Villa Elsa / A Story of German Family Life

by Stuart Oliver Henry

"You knew that the more I saw of this old Germany, the more I liked it. My governor wrote me I could stay if I would try to learn something and I thought of you. I said to myself, 'Kirtley is a serious sort of chap. If I light down near him, it will be easier to learn this confounded language they have got over here, and I will be able to shine with it in Erie, Pay, and do the old folks proud.'

"So I've got a teacher and a grammar and also a dictionary so big I can't find anything in it—all ready to loop the loop. But first, of course, I must run out and see you and see how you are getting on, swimming in beer. Nothing is too good for us Americans, you know, so my room in the hotel is right by the royal palace where I can see the Crown Prince with his sword fall off his horse every morning at ten. Gad, won't it be something to talk about when I get back to good old Pennsylwanee?"

Deming's "old man" was possessed of wealth derived from oil wells. But although Jim's pockets had always been stuffed with money, he had never been able to get through high school or enter college. Hang it all, he didn't take to books like Kirtley and all such intellectual boys. It was the fault of his dad and mam. They had petted and spoiled him—an only child. It was too bad, but shucks, he wasn't going to let it interfere with his happiness. So it was money here and money there, and a host of friends who, like Gard, could not help being fond of him.

Jim had seen the Kaiser and quaffed out of the largest hogshead on the Rhine. He had been at a duel at Heidelberg where the chap with a cut through his cheek asked for a mug of beer and blew the beer out through the gash. He had swum in Lake Starnberg where Ludwig II had drowned himself; had seen the café in Munich where the celebrated Naked Culture was said to have originated; had bribed his way into the villa at Mayerling where Rudolph of Austria and Marie had ended that mysterious night of fatality. In short, he had done Germany pretty thoroughly.

When, by his insistent questionings, he learned about the comfortable and illuminating German home where Kirtley had installed himself, and that there was a fine, serious young lady in it with a harvest of straw-colored hair, he soon confessed, after all, to his disappointments.

"Kirtley, you are always a lucky dog. Here you are with nice Dutch people, in the social swim, absorbing German to beat the band. All I see is chambermaids who shout at me some kind of devilish dialect that a fellow can't understand. And my chambermaid and I are just at present at outs. I told her this morning she was the tallest woman I ever saw. A little of her went such a long ways. As she don't know any English words, that is the only thing we have agreed about. She said, Ja wohl! This going to balls and cafés as I'm doing is all right for local color and all that, but it would tickle dad a lot if I knew a quiet, decent, respectable German family. And I want to know a nice, sober German girl who has got yellow, chorus-girl hair and will steady a fellow down. The proper study of young man is young woman. I haven't been able to meet any young ladies in this country. Sometimes I think they have only wenches. And I want some of the classic Gayty and Schiller stuff too that you can get here in Loschwitz."

This urgent idea did not appear auspicious to Gard. If Deming got the run of Villa Elsa, he would unsettle things, interfere with his own work. Jim was a good boy but he played hob with study. And he was just the kind of flashy, ignorant Yankee who would prove to Villa Elsa what it claimed about the race. He would disgust the Buchers with his showy superficiality and dolessness. Mere money, everlasting money. More than all he would complicate the situation with Fräulein. He might upset her somehow, and at least discover his own secret feelings toward her—feelings that had become more distraught after the Von Tielitz revelation. In a word, everything would be helter-skelter.

After Jim had called twice, bent upon becoming intimate with the Buchers, Gard, as he thought, conceived a clever maneuver. He took Deming over to call on Fräulein Wasserhaus. Here was an earnest young woman, lolling on the gate with plenty of time on her hands, dying for a man. She could teach Deming everything he wanted to know. She was not antagonistic to Americans as were the Buchers. On the contrary she was aching to clasp some one of them in her pudgy arms.

But this stratagem proved a flat failure. When they came away from her abode, Jim took on a worried look and lit a cigarette.

"Say, see here, old chap. Are you trying to make fun of me? Is this a joke? I don't want a walrus, thirty years old, with ragbag clothes that fit her a foot off. She has a gait like an ice wagon. Why, she couldn't get a job as window-washer in the street car shops of Erie, Pay."