Villa Elsa Part 10

And so it is not enough, as Gard recognized, for Frau or Fraulein to be ma.s.sive 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations.

"Big hips mean big women and big women mean big empires." The s.e.x 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 Fraulein Wa.s.serhaus, 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.dship, 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 h.e.l.lenic? 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 antic.i.p.ations 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 const.i.tutionally 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the chivalrous side of the great medieval evolution which ended in fostering the romantic ideal of womanhood in its chast.i.ty, daintiness and colorful spell, had never reached much east of his capital--Aix-la-Chapelle.

His heroic size, his practical religious pretensions and a.s.sumptions, 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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 l.u.s.tful appet.i.tes 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 s.e.x toward an ethereal height in all respects, toward pure a.s.sociations 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 Sh.e.l.leys, 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 a.s.sociated 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!

"What do you mean by Der Tag?" he inquired. The others grinned significantly.

"Wait and see. It will be something _kolossal_." And they called out after him:

"Don't forget about Fritzi!"

That night Gard, laden with heavy feelings, tumbled into his German bed piled with its equatorial bolsters. Could Elsa marry a man like Friedrich? Ought she to be permitted to? Could she really love him?

Wouldn't she be horrified if she knew fully about him? Or would she, like German women in general, seem to care little about the morals of her future mate? Likely, as Gard fancied, it was this knowledge of him that sent her now and then in evident unhappiness to her room.

She was a pure and very worth-while girl. He could not ignore that her healthful, productive example was a stimulus to him. It would be a st.u.r.dy prop in his long sensitive, susceptible physical recovery--and afterward. Was it really not a kind of _duty_ to try to save her from sharing the fate of Von Tielitz, and win her if he could?

CHAPTER XIX

JIM DEMING OF ERIE, PAY.

The Americanization of the Bucher home Kirtley naturally thought beyond all attempts. Its detestation of the low-born Yankee, with only his sorry millions, seemed too deeply planted there, especially in the brain and bosom of the Frau. Could Villa Elsa have been transferred to the United States, such a viewpoint might perhaps have been altered after a time. But this representative boorish German family, stuck here on the rainy banks of the mid-continent Elbe and so rooted and clamorous in the presumption that they and their kind were eclipsing the earth--how impossible of any conversion?

Gard had at first the idea of getting together some American statistics and showing the Buchers a few facts. Then he saw this was hopeless. They accepted nothing that did not come through their own official channels. And why should he waste time on these obscure people? Why should he undertake to upset their racial happiness?

n.o.body, least of all he, could change their att.i.tude about the upstart Yankee and his upstart dollars. The Buchers held themselves too far above mere money and its filth.

But the miracle was, nevertheless, to be accomplished, at least for awhile, in a manner as simple as it was unlooked for. And this was what happened.

One day, soon after Gard's disillusioning call on Von Tielitz, he was grubbing in his attic among the ninth century roots of the future super-luxuriant Teuton forest, when he heard Tekla's woodchopper feet pounding their way upstairs. A card was thrust in.

James Alexander Deming, Erie, Pa. Well, of all the world! The next moment he was there in the room, talkative, airy, sunny, dressed with the obvious American consciousness of having just left the hands of his fashionable tailor and haberdasher. Every section of his black hair and tiny black mustache was plastered down as always in correct position.

Making himself right at home with his newly acquired cosmopolitanism, Jim explained how he was already settled in Dresden for the winter.

"You knew that the more I saw of this old Germany, the more I liked it. My governor wrote me I could stay if I would try to learn something and I thought of you. I said to myself, 'Kirtley is a serious sort of chap. If I light down near him, it will be easier to learn this confounded language they have got over here, and I will be able to shine with it in Erie, Pay, and do the old folks proud.'

"So I've got a teacher and a grammar and also a dictionary so big I can't find anything in it--all ready to loop the loop. But first, of course, I must run out and see you and see how you are getting on, swimming in beer. Nothing is too good for us Americans, you know, so my room in the hotel is right by the royal palace where I can see the Crown Prince with his sword fall off his horse every morning at ten. Gad, won't it be something to talk about when I get back to good old Pennsylwanee?"

Deming's "old man" was possessed of wealth derived from oil wells.

But although Jim's pockets had always been stuffed with money, he had never been able to get through high school or enter college.

Hang it all, he didn't take to books like Kirtley and all such intellectual boys. It was the fault of his dad and mam. They had petted and spoiled him--an only child. It was too bad, but shucks, he wasn't going to let it interfere with his happiness. So it was money here and money there, and a host of friends who, like Gard, could not help being fond of him.

Jim had seen the Kaiser and quaffed out of the largest hogshead on the Rhine. He had been at a duel at Heidelberg where the chap with a cut through his cheek asked for a mug of beer and blew the beer out through the gash. He had swum in Lake Starnberg where Ludwig II had drowned himself; had seen the cafe in Munich where the celebrated Naked Culture was said to have originated; had bribed his way into the villa at Mayerling where Rudolph of Austria and Marie had ended that mysterious night of fatality. In short, he had done Germany pretty thoroughly.

When, by his insistent questionings, he learned about the comfortable and illuminating German home where Kirtley had installed himself, and that there was a fine, serious young lady in it with a harvest of straw-colored hair, he soon confessed, after all, to his disappointments.

"Kirtley, you are always a lucky dog. Here you are with nice Dutch people, in the social swim, absorbing German to beat the band. All I see is chambermaids who shout at me some kind of devilish dialect that a fellow can't understand. And my chambermaid and I are just at present at outs. I told her this morning she was the tallest woman I ever saw. A little of her went such a long ways. As she don't know any English words, that is the only thing we have agreed about. She said, Ja wohl! This going to b.a.l.l.s and cafes as I'm doing is all right for local color and all that, but it would tickle dad a lot if I knew a quiet, decent, respectable German family. And I want to know a nice, sober German girl who has got yellow, chorus-girl hair and will steady a fellow down. The proper study of young man is young woman. I haven't been able to meet any young ladies in this country. Sometimes I think they have only wenches. And I want some of the cla.s.sic Gayty and Schiller stuff too that you can get here in Loschwitz."

This urgent idea did not appear auspicious to Gard. If Deming got the run of Villa Elsa, he would unsettle things, interfere with his own work. Jim was a good boy but he played hob with study. And he was just the kind of flashy, ignorant Yankee who would prove to Villa Elsa what it claimed about the race. He would disgust the Buchers with his showy superficiality and dolessness. Mere money, everlasting money. More than all he would complicate the situation with Fraulein. He might upset her somehow, and at least discover his own secret feelings toward her--feelings that had become more distraught after the Von Tielitz revelation. In a word, everything would be helter-skelter.

After Jim had called twice, bent upon becoming intimate with the Buchers, Gard, as he thought, conceived a clever maneuver. He took Deming over to call on Fraulein Wa.s.serhaus. Here was an earnest young woman, lolling on the gate with plenty of time on her hands, dying for a man. She could teach Deming everything he wanted to know. She was not antagonistic to Americans as were the Buchers. On the contrary she was aching to clasp some one of them in her pudgy arms.

But this stratagem proved a flat failure. When they came away from her abode, Jim took on a worried look and lit a cigarette.