It was now July in the year of everlasting tragedy—1914. Kirtley must leave for home, as Villa Elsa knew. He talked over his route with Anderson. His interest in Charlemagne made him wish to see at Aix-la-Chapelle the great emperor's tomb, underneath which, according to an old-time legend, the ruler still sits in his white robes of state in his marble chair, looking forward to resurrection to power. So the trip was mapped out through central Germany.
As the time was at hand for Gard to announce his date of setting off, his perplexities before Frau and Elsa grew entangled. But, happily, their knot was cut for him. Von Tielitz, who had long been away, broke in upon the household one morning with glorious news. He had received a commission as bandmaster in the army with fair pay. Most unexpected. A civilian, who could make sport of the military, summoned into the ranks! What could it mean? Something must be in the wind.
At all events he had come to arrange to marry Elsa, and converted the Villa into a hubbub. He was so beside himself that he appeared ready to embrace and marry the first person he met. He was also officious as if conducting a rehearsal. He rushed to Gard's room and overwhelmed him with the tidings. His eye-glasses kept tumbling off. He was upstairs and down, in the flower garden, out at the tea table, and now and then he rushed to the Pleyel and rent the air with its exultant chords.
The family turned the day into celebration. The wine cellar was opened. The kitchen sent forth its hot and overflowing dishes hour after hour until well into the evening. The marriageable Jim Deming and Gard Kirtley were to Villa Elsa as if they had never been. Frau proclaimed in husky sounds that she had not felt so young in thirty years. Luckily Fräulein Wasserhaus had gone off to Brunswick to visit a relative soon after Deming's advent, so she was not in Wiesenstrasse to encounter this joyous climax and Gard's preparations for his eventful journey.
Elsa acted as one overjoyed. It was what she had yearned for and what filled the measure of her Teutonic maiden nature. On seeing her happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful shore, and knowing what Friedrich was with all his talent, Gard realized she was never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled with sentiment.
His illness had cleared his intuitions. The unalluring defects of the Teuton systems of love-making overshadowed his own defects as a suitor. Elsa had been as truly foreign to him as the German habits of eating and drinking. In thinking of her he now knew he had always been conscious of her nation. The German woman, as he had already learned, is sunk into her race. It swallows up her individuality. In marrying her, one married the whole people—the German State—the Kaiser. One became possessed not only of a help-meet but of an aggressive political idea.
Now that Gard was a friend instead of a lover, how much easier were his relations with Fräulein! Brooding sensitiveness and responsibility passed into lightsomeness. The unnatural and crankling proceeding of his trying to woo a German girl was smoothed away into a genial indifference. The mental picture of Elsa would remain as one that had attracted him on the wall of his German memories. And like the hundred maids that a youth is smitten with, she would gradually blend into the dim gallery of such pleasant visions of Kirtley's susceptible spring-time—visions which, in all men, fade sweetly into their manhood.
In this manner the cloud of Gard's awkward discomfort in speaking out or acting out his answer to Frau's virile project, had melted away before these lighted-up faces. He felt as if a fog were lifted off his consciousness. He was glad to slip out thus easily. In the lively jumble of robust, rejoicing realities about him, he seemed to have emerged from the fringy edges of a daze.