Villa Elsa Part 9

Chapter XVI

A LIVELY MUSICIAN

Gard discovered that such mockery or berating of military officials, with whom the ordinary public came in servile contact, was rather common in Germany in spite of the universal adoration of the army.

Intermixed with Friedrich's take-off were his moments of "the grand manner," appropriate to a musical director who is born to command fickle or imperious singers and musicians. He was naturally an actor. His refres.h.i.+ng mimicries amused Gard. Against the bovine background of the Villa Elsa circle, he stood out in relief as an enlivening figure with flitting phases of elegance.

He was clever, talented. He spun off a lot of new music at the piano, much of it coming from his own pen. Elsa hung absorbed over the wing of the instrument. Friedrich, of about Kirtley's age but adequately equipped and ambitious, was aspiring to some one of the dignified thrones in the musical kingdom of Germany. Gard was only just hatching out as a man. He was essentially but a lad grown up.

Von Tielitz showed already a wholly developed maturity. German instruction again versus American education!

Friedrich was better versed in English than the Bucher children. He paid two calls on Gard that first day. Talking Anglo-Saxon was good practice. On the second call he discharged a missile that struck Kirtley near the heart, and gave him a feeling of faintness.

"Don't you like Elsa?" Von Tielitz whipped out with no preamble.

"She is really a nice girl, a very nice girl. Her family thinks we are to marry. Well, perhaps. I don't know. Sometimes I think yes.

Sometimes I think no. There are so many others, don't you know. But I think we will marry as soon as I get my Kapellmeisters.h.i.+p. We are always such good friends. She used to sit on my lap before I went away. O! we are _very_ good friends. But now I am not so much in Dresden and, my dear Mr. Kirtley, my poor Kapellmeisters.h.i.+p does not come along. It is most aggravating, as you say in English. I get so discouraged."

He brightened again.

"They tell me you and Elsa have been playing duos. Such good training. Very agreeable. We used to play together also. A nice girl to rub one's knees against under the piano--oh,

"I am t.i.tania the blond, t.i.tania, of the air!"

Friedrich twittered gayly the lines from "Mignon." Then he abruptly changed.

"But I have now so little time for serious maidens. Ach Himmel! How I am driven by going here and going there! One says this to me, another says that to me, and my head gets all in a whirl."

So he wandered on with his mixtures of _nonchalance_, condescension and, above all, his ebullient self-esteem that flowed over on to everyone to the point of deluging them. When he went away, it was with such a warm invitation to call upon him the next week that Kirtley could not but accept. Besides, here was opened up a novel and suggestive line of behavior from the standpoint of the German young man of the world.

Gard was left with confused feelings that drooped their wings in displeasure if not distress. So there was a rival, and of long standing, on the little rosy sea of his romance! And this was he.

Was it a wonder that Elsa had "spells"? Here was a true heart-breaker. Just the type to play havoc with a girl. What place was there left for the mild, unpretending Gard? And still she deserved far better than Von Tielitz. Perhaps it was this feeling that added to her unhappiness. His vulgarity! To talk as Von Tielitz did about one who might become his wife, and to a stranger, was a new form of German brutality. It steadied and deepened Gard's admiration for her. Who ever heard a young Yankee speak like this about his serious sweetheart? However raw he may be, there is a certain sacred respect at the bottom of his language about her--his bearing toward her.

Elsa did not appear at meals for a day or two after Friedrich left.

Kirtley was not encouraged by learning that this usually happened after a call from the composer. He thought it strange that the Frau, with all her plain speech and hardy lack of sentiment, still made no reference to her daughter's trouble. Marriage is to the Germans such an earth-to-earth affair, as Gard perceived, that he marveled she did not unbosom herself capaciously about what must be a mother's anxiety. But the Teuton daughter is like a glove that can be put on or cast off by the sovereign male. She is meant to be toughened, exposed to rude blasts, fortified, to be able to support the draft-mare burdens of Teuton wifehood.

CHAPTER XVII

IMMORALITY AND OBSCENITY

Gard now descended unwittingly into one of the darkest regions of German life, and one which foreign publics had persistently missed or voluntarily overlooked in their chorus of approbation of the race.

It is a familiar dictum that one can judge of a nation pretty fairly by the position and treatment of its women. Kirtley had never, in America, heard anything about Deutschland in this light. But he soon found in Saxony that this was only one of the numerous German topics on which little publicity was shed in his homeland in spite of the general emphasis laid on German preeminence. This emphasis was mainly a diffusion, through mere books of information, about achievements and an extraordinary condition of learned mentality. Of the actual inhabitants beyond the Rhine, ignorance was kept widespread. German femininity was a.s.sumed to be of a predominating excellence to match that of German masculinity.

No study of a people is indeed complete without an unglossed inquiry into its conduct toward its women and children. To say that the German's business traits are the same and as reputable as those of other races, is below the mark. In this secular domain he is compelled to deal and to act within the accepted formulae of trade.

To do otherwise would be to ostracize himself.

But he is in no such compet.i.tion or is subject to no such exactions in his att.i.tude toward his own women and children. With them he does as he pleases and his real nature stands forth. These truly vital matters have been pa.s.sed over as if unnoticed by the world, as has been said, and still it wonders why it cannot learn what the German is--does not understand him. He is, perhaps more than anyone, what he is toward his own inferiors--toward those who are weaker and dependent.

The question of German womanhood and girlhood should not therefore be blinked by the earnest contemplator. It was not long before Gard was saying to himself that if Americans could be made to realize the status of womankind in Deutschland, they would not be so lured by the idea of sending their young folk thither for education. There would be a marked decline in their generous enthusiasm for _all_ things German. In what civilized land does woman lead less in lofty, sublimated power or put a fainter stamp on the talents of the race?

