little suspected that he was to drift into a somewhat similar
misadventure, but of an advanced type.




CHAPTER XXIX

WINTER AND SPRING


The sudden drop in the life in Villa Elsa occasioned by meteoric Jim
Deming's disappearance, was terrific. Frau Bucher gasped, caught her
breath and sank voluminously beneath the waters of social oblivion
whence she had so grandly emerged. When she finally came up to her
plain surface of existence she demanded, Where are now the theater
parties, and drives in the Grosse Garten behind the King? The family
had almost begun to wonder how they had got on before. She wailed:

"The good Herr Deming, the marvelous Herr Deming! How could he have
abruptly left us? Something mightily strange must have forced him to
go. He will surely return. How could he treat Elsa so? Here we are
with our hopes, our plans and our new underwear. It is terrible."

For several days the house resounded with perturbation. This
gradually decreased as the readjustment to the former flat
conditions took place. The transition was not completed until the
information arrived that Herr Deming was never coming back. The
final stroke. It was indeed pitiable, tragic, amusing. And all
because the American custom of flirtation was unknown to these
matter-of-fact Germans, so deadly in earnest about everything.

But, Teuton-like, the brave ship Villa Elsa soon righted itself,
being used to blows. It had at least entertained and been
entertained by one of the Golden Youths of Good Fortune whose
legends gild the expectations of every race. And it was a superior
satisfaction to realize that this had not happened elsewhere in
Loschwitz.

There were left behind no lingering animosities, no painful
grievings. Feelings were too stout, sensibilities too tough, to
admit of acknowledging rancors or sickly complaints. The daughter's
marriageable future was apparently faced again with courageous
determination. As she could not be a luxurious American queen, she
must be a German housewife who ranked, to say the least, high
_enough_ in the eyes of Gott. But what German's wife? Oddly enough
Frau Bucher, despite all her bluntness, never let a hint out of the
bag of her franknesses before Kirtley.

After Jim Deming's second riotous invasion of Villa Elsa, when there
had been confirmed the abject and tumultuous surrender of the two
ladies, mind, body and soul, to mere money, prostrate at the feet of
an American "pig," Gard experienced a numbness of heart. True, the
daughter was tied to the apron strings of her mother. But then Jim
could only fling his pocketbook in her face. He had done it and she,
sheep-like, had obviously accepted the situation without a question,
a murmur.

How could he, as an American, gage such a blank lack of character,
individuality? How different was this trait from that which was
exhibited by the energetic prosecution of her talents where her
personality, shining forth so steadily, held his admiration almost
undimmed! This was a baffling interrogation that furnished another
evidence to Kirtley of a gaping chasm separating the Teutons from
other peoples. The highest ideal of German character is expressed by
works. The highest ideal of "Christian" character is expressed by
self.

Spring was now at hand. The sunlit air invited to the out-door
life. The windows and doors of Villa Elsa, which was stale and
stuffy from the closed-up winter, stood open and the inmates
came out of their hibernation, shook themselves and welcomed
the warmth and lack-luster brightness. The lindens and plane
trees and shrubberies began to hug the place under their cosy
leafage. Herr Bucher's rose garden was prepared to grow merry
with colors. The companionable garden corner for afternoon tea
and beer became a nook of liveliness. The oncoming summer sent
forth generally its exulting thrills.

This fine surging-in of sunny, revivifying Nature took at first such
a strong and glad hold on Gard that his private emotions, which Elsa
had so promptly sharpened and whose edge had become dulled, seemed
to lay themselves pleasantly aside for the moment. Whether they were
to become whetted again into keen interest remained to be seen, for
the awakening green and white noon-tide of actual existence was
absorbing.

Apparently she was not greatly affected by Deming's departure.
She betook herself to her lessons and duties with well-drilled
diligence. The years were cut out for her. She had only to follow
the pattern. How much more fortunate it would be, Gard had often
felt, if she were detached from her semi-civilized household! Her
own attractions would then be freed from the surrounding thorns,
prickly hedges, that bruised and tore and dismayed one. An
American chap could marry her--but oh, her family!

It was not long, however, before she missed meals. She had begun
again being mysteriously mute at times in her room, over the Heine
poems. Gard had almost forgotten them.

There were no promenades this early season in the meadow, with the
poet. No duos were played. Winter, for that matter, was a more
favorable time for them, as it was also for the family concerts.

Fraeulein observed a meaningless familiarity with Kirtley as if he
were an old member of the home circle. He wondered again if Rudolph
had influenced and troubled from the first her relations with
himself. And nowadays Tekla was surly toward him. She served him
unwillingly and grabbed his occasional _Trinkgelds_ with scarcely a
thank-you. Had Rudi, with whom he had had hardly any contact,
stirred her up against him out of sheer unjustified Satanism?

