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Updated: May 15, 2025
This had been a fragment of his erroneous idea that they are active Protestants in the sense that carries any Calvinistic or ethical meaning. Neither the Buchers, nor any of the families whom Kirtley met through them, went to church. The Protestant churches were, in fact, gloomy, tasteless and almost empty. Their services appeared cheerless and forbidding. Tremendous fear was their keynote.
He had scarcely dreamed of such things in a girl. It was all illustrated by Gard's piano playing, which was cheap and meaningless strumming. He could rattle through a lot of popular tunes and stumble through a few short simple school-girl salon pieces. The Buchers were a real orchestra.
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.
And this was the people who were to lead the earth. The only part of it he felt the Buchers did not comprehend and were disappointed about, was that he did not candidly acknowledge the porcine truth of all they had shouted at him. He was of a heterogeneous conglomeration called Yankees. He should admit it. He was stupid not to.
What was it but a rather puerile performance? Tactless, boisterous youngsters blurt out the disagreeable sentiments of a household. The Buchers had acted like children. Laying aside all question of the wonderful German trained mind, knowledge, efficiency, Gard observed so much that was boy-like and girl-like in the adult Teuton life.
The fact that the Buchers, though coming, as they boasted, from one original, unmixed, stationary stock there in that middle spot of old Europe, had displayed themselves as social and political parvenus, led to Kirtley's reflecting: "The German thinks of a wife as in the kitchen, while a wife appears to the Frenchman as in the salon, to the Briton, as in an English garden."
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.
It is for the most part waste material or neglected material. Our public system, when economies are concerned, first considers money, property. It seems sometimes as if our free individualistic plan of government were, after all, adapted for the minority of the bright-witted." "Had the Buchers ever known an American before you came?" Anderson interrupted himself. "No."
Mind you, Germany is a real block-house, and the elaborate spy system is an integral part of it. I should say, from what you tell me of the Buchers, that young Rudolph is the sleuth here." "Rudolph?" "Yes. He's doubtless keeping an eye on you and reporting to the authorities if there's anything suspicious about you and your actions."
Even the Buchers, truest of prosy Germans, could grasp the ridiculousness of this situation, and it was the one item of noisy fun they could fall back upon when they wished to be especially entertaining. "Mein Gott!" the Frau would cry out when going over her troubles and arduous occupations. "And I've got to get a husband for the Wasserhaus yet!"
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