City of Endless Night

by Hastings , Milo M. ;

  ‘Karl,’ she whispered, ‘how do you know of all these things? Sometimes I believe you are something more than human, that you of a truth possess the blood of divinity which the House of Hohenzollern claims.’

  ‘No,’ I answered; ‘not divinity, just a little larger humanity, and someday very soon I am going to tell you more of the source of my visions.’

  She looked at me through her darkened glasses. ‘I only know,’ she said, ‘that you are wonderful, and very different from other men.’

  Had we been alone on the roof of Berlin, I could not have resisted the temptation to tell her then that stars and sun were familiar friends to me and that the devastated soil that stretched beneath us was but the wasted skeleton of a fairer earth I knew and loved. But we were surrounded by a host of babbling sightseers and so the moment passed and I remained to Marguerite a man of mystery and a seer of visions.

  The sun fully risen now, we were led to a protruding observation platform that permitted us to view the wall of the city below. It was merely one vast gray wall without interruption or opening in the monotonous surface.

  Amid the more troubled chaos of the ground immediately below we could see fragments of concrete blown from the parapet of the roof. The wall beneath us, we were told, was only of sufficient thickness to withstand fire of the aircraft guns. The havoc that might be wrought, should the defense mines ever be forced back and permit the walls of Berlin to come within range of larger field pieces, was easily imagined. But so long as the Ray defense held, the massive fort of Berlin was quite impervious to attacks of the world forces of land and air and the stalemate of war might continue for other centuries.

  With the coming of daylight we had heard the rumbling of trucks as the roof-repairing force emerged to their task. Now that our party had become tired of gazing through their goggles at the sun, our guides led us in the direction where this work was in progress. On the way we passed a single unfilled crater, a deep pit in the flinty quartz sand that spread a protecting blanket over the solid structure of the roof. These craters in the sand proved quite harmless except for the labor involved in their refilling. Further on we came to another, now half-filled from a spouting pipe with ground quartz blown from some remote subterranean mine, so to keep up the wastage from wind and bombing.

  Again we approached the edge of the city and this time found more of interest, for here an addition to the city was under construction. It was but a single prism, not a hundred meters across, which when completed would add but another block to the city’s area. Already the outer pillars reached the full height and supported the temporary roof that offered at least a partial protection to the work in progress beneath. Though I watched but a few minutes I was awed with the evident rapidity of the building. Dimly I could see the forms below being swung into place with a clock-like regularity and from numerous spouts great streams of concrete poured like flowing lava.

  It is at these building sections that the bombs were aimed and here alone that any effectual damage could be done, but the target was a small one for a plane flying above the reach of the German guns. The officer who guided our group explained this to us: these bombing raids were conducted only at times of particular cloud formations, when the veil of mist hung thick and low in an even stratum above which the air was clear. When such formation threatened, the roof of Berlin was cleared and the expected bombs fell and spent their fury blowing up the sand. It had been a futile warfare, for the means of defense were equal to the means of offense.

  Our visit to the roof of Berlin was cut short as the sun rose higher, because the women, though they had donned gloves and veils, were fearful of sunburn. So we were led back to the covered ramp into the endless night of the city.

  ‘Have we seen it all?’ sighed Marguerite, as she removed her veil and glasses and gazed back blinkingly into the last light of day.

  ‘Hardly,’ I said; ‘we have not seen a cloud, nor a drop of rain nor a flake of snow, nor a flash of lightning, nor heard a peal of thunder.’

  Again she looked at me with worshipful adoration. ‘I forget,’ she whispered; ‘and can you vision those things also?’

  But I only smiled and did not answer, for I saw Admiral von Kufner glaring at me. I had monopolized Marguerite’s company for the entire occasion, and I was well aware that his only reason for arranging this, to him a meaningless excursion, had been in the hopes of being with her.

  V

  But Admiral von Kufner, contending fairly for that share of Marguerite’s time which she deigned to grant him, seemed to bear me no malice; and, as the months slipped by, I was gratified to find him becoming more cordial toward me. We frequently met at the informal gatherings in the salon of the Countess Luise. More rarely Dr. Zimmern came there also, for by virtue of his office he was permitted the social rights of the Royal Level. I surmised, however, that this privilege, in his case, had not included the right to marry on the level, for though the head of the Eugenic Staff, he had, so far as I could learn, neither wife nor children.

  But Dr. Zimmern did not seem to relish royal society, for when he chanced to be caught with me among the members of the Royal House the flow of his brilliant conversations was checked like a spring in a drought, and he usually took his departure as soon as it was seemly.

  On one of these occasions Admiral von Kufner came in as Zimmern sat chatting over cups and incense with Marguerite and me, and the Countess and her son. The doctor dropped quietly out of the conversation, and for a time the youthful Count Ulrich entertained us with a technical elaboration of the importance of the love passion as the dominant appeal of the picture. Then the Countess broke in with a spirited exposition of the relation of soul harmony to ardent passion.

  Admiral von Kufner listened with ill-disguised impatience. ‘But all this erotic passion,’ he interrupted, ‘will soon again be swept away by the revival of the greater race passion for world rule.’

  ‘My dear Admiral,’ said the Countess Luise, ‘your ideas of race passion are quite proper for the classes who must be denied the free play of the love element in their psychic life, but your notion of introducing these ideas into the life of the Royal Level is wholly antiquated.’

