Book: Villa Elsa

S >> Stuart Henry >> Villa Elsa




It was a habit for the family, when nothing was pressing, to remain
at table discussing this and that, nearly always providing the theme
was German. He encouraged this because he could learn from the
well-stocked information which the members possessed about Germany
and the Germans, and for the further reason of conversational
opportunities.

It may be best to try to reproduce the scene in outline as it
occurred. The talk had fallen upon governments, nations, peoples--a
general field of inquiry for which Kirtley had had some predilection
at college. The vast superiority of the German Government had been
again, as often before, so emphasized in Villa Elsa that he felt now
that he ought to raise a question. Should this overweening
assumption always pass unnoticed, unqualified?

It was partly because the foreigner avoided disputing with the
Germans, who made discussion unpleasant by their acrid, dictatorial
manners and drowning diapasons, that their arrogance had so rapidly
grown out of bounds. They do not recognize courtesies in debate, fly
off the handle, burst in with interruptions on the half-finished
statements and sentences of others.

Besides, Kirtley had not yet fully learned that they have not the
same understanding of things, not the same definitions for the same
words. For instance, the Buchers insisted that the Germans had the
most freedom of any nation. But their freedom meant something like
the liberty allowed in a prison yard. Free press? Yes, it was to be
found in Deutschland in its highest state, since it was always
authoritative. And there authority meant liberty of opinion. Again,
thought was the most free and liberal there, because, as it seemed,
the German was free to think just as the Kaiser thought. Equity?
Equity was only what the Teutons wanted, and therefore of the most
desirable type. And so on.

Such differences were usually antipodal--diametrically opposed. The
reason, Gard worked out, was that in America and other democratic
lands the significance of such words sprang from the common people
upward. In Germany such interpretations proceeded essentially from
the reigning family downward. Discussions under such circumstances,
instead of leading toward mutual understanding, breed acrimony.
There is little room for shadings, amicable approachments, progress
in the direction of reciprocal enlightenment.

It was a nest of blustering, pugnacious hornets which Kirtley poked
up on the evening in question, by asking:

"How do you prove that the German Government is the best?"

The Herr, taking his knife from his mouth--the Teuton eats
conspicuously with his knife--suddenly showed that he had evidently,
in the presence of his American guest, long held himself in on this
subject with ill-feelings that clamored to be let loose.

"Prove it? Prove it?" he hoarsely exclaimed. "It needs no proof.
Everybody knows it. Could we have the greatest people without the
best Government? Could we have the best education without the best
Government? Why does everybody come to Germany to study? Why did
_you_ come? It's because these things are true. Did you ever hear of
young Germans going elsewhere to universities? They do not need to.
We have the best."

The family were up in arms. Their Government had been questioned.
Each member, with the exception of Fraeulein, who was "at class," was
bursting to talk about America. It had no army. Therefore it
amounted to little. It had no higher education worthy of the name.
It had only one institution that could claim to be called a
university. It had no aristocracy. It was a country of low, lawless
classes. These and similar sentences flew back at Kirtley, whose
face reddened. The mask was being at last hurled off. What
self-control, indeed, had the family before maintained, when they
were so armed with displeasure concerning the United States! He
would not have credited it. It was at least illuminating, if
blinding. For what could be the excuse, provocation? Nothing that he
had ever heard of. The two peoples had been so separate and
distinct. The words of Anderson rushed into his mind. "The Germans
can hate people they've never known, never seen. They hate on
principle and without principle."

Knives and forks figured in the air, beer mugs were grabbed and
banged down, napkins took refuge under the table as if in fright,
to be indiscriminately dirtied under foot. The gulped down food,
meeting the oncoming throaty expressions of irritability, created
much alimentary confusion. Gard almost trembled. Here he had been
for weeks dwelling in a friendly society, in an intimate
relationship, without any realization of what ugly thoughts were
secretly leveled at him in the form of a political unit. As an
individual, he had been most welcome. As a citizen of the United
States he was despised. The Herr vociferated:

"What is your country, tell me, what is your country? It is _nichts,
nichts_. It is not a country. It is a ragout, a potpourri, a mess.
We do not recognize such a country. It has no beginnings, no
tradition, no unity of blood, no ideals----" He choked and the Frau
flared forth while attempting to crack a nut between her teeth.

