Villa Elsa Part 4

GERMAN COURTSHIP

Once during the winter he tried on her a course of flirtation which he had learned very well in his Soph.o.m.ore year. But German girls do not flirt. His arrows sank in feebly, impotently, as if her attention had the despairing resistance of a sandbag. Unperturbed she made nothing of it. He felt that she thought he was silly or had the rickets. So he speedily gave this up.

Thus he became aware how vastly different are courtship and other relations between young men and young women in America and in Germany. He asked himself.

"Are the German ways more civilized?" Certainly, to the Teuton, they represent a more creditable and becoming evolution. He always stoutly favors his own customs, and finds little here to discuss.

Even if a rotten morality in his young G.o.ds is to be a.s.sumed, this would be proper as in the young G.o.ds of the mythologies.

The Teuton marriage refers plainly to property. The language has prominent terms indicating how espousal means goods with a woman attached to them. There is scarcely an equivalent in English.

Courtship in the form of natural little raptures that disport in and beautify enamored companionship in youth, the pure, unfettered, mystic attraction between the s.e.xes in blossoming time, are practically unknown to the German social life. The full gloss of fancy, the velveting of manners, the felicitous fabrication of innocent emotions into a blessed garment of many colors, find their development outside the domain of Thor. Such a.s.sociations have there no charming playtime, but forthwith make for permanent good or permanent evil.

Accordingly, for Gard, in his fond inclinations, there was no experience with Cupids about the Bucher flower garden. Only, as it were, a sort of rough sledding on broken, jolting ice! And he noted the comparative absence of such delicate sentiment in German literature. Aside from Heine, who became French, German letters have relatively little to offer on this score. The very language discourages love-making. Since Heine's exile a century ago, the increasing might of the armored Hohenzollerns had finally almost killed all this.

Gard was thrown out of gear in another way. Fraulein's lack not only of amatory complaisance but of social polish or even facility kept him dubious and disconcerted. She brusquely alternated between a sisterly tenderness of familiarity, almost exaggerated, only to follow it by a sudden, disquieting flop over on the side of a formality as stiff as buckram. She would be as distant as if they were two boarders having a tiff in a _pension_. These detachments were not because of anything Kirtley had done or said. They formed a natural example of Gothic undevelopedness in human relations, the rude unevenness of beginners.

But, then, he forgave her for this.

"Is she not extremely occupied--full of pursuits? How admirable!"

It shamed him, spurred him on not a little. For days he would only see her at the generous meals where she exclaimed over her dread of getting fat. That usually furnishes a German with an excuse for being helped to more. She dutifully played of an evening in the family orchestra, yet this was a musical, not a social, happening.

The severe if rich harmonies that were favored, largely with the idea of drill, created generally an atmosphere of austerity.

She could not understand Gard's offers to carry her umbrella over her to a cla.s.s or to bring her a storm coat in case of need. Such attentiveness meant intrusions almost to be resented. She appeared to frown upon any kindly little considerations that should have been agreeable to her or at any rate convenient. She had been brought up to do everything for herself. There was nothing of the clinging vine about her. Young German women are not expected to lean upon men in this wise.

Presents of candy or what-not are looked upon with an inquisitive or doubtful eye, especially by the parents. For the German girl has no charming secrets from her father and mother. They must know all, with immediate conjectures about marriage. Troubling gifts, consequently, became rather out of the question with Gard.

He feared that Fraulein Elsa might reflect sometimes the feeling of unfriendliness which he was aware of in the supercilious Rudi. The latter exhibited a negligent att.i.tude of indifference toward Gard, though it was cloaked under casualness. There was a sinister air about the young engineer, and she would be bound to follow submissively anyone breathing the military ozone.

Under all these unsettling circ.u.mstances, Kirtley's uncertain attachment for the German language did not increase by Peter Schlemihl strides. Besides, his regular teacher was something like a wild boar. He had proceeded to dragoon Gard as if he were a lad. And Herr Keller's person was offensive. He exhaled a smell unpleasant if scholastic. Dressed in a soiled, shiny, black garb, and with a bristly mustache and beard which often showed egg of a morning, he talked blatantly of having been in Paris as a soldier in '70. It was his one excursion out of Saxony.

Even the German language at such a cost was not very inviting.

Finally Gard received a curt note to the effect that if he were not more a.s.siduous, the lessons would better end. Herr Keller did not want to be bothered with triflers.

