Villa Elsa Part 18

One morning early in June when Kirtley, who had been away the afternoon and evening before, came down to breakfast, he found the household upset. Something bad had happened. Tekla was gone. Rudi was not to be seen. Frau had prepared a partial meal and Elsa was making ready to sweep and dust and tidy up the rooms.

The parents were in a rage. They made no bones about it. Frau blurted out with German unreservedness:

"I packed Tekla off--the animal. She had no consideration for me.

What do you think, Herr Kirtley? She is going to be a mother. And by Rudi. Wouldn't you have thought he would have more sense than this--right here at home--break up my service? He let her get him into the mess. I have no doubt it was her doings--my poor Rudi. We have sent him away for a couple of days. I told Tekla to go--be off.

And she was out on the street--like _that_--with her bundle of belongings under her arm. And here I am with no servant. Ach Gott!

they are all cattle, of course. One has to put up with them."

Herr was in a growling, ferocious state. He blamed Tekla. He blamed his Frau for not knowing what was going on. It was the woman's fault. Everything always was. His incomplete breakfast was late.

"Is there nothing left to eat in the house?" he cried out. He took on a famished and abused air, although he had had his usual six meals the day before. "Give me at least some cheese and bread!"

In this manner Tekla was roundly denounced for interrupting the course of family comfort. That she had mortally sinned awakened no attention, aroused no concern. There was no sympathy expressed for her in her condition, no responsibility felt for her in her downfall or anxiety about her future. Whether she would, from this misstep, have to take to the streets for a living occurred to no one but Kirtley.

Germans are little wrought up about such questions. There is no shuddering as from an admitted mortal sin. Natural impulses and facts are natural impulses and facts. Why should one be squeamish about them or have soul burnings? In general, carnal desires meet with no great fastidiousness in the German domestic circle. They are rather regarded as honest and healthy like desires for food and drink. The Teuton wife is ashamed of barrenness and considers it proper for women to be fully s.e.xed in feeling. s.e.xuality is not something to be shrunk from, discouraged or denied, but is a candid, copious law of Nature to be recognized.

When Rudi returned shortly from Leipsic, where it had been deemed best for him to retire for the moment, he appeared as conceited and noisy as if nothing had happened. He was not cowed or penitent. His parents, who had got Villa Elsa in running order and were forgetting the _contretemps_, almost beamed upon him. He was now a full-fledged male. Any lingering uncertainties as to his completed manhood had been effectually removed. His affair was viewed from the standpoint of potent strength, not lapse from virtue. Young men had their wild oats to sow. His mistake had been to disturb his own household. Had it been another household, little heed would have been given.

In the Bucher minds the satisfying net result seemed to be that another _soldier_ (it was to be hoped) was to be born for the army, for the Kaiser. Soldiers had to be. Tekla was to fulfill her highest mission as a German servant girl. She was to become a just and const.i.tuent part of the swelling Empire.

Frau's ideas and information on the subject provided Gard's journal with some more condensed material. They were talking out by the garden table.

"What becomes of the German servant girl under such conditions?" he inquired.

"Oh, she can get into another family and go on as before."

"And the baby? How does she manage with that?"

"She puts it out among poor farm people and pays a little for its keep. As the mother usually works about in different localities--sometimes being taken far away by her employers--the farmer often adopts the baby as it grows up. He can always use more help. If it's a girl, she is good for the farm as well as the house. If it's a boy, he becomes a soldier. A boy of this kind makes the best soldier because he has no parental and no home attachments.

He only knows the barracks and has the officers to obey. He does not learn who his father is, and the mother becomes practically a stranger to him as she moves about in the city or country. He is ready to serve in the colonies or go anywhere or do anything, having no personal ties to hold him."

"Does not your large army badly demoralize these social conditions?"

"You know, we housewives don't like it much when a new regiment moves into the vicinity. It makes mothers among our domestics and we have to change about. Of course, you see, we have more women than men in Germany and we must have children growing up for the barracks and the cheap labor market. There seems to be no other way, but it is often a great nuisance for us housekeepers. Yet there is this to say: The girls rarely have more than one child by the same man. For another regiment comes along and there are new relations. The army is necessarily a floating population and not very responsible for what it does among us civilians because it _protects_ us."

Kirtley concluded that this accounted for the large number of detached young men in Germany--in the army and out of it--who appeared to be so entirely footloose, ready for any mission or task in any part of the globe. As the two sat there talking about the question of lovelessness in these relations, Herr Bucher strolled up from his flower beds and joined them in his Tyrolean jacket of the chase and big army boots. Gard said,

"We were speaking of affection, Herr Bucher. Why do the Germans have the ideal of hate when other races are holding up the ideal of love?"

"Because it is good to hate!" exclaimed the host with rugged forcefulness as he squatted in a seat. "To hate is strong, manly. It makes the blood flow. It makes one alert. It is necessary for keeping up the fighting instinct. To love is a feebleness. It enervates. You see all the nations that talk of love as the keynote of life are weak, degenerate. Germany is the most powerful nation in the world because she hates. When you hate, you eat well, sleep well, work well, fight well. It is best for the health. When you love, it is like a sickness and disorganizes and debilitates."

"How do you reconcile that with Christ and His mission of love?"

pursued Gard.

"There is nothing to reconcile. We simply do not admit all that. It is not practical. Christ was not practical. He had no family. He made no home. He never even built a house. He did not found a State.