The spring weather somewhat curtailed, mollified, all the frank
irascibility and wrangling that went on in the house, and it was
under the lukewarm spell of this German virgin summer-time that the
routine took on its most agreeable aspects, though accompanied with
the usual Teuton domestic din. It was, in fact, very enjoyable,
contrasted with what the cold months had permitted.

In the winter a pleasant feature had been the theater or opera
nights. Darkness then came at four. Dinner would be served at five
in order to reach the amusement place at half past six or seven. By
eleven the family were back in Loschwitz, sitting down, starved, to
a bouncing supper where frequently Kirtley regaled himself with the
toothsome Pumpernickel. Over the hot dishes the feverish points of
the entertainment were discussed, exclaimed about, while the party
cooled off and solaced themselves with Schultheiss. These were
rousing and satisfying little happenings.

Free public lectures had also been a source of enjoyment to the
Buchers during the long frigid fortnights. Of the five senses, Gard
reflected, hearing is the only good one the Germans possess. They
hear, absorb through hearing, to better advantage than other races.
They close their eyes and drink in seriously. Naturally enough comes
about the universality of their music and lectures.

Of these public dissertations a course on the Union between Greek
Philosophy and Greek Poetry was especially raved over in Villa Elsa.
Gard attended one of these evenings, inspired by the instructional
ardors of Frau and Fraeulein and Ernst. The example of little Ernst,
avid of such intellectual pleasures at his tender age, ever
impressed Gard anew. He thought of American lads in comparison.

The German professor, as is well known, occupies a much more potent
and exalted position in Germany than the American professor in
America. He is considered a reliable fount of wisdom. He speaks with
sure authority. He is an oracle, permanent and sounding afar.

On this occasion, precisely at eight o'clock, in a majestic
university hall, Kirtley saw this particular grand and popular
orator ascend the pulpit. He was in full dress--white waistcoat,
white tie, white kids. He was large, shapely, commanding. The women
were "at his feet." He stood there solemnly as the clock was
striking, and slowly removed his gloves and inserted them under his
coat tail. And for exactly an hour there was a remarkable flow of
formidable, finished periods, without a note, without a hesitation.
Gard really felt there would never be anything else to say about
Beauty, so profound, so complete, so final, seemed this survey of
the topic.

At the close the audience flocked to the speaker as if to an
Olympian victor. Frau Bucher was ecstatic, covering him with her
compliments while insisting on waiting for a propitious moment to
introduce Herr Kirtley. But as Gard remained there at the lecturer's
elbow, he met with another disillusion about German professors. This
locally famous man, so correctly dressed to outward view, wore no
shirt collar under his beard. His neck and ears showed no signs of
recent ablutions and were bushy with unkempt hairs. And he exhaled a
rank odor compounded of perspiration and dirt.

Gard almost choked, being crowded into close contact. Could he ever
get fully accustomed to German smells? It was most unpleasant,
disenchanting. He could not, it appeared, find himself attracted
to Teuton university expounders--those gods of wisdom who had
repulsed him.

Whether it was his unfortunate luck or not, he was not able to
summon a desire to go again. He had not forgotten his other
experience. It was a part of that something fundamentally,
monumentally lacking in the German race--something shoddy,
deceptive, which he had met with at so many turns.




CHAPTER XXX

VILLA ELSA OUTDOORS


In the vernal season the lectures and theaters were dropped for
neighborhood excursions of which the Buchers, like all German
families, were extremely fond. A rendezvous would be made for
dinner, for instance, at some attractive spot up the Elbe. It would
be a walking trip from Loschwitz along the winding banks or up on a
higher path stretching from one smooth, low-lying hilltop to
another. Everywhere the invigorating odor of pine lay in the air.
The company assembled by twos or singly at their convenience during
the late afternoon. Generally the Herr would be last. And when he
was spied approaching, with a cock's feather in his hat and
supporting himself authoritatively on his big stick, a chorus of
acclaim greeted him, for craving appetites were now to be
satisfied.

The household would pass the evening dining _al fresco_ and enjoying
the landscape studded with historic and other enduring memories.
Near by was Hosterwitz, where Weber composed "Oberon" and "Der
Freischuetz." Often mists from the Elbe rose mystically to engarland
the crenelated castles here and there on the heights. A drowsy river
boat in that long agreeable northern twilight would finally gather
up the family at the dock and drop them off at home.

Sundays were the favorite time for these little outings. Lessons,
classes, tasks, were then lightened. Gard had quickly become aware
in Germany that the Sabbath is considerably a day of work as well as
pleasure. The usual impression in America that the Germans are
religious, not to speak of being moral, was dispelled. This had been
a fragment of his erroneous idea that they are active Protestants in
the sense that carries any Calvinistic or ethical meaning.