"The American people are the off-scourings of Europe. They were
criminals, atheists, diseased people, failures, who were sent away
from Europe. So they go and try to found a new race, a new nation.
They try, but they fail of course...."

When his mother got out of breath, little Ernst began with a milder,
more judicial air, though he seemed partly to have memorized
official declarations.

"Don't you think, Herr Kirtley, it stands to reason that our
reigning family, which is admitted to be honest and has practiced
ruling for centuries, knows better how to govern a race than the
always new and untried persons who keep taking the reins of
government in a democracy? The Americans can never tell far ahead
who is to rule. There are changes all the time. How can the citizen
prepare confidently for the future? How can he plan long ahead as we
do? I have always read that this is the reason things are so steady
and stable in Germany and so uncertain and wabbling in America. This
uncertainty hanging over a republic unsettles its population. You
have panics, lynchings, graft. We are free of such scourges. Our
Government is always the same unit and to be relied on. If new
policies are begun, it is there to carry them through to their
logical end, even if it takes a generation or longer. You have
always new statesmen with new ideas. We no sooner learn to know of
one of your politicians than he is dropped and we must read about
another in control. How does that make for any well-considered and
thoroughly demonstrated plans? Would it not be the natural result
that the German people are completely contented and the American
people are always discontented?"

Rudolph's excited pronouncements ran along a different line,
interchanged with voluminous whiffs of tobacco.

"Under our Government, Herr Kirtley, the German flag is seen in all
parts of the globe. And wherever it is seen, it is respected,
feared. Who ever sees the American flag? Even _I_ don't know what it
looks like. It is not feared. It is only noticed out of voluntary
courtesy. And a nation can't be really great without an army like
ours. The army is the spine of the country. It makes a country a
vertebrate. What would even Germany be without its army? Almost
nothing. The army consolidates, trains, disciplines. It gives us
health, good constitutions, industrious habits, exactness. It makes
a nation superior because it fortifies human effort. In the constant
changing of our regiments about to different sections of the Empire,
our soldiers come to be well acquainted everywhere. They make
friends and are at home in every direction. They learn to realize
how great we are and this strengthens the German feeling and makes
all parts of the nation one.

"Of course we have the only first-class army. All our General Staff
has to do any day is to say the word and, as I have so often said,
our army can go out and defeat the world. Our navy will soon be in a
position to destroy England's. We are getting her trade routes, her
mail routes. Our goods are now selling everywhere. It is not only
because they are the best and the cheapest, but because our army and
our navy stand behind them to _make_ people know what is best for
them. Every little German box of goods has a big gun behind it. Of
course we don't need to use the gun--_yet_--because people are
crying for our manufactures all over the world. If we had occupied
your big and half-developed country in your place, we would have
long ago been the only great State. There would have been no others.
We would have annihilated them if they were not willing to become
German provinces."

Rudi took a long pull at his cigarette, with his elbows outspread
like the haughty wings of the Prussian eagles of war. Emitting a
long streamer of smoke, he summed up the whole thing in a nutshell
with a derisory--Pouf!

Kirtley was inwardly fired up with resentment. Then he had to
smother a laugh. This exhibition of the family taken off its guard
was more instructive than volumes of discussion he might read about
the true German attitude toward America--toward everyone. Were these
but Goths with the German skins scratched off a little? He kept
thinking of Anderson--how it furnished the pure evidence of what the
latter was despairing of before deaf ears! Gard's respect, his
sympathy, for the old man, jumped up with patriotic fervor.

He marveled at first how the good Buchers had been primed with this
knowledge, these comparisons. Then he realized that the editorials
and other articles in the Dresden journals, whose lengthy, heavy,
pounding sentences confused with an obtuse, inverted syntax he was
reading at Anderson's suggestion, accounted for these venomous
conceptions and prejudices.

