“You see,” Ferdie apologized, miserably avoiding his son’s eyes, “your grandfather invited us to pay him a long visit to Munich. I and Deb—and your dear mother, of course. He had never seen little Deb ... she was seven years old——”
“A quite abominable pest of a child!” from the depths of the armchair in the corner.
“And so we all went over. And you were born there. Your poor mother died of it ...” he cleared his throat, and blew his nose. “That, perhaps, is why it was never mentioned to you.”
Ferdie was right. He had felt the loss of Dorothea so keenly that sentiment demanded of the household that her death should never be alluded to. Whence followed that Richard’s birth was likewise hushed up, being intimately linked with the bereavement and all its tragic circumstances. He had never bothered about the matter, taking it for granted that, like Deb, he was born at Daisybanks.
“But, father, I can’t be a German. I—I don’t like Germans. I can’t stick them at any price.” His tone was sharp with the first agonized belief that some truth might lurk in the altogether staggering accusation that these two were bringing against him. “I don’t like Germans. And we’re fighting them. I’m English—like other chaps. You can’t make a fellow German by saying he is,” relieved commonsense asserting itself over a frame of mind which was almost babyish in its reliance on the repetition: “I don’t like Germans!”
And then, a criminal before the sternest of judges, Ferdinand Marcus made his confession:
“You see—when I was naturalized afterwards, you—you were not naturalized at the same time. I wanted you to choose for yourself when you came of age; to be free to make your own choice for one country or another—for any country. I, as a boy, had never been consulted what were my private wishes——” His father here gave utterance to a grunt pregnant with rich opinions of the unimportance of Ferdie’s wishes, whatever they might have been. “—It should be different for you, I said. Who knows if you would want to find yourself a British subject, in twenty-one years? Time enough then. So I left it till you should be old enough——”
“It didn’t strike you, I suppose, that a war might break out in the meantime?”
“It did not strike a great many other people, Richard.”
“Doch! everyone but an idiot; an idiot and a bungler ... with your prate of ‘my children’s rights,’ and ‘my children’s opinions’ and ‘my children’s liberty.’... A bungler with your children, like with everything else, you are bringing one of them to an internment camp; we will see to what fine end you bring the other.”