Neither the Buchers, nor any of the families whom Kirtley met
through them, went to church. The Protestant churches were, in fact,
gloomy, tasteless and almost empty. Their services appeared
cheerless and forbidding. Tremendous fear was their keynote. It
seemed far more agreeable to a German to partake of the national
sacrament out in a beer garden.

His attitude seemed to be that his race were born so
constitutionally and thoroughly in line with Divineness that they
did not need to _do_ anything about it. The religious element, as a
shaper of conduct and thought, was accordingly not required. As for
any restraining power, the Government furnished all of this that was
necessary.

At any rate the rulers looked after religion. They observed
all-sufficiently its rites. They stood next to Deity and represented
and protected the people. Kirtley remarked that when the ordinary
German began talking of God, which was rare, he was soon talking of
the Emperor. Both deities were ever solicitous for him, working
tirelessly in his behalf. The Kaiser was properly the national
busybody, the head schoolmaster, who attended to everybody and
everything and drove all constantly forward toward a unified and
splendid destiny.

Thus arose the firm belief of the Germans in their natural
righteousness--the righteousness of how they act, what they
possess. Gard saw there existed among them little virtue in the way
of religion to offer the youth of other lands. To send an American
son or daughter to Deutschland for such influence and benefit was
but another example of the prevailing misconception of real
Teutonism.

Many an evening the family dined at the famous Schiller Garden which
stretched along the shore, just across the river. Knitting and
sewing and books were taken along, a large table was secured, and
there the members ate and refreshed themselves with liquids in
leisurely fashion from six o'clock until bed time. There would be
plenty of talking and smoking and plying of needles as the moonlight
or river lights danced forth to guide the active river traffic and
also the large inflowings and outflowings of restaurant guests. And
all to the bracing music of a capital orchestra reeling off jubilant
marches and waltzes.

These were good times when the German was to be observed under the
most favorable colors. After Tekla's little tragedy snatched her
away from Villa Elsa, as will soon be seen, this dining out became
the regular event of the day.

On one of these occasions in the Schiller Garden the conversation
fell once more on America. The subject had not been touched since
the eruption over Yankee "pigs". It had lain dormant under the
mesmeric effect of Jim Deming's appearance.

Gard gathered the following for his notebook. The Buchers maintained
that, even if the Hohenzollerns were not wanted, they were necessary
to hold Germany together. Otherwise she would split up into many
impotent states and be at the mercy of the solidary races adjoining
her. But who could not want the Hohenzollerns? They had made of
Germany--really a small, poor country--a mighty power. Look at huge
America, by contrast! She was weak, disorganized, aimless. She was
the proverbial giant with few bones. The western half of the United
States was still practically undeveloped, and yet it abounded in
natural wealth.

Then there was the Monroe Doctrine. It was a baseless fiat for which
there was no legal or moral justification--as arrogant a presumption
as could be claimed of any edict of a Kaiser. The Buchers asserted
that the Doctrine was a crime against humanity. It had kept, for a
hundred years, South America and Central America indifferently
civilized, miserably governed, their thin populations uneducated,
thriftless, superstitious, bigoted. Said the Herr:

"If our Germany had had full access to that half hemisphere it would
be in a full blaze of progress. It would be affording prosperous
homes to untold millions of Europeans now packed together like
sardines. The mines, forests, rich soils, grazing lands, would have
long ago been completely opened up, tilled, occupied, for the
benefit of man who is still, in the main, inadequately fed and
clothed. We Germans can, admittedly, manufacture cheaper and better
goods than anyone. We ought to be free in our way and by our own
methods to supply those Americas with the necessities and comforts
of civilization and make them rich and happy.

"Their mongrel races are poverty stricken, disease stricken, and
often fighting among themselves. The United States does little for
them. Nor will she let anyone else. She plays the dog in the manger
to the detriment of the world. And this is because she is vain,
timid and without plan. Is that logical, wise and serving mankind
for the best? Were conditions reversed, would she herself favor such
a backward, lagging programme?"

Kirtley admitted to himself that this was a very good and valid
point of view for Germans. He recognized its general source, for the
Buchers, in the Dresden newspapers. But he did not enter into
argument. He had satisfied himself that argument with Teutons, who
do not have open minds, who are obsessed by fixed ideas bored into
them, can only end in unpleasantness--a row. He had come to Germany
to learn. It would be defeating this purpose to air what notions he
might have.

In Villa Elsa itself a good deal of the feasting in April and May
was carried on in the garden where flowers and dogs completed the
picture, together with much open-air singing accompanied by the
piano up in the salon. Were it not for the musical cult, it would
have been difficult, Gard had concluded, to live in this household.
As Anderson said, music had in a degree tamed the German "beast" of
the north and made it possible to get on with him at all. Music
rather than woman, religion, or the ideal of social intercourse,
had partly softened him.

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