Military Blockheads
GARD'S attentions to Elsa continued intermittently, and as if detached, on their unadvancing course. He had, however, reached the stage of playing piano duets with her. This is always hopeful. Occasionally they rambled through Schubert's little Vienna love waltzes and other selections that could top off an evening with melodies of a sprightly and sentimental nature. He felt he was becoming acquainted with her in a way he otherwise could not. She was more cheerful at these times, exhilarated by the music.
He had learned a large part of his playing by ear. Reading at sight was a fresh experience. She corrected his fingering while helping fill out his conversational vocabulary. It was certainly most agreeable to have Fräulein take his fingers in her warm, plump, flexible hand with conscientious authority and show him the method of the Dresden Conservatoire.
Think of a young and lustrous miss being able to instruct him like a veteran! He had never considered American girls in such a light—had never expected to learn anything of profitable skill from them. Elsa, for her part, regarded it as a curious and amusing experience to watch this tall man playing like a boy. The musical Germans she knew were adept at some instrument.
He formed the habit of adding en, or its variants, to the English equivalent of the German word he could not think of, and she seemed to be struck by this as a very original fashion of eliciting information. On one occasion at the piano they heard the entrance bell below clang, announcing a visitor, and Gard, hastening to disappear upstairs, exclaimed:
"Wir müssen—wir müssen—stopfen!"
The word for stop would not come to him. Fräulein blushed and snickered and ran off to tell her mother about Herr Kirtley and his German. He was frightened. What absurdity had he uttered? He got to his dictionary as soon as he could and found he had said—We must darn stockings!
The incident nearly always put Elsa in good humor. She doubtless considered Yankees an odd folk. How could they expect to become civilized with their rudimentary attainments? Must he not be seeming to her a sort of freak?...
But, for the most part, she continued to hold him aloof, and he concluded the reason lay in the mystery which shadowed her young life and to which he could trace no clue. What could it frankly be that sent her to her room and to Heine? The beginning of the answer seemed to come at last in the form of a youth who suddenly soared in at Villa Elsa.
Herr Friedrich von Tielitz-Leibach was a composer and a music director. He was the son of a neighbor who had moved away, and the musical Buchers doted on him as one with a shining future. Kirtley had often heard them refer to Friedrich as to so many of their friends of whom he knew nothing.