Читать книгу Villa Elsa - Stuart Oliver Henry - Страница 22

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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 class 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 assured 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 advertisement 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 scraps 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 advertisement 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 godless 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 class that makes up the might of the nation.

"Can you read German comfortably?" asked Anderson. "What do you make of it? I've been studying it for seven years and sometimes it seems as if I hadn't got much further than the verb to hate."

"You can't give me any short cuts about it, then?" laughed Gard.

"Yes, I can—yes, I can. Here's a little compilation and analysis of the irregular verbs," explained his new acquaintance, pulling a green brochure from his pocket. "Only costs a mark. You can get a second-hand one at the book stalls by the Augustus bridge. I always carry it with me and con it over and over. Good for the pronunciation. If you get the irregular verbs of a language well fed into your system, you've got the language by the windpipe.

"Then buy Simplicissimus. You'll pick up a good deal from that—the popular expressions, the phrases and exclamations that are going. If you learn to use the exclamations, it makes you interesting and well-liked. It gives the other fellow the chance to do the talking. Simplicissimus and that kind of thing are better than the dry, stilted German classics—'Ekkehard,' 'Nathan der Weise' and all that discarded stuff. But remember that esprit was not given the Germans, because it would hide their Boeotian stupidity."

"I haven't yet seen—I suppose I shall see"—said Kirtley, "why the general American student like me is so persistently encouraged to come to Germany. Why is it?"

"Because we are damn fools," heartily rejoined Anderson. "The Germans don't have education. They have instruction. The one makes gentlemen. The other makes experts. It is hard for an expert to be a gentleman. They don't have gentlemen in Germany. No such word in their language. It is a nation of experts, but that's precisely the reason it should be feared. Why, education would teach a German not to slobber at his meals.

"It is his strenuous ingrowing instruction that cultivates his extreme national egotism until it has become like a boil. His racial egoism helps obscure the obscure sunlight here in Germany and blinds him. He has to wear spectacles. It is a natural cry, his cry for a place in the sun."

"Should I have gone to England or France?" suggested Gard.

"Yes. At any rate, not here. The German procedure roughens the fiber and lowers the moral standards of the general student. Instruction here is along mental and manual lines. The Teuton is meant to be a specialist. He is competent but not refined."

The two compatriots gossiped along about this and that.

"I'm having a devil of a time sleeping on my bed," confessed Gard. "You ought to know about German beds. How do you get on with them?"

"The German bed helps to give the German his bad disposition. I put two beds side by side and sleep across the middle. That's one way to fool the German bed. If I saw yours I might be able to suggest something."

Anderson frankly expressed a desire to visit the Loschwitz home. So on Gard's invitation they had lunch and went out to his suburb.