Ingolls said: “That’s music. It does things to you! They say it’s just operetta stuff—but it fills you with all the sort of ridiculous, lovely thoughts you haven’t had since you were a boy and the world was a damned sight better place to live in. By God, it makes you want to go back, not so much to your own boyhood as your grandfather’s!” His dark eyes were glittering and there was a half-smile at the corners of his strong mouth and his body was as straight as that of the boy he was dreaming of. He said:
“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. . . .