German art, music, poetry, language, politics, education, all are distinctively masculine. The Teuton woman merely partakes of the life of man, the ideal. She does not a.s.sume to lead him. She would seem so far below par that, as Gard had seen, even flirtation scarcely exists in Deutschland. Flirtation is particularly a custom among equals.

When he returned Friedrich's visits as promised, he found him sharing the room of his friend Karl Messer. Messer was a successful architect who had already secured a Government commission while the equally youthful Kirtley--may it be repeated--had not begun real life and, according to the American plan, could do nothing very well. Those two room-mates and cronies were leading the typical Teuton existence of youths who combined proficient work with a frank sensuality accompanied, of course, by much imbibing in the German way. And it may be preliminarily noted that what explorations Gard afterward made in this great and seamy side of Teuton nature, likewise ended in a downward direction toward depths that he had scarcely thought possible in the educated human.

Von Tielitz and Messer had been at an uproarious ball the night before and were idling about, recuperating. They had accomplished the ruin there of two girls, which they looked upon as truly manly sport. a.s.suming that Kirtley, as must be the case with all young men, was equally interested with them in being satyrs, they lost no time in trying to entertain him with their adventures.

The pursuit of woman! In Germany this is not very difficult, as she is not visibly unhappy to consider herself the legitimate prey of the lordly s.e.x. This idea runs naturally and powerfully throughout the Teuton scheme. It is not merely that the female is considered to have a price, but the price must be low, if not a cypher. To German women the triumphant male is a splendid creature. His acts are n.o.ble. To be hungry, thirsty, sensual are proper, and therefore candid, attributes in man. In order to subdue the earth, the race must be prolific, and to be prolific, desires must not be limited or weakened by pale Puritanisms. That men are normally uncleansed sewers from which the face need not be averted, was a conception Kirtley's senses had fallen somewhat foul of in the Bucher home. To what point this aspect was carried logically outside Villa Elsa, he was to realize in skirting the openly sensual sides.

The two Germans told of the various girls who had lived with them when in college. For the frank amatory life of the Teuton student begins early. Von Tielitz and Messer also boasted of their present-day mistresses who were so often changed for reasons of economy. The hilarious game, as Gard learned, was to obtain favors in exchange for nothing as far as possible. Trickery, lies, abuse, kicks, were employed to this purpose. Female chast.i.ty? A fable for the impotent. Consequently all was fair.

Sisters of their respected fellows were inferentially appraised and colloquially "hefted" as articles of social commerce ready to be knocked off matrimonially to the best bidder under the material rules of the German _Mitgift_ system. Through the garish films of innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images of these daughters as if they were languis.h.i.+ng to become mates and beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s in their longing to become mothers. He had by no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.

Before Gard was to leave Deutschland he had to conclude that the German puts himself in the att.i.tude of thinking of his women as s.l.u.ttish and accordingly acting in that scale toward them. There is no great gilding to these fancies. Girls are small inspiration to him compared with what the _pet.i.tes dames_ are to the amorous Frenchman. Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate, are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations of delicate refinement.

Kirtley thought he knew young men, yet this revolting capacity in them in Germany was proven to him to be not unnormal by its openness and by the dearth of any loud voices in rebuke. The German is conspicuously full of animal spirits. He affects the mighty in physique. Exudations and emanations are frank and prominent functions.

Under the Kaiser the Berlin dame who rented rooms to the foreign student, offering them "with" or "without," meaning sometimes her own daughter in the bargain, considered herself respectable enough.

More than this she acted in line with what appeared to be the purpose of acquiring a sympathetic control of the morals as well as the minds of the alien sojourner, the one being accompanied by a pandering to his lower nature with the doors of vice flagrantly ajar while the other armed his mentality with a Teutonized equipment and outlook. To sap the will, to galvanize the mind as from a German electric battery, palsied resistance to aggressive Germania. It was of a piece with that propaganda which the world was not to wake up to until almost too late.

These downright animal phases pointed the way logically, in Gard's mind, to that obscenity which is interwoven in the German civilization. He had first come across such evidence in leading comic journals. The drawings and jests that did not leave much to be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It divorced him from _Simplicissimus_ and _Ulk_, not that he was squeamish or a Miss Priscilla, but he saw no fun in that sort of thing.

He talked of it later with Anderson. Though there were pleasant delusions in Anderson's mind about Germany before he arrived, it was not his fault if few seemed to be left after his seven years. He bluntly defined the limited German wit and humor as characteristically born of the latrine.

Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the p.o.r.nographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book.

Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.

He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise.

Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.

This ran through his mind:

"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it seems--everybody!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NAKED CULT

The German, in all this physical aspect, is not a little like an unabashed ape. Accordingly the foreigner in Deutschland is impressed by the popular wors.h.i.+p of the wide-hipped female. The Teuton can leave little to be inferred but that he is more interested in the magnet of her developed hips than in the magic of her brain.

American women, with their slender waists and chaste frigidness born of Plymouth Rock, with their rulers.h.i.+p in the home, their influence permeating conspicuously in matters of public interest out of the home, their entire freedom to be courted and married or let alone in unbounded respect--how long would these conditions have been permitted by the Gothic Kaiser if heedless America had fallen into his gradually tightening grip? Doubtless to his view Yankee women were treated too much like dolls. They are not breeders of soldiers, makers of kingdoms. They do not rear children for the State. What have they desirably in common with the disciplined Hausfrau who becomes the mother of the ruling future generations?

_She_ is properly the chattel of the Government.