A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott Read Free Book Online

he must have in his acquisitive mind’s eye, built up at intervals in perhaps fifty years. Perhaps, I reflected, the estimation of the young, bright eyed, un biased observer is the least authoritative of all. Certainly I could not imagine a more beautiful city.
    Mr. Auerbach sighed again. “And I tell you,” he added, “it would be the greatest city in the world too if the Germans had it. What a pity they lost the War!”
    I could scarcely bear to hear this, just there in the sunlight, with fine spun shadows on the pavement, and the fragrances of tobacco and petrol and women borne round us by courteous breeze; just then, in 1923, so soon after the treaty of peace. I exclaimed, “But why, Mr. Auerbach? Why?”
    You see, I was not in a position to deny what he said. I was an outsider, what you might call a virgin tourist. I was not pro-French at all, I did not know the French. On the other hand, I had spent a year in Germany and I was fond of certain Germans. There was no bias in my heart, not yet; no French fearfulness, nor even the expectation of another Armageddon. I suppose, in fact, that hearing Mr. Auerbach make that statement was the first political or historical fright of my life.
    “Why, Mr. Auerbach? Why should the Germans have it?”
    “Because France,” he replied, “is a sensual, effeminate, idle, decadent nation. The Germans are superior to them. The Germans are a wonderful race; they are virile, hard-working, patriotic, self-sacrificing, with the future before them.”
    I think we never spoke of it again; in any case I did not make a quarrelsome issue of it between us. It was a history lesson for me. The point of it was the extraordinary lack of foresight of so many well-meaning Germans and German-Jews, caring for nothing in the world so much as the recovery of that injured, invalid Reich which was to grow too strong for them, so soon. I have mentioned the important English believers in Germany; there were a good many of the same persuasion and influence in every country.
    The scorn of Mr. Auerbach also first suggested to my immature, uninformed American mind another grave problem: the problem of the weakness of France. Evidently Great Britain and the United States have expected too much of that nation which they have loved more than any other; and now many Englishmen and Americans say of it, word for word, what Mr. Auerbach said. A better understanding of its nature and limitations, a measure of exoneration in the eyes of the world, will be one of the chief difficulties and one of the noblest aims of the peacemaking after this war. I myself think that an entirely Anglo-Saxon world, with no respect for the weak Latin nations, no interest in their grandeur of art, no confidence in their antique sagacity, would scarcely be worth living in. Both the heritage and the future expectation of humankind would be cut in half; and it would be absurd, like a world of men without women.
    Mr. Auerbach did go blind, a year or so after our journey abroad together. For various reasons I did not keep up our friendship, so that I never had to sympathize with him in person concerning the fate of the Jews and those superior liberal Aryans in Germany whom he so fondly admired. I do feel a peculiar pity for men of his type who go forward in their minds to meet and indeed welcome a new violence of history with no notion that it concerns themselves and those they love. As to the relative strength of Germany and France, Mr. Auerbach did not live to see how prophetic he had been; he died in 1938.

The Babe’s Bed
    All summer long that country and the sky over it, if any one gaze could have embraced it all at once, would have been said to be silken, Roman-striped with rainbows. Hard-looking clouds and hard rains were interspersed with choking sunshine. Prodigal breezes brought the needed moisture, and then perversely burned the oats and the immature corn. The continual lightning had much in common with the wild lilies, the grass