GARD KIRTLEY
Into this Triumphant Germany young Kirtley had come to recuperate
from the sadness over the loss, the previous year, of his parents
and from a siege of sickness. Still somewhat pale, somewhat weak, he
showed the shock he had undergone. He had toured across southern
Germany and up to Berlin where he had bidden good-by to his chance
American traveling companion, Jim Deming, who was knocking about
Italy and Teutonland. They had exchanged final addresses.
Kirtley, clean-shaven, with pleasant brown eyes, and brown hair
brushed down flat, giving his head the appearance of smallness,
looked very lank and Yankeeish among the robust, fat Teutons of the
Saxon capital. He was entering Dresden on a late afternoon brown
with German sunshine. The school year had begun, but a loitering
summer-time brightened city and countryside. As he made his way
slowly through the throng at the station, he gave evidence of a
rather shy way of looking up and about, an apologetic readiness
to step aside, to yield place, not characteristic of the speedy
American in Europe. He had not, as we have said, come to Germany
for adventure. He had not come merely to idle for the winter. And
certainly he little mistrusted he was finally to figure as a modest
hero in a curious and dangerous experience that linked itself up
with the beginning of the war of which he, like the world at large,
felt not the slightest premonition.
His German teacher had been his favorite in his eastern college
where he had one season been a very fair halfback. His better
showing had exhibited itself in his ability to throw from left field
to home plate on the ball team. This American preceptor of German
parentage had taken an interest in Kirtley with the insistent way of
Teutonic pedagogues. Always commending with a uniform vigor the
Germans and German fashions of living, he had gradually filled Gard
full of the idea of their excelling merits.
Kirtley heard of the tonic of the nutritious Teuton beer and Teuton
music in overflowing measures. In the Kaiser's realm, it appeared,
the digestions are always good. How desirable it would be for Gard
to take on some flesh in the German manner! In that climate,
Professor Rebner claimed with assurance, although he had never been
abroad, one can eat and drink his fill without causing the human
system to rebel as it is apt to in our dry, high-strung America. His
pupil's appetite would come back. Hearty meals of robust cheese and
sausages would be craved with an honest, clamorous hunger that meant
foolish indelicacy here at home.
Rebner also urged that Gard could in Deutschland improve his German
which, notwithstanding his affection for his preceptor, was
indifferent. Its gutturalness grated on his nerves, antagonized him.
But he criticized himself for this, not the language. Had not his
old mentor always sung of the superiorities of that tongue?
Kirtley could improve, too, his fingering on the piano by
familiarizing himself with the noble melodies that flooded the
German land. Two hairy hands would go up in exultation,
"To hear Beethoven and Wagner in their own country, filling the
atmosphere with their glories! And then Goethe and Schiller. Those
mighty deities. To read them in their own home!"
But the greatest thing, to the old professor's mind, would be to
behold the German people themselves, study them, profit by them in
their preëminence. What an example, what an inspiration, what a
grand symphony of concentrated harmony! Germany was the source of
Protestantism and therefore of modern morals--honest, uncompromising
morals. German discipline would have a bracing, solidifying effect
on a typically casual, slack American youth like Gard, whose latent
capabilities were never likely to be fully called upon in the
comparatively hit-and-miss organization of Yankee life.
For he had not yet begun to find himself. He had not even decided on
a calling at an age when the German is almost a full-fledged
citizen, shouldering all the accompanying obligations. Kirtley's
exemplary conduct and the gravity cast over him by the death of his
loved ones, had led him to think a little of Rebner's suggestions
about the ministry. And for this, Luther's country would be expected
to be sublime.
The loudly reiterated praise of Germany and the Germans had at last
produced the desired effect on Gard. He was prevailed upon to break
away from the old associations, go abroad for a year and get a fresh
and stout hold on the future. Rebner, through his connections, had
been able to arrange for a home in Saxony for his pupil's sojourn.
It was in "a highly estimable and well-informed family" who had
never taken a paying guest. Although a new experience for them, they
had urgently insisted that they would do everything they could to
make his stay agreeable and beneficial. This was deemed most lucky.
For the real German character and existence could there be observed
and lived with the best profit, uncontaminated by the intermixture
of doubtful foreign associations.
And so Gard had arrived in Dresden, in whose attractive suburb of
Loschwitz, on the gently rising banks of the Elbe, the worthy
Buchers were domiciled. As his limping German did not give him
confidence about the up-and-down variety of the Saxon dialect, he
did not venture this afternoon to find his way by tram to the house.
The blind German script in which his hosts' solicitous and minute
instructions were couched, and the funny singsong of the natives
talking blatantly about him, made him feel still more helpless. He
sought refuge in an open droschke. He could then, too, enjoy the
drive across the city.
The Saxon capital sits capaciously like a comfortable old dowager
fully dressed in stuffs of a richly dull color. Her thick skirts are
spread about her with a contented dignity which does not interfere
with her eating large sandwiches openly and vigorously at the opera.
To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a
becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through
the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park,
all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal
palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet
lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor Gard knew.
The dingy baroque architecture, whose general tastelessness was
heavily banked up by a multitude of towers, gables and high copings,
suggested an old-fashioned residential city of the days of urban
fortifications. The uniform arrays of buildings, all pretending to
the effect of sumptuousness thickened by weighty proportions and
blasphemed by rococo hesitations and doubts, seemed constructed to
exalt the doughty glory of Augustus the Strong--Dresden's local
Thor, its chief heroic figure in the favorite Teuton galaxy of
muscled Titans. Somber medieval squares, blocked away quaintly from
the world, were relieved by the celebrated Brühl Terrace, enlivened
by gilded statuary and by historic and literary memories.
Through all this metropolis of formidable and dun respectability
curved the Elbe as if to round off the massive imitations of
something better somewhere else. Hither coursed the smooth brown
stream from Bohemia, not far away, through the high fastnesses of
the Erz range and the groomed vistas of Saxon Switzerland, and past
the frowning old fortress of Königstein, towering near a thousand
feet above its untroubled bosom. Kirtley was to find the river, with
its carefully tended shores, a companion in many an hour.