A JOURNALIST
Gard's experience in perfecting himself in German met with another
rebuff. Under the prompting of his parental friends in Villa Elsa he
concluded at length to attend a course of lectures given by a
celebrated professor who was, however, known to be of an
exceptionally cantankerous disposition. Kirtley had become aware of
the querulous restrictions and exactions attending the most peaceful
German activities and made sure of his ground at the class room,
whither he went one morning with encouraging expectations. He asked
the janitor if the hearings were free and public. They were.
It was the usual amphitheater and Gard entered to find only a few
regular students down in the front rows. He decided on a seat alone
in the center. Herr Professor, be-spectacled, soon clambered up on
the rostrum and squatted dumpily. Blear-eyed he scanned the place
and blurted out:
"There is a stranger in the room. The lecture will not proceed until
he departs." Gard, having been assured by the janitor, could not
imagine that he himself was meant. The man of prodigious learning
shouted angrily, throwing out his arm toward Kirtley:
"Must I repeat that there is a foreigner in the audience? I shall
not begin until his presence has been removed."
Gard went away, incensed. Surely, he swore to himself, Teuton
erudition acts so often like a mad bear ready to claw away at men
and things. He never attended another day lecture.
But he had to get on with his German. He decided to put an
advertisement for an instructor in the Dresden _Nachrichten_. At its
_bureau_ he ran counter to a lot of ifs and ands at the hands of a
surly young clerk. A German, naturally gruff, only needs a small
position to increase his acerbity. His newspapers display, likewise,
a disagreeable officiousness, being nearly always, to some extent,
bureaucratic organs. They are lords, not servants, of the public.
They do not appear to want your business, your money.
Gard's imperfect German balked him, too. After he had been back and
forth to the little window three or four times, trying to alter his
"ad" to suit the rasping individual whose face Gard could scarcely
catch a glimpse of by stooping down to the aperture, an American
stepped forward. He was a steel gray man of about sixty and was
inserting a notice. He said he was familiar with all the rigors of
such a proceeding, being a correspondent for the Chicago _Gazette_.
"Perhaps I can help," volunteered Miles Anderson. "After having had
scraps and fights about this sort of thing around this country for
seven years--though the Germans won't fight--I've finally got the
hang of it. You can save three or four words by a different jargon.
I can see you are an American because you take up more room about
this than necessary. German economy, you must remember."
Gard was glad to find a friend of his race. And after the
advertisement was disposed of, they repaired to a neighboring beer
hall to refresh and relieve their feelings. Anderson was
smooth-shaven, with piercing gray eyes under bushy eyebrows, his
head presenting the appearance of just having been in a barber's
chair. With the insistent curiosity of a practiced interviewer he
wanted to know why Kirtley had come to this godless land; where he
was hanging out; and all about the Buchers.
A bachelor, Anderson had become toughened by hotel and _pension_. He
thought Kirtley very fortunate in getting right into a family where
the veritable German bloom had not been rubbed off by foreigners, by
boarders. It would be a most fragrant experience. Here Kirtley would
see on the native heath the genuine German of the great middle class
that makes up the might of the nation.
"Can you read German comfortably?" asked Anderson. "What do you make
of it? I've been studying it for seven years and sometimes it seems
as if I hadn't got much further than the verb to hate."
"You can't give me any short cuts about it, then?" laughed Gard.
"Yes, I can--yes, I can. Here's a little compilation and analysis of
the irregular verbs," explained his new acquaintance, pulling a
green brochure from his pocket. "Only costs a mark. You can get a
second-hand one at the book stalls by the Augustus bridge. I always
carry it with me and con it over and over. Good for the
pronunciation. If you get the irregular verbs of a language well fed
into your system, you've got the language by the windpipe.
"Then buy _Simplicissimus_. You'll pick up a good deal from
that--the popular expressions, the phrases and exclamations that are
going. If you learn to use the exclamations, it makes you
interesting and well-liked. It gives the other fellow the chance to
do the talking. _Simplicissimus_ and that kind of thing are better
than the dry, stilted German classics--'Ekkehard,' 'Nathan der
Weise' and all that discarded stuff. But remember that _esprit_ was
not given the Germans, because it would hide their Boeotian
stupidity."
"I haven't yet seen--I suppose I shall see"--said Kirtley, "why the
general American student like me is so persistently encouraged to
come to Germany. Why is it?"
"Because we are damn fools," heartily rejoined Anderson. "The
Germans don't have education. They have instruction. The one makes
gentlemen. The other makes experts. It is hard for an expert to be a
gentleman. They don't have gentlemen in Germany. No such word in
their language. It is a nation of experts, but that's precisely the
reason it should be feared. Why, education would teach a German not
to slobber at his meals.
"It is his strenuous ingrowing instruction that cultivates his
extreme national egotism until it has become like a boil. His racial
egoism helps obscure the obscure sunlight here in Germany and blinds
him. He has to wear spectacles. It is a natural cry, his cry for a
place in the sun."
"Should I have gone to England or France?" suggested Gard.
"Yes. At any rate, not here. The German procedure roughens the fiber
and lowers the moral standards of the general student. Instruction
here is along mental and manual lines. The Teuton is meant to be a
specialist. He is competent but not refined."
The two compatriots gossiped along about this and that.
"I'm having a devil of a time sleeping on my bed," confessed Gard.
"You ought to know about German beds. How do you get on with them?"
"The German bed helps to give the German his bad disposition. I put
two beds side by side and sleep across the middle. That's one way to
fool the German bed. If I saw yours I might be able to suggest
something."
Anderson frankly expressed a desire to visit the Loschwitz home. So
on Gard's invitation they had lunch and went out to his suburb.