"So it is our duty to hate," broke in the Herr once more, with
croaks and grunts now behind his long porcelain pipe which roved
down over his stomach, a green tassel dangling at the end. "We give
our children beatings to educate them, don't we? So we have the best
education. We must give the world a beating to improve it."

The Frau all the while could hardly restrain herself.

"You know what we in Germany call Americans? We call them
pigs--yes, _pigs_. America is like a big pig pen where everybody is
wallowing over everybody for money--just for money."

"And Germany," added her elder son, "is just waiting till the United
States gets money enough, then we go in with our _navy_ and our
_army_ and take it all."

Gard wanted to see how far they _would_ go, and he had seen. Was
this the old barbarian of the north risen to earth again, his rude
garments of hide torn off, exposing him in his pristine, fighting
nakedness? Where was the German under it all--the German who was
taken to be civilized in heart and spirit as other men are? These
law-abiding, stay-at-home people had deliberately grown in Villa
Elsa this robust plant of contempt, so full-blossomed now and ready
to exhale its noisome fumes which at moments almost stifled Kirtley
with their poison. What would Rebner say to this with his golden,
soul-felt opinions of the excelling race!

This hospitable and apparently harmless domicile was, in reality,
like a martial encampment. Gard could not but conclude that he would
have to leave Loschwitz. How could he for a moment stay in face of
these direct and hard-fisted attacks? And certainly Villa Elsa would
not want to harbor a hog any longer. The similar households he had
come to know, all such households, unquestionably bore the same
furious grudges against the western hemisphere.

But Elsa? How could he leave her--like this? She was the first girl
to excite seriously his affections. She seemed to strike the note of
whatever was truly earnest in him. Yet did she, too, think Americans
were pigs? Did she consider him of such an inferior breed? Perhaps,
in her misled innocence, she did. Perhaps that was the reason why
she acted toward him in an upsetting fashion which only the more
tempted a certain tenacious element in his make-up.




CHAPTER XIV

AFTERMATH


This astonishing outbreak in Villa Elsa was followed by something
still more singular to Kirtley, or at least out of his reckoning. It
was to stir the depths of his contemplations and comparisons and
give him the sharpest look into German character he had yet
received. It was to show him that a gaping abyss might be separating
the Teuton from other western humanity. Having latterly doubted that
the race was easy of sympathetic grasp, any true kinship, he now
profoundly realized that instead of being able to approach it nearer
in feeling the more he knew it, he was encountering very high cliffs
that threatened forever to mark an inaccessible boundary line.

He had taken it for granted that the anti-American outburst would
end the Buchers' relations with him. He must have turned out to be
very unwelcome. The very sight of him as one of the American pigs
about the house must have been most unsatisfactory, distasteful.
They could not from now on visibly wish him or any Yankee in their
home. Their personal dignity could not permit their assault to be
backed up afterward by any equivocal conduct toward him.

Then, too, they would expect that he would not want to remain. Had
they not voluntarily, deliberately, hurled at him their defiant
scorn of his people? Self-respect would demand his immediate
departure.

As for himself, Gard passed a sleepless night thinking hotly about
the episode. Toward morning he cooled off. These were boors. Why
should he take to heart their boorishness? Richness was here indeed.
Just the place to keep finding out the real German. Having let the
bars down with such a bang and hullabaloo, the family would from now
on readily and fully reveal themselves. It is a poor investigator
and observer who is easily shied away from his purpose by taunts and
ill-breeding.

But the miracle was that the Buchers went on exactly as before. They
obviously saw no reasons for altering their friendly daily
intercourse, nor did they have any idea that he should harbor a
grievance. Beginning with the next morning, their usual amicable
bearing and attentions continued uninterrupted. The family was not
conscious of having tried to give mortal offense or to cause
resentment from him.

