THE HOME
Often when he peeked down from his attic window he spied the shining
bald head of the very elderly Herr Bucher surrounded by the mass of
lively colors of his rose garden. He loved to spend hours there in
the sunshine with his posies, tying up their branches, clipping
choice specimens with which he was fond of decorating the members
of Villa Elsa, its dining table, its living room. Roses, roses,
everywhere.
It was his hobby, this spot of blossoms, and in it his short, bulky
form, so whitened by his Jovian beard meerschaumed by the stains
from his huge, curving German pipe, was often almost lost to view.
He was like some droll gnome waddling about in a flower patch.
Frequently someone had to be sent to find him among all those pets
which he knew so well by their Latin and popular names and by their
characteristics. While he grumbled and so often stormed about in the
house, speaking always in gruff tones of command, he was quite sunny
out there in his plot, although still guttural and dictatorial.
He was a retired professor of phonetics and diction, but now and
then prepared a pupil. This was how he had met his wife a long, long
time before, when she was a young singer. She was twenty years his
junior and had become so completely a housewife that you could
scarcely associate her with any art. She was fat, harsh, homely,
masculine in the way of German women, an occasional long hair
sticking from her face in emulation of a beard.
Devoid of any graces of seduction, putting out her heavy fists in
every direction she exhibited a bearish kindness toward Gard that
seemed calculated at first to frighten him. She was loud-voiced,
iron-jawed. One of her favorite boasts was that she had never been
to a dentist. She pulled out her rarely aching teeth, or some one of
the family pulled them for her.
The Herr could be smoother and he assumed a fatherly solicitude over
Gard, looking out for his advantages, anxious that he should make
progress. But Bucher evidently was annoyed at times by not having
authority in the matter of the slow way in which his young guest set
about with his "studies." Kirtley had not come to study, had not
been trained to study, in the German sense. It would have been
difficult to make the old man see any virtue in such desultoriness.
It doubtless proved to his mind that Americans are only half
trained, half tamed, half domesticated.
The couple surrounded Kirtley with a protection, an honesty, a
reliability, a zeal, that was as surprising as it was, on the whole,
gratifying. He felt a security he had hardly known in his own home.
If he were cheated or otherwise imposed upon anywhere in
Dresden--and this did not often happen--the Buchers were violently
up in arms about it and never ceased pursuit of the recreant until
the wrong was righted.
"The good German name must not be tarnished."
In a word, they tried to treat him like a son; and so forceful and
constant were their efforts in this direction that he sometimes
wished their well-meant attentions were less formidable. The easy
American "forget it," "why bother," "never again," were expressions
of a mood unfamiliar to them. They visibly had small patience with
such slackness which only, to their minds, encouraged lawlessness.
The setting for Gard's approaching German love affair was
appropriately picturesque and propitious. A tight little meadow,
with a grassy path wandering through by the Elbe, lay near at hand,
and beyond, at the right, a pine wood--the Waldpark--with neat
graveled walks and rustic seats where the tonic air was often to
brace his musings.
Adjacent was the small summer house, still poetically standing,
where Schiller wrote "Don Carlos" a century and a quarter before. A
leafy lane led from the meadow to the walled garden inclosure of
Villa Elsa, whose branches, vines and flowering bushes insisted
on making it almost a hidden retreat. The spot could not be more
_gemütlich_--that familiar expressive word which Kirtley soon
learned to rely on amid the scant artillery of his defensive
weapons of conversational German.
Through a swinging gate in the wall, and usually to the clanging of
a bell that announced you, you entered the house on a level with the
ground. On this floor were the kitchen and dining room. Next came
the _belle étage_, with the salon and music room opening into each
other, and with another apartment or two. Above, the chambers. And
still above, the two attic rooms. All was plain but substantial.
The garden furnished not only flowers but vegetables. And in one
corner stood a table and chairs for afternoon tea with cakes or beer
with cheese. Here the ever-busy sewing and knitting mainly went on
in summer, and a forgotten book, half read, was usually left by some
one of the young folks. There was a drowsy, old-fashioned air about
the premises that recalled illustrations in some of the editions of
Grimm's fairy tales.
Aside from the abundance of bound music, Gard had been far from
expecting that fine examples of art and literature would be so
meagerly represented in this representative German home. There
were poor pictures of Bismarck, of William the Second, and of
his grandfather aping the appearance of Gambrinus.
