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He endeavored to save his friend from falling deeper into the toils. He nudged him under the table, but the Teuton stupidly understood nothing. He kept on, more and more distraught, losing money, then groaning about it and wiping his trickling and distressed countenance. When the dealer finally saw that Kirtley would not wager, he grew noisy.
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?
All these facts testified that the Teuton little cultivates loveliness in human contact. Beauty of living is not, with him, a natural end to attain. After awhile it came over Kirtley that the Buchers showed no interest in his antecedents or in his country. Their apparent ignorance of America was rivaled by their indifference about it.
However, under the spur of the valuable significance that Anderson attached to this typical household life, Kirtley felt it profitable to observe closely its manifestations and opinions. They were verified in other German families where Gard often went with the Buchers. What could be more truly educational?
But Bucher evidently was annoyed at times by not having authority in the matter of the slow way in which his young guest set about with his "studies." Kirtley had not come to study, had not been trained to study, in the German sense. It would have been difficult to make the old man see any virtue in such desultoriness.
He was becoming worried and consulted the experience of Miles Anderson whom he had, of course, met through Kirtley. "In the toils of the German high police!" chuckled Anderson. "That is certainly funny." "But what am I to do to get rid of them?" inquired Jim anxiously. "It seems I have no privacy. And I don't want to be going to the Platz all the time.
Besides, he did not want to fire up Anderson who already was so unsettled, so comfortless, on the subject. But Kirtley was reasoning out how this animus gave a solidity, a solidarity, to the German household a satisfied contentment because it was working toward a definite racial goal. Any such incentive was almost absent in the American family.
And then the journalist, pleased to have a fresh listener, launched upon his pet idea. "The Kaiser is preparing an abysmal pitfall for the world and it won't take heed. I tell you, Kirtley and I want you to mark my words Deutschland is going to spring at Europe like a tiger. The army and navy are ready for the onslaught.
The talk had fallen upon governments, nations, peoples a general field of inquiry for which Kirtley had had some predilection at college. The vast superiority of the German Government had been again, as often before, so emphasized in Villa Elsa that he felt now that he ought to raise a question. Should this overweening assumption always pass unnoticed, unqualified?
The ball did not begin until ten, to give the young ladies time to finish their dining-room duties and dress. Kirtley went to a café and watched the billiards until after dark, then slipped out to Villa Elsa, jumped into his evening clothes, and slipped away again. He had seen the royalty dance. Now he would see the common people. This bustling about was cheering. He was glad to go.
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