Villa Elsa | Page 4

for it was proper to gorge themselves like the human gods they were. Even the most servile took on a conscious air of being of a regal species.
In this wise, the German, like Cain, the competent iron-worker, was treading the earth with resounding footsteps. Over his bullneck and under his spiked hat he had naturally come to look upon himself as a super-being. While the American watched ball games, the Englishman played golf and the Frenchman wrote to his loved one, the Teuton was keeping himself hardened for war, and toiling like the systematic beaver in up-building national industries that were so swiftly dominating all others. To say the least, this intense people were strenuously perfecting an intensive and powerful civilization such as never had been seen.
So--as Gard Kirtley was finding and yet failing to explain to himself--expectancy, undescribable and splendid, was in the air beyond the Rhine. And there was one special toast drunk to it all with ever more loudly clinking glasses--Der Tag! Such was triumphant Germany, the triumphant Vaterland, in 1913--foretasting a portentous future; pregnant with colossal success; swollen with a hundred years of victories and growth; as sure of its prowess and might as were the swaggering gods of its Valhallas.
Imperial Deutschland ��ber Alles!
CHAPTER III
GARD KIRTLEY
Into this Triumphant Germany young Kirtley had come to recuperate from the sadness over the loss, the previous year, of his parents and from a siege of sickness. Still somewhat pale, somewhat weak, he showed the shock he had undergone. He had toured across southern Germany and up to Berlin where he had bidden good-by to his chance American traveling companion, Jim Deming, who was knocking about Italy and Teutonland. They had exchanged final addresses.
Kirtley, clean-shaven, with pleasant brown eyes, and brown hair brushed down flat, giving his head the appearance of smallness, looked very lank and Yankeeish among the robust, fat Teutons of the Saxon capital. He was entering Dresden on a late afternoon brown with German sunshine. The school year had begun, but a loitering summer-time brightened city and countryside. As he made his way slowly through the throng at the station, he gave evidence of a rather shy way of looking up and about, an apologetic readiness to step aside, to yield place, not characteristic of the speedy American in Europe. He had not, as we have said, come to Germany for adventure. He had not come merely to idle for the winter. And certainly he little mistrusted he was finally to figure as a modest hero in a curious and dangerous experience that linked itself up with the beginning of the war of which he, like the world at large, felt not the slightest premonition.
His German teacher had been his favorite in his eastern college where he had one season been a very fair halfback. His better showing had exhibited itself in his ability to throw from left field to home plate on the ball team. This American preceptor of German parentage had taken an interest in Kirtley with the insistent way of Teutonic pedagogues. Always commending with a uniform vigor the Germans and German fashions of living, he had gradually filled Gard full of the idea of their excelling merits.
Kirtley heard of the tonic of the nutritious Teuton beer and Teuton music in overflowing measures. In the Kaiser's realm, it appeared, the digestions are always good. How desirable it would be for Gard to take on some flesh in the German manner! In that climate, Professor Rebner claimed with assurance, although he had never been abroad, one can eat and drink his fill without causing the human system to rebel as it is apt to in our dry, high-strung America. His pupil's appetite would come back. Hearty meals of robust cheese and sausages would be craved with an honest, clamorous hunger that meant foolish indelicacy here at home.
Rebner also urged that Gard could in Deutschland improve his German which, notwithstanding his affection for his preceptor, was indifferent. Its gutturalness grated on his nerves, antagonized him. But he criticized himself for this, not the language. Had not his old mentor always sung of the superiorities of that tongue?
Kirtley could improve, too, his fingering on the piano by familiarizing himself with the noble melodies that flooded the German land. Two hairy hands would go up in exultation,
"To hear Beethoven and Wagner in their own country, filling the atmosphere with their glories! And then Goethe and Schiller. Those mighty deities. To read them in their own home!"
But the greatest thing, to the old professor's mind, would be to behold the German people themselves, study them, profit by them in their pre?minence. What an example, what an inspiration, what a grand symphony of concentrated harmony! Germany was the source of Protestantism and therefore of modern morals--honest, uncompromising morals. German discipline