OFTEN when he peeked down from his attic window he spied the shining bald head of the very elderly Herr Bucher surrounded by the mass of lively colors of his rose garden. He loved to spend hours there in the sunshine with his posies, tying up their branches, clipping choice specimens with which he was fond of decorating the members of Villa Elsa, its dining table, its living room. Roses, roses, everywhere.
It was his hobby, this spot of blossoms, and in it his short, bulky form, so whitened by his Jovian beard meerschaumed by the stains from his huge, curving German pipe, was often almost lost to view. He was like some droll gnome waddling about in a flower patch. Frequently someone had to be sent to find him among all those pets which he knew so well by their Latin and popular names and by their characteristics. While he grumbled and so often stormed about in the house, speaking always in gruff tones of command, he was quite sunny out there in his plot, although still guttural and dictatorial.
He was a retired professor of phonetics and diction, but now and then prepared a pupil. This was how he had met his wife a long, long time before, when she was a young singer. She was twenty years his junior and had become so completely a housewife that you could scarcely associate her with any art. She was fat, harsh, homely, masculine in the way of German women, an occasional long hair sticking from her face in emulation of a beard.
Devoid of any graces of seduction, putting out her heavy fists in every direction she exhibited a bearish kindness toward Gard that seemed calculated at first to frighten him. She was loud-voiced, iron-jawed. One of her favorite boasts was that she had never been to a dentist. She pulled out her rarely aching teeth, or some one of the family pulled them for her.
The Herr could be smoother and he assumed a fatherly solicitude over Gard, looking out for his advantages, anxious that he should make progress. But Bucher evidently was annoyed at times by not having authority in the matter of the slow way in which his young guest set about with his "studies." Kirtley had not come to study, had not been trained to study, in the German sense. It would have been difficult to make the old man see any virtue in such desultoriness. It doubtless proved to his mind that Americans are only half trained, half tamed, half domesticated.
The couple surrounded Kirtley with a protection, an honesty, a reliability, a zeal, that was as surprising as it was, on the whole, gratifying. He felt a security he had hardly known in his own home. If he were cheated or otherwise imposed upon anywhere in Dresden—and this did not often happen—the Buchers were violently up in arms about it and never ceased pursuit of the recreant until the wrong was righted.
"The good German name must not be tarnished."
In a word, they tried to treat him like a son; and so forceful and constant were their efforts in this direction that he sometimes wished their well-meant attentions were less formidable. The easy American "forget it," "why bother," "never again," were expressions of a mood unfamiliar to them. They visibly had small patience with such slackness which only, to their minds, encouraged lawlessness.
The setting for Gard's approaching German love affair was appropriately picturesque and propitious. A tight little meadow, with a grassy path wandering through by the Elbe, lay near at hand, and beyond, at the right, a pine wood—the Waldpark—with neat graveled walks and rustic seats where the tonic air was often to brace his musings.
Adjacent was the small summer house, still poetically standing, where Schiller wrote "Don Carlos" a century and a quarter before. A leafy lane led from the meadow to the walled garden inclosure of Villa Elsa, whose branches, vines and flowering bushes insisted on making it almost a hidden retreat. The spot could not be more gemütlich—that familiar expressive word which Kirtley soon learned to rely on amid the scant artillery of his defensive weapons of conversational German.