Sisters of their respected fellows were inferentially appraised and colloquially "hefted" as articles of social commerce ready to be knocked off matrimonially to the best bidder under the material rules of the German Mitgift system. Through the garish films of innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images of these daughters as if they were languishing to become mates and beating their breasts in their longing to become mothers. He had by no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.
Before Gard was to leave Deutschland he had to conclude that the German puts himself in the attitude of thinking of his women as sluttish and accordingly acting in that scale toward them. There is no great gilding to these fancies. Girls are small inspiration to him compared with what the petites dames are to the amorous Frenchman. Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate, are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations of delicate refinement.
Kirtley thought he knew young men, yet this revolting capacity in them in Germany was proven to him to be not unnormal by its openness and by the dearth of any loud voices in rebuke. The German is conspicuously full of animal spirits. He affects the mighty in physique. Exudations and emanations are frank and prominent functions.
Under the Kaiser the Berlin dame who rented rooms to the foreign student, offering them "with" or "without," meaning sometimes her own daughter in the bargain, considered herself respectable enough. More than this she acted in line with what appeared to be the purpose of acquiring a sympathetic control of the morals as well as the minds of the alien sojourner, the one being accompanied by a pandering to his lower nature with the doors of vice flagrantly ajar while the other armed his mentality with a Teutonized equipment and outlook. To sap the will, to galvanize the mind as from a German electric battery, palsied resistance to aggressive Germania. It was of a piece with that propaganda which the world was not to wake up to until almost too late.
These downright animal phases pointed the way logically, in Gard's mind, to that obscenity which is interwoven in the German civilization. He had first come across such evidence in leading comic journals. The drawings and jests that did not leave much to be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It divorced him from Simplicissimus and Ulk, not that he was squeamish or a Miss Priscilla, but he saw no fun in that sort of thing.
He talked of it later with Anderson. Though there were pleasant delusions in Anderson's mind about Germany before he arrived, it was not his fault if few seemed to be left after his seven years. He bluntly defined the limited German wit and humor as characteristically born of the latrine.
Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the pornographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book. Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.
He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.
This ran through his mind:
"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it seems—everybody!"