Through a swinging gate in the wall, and usually to the clanging of a bell that announced you, you entered the house on a level with the ground. On this floor were the kitchen and dining room. Next came the belle étage, with the salon and music room opening into each other, and with another apartment or two. Above, the chambers. And still above, the two attic rooms. All was plain but substantial.
The garden furnished not only flowers but vegetables. And in one corner stood a table and chairs for afternoon tea with cakes or beer with cheese. Here the ever-busy sewing and knitting mainly went on in summer, and a forgotten book, half read, was usually left by some one of the young folks. There was a drowsy, old-fashioned air about the premises that recalled illustrations in some of the editions of Grimm's fairy tales.
Aside from the abundance of bound music, Gard had been far from expecting that fine examples of art and literature would be so meagerly represented in this representative German home. There were poor pictures of Bismarck, of William the Second, and of his grandfather aping the appearance of Gambrinus.
Prominent also were steel engravings of Saxon and Prussian kings of whom Kirtley had never heard. But there they were, conspicuous household gods, with fierce, epic miens and lordly bodies, surrounded by wreaths of glory and Latin texts, and supported by cannon pointed at the observer with menaces of angry welcome. And not to be forgotten were the august thrones, avenging swords of royalty, and the dark swirling clouds suggesting the German Olympus.
"It all harmonizes with the arsenal down in the entrance," muttered Gard.
As for books, he was taken at an angle still more unexpected and significant. Goethe and Schiller and the other old Teuton classics, breathing of liberalness and freedom—figures that had always stood out in the world as leading exponents and guardians of a cultured enlightenment—were only present in the Bucher home in the form of musty, unused volumes.
These authors, who were so loved, advocated and expounded in American colleges and whom Kirtley had come to Germany to know better and to worship, were scarcely ever mentioned. He was astonished to find that the Germans thought little of them. And Heine likewise, that naughty child of the Vaterland! At the Buchers the presentable red and gilt edition of his poems was kept in Fräulein's escritoire in her room.
American education, Gard began to realize, was somehow on the wrong track here. It was trying to cultivate a Germany that no longer seemed to exist. It was diligently teaching and acclaiming Teutons who were repudiated in their own land. It was separating the spirit and taste of the two peoples instead of bringing them together.
The books that were in evidence in Villa Elsa were a new lot, excepting the great and formidable Nietschke. Kirtley had never heard of the Treitschkes and Bernhardis and Hartmanns, whom the Buchers were reading and quoting.
From what he made out, these and similar authorities were insisting mightily on German conceptions and prerogatives—some exalting the Teuton supremacy of will, others urging and preparing the mental ground for an armed attack on the world for a German dictatorship. This militant literature was introduced here by Rudolph, who was armed with strategic plans, diagrams, military maps, which the family frequently of an evening pored over with the enthusiasm of a parlor game. First it was Russia to be assaulted, then Belgium, and always France.