"There is a stranger in the room. The lecture will not proceed until he departs." Gard, having been assured by the janitor, could not imagine that he himself was meant. The man of prodigious learning shouted angrily, throwing out his arm toward Kirtley:
"Must I repeat that there is a foreigner in the audience? I shall not begin until his presence has been removed."
Gard went away, incensed. Surely, he swore to himself, Teuton erudition acts so often like a mad bear ready to claw away at men and things. He never attended another day lecture.
But he had to get on with his German. He decided to put an advertisement for an instructor in the Dresden Nachrichten. At its bureau he ran counter to a lot of ifs and ands at the hands of a surly young clerk. A German, naturally gruff, only needs a small position to increase his acerbity. His newspapers display, likewise, a disagreeable officiousness, being nearly always, to some extent, bureaucratic organs. They are lords, not servants, of the public. They do not appear to want your business, your money.
Gard's imperfect German balked him, too. After he had been back and forth to the little window three or four times, trying to alter his "ad" to suit the rasping individual whose face Gard could scarcely catch a glimpse of by stooping down to the aperture, an American stepped forward. He was a steel gray man of about sixty and was inserting a notice. He said he was familiar with all the rigors of such a proceeding, being a correspondent for the Chicago Gazette.
"Perhaps I can help," volunteered Miles Anderson. "After having had scraps and fights about this sort of thing around this country for seven years—though the Germans won't fight—I've finally got the hang of it. You can save three or four words by a different jargon. I can see you are an American because you take up more room about this than necessary. German economy, you must remember."
Gard was glad to find a friend of his race. And after the advertisement was disposed of, they repaired to a neighboring beer hall to refresh and relieve their feelings. Anderson was smooth-shaven, with piercing gray eyes under bushy eyebrows, his head presenting the appearance of just having been in a barber's chair. With the insistent curiosity of a practiced interviewer he wanted to know why Kirtley had come to this godless land; where he was hanging out; and all about the Buchers.
A bachelor, Anderson had become toughened by hotel and pension. He thought Kirtley very fortunate in getting right into a family where the veritable German bloom had not been rubbed off by foreigners, by boarders. It would be a most fragrant experience. Here Kirtley would see on the native heath the genuine German of the great middle class that makes up the might of the nation.
"Can you read German comfortably?" asked Anderson. "What do you make of it? I've been studying it for seven years and sometimes it seems as if I hadn't got much further than the verb to hate."
"You can't give me any short cuts about it, then?" laughed Gard.