Villa Elsa Part 7

"In America, the child's future is somewhat a matter of buffeting back and forth aimlessly between teacher and parent. The latter is disposed to shirk the responsibility by leaning on the shoulders of the instructor who is inclined to keep shifting the burden back to the home. As a result, while the German youngster is early being adapted to a particular future course for which Nature has given him an apt.i.tude, his American compet.i.tor is often left to drift through the years without definite ambition, or at least with only a belated or partly drilled preparation therefor."

In Germany, Kirtley observed, the Government stood as the real father. The actual father was its representative. The mother played a subsidiary role. All was the father idea. The Germans call it Fatherland, not Motherland, as the English affectionately term their own country.

This interposition of the State in the Teuton family weakens the links of personal tenderness. The State rather than Love rules the home. Hence resulted the unfeelingness that Kirtley observed in the life about him in Loschwitz--the roughness so little tempered with affection, but, instead, frankly interpreted and exhibited as the true bearing of the dominant male's masculine n.o.bility.

Quite normally, then, came about the extensive amount of open and violent quarreling which Gard noticed in the households. In Villa Elsa the Herr quarreled with the Frau, each quarreled with the children, they quarreled with Tekla, and she took it out on the dogs. It was not disputing among self-respecting equals, but ill-humored domineering over those who were confessedly underneath.

CHAPTER XIII

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 a.s.sumption always pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 bl.u.s.tering, 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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 Fraulein, who was "at cla.s.s," 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 inst.i.tution that could claim to be called a university. It had no aristocracy. It was a country of low, lawless cla.s.ses. 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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 const.i.tutions, 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-cla.s.s 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 nutsh.e.l.l 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 att.i.tude 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 ta.s.sel 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.

CHAPTER XIV

AFTERMATH

This astonishing outbreak in Villa Elsa was followed by something still more singular to Kirtley, or at least out of his reckoning. It was to stir the depths of his contemplations and comparisons and give him the sharpest look into German character he had yet received. It was to show him that a gaping abyss might be separating the Teuton from other western humanity. Having latterly doubted that the race was easy of sympathetic grasp, any true kinship, he now profoundly realized that instead of being able to approach it nearer in feeling the more he knew it, he was encountering very high cliffs that threatened forever to mark an inaccessible boundary line.

He had taken it for granted that the anti-American outburst would end the Buchers' relations with him. He must have turned out to be very unwelcome. The very sight of him as one of the American pigs about the house must have been most unsatisfactory, distasteful.

They could not from now on visibly wish him or any Yankee in their home. Their personal dignity could not permit their a.s.sault to be backed up afterward by any equivocal conduct toward him.

Then, too, they would expect that he would not want to remain. Had they not voluntarily, deliberately, hurled at him their defiant scorn of his people? Self-respect would demand his immediate departure.