Villa Elsa Part 21

One afternoon they were eating some of the big German cherries, and the fragrance of Herr Bucher's rose garden below was engaged in balmy conflict with the odors of cigars.

"Well, what is the solution about the German people?" Gard propounded. "What's to be done with them? Here they are, industrious as bees and as fully armed with stings. Will a war cure anything?

Even if defeated, won't they be the same people? Won't they present the same problem? Won't they present the same menace to what we consider as the best and most desirable types of civilization?"

Anderson did not interrupt these questions. When they had all come out, he gravely took another cigar, leisurely lighted it and turned his chair to face the linden at the window. He spoke very mildly.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THE GERMAN PROBLEM. AN ANSWER

"I have given this a great deal of thought. I have read a great deal and I believe I have never known of a writer who furnished what I should call an answer. And that is the most important thing--the vital thing. So I have evolved a simple, natural proposal. It is the only proposal, I think, that will remedy the evil of the German nation--remedy the ugly situation that hangs over the careless earth.

"We know that when young foreigners are educated in considerable part in a country, they generally become at peace with it.

Everything, in fact, draws them to this att.i.tude--for instance, their excusable satisfaction in feeling that their sojourn abroad has been a success for them instead of a failure. Any foreign instruction makes the student more of an intelligent, cosmopolitan sympathizer. It knits together warm acquaintances abroad. Every Rhodes scholar is an ally of England. He goes forth bearing kindly messages for her. I have told you how it works with our Americans coming over here to the German universities. They nearly all become pro-Germanic. And this is one reason why our compatriots at home have in general such a downright admiration for what they consider the super-excellence of the Teutons.

"But while this providing of the German education for Americans is pulling so strong in favor of Germany, we have nothing similar in America pulling Germany toward us and our ways. Young Germans are not sent to the United States to study and to lead our lives and to return home bearing good-will and good reports. They stay where they are and become more narrowly, intrinsically Teutons--irreclaimably Teutons. They are left with the undisputed idea that their system of instruction is altogether the best, as proven by the spectacle of aliens coming here for schooling. Why, then, should German lads and misses go abroad to learn? And they don't.

"Now as long as this state of things continues, the German race will remain a tribe in itself, and radically at loggerheads with the world. It will be hopelessly separated, unreconciled, inimical. It will be strange and opposed to everyone else--everything else. As you have seen yourself, even the meanings of the most common and essential terms are usually, to the German, the contrary of what they are to the rest of mankind.

"How will there ever be any natural and genuine meeting of the minds, fellowship, community of interests, under present programmes?

For centuries civilized countries have been living side by side with the Teutons, have been pursuing education ever more zealously, and still the German brain and character stay profoundly different from the rest and are not understood. They are so different, in fact, that the forces of war and destruction must be maintained as against them and are constant irritants to thought and activity.

"My plan is this. Young German men and women should be amicably educated abroad in very large numbers--the largest well possible.

And on a broader basis than the Cecil Rhodes scheme. In our country they would become, from youthful a.s.sociation, more or less fond of our open homes, our sense of democracy, the untrammeled opportunities to go and to do. They would see the advantages of these blessings--or at least their human attraction--among boys and girls.

"Under my programme these Germans, still adolescent, will return home and a little of this foreign education will stick. But their children will do the same. More will stick with them. Then their children, and still more sticking. After fifty or a hundred years you will have a large population in Deutschland thinking and liking and to a great extent living like their Christian and less warlike neighbors. It will be a tremendous beneficial element introduced for the first time into Germany. It will slowly and silently, without friction or loss of self-respect, accomplish an internal revolution.

"Foreign education for Teuton boys and girls! That's the only final answer I can find--the only true one. You see, a war will never accomplish this, nor tariffs or penalties. Such agencies do not change human nature or character or modes of existence. They antagonize, make stubborn or resentful or malevolent. And, unlike other races, the Germans would always remain, as they are to-day, UNITED. This is the explanation of their World Power."

