City of Endless Night

by Hastings , Milo M. ;

  ‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that the way must be by education. More men must think as we do.’

  ‘But they cannot think,’ replied Hellar, ‘they have nothing to think with.’

  ‘But the books,’ I said, ‘there is power in knowledge.’

  ‘But,’ said Hellar, ‘the laborer cannot read the forbidden book and the intellectual will not, for if he did he would be afraid to talk about it, and what a man cannot talk about he rarely cares to read. The love or hatred of knowledge is a matter of training. It was only last week that I was visiting a boy’s school in order to study the effect of a new reader of which complaint had been made that it failed sufficiently to exalt the virtue of obedience. I was talking with the teacher while the boys assembled in the morning. We heard a great commotion and a mob of boys came in dragging one of their companions who had a bruised face and torn clothing. ‘Master, he had a forbidden book,’ they shouted, and the foremost held out the tattered volume as if it were loathsome poison. It proved to be a text on cellulose spinning. Where the culprit had found it we could not discover but he was sent to the school prison and the other boys were given favors for apprehending him.’

  ‘But how is it,’ I asked, ‘that books are not written by free-minded authors and secretly printed and circulated?’

  At this question my companions smiled. ‘You chemists forget,’ said Hellar, ‘that it takes printing presses to make books. There is no press in all Berlin except in the shops of the Information Staff. Every paper, every book, and every picture originates and is printed there. Every news and book distributor must get his stock from us and knows that he must have only in his possession that which bears the imprint for his level. That is why we have no public libraries and no trade in second-hand books.

  ‘In early life I favored this system, but in time the foolishness of the thing came to perplex, then to annoy, and finally to disgust me. But I wanted the money and honor that promotion brought and so I have won to my position and power; with my right hand I uphold the system and with my left hand I seek to pull out the props on which it rests. For twenty years now I have nursed the secret traffic in books and risked my life many times thereby, yet my successes have been few and scattered. Every time the auditors check my stock and accounts I tremble in fear, for embezzling books is more dangerous than embezzling credit at the bank.’

  ‘But who,’ I asked, ‘write the books?’

  ‘For the technical books it is not hard to find authors,’ explained Hellar, ‘for any man well schooled in his work can write of it. But the task of getting the more general books written is not so easy. For then it is not so much a question of the author knowing the things of which he writes but of knowing what the various groups are to be permitted to know.

  ‘That writing is done exclusively by especially trained workers of the Information Service. I myself began as such a writer and studied long under the older masters. The school of scientific lying, I called it, but strange to say I used to enjoy such work and did it remarkably well. As recognition of my ability I was commissioned to write the book God’s Anointed. Through His Majesty’s approval of my work I now owe my position on the Staff.

  ‘His Majesty,’ continued Hellar, ‘was only twenty-six years of age when he came to the throne, but he decided at once that a new religious book should be written in which he would be proclaimed as “God’s Anointed ruler of the World”.

  ‘I had never before spoken with the high members of the Royal House, and I was trembling with eagerness and fear as I was ushered into His Majesty’s presence. The Emperor sat at his great black table; before him was an old book. He turned to me and said, “Have you ever heard of the Christian Bible?”

  ‘My Chief had informed me that the new book was to be based on the old Bible that the Christians had received from the Hebrews. So I said, “Yes, Your Majesty, I am familiar with many of its words.”

  ‘He looked at me with a gloating suspicion. “Ah, ha,” he said, “then there is something amiss in the Information Service – you are in the third rank of your service and the Bible is permitted only to the first rank.”

  ‘I saw that my statement unless modified would result in an embarrassing investigation. “I have never read the Christian Bible,” I said, “but my mother must have read it for when as a child I visited her she quoted to me long passages from the Bible.”’

  ‘His Majesty smiled in a pleased fashion. “That is it,” he said, “women are essentially religious by nature, because they are trusting and obedient. It was a mistake to attempt to stamp out religion. It is the doctrine of obedience. Therefore I shall revive religion, but it shall be a religion of obedience to the House of Hohenzollern. The God of the Hebrews declared them to be his chosen people. But they proved a servile and mercenary race. They traded their swords for shekels and became a byword and a hissing among the nations – and they were scattered to the four corners of the earth. I shall revive that God. And this time he shall chose more wisely, for the Germans shall be his people. The idea is not mine. William the Great had that idea, but the revolution swept it away. It shall be revived. We shall have a new Bible, based upon the old one, a third dispensation, to replace the work of Moses and Jesus. And I too shall be a lawgiver – I shall speak the word of God.”’

  Hellar paused; a smile crept over his face. Then he laughed softly and to himself – but Dr. Zimmern only shook his head sadly.

  ‘Yes, I wrote the book,’ continued Hellar. ‘It required four years, for His Majesty was very critical, and did much revising. I had a long argument with him over the question of retaining Hell. I was bitterly opposed to it and represented to His Majesty that no religion had ever thrived on fear of punishment without a corresponding hope of reward. “If you are to have no Heaven,” I insisted, “then you must have no Hell.”

