“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. . . .
“But every man must be at least something of a sentimentalist—and while I hate the present rulers and doctrines of my first country with a far greater hate than would be possible to any man of any other nationality, I still give you the toast of Germany. To the Germany of green, fat fields and slow, winding rivers; the Germany of Beethoven and Blücher; of Rhenish wine and Wagner; of Württemberg and the Black Forest; of Grimm and Handel and Frederick’s Hussars; of my father and my mother and my wife. . . .”
Otto said:
“I will drink to that Germany with you.”
He put his hands upon the broad arms of his chair and raised himself and stood upright and tottered a little and then arranged his cumbersome legs and rested one hand upon the back of another chair while Ingolls watched him and did not make the mistake of offering help.
They raised their glasses and drank. The room was very quiet and through the windows, as an underline to silence, drifted the croaking chorus of the frogs.
They set down their glasses, and the dog by Ingolls’ side padded softly back to his place upon the hearth and lay.
And Otto climbed the stairs to his room. He was in bed when he heard the sound of Clare’s returning car—but when she came softly in, he feigned deep and untroubled sleep.