Book: Villa Elsa

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"So this stupid _Kerl_ took 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 never had 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 the _Dummkopfen_ began 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.




Chapter XVI

A LIVELY MUSICIAN


Gard discovered 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, of about 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 are _very_ good friends. But now I am not so much in
Dresden and, my dear Mr. Kirtley, my poor Kapellmeistership does not
come along. It is 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 of _nonchalance_, 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 of behavior 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 her plain 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.




CHAPTER XVII

IMMORALITY AND OBSCENITY


Gard now 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 preeminence. 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 formulae 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 if Americans 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 for _all_
things 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 German _Mitgift_ system. 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 the _petites dames_ are 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 full of 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 much to
be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It
divorced him from _Simplicissimus_ and _Ulk_, 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!"




CHAPTER XVIII

THE NAKED CULT


The German, 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 much like 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?
_She_ is properly the chattel of the Government.

And so it is not enough, as Gard recognized, for Frau or Fraeulein 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 Fraeulein
Wasserhaus, with her bared and 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 was laughable. 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. Of course 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--the _Nackt
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
such fitting 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 form _al
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, he had 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 German _motifs_, 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 in Saxony. 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!

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