  ‘“But we do not need Heaven,” argued His Majesty, “Heaven is superfluous. It is an insult to my reign. Is it not enough that a man is a German, and may serve the House of Hohenzollern?”’

  ‘“Then why,” I asked, “do you need a Hell?” I should have been shot for that but His Majesty did not see the implication. He replied coolly:

  ‘“We must have a Hell because there is one way that my subjects can escape me. It is a sin of our race that the Eugenics Office should have bred out – but they have failed. It is an inborn sin for it is chiefly committed by our children before they come to comprehend the glory of being German. How else, if you do not have a Hell in your religion, can you check suicide?”

  ‘Of course there was logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children’s Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed the manuscript, for the first time in over a century we printed a bible on a German press. The press where the first run was made we named “Old Gutenberg”.’

  ‘Gutenberg invented the printing press,’ explained Zimmern, fearing I might not comprehend.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hellar with a curling lip, ‘and Gutenberg was a German, and so am I. He printed a Bible which he believed, and I wrote one which I do not believe.’

  ‘But I am glad,’ concluded Hellar as he arose, ‘that I do not believe Gutenberg’s Bible either, for I should very much dislike to think of meeting him in Paradise.’

  VII

  After taking leave of my companions I walked on alone, oblivious to the gay throng, for I had many things on which to ponder. In these two men I felt that I had found heroic figures. Their fund of knowledge, which they prized so highly, seemed to me pitifully circumscribed and limited, their revolutionary plans hopelessly vague and futile. But the intellectual stature of a man is measured in terms of the average of his race, and, thus viewed, Zimmern and Hellar were intellectual giants of heroic proportions.

  As I walked through a street of shops. I paused before t
he display window of a bookstore of the level. Most of these books I had previously discovered were lurid-titled tales of licentious love. But among them I now saw a volume bearing the title God’s Anointed, and recalled that I had seen it before and assumed it to be but another like its fellows.

  Entering the store I secured a copy and, impatient to inspect my purchase, I bent my steps to my favorite retreat in the nearby Hall of Flowers. In a secluded niche near the misty fountain I began a hasty perusal of this imperially inspired word of God who had anointed the Hohenzollerns masters of the earth. Hellar’s description had prepared me for a preposterous and absurd work, but I had not anticipated anything quite so audacious could be presented to a race of civilized men, much less that they could have accepted it in good faith as the Germans evidently did.

  God’s Anointed, as Hellar had scoffingly inferred, not only proclaimed the Germans as the chosen race, but also proclaimed an actual divinity of the blood of the House of Hohenzollern. That William II did have some such notions in his egomania I believe is recorded in authentic history. But the way Eitel I had adapted that faith to the rather depressing facts of the failure of world conquest would have been extremely comical to me, had I not seen ample evidence of the colossal effect of such a faith working in the credulous child-mind of a people so utterly devoid of any saving sense of humor.

  Not unfamiliar with the history of the temporal reign of the Popes of the middle ages, I could readily comprehend the practical efficiency of such a mixture of religious faith with the affairs of earth. For the God of the German theology exacted no spiritual worship of his people, but only a very temporal service to the deity’s earthly incarnation in the form of the House of Hohenzollern.

  The greatest virtue, according to this mundane theology, was obedience, and this doctrine was closely interwoven with the caste system of German society. The virtue of obedience required the German to renounce discontent with his station, and to accept not only the material status into which he was born, with science aforethought, but the intellectual limits and horizons of that status. The old Christian doctrine of heresy was broadened to encompass the entire mental life. To think forbidden thoughts, to search after forbidden knowledge, that was at once treason against the Royal House and rebellion against the divine plan.

  German theology, confounding divine and human laws, permitted no dual overlapping spheres of mundane and celestial rule as had all previous religious and social orders since Christ had commanded his disciples to ‘Render unto Caesar –.’ There could be no conscientious objection to German law on religious grounds; no problem of church and state, for the church was the state.

  In this book that masqueraded as the word of God, I looked in vain for some revelation of future life. But it was essentially a one-world theology; the most immortal thing was the Royal House for which the worker was asked to slave, the soldier to die that Germany might be ruled by the Hohenzollerns and that the Hohenzollerns might sometime rule the world.

  As the freedom of conscience and the institution of marriage had been discarded so this German faith had scrapped the immortality of the soul, save for the single incongruous doctrine that a child taking his own life does not die but lives on in ceaseless torment in a ghoulish Children’s Hell.

  As I closed the cursed volume my mind called up a picture of Teutonic hordes pouring from the forests of the North and blotting out what Greece and Rome had builded. From thence my roving fancy tripped over the centuries and lived again with men who cannot die. I stood with Luther at the Diet of Worms. With Kant I sounded the deeps of philosophy. I sailed with Humboldt athwart uncharted seas. I fought with Goethe for the redemption of a soul sold to the Devil. And with Schubert and Heine I sang:

  Du bist wie eine Blume,

  So hold und schoen und rein,

  Betend dass Gott dich erhalte,So rein und schoen und hold.

