Читать книгу Villa Elsa - Stuart Oliver Henry - Страница 16

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OFTEN when he peeked down from his attic window he spied the shining bald head of the very elderly Herr Bucher surrounded by the mass of lively colors of his rose garden. He loved to spend hours there in the sunshine with his posies, tying up their branches, clipping choice specimens with which he was fond of decorating the members of Villa Elsa, its dining table, its living room. Roses, roses, everywhere.

It was his hobby, this spot of blossoms, and in it his short, bulky form, so whitened by his Jovian beard meerschaumed by the stains from his huge, curving German pipe, was often almost lost to view. He was like some droll gnome waddling about in a flower patch. Frequently someone had to be sent to find him among all those pets which he knew so well by their Latin and popular names and by their characteristics. While he grumbled and so often stormed about in the house, speaking always in gruff tones of command, he was quite sunny out there in his plot, although still guttural and dictatorial.

He was a retired professor of phonetics and diction, but now and then prepared a pupil. This was how he had met his wife a long, long time before, when she was a young singer. She was twenty years his junior and had become so completely a housewife that you could scarcely associate her with any art. She was fat, harsh, homely, masculine in the way of German women, an occasional long hair sticking from her face in emulation of a beard.

Devoid of any graces of seduction, putting out her heavy fists in every direction she exhibited a bearish kindness toward Gard that seemed calculated at first to frighten him. She was loud-voiced, iron-jawed. One of her favorite boasts was that she had never been to a dentist. She pulled out her rarely aching teeth, or some one of the family pulled them for her.

The Herr could be smoother and he assumed a fatherly solicitude over Gard, looking out for his advantages, anxious that he should make progress. But Bucher evidently was annoyed at times by not having authority in the matter of the slow way in which his young guest set about with his "studies." Kirtley had not come to study, had not been trained to study, in the German sense. It would have been difficult to make the old man see any virtue in such desultoriness. It doubtless proved to his mind that Americans are only half trained, half tamed, half domesticated.

The couple surrounded Kirtley with a protection, an honesty, a reliability, a zeal, that was as surprising as it was, on the whole, gratifying. He felt a security he had hardly known in his own home. If he were cheated or otherwise imposed upon anywhere in Dresden—and this did not often happen—the Buchers were violently up in arms about it and never ceased pursuit of the recreant until the wrong was righted.

"The good German name must not be tarnished."

In a word, they tried to treat him like a son; and so forceful and constant were their efforts in this direction that he sometimes wished their well-meant attentions were less formidable. The easy American "forget it," "why bother," "never again," were expressions of a mood unfamiliar to them. They visibly had small patience with such slackness which only, to their minds, encouraged lawlessness.

The setting for Gard's approaching German love affair was appropriately picturesque and propitious. A tight little meadow, with a grassy path wandering through by the Elbe, lay near at hand, and beyond, at the right, a pine wood—the Waldpark—with neat graveled walks and rustic seats where the tonic air was often to brace his musings.

Adjacent was the small summer house, still poetically standing, where Schiller wrote "Don Carlos" a century and a quarter before. A leafy lane led from the meadow to the walled garden inclosure of Villa Elsa, whose branches, vines and flowering bushes insisted on making it almost a hidden retreat. The spot could not be more gemütlich—that familiar expressive word which Kirtley soon learned to rely on amid the scant artillery of his defensive weapons of conversational German.

Through a swinging gate in the wall, and usually to the clanging of a bell that announced you, you entered the house on a level with the ground. On this floor were the kitchen and dining room. Next came the belle étage, with the salon and music room opening into each other, and with another apartment or two. Above, the chambers. And still above, the two attic rooms. All was plain but substantial.

The garden furnished not only flowers but vegetables. And in one corner stood a table and chairs for afternoon tea with cakes or beer with cheese. Here the ever-busy sewing and knitting mainly went on in summer, and a forgotten book, half read, was usually left by some one of the young folks. There was a drowsy, old-fashioned air about the premises that recalled illustrations in some of the editions of Grimm's fairy tales.

Aside from the abundance of bound music, Gard had been far from expecting that fine examples of art and literature would be so meagerly represented in this representative German home. There were poor pictures of Bismarck, of William the Second, and of his grandfather aping the appearance of Gambrinus.

