Kirtley was inwardly fired up with resentment. Then he had to smother a laugh. This exhibition of the family taken off its guard was more instructive than volumes of discussion he might read about the true German attitude toward America—toward everyone. Were these but Goths with the German skins scratched off a little? He kept thinking of Anderson—how it furnished the pure evidence of what the latter was despairing of before deaf ears! Gard's respect, his sympathy, for the old man, jumped up with patriotic fervor.
He marveled at first how the good Buchers had been primed with this knowledge, these comparisons. Then he realized that the editorials and other articles in the Dresden journals, whose lengthy, heavy, pounding sentences confused with an obtuse, inverted syntax he was reading at Anderson's suggestion, accounted for these venomous conceptions and prejudices.
"So it is our duty to hate," broke in the Herr once more, with croaks and grunts now behind his long porcelain pipe which roved down over his stomach, a green tassel dangling at the end. "We give our children beatings to educate them, don't we? So we have the best education. We must give the world a beating to improve it."
The Frau all the while could hardly restrain herself.
"You know what we in Germany call Americans? We call them pigs—yes, pigs. America is like a big pig pen where everybody is wallowing over everybody for money—just for money."
"And Germany," added her elder son, "is just waiting till the United States gets money enough, then we go in with our navy and our army and take it all."
Gard wanted to see how far they would go, and he had seen. Was this the old barbarian of the north risen to earth again, his rude garments of hide torn off, exposing him in his pristine, fighting nakedness? Where was the German under it all—the German who was taken to be civilized in heart and spirit as other men are? These law-abiding, stay-at-home people had deliberately grown in Villa Elsa this robust plant of contempt, so full-blossomed now and ready to exhale its noisome fumes which at moments almost stifled Kirtley with their poison. What would Rebner say to this with his golden, soul-felt opinions of the excelling race!
This hospitable and apparently harmless domicile was, in reality, like a martial encampment. Gard could not but conclude that he would have to leave Loschwitz. How could he for a moment stay in face of these direct and hard-fisted attacks? And certainly Villa Elsa would not want to harbor a hog any longer. The similar households he had come to know, all such households, unquestionably bore the same furious grudges against the western hemisphere.
But Elsa? How could he leave her—like this? She was the first girl to excite seriously his affections. She seemed to strike the note of whatever was truly earnest in him. Yet did she, too, think Americans were pigs? Did she consider him of such an inferior breed? Perhaps, in her misled innocence, she did. Perhaps that was the reason why she acted toward him in an upsetting fashion which only the more tempted a certain tenacious element in his make-up.