  But what a cankerous end was here. This people which the world had once loved and honored was now bred a beast of burden, a domesticated race, saddled and trained to bear upon its back the House of Hohenzollern as the ass bore Balaam. But the German ass wore the blinders that science had made – and saw no angel.

  VIII

  As I sat musing thus and gazing into the spray of the fountain I glimpsed a gray clad figure, standing in the shadows of a viny bower. Although I could not distinguish her face through the leafy tracery I knew that it was Bertha, and my heart thrilled to think that she had returned to the site of our meeting. Thoroughly ashamed of the faithless doubts that I had so recently entertained of her innocence and sincerity, I arose and hastened toward her. But in making the detour about the pool I lost sight of the gray figure, for she was standing well back in the arbor. As I approached the place where I had seen her I came upon two lovers standing with arms entwined in the path at the pool’s edge. Not wishing to disturb them, I turned back through one of the arbors and approached by another path. As I slipped noiselessly along in my felt-soled shoes I heard Bertha’s voice, and quite near, through the leafy tracery, I glimpsed the gray of her gown.

  ‘Why with your beauty,’ came the answering voice of a man, ‘did you not find a lover from the Royal Level?’

  ‘Because,’ Bertha’s voice replied, ‘I would not accept them. I could not love them. I could not give myself without love.’

  ‘But surely,’ insisted the man, ‘you have found a lover here?’

  ‘But I have not,’ protested the innocent voice, ‘because I have sought none.’

  ‘Now long have you been here?’ bluntly asked the man.

  ‘Thirty days,’ replied the girl.

  ‘Then you must have found a lover, your debut fund would all be gone.’

  ‘But,’ cried Bertha, in a tearful voice, ‘I only eat one meal a day – do you not see how thin I am?’

  ‘Now that’s clever,’ rejoined the man, ‘come, I’ll accept it for what it is worth, and look you up afterwards,’ and he laughingly led her away, leaving me undiscovered in the neighboring arbor to pass judgment on my own simplicity.

  As I walked toward the elevator, I was painfully conscious of two ideas. One was that Marguerite had been quite correct with her information about the Free Women who found it profitable to play the role of maidenly innocence. The other was that Dr. Zimmern’s precious geography was in the hands of the artful, child-eyed hypocrite who had so cleverly beguiled me with her role of heroic virtue. Clearly, I was trapped, and to judge better with what I had to deal I decided to go at once to the Place of Records, of which I had twice heard.

  The Place of Records proved to be a public directory of the financial status of the Free Women. Since the physical plagues that are propagated by promiscuous love had been completely exterminated, and since there were no moral standards to preserve, there was no need of other restrictions on the lives of the women than an economic one.

  The rules of the level were prominently posted. As all consequential money exchanges were made through bank checks, the keeping of the records was an easy matter. These rules I found forbade any woman to cash checks in excess of one thousand marks a month, or in excess of two hundred marks from any one man. That was simple enough, and I smiled as I recalled that I had gone the legal limit in my first adventure.

  Following the example of other men, I stepped to the window and gave the name: ‘Bertha 34 R 6.’ A clerk brought me a book opened to the page of her record. At the top of the page was entered this statement, ‘Bred for an actress but rejected for both professional work and maternity because found devoid of sympathetic emotions.’ I laughed as I read this, but when on the next line I saw from the date of her entrance to the level that Bertha’s thirty days was in reality nearly three years, my mirth turned to anger. I looked down the list of entries and found that for some time she had been cashing each month the maximum figure of a thousand marks. Evidently her little scheme of pensive posing in the Hall of Flowers was working nicely. In the current month, hardly half gone, she already had to her credit seven
hundred marks; and last on the list was my own contribution, freshly entered.

  ‘She has three hundred marks yet,’ commented the clerk.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ – and I turned to go. But I paused and stepped again to the window. ‘There is another girl I would like to look up,’ I said, ‘but I have only her name and no number.’

  ‘Do you know the date of her arrival?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘Yes, she has been here four years and six days. The name is Marguerite.’

  The clerk walked over to a card file and after some searching brought back a slip with half a dozen numbers. ‘Try these,’ he said, and he brought me the volumes. The second record I inspected read: ‘Marguerite, 78 K 4, Love child.’ On the page below was a single entry for each month of two hundred marks and every entry from the first was in the name of Ludwig Zimmern.

  IX

  I kept my appointment with Bertha, but found it difficult to hide my anger as she greeted me. Wishing to get the interview over, I asked abruptly, ‘Have you read the book I left?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ she replied, ‘I found it rather dull.’

  ‘Then perhaps I had better take it with me.’

  ‘But I think I shall keep it awhile,’ she demurred.

  ‘No,’ I insisted, as I looked about and failed to see the geography, ‘I wish you would get it for me. I want to take it back, in fact it was a borrowed book.’

  ‘Most likely,’ she smiled archly, ‘but since you are not a staff officer, and had no right to have that book, you might as well know that you will get it when I please to give it to you.’