Villa Elsa | Page 9

which was cheap and meaningless strumming. He could rattle through a lot of popular tunes and stumble through a few short simple school-girl salon pieces. The Buchers were a real orchestra. With the ladies at the piano, the old Herr at the flute, Ernst at the violin and Rudi at the 'cello, they could play a dozen programmes and furnish enjoyment for the listener.
And always salutary, enlightened, cultivated music. The house reverberated with a multitude of choice enduring arias, sung, hummed or whistled, and this made Villa Elsa almost take on a charm for Gard. He had not known how his melodious soul was starved.
Why should not the Germans be expected to have noble souls with all the wealth of distinguished, inspiring music flowing through their lives? Should it not give them necessarily a strong, desirable spirit, fortify them in healthy aspirations, encourage them to get the best out of existence? This incentive and pleasureableness, making for the good, the true and the beautiful--must it not contribute a deep richness and righteousness to the Teuton heart?
And is it to be wondered at--the Germans' big supply of red blood? For the strength of the Teuton's body, Gard observed, was built up, maintained, in equal measure with his other training. The military drilling and strenuous gymnastics provided him with straight shoulders, a full chest, a sound spine, strength of limb--in short, good, presentable health.
The Bucher fireside had no doctor, no adored specialists, hanging about. It had been taught to handle simple complaints itself. Medical and surgical bills did not upset its modest financial equilibrium. The family were extraordinarily well. Their brawn, energetically looked after as well as the brain, accounted partly for their marvelous appetites.
So nothing seemed to Gard to be missed in this potent scheme of instruction and Kultur.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOME
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