Prominent also were steel engravings of Saxon and Prussian kings of
whom Kirtley had never heard. But there they were, conspicuous
household gods, with fierce, epic miens and lordly bodies,
surrounded by wreaths of glory and Latin texts, and supported by
cannon pointed at the observer with menaces of angry welcome. And
not to be forgotten were the august thrones, avenging swords of
royalty, and the dark swirling clouds suggesting the German Olympus.
"It all harmonizes with the arsenal down in the entrance,"
muttered Gard.
As for books, he was taken at an angle still more unexpected and
significant. Goethe and Schiller and the other old Teuton classics,
breathing of liberalness and freedom--figures that had always stood
out in the world as leading exponents and guardians of a cultured
enlightenment--were only present in the Bucher home in the form of
musty, unused volumes.
These authors, who were so loved, advocated and expounded in
American colleges and whom Kirtley had come to Germany to know
better and to worship, were scarcely ever mentioned. He was
astonished to find that the Germans thought little of them. And
Heine likewise, that naughty child of the Vaterland! At the Buchers
the presentable red and gilt edition of his poems was kept in
Fräulein's escritoire in her room.
American education, Gard began to realize, was somehow on the wrong
track here. It was trying to cultivate a Germany that no longer
seemed to exist. It was diligently teaching and acclaiming Teutons
who were repudiated in their own land. It was separating the spirit
and taste of the two peoples instead of bringing them together.
The books that were in evidence in Villa Elsa were a new lot,
excepting the great and formidable Nietschke. Kirtley had never
heard of the Treitschkes and Bernhardis and Hartmanns, whom the
Buchers were reading and quoting.
From what he made out, these and similar authorities were insisting
mightily on German conceptions and prerogatives--some exalting the
Teuton supremacy of will, others urging and preparing the mental
ground for an armed attack on the world for a German dictatorship.
This militant literature was introduced here by Rudolph, who was
armed with strategic plans, diagrams, military maps, which the
family frequently of an evening pored over with the enthusiasm of a
parlor game. First it was Russia to be assaulted, then Belgium, and
always France.
"Italy is already as good as conquered," Rudi proclaimed, "and
England simply needs to be tilted off her worm-eaten perch by a
sudden shock."
Kirtley rubbed his eyes. What a widespread, horrible butchery was
being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace?
Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was
it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about,
puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at this respectable hearthstone?
Such a strange form of social entertainment! The "arsenal" below
always came to Gard's mind. These people acted as if they were
actually thinking of capturing the whole Eastern Hemisphere,
speaking as if they were going to rule it like conquerors, going to
enforce at the point of the blade German "might," "will," "rights."
These were the common expressions used. Kirtley thought the
household must be unbalanced on this topic.
He said to himself, "No one else whom I have read or heard of is
contemplating such a campaign. Other races are holding forth on the
benefits and glories of peace. These Dresden Germans are talking of
the benefits and glories of war!"
This example in these simple, every-day Buchers was most pointed.
Their lines were furthest from the military. Teaching diction and
phonetics to women and male singers, studying engineering, religion
and the gentle arts, had nothing to do with such proposed bloody
belligerence.
Only Rudi could be called somewhat martial. Hydraulics was his
branch, and his frequent absences on missions about which he assumed
an important and mystifying air, such as is, for that matter, usual
in bumptious young men, never caused any comment or visible interest
on the part of the others. He gave himself out to be close to the
_militaire_, familiar with its secrets, as he freely blew his
cigarette smoke across the meal table; and to him the family
deferred on these subjects. Surely all this was to Gard very
foreign and interesting.
"What a different race of beings! What a curious revelation to
observe, what a doughty complex to comprehend!"
He was more confounded by the attitude of the women. They were even
fiercer than the men. To them the other Europeans were a wholly bad
lot. Those neighbors were so much in the way of the good, all-worthy
Germans. But it was on the English that this feminine hatred vented
itself most turbulently. Frau Bucher shouted that she would be more
than glad--she would be hilarious--if war came.
"I would wear my last rag for years, see my two boys dead on the
battle front, if Gross Britain could be knocked into the bottom of
the sea."
Was all this a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in
Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and
sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of
prose and verse--how would they feel at home in this modern
Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it
possible he had really come on a sort of fool's errand?