For, to a German, blows in all senses are a normal part of living.
His social habits indulge themselves in knocks, coarse attacks,
unseemly abuse, as rather matters of course. He wields a bludgeon
where more refined men would cut down with sarcasm or wither one
with disdain. Blows are his natural method of instructing others and
of getting himself instructed. "Good German blows" are what the
Kaiser talked of loudly. To strike as well as to kick is a
wholesome, healthful, righteous procedure, not to be grieved over,
not to be kept rankling in the bosom. It is truth and fact in
action, and action should always be forceful and decisive to be
effective. The whipping of a school boy for any just cause should
not be remembered by him throughout life as something to be allowed
to fester or as calling for angry vengeance.

So Gard's hosts pursued the tenor of their ways as if that
detonating night had witnessed nothing. Their insensitiveness about
it included insensitiveness about him. In other words, he discovered
that as you cannot insult a German, therefore he cannot insult you.
He does not know about such things in the Anglo-Saxon meaning. His
conception of social and moral values is so obtusely or radically
different from those of the truly occidental civilizations that
there is little common ground here. Consequently, in such relations,
the Teuton does not feel anything to be sorry for. There is nothing
for him to worry about in any shame the next day.

Kirtley learned gradually, through his dealings with tradesmen and
in hearing business men talk in the cafes, that this underbred
attitude extended into the German secular world. A German may cheat
you, lie to you, take a grossly unfair advantage of your good faith,
but he will not expect that this is going to interfere with a
continuance of your business relations. It is only a part of the
hard game of gain. If you indignantly enumerate to him the facts of
your unpleasant discovery, he sees little about which to bear a
grudge. He is not humiliated. He merely and unfortunately did not
succeed, or succeeded while unluckily you found him out.

Likewise if one lies to him, cheats him or otherwise mistreats him
in a transaction, he does not permanently lay it up against the
evil-doer. For he knows he would have done the same thing under
similar circumstances. He is prepared to go on next week with the
usual dealings. Of course he will complain with prompt vigor, and
rage in his favorite fashion, but it is only because of his material
loss or discomfort, not because of broken standards of trusted faith
lying dishonored in the dust.

All this alien side of German character thus came to be lain before
Gard like a scroll unrolled. He read its lines with eyes blinking in
wonderment. And this was the people who were to lead the earth.

The only part of it he felt the Buchers did not comprehend and were
disappointed about, was that he did not candidly acknowledge the
porcine truth of all they had shouted at him. He was of a
heterogeneous conglomeration called Yankees. He should admit it. He
was stupid not to. For him not to join in the Bucher chorus of
Germany's greatness was a poor return for all they were doing for
his ease and profit. But he was an American and of course the
Americans--

It must be quickly acknowledged, it is true, that Kirtley's
experiences and observations along these channels did not
necessarily show that the Teuton is less honest than others. Let it
be granted that he is fully as upright as anyone in the sum total of
his commercial transactions. The point Gard uncovered was that here
were full-fledged race traits and habitudes which stood counter to
Christian ideals, were pagan in type, were due to a lower stratum of
moral and social perceptions.

The explosion in Villa Elsa led him on to another revealment. What
was it but a rather puerile performance? Tactless, boisterous
youngsters blurt out the disagreeable sentiments of a household. The
Buchers had acted like children. Laying aside all question of the
wonderful German trained mind, knowledge, efficiency, Gard observed
so much that was boy-like and girl-like in the adult Teuton life. No
country has such a wealth of toys and juvenile story books as
Germany. The Teuton weaves his nursery tales, so grotesque and
strikingly cruel, into his grown-up years. All this influence
continues with him and affects him strongly as long as he lives. The
mature German can kick, sulk, whine, much as his offspring do. When
irritated he can easily act like an _enfant terrible_.

What is quaint, droll, distorted, comically ugly, or of a
gingerbready effect, in Germany, is the expression of this childish
strain. And it appeals particularly there to the youthfulness that
remains in the hearts of visiting foreigners. It is accordingly one
of the most popular Teuton aspects, especially among women and the
young.




CHAPTER XV

MILITARY BLOCKHEADS


Gard's attentions 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 Fraeulein 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 adding _en_, 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 muessen--wir muessen--_stopfen_!"

The word for stop would not come to him. Fraeulein 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? Friedrich
truly 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 august _military_. 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.

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