“Jacques Offenbach! D’you know what his blood was? He was a German Jew. That always strikes me as peculiarly illustrative of something or the other which I can’t remember just now. Have another drink?”
The music ceased for a moment. There was a soft mechanical whirring as the record changed, and then began the second of the four parts and the room was refilled with melody.
Otto’s head was buzzing, slightly and delightfully. He drank from the great glass again and smiled up at his host. But Ingolls was not looking at him; he was standing with his head half-turned towards the music. There was the most extraordinary expression, Otto suddenly realized, upon his face. He said, to no one:
“Dolmans and dress-spurs and busbies carried underneath your arm. . . . And war was brutal but with a gentleman’s brutality. . . .” He lifted his glass and did not sip at it but drained it and then poured more into it and still did not look at Otto. He crossed towards the machine and lifted its lid as if to cut off the music and then seemed to change his mind and closed it again. The dog got to its feet and padded across the room and thrust its nose into his hand.
The record came to an end—and in the little interval of its changing Ingolls spoke. He said, in a voice which brought Otto out of reverie with a shock:
“I’ll give you a toast, Jorgensen. Drink it with me—if you can. It’s a toast to my country.” He raised his glass: his face was set in hard, grooved lines and he was an old man. He said:
“To the loveliest land of them all—to my country—to Germany!”
He said:
“I mean the land and not its present rulers, nor the robot-parrots they have made from children. I mean the quiet, lovely country and the men and women it breeds if you leave them alone. . . .
“Ingolls is only half the name I was born with. My name was Walter Bruno Waldemar von Ingolstadt. I was a soldier. During the war of ’14-’18 I was first a Colonel, then a Brigade Commander, then at the head of a Division. I was the youngest Divisional Commander in the armies of the Kaiser. I was on the Russian front for a little while, but mostly in Belgium and France. I had a good division. In it there were fifteen thousand officers and men—and two senses of humour, mine and the staff cook’s. . . .
“Germany went rotten—from the inside, at the top. That is the way she always goes rotten, and it is because in the main her people are a grave, simple people who are the most credulous and trusting in the world and instinctively give their support and obedience to anyone who tells them, rudely and violently and constantly enough, that he is their proper ruler. Such a man used to need blue blood until aristocracy went out of fashion and now he must have none. But the principle remains the same. It is perhaps due to a national lack of any sense of proportion, which is perhaps the same thing as a lack of humour. . . .
“Germany went rotten and the war stopped. It was a mistake in the first place. But when it was over the victors made a series of far, far worse mistakes. They wanted no more war—and were misguided enough as to impose the very sort of conditions upon Germany which would ensure, sooner or later, the rapid virus-breeding of a fresh war spirit, a naturally revengeful, turn-of-the-worm-and-tables spirit all blooming and ready after a very few years to be taken hold of by the first power-hungry loudmouth who happened to come along. . . .
“So he came along—and most decent Germans were either destroyed or ran away or became converted and no longer decent. I myself was already away. I was here, in America. I came here immediately after the last war finished, as soon as I saw what economic conditions were going to be in Germany. There was nothing left of my lands and property, nothing worth having—and although I was tough and hard, my wife was not. She was a gentle person, and I could not face the thought of her fighting through the years of misery and starvation which I knew were ahead.
“So I came here, to America. I had nothing, and I was forty-three years old. But I was strong and free here and could use my body and brains. Farming was in my blood as much or more than soldiering. My family’s land in Bavaria was farm land, and for a long time the head of the family had also been the feudal head of three hundred farmers and the master farmer of them all. . . .
“I stayed here, and made enough money, and my wife died in childbirth and I brought up my daughter. I was still a German at heart and even in nationality. And then, in the early ’30’s, I went back—ostensibly on business, but really to see whether what I had been hearing about the New Party was true; to see, in fact, whether I could not become a real German again, living and working in Germany.
“But what I found brought me back quickly to this country once more and made me become, as fast as I could, an American. I am only a German now with my body which was born in Germany. In law and in my head I am an American—but that does not stop me from being sad about Germany—or from hating the cretinous megalomaniacs who rule her and who are storing up against her such vast batteries of hatred that she may never have a chance again to be her easy and beautiful and rather stupid self. . . .
“I used sometimes to feel that I had been a coward and lacking in duty to run away from Germany that second time instead of staying with her and being one more right-thinking German to oppose the new and rabid power. But I do not think that I was: the power was too powerful, and too rabid, to be opposed without at least an equal force. It is so powerful that it will have to be destroyed, in the very end, by a steady opposition from without which will not so much defeat it as give time for it to be defeated by the increasing velocity of its own hysteric, unreal momentum. . . .
“I had two friends who stayed. One of them was won over by the hysteria and now is a madman himself. The other tried to fight them. They broke him into shattered, jarring pieces beneath the outside husk. They ‘questioned’ him. For a long time. And again and again. And finally, through some political misunderstanding, they released him and threw what was left of him away and it was possible for friends to smuggle him out of the country. He is in America now. He is not more than two hundred miles from this house, in the kind of ‘sanatorium’ that should properly be called a lunatic asylum. I say ‘he’—but the thing I saw is not a man, even structurally. . . .
“And I say that my way was the better—for in this war, at last and for the first time in history, it seems to me that the issue has gone beyond the somewhat adolescent exhibition of team-spirit which we call patriotism and has become one of ideology: that at last, and after centuries of pretending, all the men in the world are divided into two camps and are fighting, not for this religion or that piece of ground or the other lump of gold, but for their beliefs in the matter of how Man shall govern and conduct himself. . . .
“So I am glad that I didn’t stay with him and fight uselessly and become, because I was defeated, an asset to them instead of a danger. I am glad that I came here to this old land which is new for men and swore allegiance to it. I am glad because, in doing so, I have sworn allegiance to a way of life and thought which, however much it may have become obscured and overlaid by pettiness of thought and doing in peaceful times, is beginning to show stronger and clearer with every day of this strife. . . .
“I am too old to fight as a soldier—but I am not too old to fight, and I tell you that every man or woman or child, whether or not a member of any organized body or army, who lives his life here and thinks his own free thoughts and carries on his work and is opposed in everything he does to any form of tyranny—I say that that one is fighting, is at least a part of the right, slow, deep-rooted force which will stem the wrong, wild force at last and make it destroy itself. . . .