Anderson stopped as if waiting for a comment.

"It all sounds well and is a beautiful way to do it, but how is it practicable?" asked Gard, who had listened attentively, impressed.

"How are you going to coax the Germans to enter into this? What benefit will they see in it?"

"You are right," returned Anderson. "That's the difficulty at present. It can't be put in operation, as I see it, unless Germany happens to be defeated in the coming war. If she is defeated she will, of course, be humbled and temporarily sick of fighting, and this proposal could then be readily forced into adoption as one of the post-war measures looking to the quickest rehabilitation of the nation. Anything that will put it on its feet again soon will be most welcome at that time. Meanwhile, the instruments of war, the power to do damage, must not be left in the German's hands. As long as he has them, he will prepare to destroy."

"But if Germany is victorious, as you seem to think she will be?"

suggested Gard.

"Oh, then nothing will work. It won't have a chance. What will there be of all this to contemplate? Germany will be the master and its semi-paganism will prevail. The modern Teuton tribes will begin to level the Christian civilizations to the ground just as the Huns leveled the Roman civilization. The Hun disposition in the German _must_ be eradicated--_must_ be destroyed. Until this is done the world will always have these Huns at its gates."...

It was now July in the year of everlasting tragedy--1914. Kirtley must leave for home, as Villa Elsa knew. He talked over his route with Anderson. His interest in Charlemagne made him wish to see at Aix-la-Chapelle the great emperor's tomb, underneath which, according to an old-time legend, the ruler still sits in his white robes of state in his marble chair, looking forward to resurrection to power. So the trip was mapped out through central Germany.

As the time was at hand for Gard to announce his date of setting off, his perplexities before Frau and Elsa grew entangled. But, happily, their knot was cut for him. Von Tielitz, who had long been away, broke in upon the household one morning with glorious news. He had received a commission as bandmaster in the army with fair pay.

Most unexpected. A civilian, who could make sport of the military, summoned into the ranks! What could it mean? Something must be in the wind.

At all events he had come to arrange to marry Elsa, and converted the Villa into a hubbub. He was so beside himself that he appeared ready to embrace and marry the first person he met. He was also officious as if conducting a rehearsal. He rushed to Gard's room and overwhelmed him with the tidings. His eye-gla.s.ses kept tumbling off.

He was upstairs and down, in the flower garden, out at the tea table, and now and then he rushed to the Pleyel and rent the air with its exultant chords.

The family turned the day into celebration. The wine cellar was opened. The kitchen sent forth its hot and overflowing dishes hour after hour until well into the evening. The marriageable Jim Deming and Gard Kirtley were to Villa Elsa as if they had never been. Frau proclaimed in husky sounds that she had not felt so young in thirty years. Luckily Fraulein Wa.s.serhaus had gone off to Brunswick to visit a relative soon after Deming's advent, so she was not in Wiesenstra.s.se to encounter this joyous climax and Gard's preparations for his eventful journey.

Elsa acted as one overjoyed. It was what she had yearned for and what filled the measure of her Teutonic maiden nature. On seeing her happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful sh.o.r.e, and knowing what Friedrich _was_ with all his talent, Gard realized she was never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled with sentiment.

His illness had cleared his intuitions. The unalluring defects of the Teuton systems of love-making overshadowed his own defects as a suitor. Elsa had been as truly foreign to him as the German habits of eating and drinking. In thinking of her he now knew he had always been conscious of her nation. The German woman, as he had already learned, is sunk into her race. It swallows up her individuality. In marrying her, one married the whole people--the German State--the Kaiser. One became possessed not only of a help-meet but of an aggressive political idea.

Now that Gard was a friend instead of a lover, how much easier were his relations with Fraulein! Brooding sensitiveness and responsibility pa.s.sed into lightsomeness. The unnatural and crankling proceeding of his trying to woo a German girl was smoothed away into a genial indifference. The mental picture of Elsa would remain as one that had attracted him on the wall of his German memories. And like the hundred maids that a youth is smitten with, she would gradually blend into the dim gallery of such pleasant visions of Kirtley's susceptible spring-time--visions which, in all men, fade sweetly into their manhood.

