DOWN WITH AMERICA!
The German text books that came in Gard's way proved the national
craze for what was Deutsch, _echt Deutsch_, to the exclusion of what
was not. It was almost a ferocity of inbreeding instruction. It
created the _furor Teutonicus_. The Hohenzollerns used education as
a prod to madden the Germans. It kept stirred up, with increasing
exaggeration and rage, the racial rabidness on the subject of other
nations.
Kirtley still did not believe that this reached to America and
Americans, for which topics, as already indicated, the Buchers had
shown small curiosity in their intercourse with him, seldom
mentioning the names. But his eyes were abruptly opened wide with
astonishment and concealed indignation one evening at dinner.
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 Fräulein, 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.