Prominent also were steel engravings of Saxon and Prussian kings of whom Kirtley had never heard. But there they were, conspicuous household gods, with fierce, epic miens and lordly bodies, surrounded by wreaths of glory and Latin texts, and supported by cannon pointed at the observer with menaces of angry welcome. And not to be forgotten were the august thrones, avenging swords of royalty, and the dark swirling clouds suggesting the German Olympus.

"It all harmonizes with the arsenal down in the entrance," muttered Gard.

As for books, he was taken at an angle still more unexpected and significant. Goethe and Schiller and the other old Teuton classics, breathing of liberalness and freedom—figures that had always stood out in the world as leading exponents and guardians of a cultured enlightenment—were only present in the Bucher home in the form of musty, unused volumes.

These authors, who were so loved, advocated and expounded in American colleges and whom Kirtley had come to Germany to know better and to worship, were scarcely ever mentioned. He was astonished to find that the Germans thought little of them. And Heine likewise, that naughty child of the Vaterland! At the Buchers the presentable red and gilt edition of his poems was kept in Fräulein's escritoire in her room.

American education, Gard began to realize, was somehow on the wrong track here. It was trying to cultivate a Germany that no longer seemed to exist. It was diligently teaching and acclaiming Teutons who were repudiated in their own land. It was separating the spirit and taste of the two peoples instead of bringing them together.

The books that were in evidence in Villa Elsa were a new lot, excepting the great and formidable Nietschke. Kirtley had never heard of the Treitschkes and Bernhardis and Hartmanns, whom the Buchers were reading and quoting.

From what he made out, these and similar authorities were insisting mightily on German conceptions and prerogatives—some exalting the Teuton supremacy of will, others urging and preparing the mental ground for an armed attack on the world for a German dictatorship. This militant literature was introduced here by Rudolph, who was armed with strategic plans, diagrams, military maps, which the family frequently of an evening pored over with the enthusiasm of a parlor game. First it was Russia to be assaulted, then Belgium, and always France.

"Italy is already as good as conquered," Rudi proclaimed, "and England simply needs to be tilted off her worm-eaten perch by a sudden shock."

Kirtley rubbed his eyes. What a widespread, horrible butchery was being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace? Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about, puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at this respectable hearthstone?

Such a strange form of social entertainment! The "arsenal" below always came to Gard's mind. These people acted as if they were actually thinking of capturing the whole Eastern Hemisphere, speaking as if they were going to rule it like conquerors, going to enforce at the point of the blade German "might," "will," "rights." These were the common expressions used. Kirtley thought the household must be unbalanced on this topic.

He said to himself, "No one else whom I have read or heard of is contemplating such a campaign. Other races are holding forth on the benefits and glories of peace. These Dresden Germans are talking of the benefits and glories of war!"

This example in these simple, every-day Buchers was most pointed. Their lines were furthest from the military. Teaching diction and phonetics to women and male singers, studying engineering, religion and the gentle arts, had nothing to do with such proposed bloody belligerence.

Only Rudi could be called somewhat martial. Hydraulics was his branch, and his frequent absences on missions about which he assumed an important and mystifying air, such as is, for that matter, usual in bumptious young men, never caused any comment or visible interest on the part of the others. He gave himself out to be close to the militaire, familiar with its secrets, as he freely blew his cigarette smoke across the meal table; and to him the family deferred on these subjects. Surely all this was to Gard very foreign and interesting.

"What a different race of beings! What a curious revelation to observe, what a doughty complex to comprehend!"

He was more confounded by the attitude of the women. They were even fiercer than the men. To them the other Europeans were a wholly bad lot. Those neighbors were so much in the way of the good, all-worthy Germans. But it was on the English that this feminine hatred vented itself most turbulently. Frau Bucher shouted that she would be more than glad—she would be hilarious—if war came.

"I would wear my last rag for years, see my two boys dead on the battle front, if Gross Britain could be knocked into the bottom of the sea."

Was all this a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of prose and verse—how would they feel at home in this modern Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it possible he had really come on a sort of fool's errand?