He let the Romans run over Him. How can one live in a cold northern climate without a house, a nation and an army to protect him? No, it is not at all practical. Even Christ could not defend Himself. He was crucified without any resistance, any struggle. To hate is to struggle and that is the mainspring of action. So one must prepare himself to struggle successfully. To hate, to cause to be feared, are the proper motives for life. They _are_ life. Fear is a stronger and far more universal human motive than love. Therefore we Germans want to be feared rather than to be loved. So we hate because it engenders fear in others. To love is already half a surrender and ends logically in death. With Christ the real victory, the real heaven aspired to, was in death, not in life."

The Herr had faithfully read Rudi's contemporary German military philosophers.

Truly this was too strange a race, Kirtley felt, to admit of any levels of genuine, unreserved a.s.sociation and companions.h.i.+p except under a _quasi_ truce or other provisional conditions. To form a perfect union with it, other races had to adopt its att.i.tude. It could not and would not adopt theirs until some sort of a Teuton reformation took place.

In the midst of these repulsing discords Gard was surprised, on returning to his room a night or two later, to find by his table a new red and gold copy of Heine's verse inclosing a sprig of forget-me-not. On the fly leaf was inscribed in a youthful, copybook hand:

Immer h.e.l.ler brennt die Licht, Meines schoen' Vergissmeinnicht.

Offered to her meadow pupil By his meadow teacher.

(Ever brighter burns the light Of my sweet forget-me-not.)

The Germans are not original in love-making. Elsa had read of such things being done. But it was an admission or advance from her as unexpected as it was belated. Gard tossed about awhile on his bed, thinking of it. As he had often acknowledged to himself, he had been interested in her more than any girl he had yet known.

In the morning, when things were clearer in his consciousness, he a.s.sumed that her enterprising, calculating mother had inspired the gift. For it seemed to be _apropos_ of nothing in particular at this unpropitious time, although he had made Elsa little presents during the fall and early winter. It was evident that the family, after the arrival of the mirific Jim Deming, had grown somewhat accustomed to Americans and had at length struck a sentimental att.i.tude.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

A GERMAN MARRIAGE PROPOSAL

A day or two afterward, another little tragedy visited Villa Elsa, following on the heels of the unfortunate departure of Tekla. Ernst came home at lunch time with his head swollen in reds and purples and hardly able to walk. At his morning drill his sergeant had knocked him down by a blow in the face and then kicked him in the knee. The little philosopher was a good deal of a dreamer and had failed in strict and prompt attention. To strike down and boot the rank and file are, of course, a normal part of Prussian army discipline.

Kirtley was incensed, horrified. But to his amazement the family sided with the officer. Although Ernst stood in grave danger of being crippled for life, they were ugly in their censures of him.

They said it was a good thing to bring him down from the clouds.

The poor little fellow was a pitiable object for some time. He not only suffered painfully from his bruises but had to meet the irate looks and casehardened bearing of his parents. Brutality made soldiers of visionary and idealistic temperaments. It kept the feet on the earth.

Gard thought how differently an American father and mother would act. Their sons belonged to them and they would resent any outside interference that smacked of cruelty. In Germany, the boys, as already observed, belonged essentially to the Government. The vicious treatment of German children in the home, at school, in the army, accounts for the unique Teuton inst.i.tution of child-suicide.

The number of these boys and girls who, because of their hards.h.i.+ps, destroy themselves in despair, is shockingly great. The statistics in other races offer little in comparison.

To break down the will by abasing youth before its comrades and elders, to lay its self-respect low, to beat dignified individuality into callous insensibility, manufactured a docile, automatic unit for the German mechanism. The peculiar strength of Deutschland lay in this early control and training of its young. And as the young surrendered their unimportant consciousness as individuals, they gained an important consciousness as factors in the State. For this reason, as they learned to be almost servile among their own folk, they became domineering among foreigners.

Villa Elsa now was true to the adage that misfortunes do not come or loom singly. One forenoon, about the middle of June, Kirtley was sitting in his attic, turning over in his mind the fact that his year in Germany would soon be up, and endeavoring to explain why he felt depressed. The recent events, it was true, had created a very unpleasant condition of mind, but his body itself also seemed to share in the inharmony. A dullness, a heaviness, had begun to weigh upon his physique and yet here were summer, Nature, the green earth, rejoicing all about him. It was odd. What was the full explanation?

As he sat there thinking somewhat dolefully about himself and forgetting his opened books, a loud knock was heard at his door. It was Frau Bucher with her knitting. She had never honored him with a call in his room. Something must be the matter.

At his invitation she came in and sank into a chair. Her face and hair were mussed. She was laboring under a great strain. The sons with their ill-luck had troubled her. The recent mishaps had evidently alarmed her, upset her, so that it was now the daughter filling the mother's anxious hours.

"Your daughter--Fraulein Elsa!" Gard exclaimed in astonishment.

"Yes, my poor daughter. Oh, good Herr Kirtley, you have always been so kind. I have treated you this winter like a son--just like my own sons."

"You have been very good to me, Frau Bucher," interpolated Kirtley, hastening to offer any consolation, although he could not imagine what distress had brought her to him.

"Well, my daughter--you know it has always been the intention that she marry Friedrich--ever since they were almost children. But, mein Gott, the poor Friedrich does not arrive at anything. We love him.

All our friends love him--admire him. But he can get no fixed position. We wait, he waits, Elsa waits. Always hopes and more hopes and nothing comes. And he is so disappointed. No Kapellmeisters.h.i.+p.