In this manner the cloud of Gard's awkward discomfort in speaking out or acting out his answer to Frau's virile project, had melted away before these lighted-up faces. He felt as if a fog were lifted off his consciousness. He was glad to slip out thus easily. In the lively jumble of robust, rejoicing realities about him, he seemed to have emerged from the fringy edges of a daze.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

A GERMAN "GOTT BE WITH YE"

A dash of adventure was to crown Gard Kirtley's farewell to Germany as it had crowned Jim Deming's, but with an ominous wreath of the tragic instead of garlands of the comic. War was at hand, yet even Anderson did not see it plainly enough to report it. War was often in the sky in Germany and often had he been fooled. The Teutons must be sure of victory and, he was positive, would avail themselves of a long summer for their campaign.

In those days of July something peculiar and tense hung over the land, but its sources were untraceable, its form, abstract. The unadvised, ordinary people wiped the sweat from their foreheads and said it must be the heat. Kirtley would not have been expected to interpret Friedrich's surprising engagement in the music ranks of the _Landwehr_ as a sign that widespread preparations were being made for the fullest onslaught of which the nation could be capable.

The Government was, nevertheless, quietly laying its hands on all its young men--even musicians who were blind in one eye and could not see out of it.

Gard was glad to go home through the heart of Germany. Jena, Weimar, Erfurt, Eisenach!--the land of Goethe, Schiller, Luther. While these figures were discarded from the blatant pageantry of the armed Empire, the landmarks a.s.sociated with them remained to satisfy the vision, and he could tell of them to dear old ignorant Rebner who would be waiting to hear of his beloved Deutschland which existed no more. Afterward, Heidelberg; the trip down the Rhine to the spires of Cologne; and then Aix at the western border, where that august sovereign slept in a haunting majesty, wrapped in the mystic grandeur of the Dark Ages. It was the most fitting and impressive place on the frontier from which to bid adieu to Germania.

In grat.i.tude for his recovery Gard made handsome presents to everyone at Loschwitz, accompanied by the conventional _Edelweiss_.

Villa Elsa, in turn, was profuse in its expressions and little acts of good will. Herr Bucher gave him a queer pipe, and the boys furnished the smoking tobacco. These gifts were to while away the lost hours on the tour. From Frau came a flask of cognac for use in case he were dizzy on the trains. Fraulein bestowed on him one of her tiny etchings showing the Elbe with the Schiller Garden where all had spent so many evenings.

Gard's route, his through ticket to the sea, his traveling clothing, were subjects of daily conversation at the table. Although the family were entirely obliging, Rudi, odd to say, occupied himself the most about the trip. He seemed wonderfully keyed up and more full of military talk even than usual. He insisted on seeing about time-tables, hotels to be recommended, the favorite dishes and brews to be called for at each stopping place for local tone.

Kirtley was pleased over his friendly attentions. He wished to leave with good feelings all around.

When Rudi helped him get his trunk from the store room, Gard's forgotten pa.s.sport fell out and excited the other's curiosity.

"I've never seen an American state paper before," he remarked, puffing a cigarette. "What a droll looking affair! So different from ours. Would you mind if I just glanced at it?"

"Certainly not." Anderson's suspicions of the young German glanced through Kirtley's mind. But Rudi was a thick-headed boy, and what could he or anyone accomplish with a pa.s.sport? Gard had scarcely been called upon to use it. It had been treated almost as a blank formality, an empty courtesy.

"You don't have to show it in German towns--only at the frontier? Am I right?" inquired Rudi after he had minutely read it through as if he had been an official.

"Only at the frontier." Gard grew wary. This knowing and recent familiarity was not becoming entirely agreeable. It would be prudent to mystify the son.

"But of course something _might_ happen in a German town and I might need it. So it's always convenient to have about."