And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been horrified by the cold-hearted envy, hatred and meanness which lay underneath the polished manners of many of the people in their circle. “They do not wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply have no conception of the meaning of that American word ‘friendly.’”
Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and we entered the Freshman class together. She was a very pretty girl, one of the brown-haired Teutons, who are so much finer and more neatly finished than the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popularity. We were taken into the same fraternity, studied together, and were much in each other’s homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not altogether a light-hearted one. After the first flush of pleasure at being back had passed, a cloud of depression settled over them. Their sojourn in a more finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civilization had put them all out of key for the loud-mouthed, cheerful American tune. They found it shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against it. Heavens, they had not remembered that American trades-people were so utterly mannerless! Nor that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of the arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, and very soon developed an active hostility for football because of the indisputable fact that the university world was so occupied with it, that nothing serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving when the last game was played. The Behrens were musical and nobody in the city cared for music except the German-Americans in their shabby quarter at the other end of town, and they were fat grocers, saloon-keepers or foremen in factories, people with whom the Behrens could not dream of associating. They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned.
When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But, oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it impossible for civilized beings to organize a livable existence in America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which rasped and fretted them at every turn.
They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal country, something more than meets the eye.
I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs. Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old maid!”
But later on, when her mother and she were exchanging reminiscences about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh, I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!”
Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms, and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.”
It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey.