Then there was Christmas in Berlin. Three friends traveled up from Rome to be with us, two students came from Leipzig, and four from Berlin—eleven for dinner, and four chairs all told. It was a regular "La Bohême" festival—one guest appearing with a bottle of wine under his arm, another with a jar of caviare sent him from Russia. We had a gay week of it after Christmas, when the whole eleven of us went on some Dutch-treat spree every night, before going back to our studies.
Then came those last grueling months in Berlin, when Carl had a breakdown, and I got sick nursing him and had to go to a German hospital; and while I was there Jim was threatened with pneumonia and Nandy got tonsillitis. In the midst of it all the lease expired on our Wohnung, and Carl and Anna had to move the family out. We decided that we had had all we wanted of coaching in Berlin,—we came to that conclusion before any of the breakdowns,—threw our pride to the winds, borrowed more money from my good father, and as soon as the family was well enough to travel, we made for our ever-to-be-adored Heidelberg.
CHAPTER VI
Here I sit back, and words fail me. I see that year as a kaleidoscope of one joyful day after another, each rushing by and leaving the memory that we both always had, of the most perfect year that was ever given to mortals on earth. I remember our eighth wedding anniversary in Berkeley. We had been going night after night until we were tired of going anywhere,—engagements seemed to have heaped up,—so we decided that the very happiest way we could celebrate that most-to-be-celebrated of all dates was just to stay at home, plug the telephone, pull down the blinds, and have an evening by ourselves. Then we got out everything that we kept as mementos of our European days, and went over them—all the postcards, memory-books, theatre and opera programmes, etc., and, lastly, read my diary—I had kept a record of every day in Europe. When we came to that year in Heidelberg, we just could not believe our own eyes. How had we ever managed to pack a year so full, and live to tell the tale? I wish I could write a story of just that year. We swore an oath in Berlin that we would make Heidelberg mean Germany to us—no English-speaking, no Americans. As far as it lay in our power, we lived up to it. Carl and I spoke only German to each other and to the children, and we shunned our fellow countrymen as if they had had the plague. And Carl, in the characteristic way he had, set out to fill our lives with all the real German life we could get into them, not waiting for that life to come of itself—which it might never have done.
One afternoon, on his way home from the University, he discovered in a back alley the Weiser Boch, a little restaurant and beer-hall so full of local color that it "hollered." No, it did not holler: it was too real for that. It was sombre and carved up—it whispered. Carl made immediate friends, in the way he had, with the portly Frau and Herr who ran the Weiser Boch: they desired to meet me, they desired to see the Kinder, and would not the Herr Student like to have the Weiser Boch lady mention his name to some of the German students who dropped in? Carl left his card, and wondered if anything would come of it.
The very next afternoon,—such a glowing account of the Amerikaner the Weiser Boch lady must have given,—a real truly German student, in his corps cap and ribbons, called at our home—the stiffest, most decorous heel-clicking German student I ever was to see. His embarrassment was great when he discovered that Carl was out, and I seemed to take it quite for granted that he was to sit down for a moment and visit with me. He fell over everything. But we visited, and I was able to gather that his corps wished Herr Student Par-r-r-ker to have beer with them the following evening. Then he bowed himself backwards and out, and fled.
I could scarce wait for Carl to get home—it was too good to be true. And that was but the beginning. Invitation after invitation came to Carl, first from one corps, then from another; almost every Saturday night he saw German student-life first hand somewhere, and at least one day a week he was invited to the duels in the Hirsch Gasse. Little by little we got the students to our Wohnung; then we got chummier and chummier, till we would walk up Haupt Strasse saluting here, passing a word there, invited to some student function one night, another affair another night. The students who lived in Heidelberg had us meet their families, and those who were batching in Heidelberg often had us come to their rooms. We made friendships during that year that nothing could ever mar.
It is two years now since we received the last letter from any Heidelberg chum. Are they all killed, perhaps? And when we can communicate again, after the war, think of what I must write them! Carl was a revelation to most of them—they would talk about him to me, and ask if all Americans were like him, so fresh in spirit, so clean, so sincere, so full of fun, and, with it all, doing the finest work of all of them but one in the University.
The economics students tried to think of some way of influencing Alfred Weber to give another course of lectures at the University. He was in retirement at Heidelberg, but still the adored of the students. Finally, they decided that a committee of three should represent them and make a personal appeal. Carl was one of the three chosen. The report soon flew around, how, in Weber's august presence, the Amerikaner had stood with his hands in his pockets—even sat for a few moments on the edge of Weber's desk. The two Germans, posed like ramrods, expected to see such informality shoved out bodily. Instead, when they took their leave, the Herr Professor had actually patted the Amerikaner on the shoulder, and said he guessed he would give the lectures.