"Bounced from school!" Kirtley exclaimed. It was the first time. He took advantage of this opportunity to discontinue.

He could see that his hosts did not blame the professor. Why, he was capable of forcibly drilling the Teuton language and literature into a post hole. This doubtless confirmed Kirtley's failure as a student in their eyes. And this was to be looked for in Americans who think that they can acquire knowledge and know life by gadding about and "observing," instead of by book study. The awful German language seemed doomed to blast Gard's affectionate hopes.

While his burgeoning amorousness met with such blighting encouragement in the direction of Fraulein Elsa, it encountered unexpectedly an immense and yearning bosom in another quarter.

Fraulein Wa.s.serhaus, next door, clamored for a mate. With cowlike simpleness she almost bellowed out for love. Of an age verging on the precarious she waddled into and out from Villa Elsa with bulging b.r.e.a.s.t.s so bared, under the transparent pretenses of white gauze, that Frau Bucher declared herself shocked. She said that the Wa.s.serhaus was trying to be a part of the disgraceful Naked _Kultur_ that had been a.s.sailing Germany.

When this bovine soul came to know of Kirtley's presence, she fastened her consuming desires upon him. She had a brother in America and actively developed a hankering to go there and be near him. Yoking up with a Yankee would be a most natural and fitting state in which to negotiate the Atlantic.

As the Bucher wall was too high for her to hang over in her languishing ardors, she hung over her gate to offer a book or a tiger lily to Gard as he pa.s.sed. Several times when the pachydermatous Tekla banged her way upstairs with an armful of utensils in her work, a bouncing compote or other unabashed delicacy would be tumbling about on a dustpan or a slop basin, bound for the attic room by the linden tree. Twice a belabored missive accompanied these little couriers, anxiously quoting some anguishing sentimentality from one of the household poets writhing amid the pages of the affecting Gartenlaube.

It was at first so bothersome that Gard contemplated leaving the neighborhood. Even the Buchers, truest of prosy Germans, could grasp the ridiculousness of this situation, and it was the one item of noisy fun they could fall back upon when they wished to be especially entertaining.

"Mein Gott!" the Frau would cry out when going over her troubles and arduous occupations. "And I've got to get a husband for the Wa.s.serhaus yet!" The Herr often went into a deafening rage about it.

"Is there no way to keep that lachrymose female out of my house with her belated calf-love? She annoys the good Herr Kirtley." And he would toddle out, slamming the door like a clap of thunder.

The family a.s.sumed a very self-conscious behavior when the lorn maiden was mentioned, and were anxious Gard should know that, while unfortunately she was their neighbor, she was not at all of their stratum.

"Poor girl!" Gard mused. There were nearly half again as many women as men in Saxony.

At last he came to know there seemed to be a mystery about Fraulein Elsa--something which was hidden from him. And a new and deeper interest was summoned forth from within his breast. Occasionally at table she was silent as a mile stone. Some days she did not appear to his sight at all. And then, when he did see her, she evidently wanted to avoid him. Very true it was that she often pored over the little volume of Heine in her room without a word to anyone. But, of a sudden, she would become frankly in evidence again--a floral and quite superb girl, resolutely "making good," as was her wont.

"What is it?" Gard wondered.

None of the family ever referred to it. Even in his intimate talks with her mother, whom Gard now and then practiced his German upon as she was plying her needle, nothing was divulged. There was no young German coming to the house with regularity. Consequently, could it be love difficulties? Yet something was wrong. It lent respect to Elsa, threw enhancement about her.

Gard concluded that the roughness of the Bucher family life mortified her. It was often well-nigh outlandish. How could she have so ardently studied the beautiful in music and colors without realizing this?

But he had not been long enough in Germany to be advised that knowledge is not expected there to enter into the inner life. What one is has little in common with what one knows or can dexterously do. Study does not pa.s.s into character. The German, with all his acquirements, does not look for moral or esthetic effect upon the heart or soul.

German women esteem the strong fighter, the rugged accomplisher the boisterous enthusiast, among their men. Whether these are atheistic, immoral, boorish, cruel, are considerations of secondary importance.

The daughters marry them with little hesitation. Men are men, supreme, to be adored. Women are to be tolerated, stepped on, sat upon. Man is the master, woman is the willing servant.

CHAPTER IX

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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.dless 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 cla.s.s that makes up the might of the nation.