  ‘It is you who are antiquated,’ returned the Admiral, ‘for now the day is at hand when we shall again taste of danger. His Majesty has –’

  ‘Of course His Majesty has told us that the day is at hand,’ interrupted the Countess. ‘Has not His Majesty always preserved this allegorical fable? It is part of the formal kultur.’

  ‘But His Majesty now speaks the truth,’ replied the Admiral gravely, ‘and I say to you who are so absorbed with the light passions of art and love that we shall not only taste of danger but will fight again in the sea and air and on the ground in the outer world. We shall conquer and rule the world.’

  ‘And do you think, Admiral,’ enquired Marguerite, ‘that the German people will then be free in the outer world?’

  ‘They will be free to rule the outer world,’ replied the Admiral.

  ‘But I mean,’ said Marguerite calmly, ‘to ask if they will be free again to love and marry and rear their own children.’

  At this naïve question the others exchanged significant glances.

  ‘My dear child,’ said the Countess, blushing with embarrassment, ‘your defective training makes it extremely difficult for you to understand these things.’

  ‘Of course it is all forbidden,’ spoke up the young Count, ‘but now, if it were not, the Princess Marguerite’s unique idea would certainly make capital picture material.’

  ‘How clever!’ cried the Countess, beaming on her intellectual son. ‘Nothing is forbidden for plot material for the Royal Level. You shall make a picture showing those great beasts of labor again liberated for unrestricted love.’

  ‘There is one difficulty,’ Count Rudolph considered. ‘How could we get actors for the parts? Our thoroughbred actors are all too light of bone, too delicate of motion, and our actresses bred for dainty beauty
would hardly caste well for those great hulking round-faced labor mothers.’

  ‘Then,’ remarked the Admiral, ‘if you must make picture plays why not one of the mating of German soldiers with the women of the inferior races?’

  ‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed the plot-maker; ‘and practical also. Our actresses are the exact counterpart of those passionate French beauties. I often study their portraits in the old galleries. They have had no Eugenics, hence they would be unchanged. Is it not so, Doctor?’

  ‘Without Eugenics, a race changes with exceeding slowness,’ answered Zimmern in a voice devoid of expression. ‘I should say that the French women of today would much resemble their ancestral types.’

  ‘But picturing such matings of military necessity would be very disgusting,’ reprimanded the Countess.

  ‘It will be a very necessary part of the coming day of German dominion,’ stated the Admiral. ‘How else can we expect to rule the world? It is, indeed, part of the ordained plan.’

  ‘But how,’ I questioned, ‘is such a plan to be executed? Would the men of the World State tolerate it?’

  ‘We will oblige them to tolerate it; the children of the next generation of the inferior races must be born of German sires.’

  ‘But the Germans are outnumbered ten to one,’ I replied.

  ‘Polygamy will take care of that, among the white races; the colored races must be eliminated. All breeding of the colored races must cease. That, also, is part of the ordained plan.’

  The conversation was getting on rather dangerous ground for me as I realized that I dare not show too great surprise at this talk, which of all things I had heard in Germany was the most preposterous.

  But Marguerite made no effort to disguise her astonishment. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that the German rule of the world was only a plan for military victory and the conquering of the World Government. I supposed the people would be left free to live their personal lives as they desired.’

  ‘That was the old idea,’ replied the Admiral, ‘in the days of open war, before the possibilities of eugenic science were fully realized. But the ordained plan revealed to His Majesty requires not only the military and political rule by the Germans, but the biologic conquest of the inferior races by German blood.’

  ‘I think our German system of scientific breeding is very brutal,’ spoke up Marguerite with an intensity of feeling quite out of keeping with the calloused manner in which the older members of the Royal House discussed the subject.

  The Admiral turned to her with a gracious air. ‘My lovely maiden,’ he said, ‘your youth quite excuses your idealistic sentiments. You need only to remember that you are a daughter of the House of Hohenzollern. The women of this House are privileged always to cultivate and cherish the beautiful sentiments of romantic love and individual maternity. The protected seclusion of the Royal Level exists that such love may bloom untarnished by the grosser affairs of world necessity. It was so ordained.’

  ‘It was so ordained by men,’ replied Marguerite defiantly, ‘and what are these privileges while the German women are prostituted on the Free Level or forced to bear children only to lose them – and while you plan to enforce other women of the world into polygamous union with a conquering race?’

  ‘My dear child,’ said the Countess, ‘you must not speak in this wild fashion. We women of the Royal House must fully realize our privileges – and as for the Admiral’s wonderful tale of world conquest – that is only his latest hobby. It is talked of, of course, in military circles, but the defensive war is so dull, you know, especially for the royal officers, that they must have something to occupy their minds.’

  ‘When the day arrives,’ snapped the Admiral, ‘you will find the royal officers leading the Germans to victory like Attila and William the Great himself.’

  ‘Then why,’ twitted the Countess, ‘do you not board one of your submarines and go forth to battle in the sea?’

  ‘I am not courting unnecessary danger,’ retorted the Admiral; ‘but I am not dead to the realities of war. My apartments are directly connected with the roof.’

  ‘So you can hear the bomb explosions,’ suggested the Countess.

  ‘And why not?’ snapped the Admiral; ‘we must prepare for danger.’

  ‘But you have not been bred for danger,’ scoffed the Countess. ‘Perhaps you would do well to have your reactions to fear tested out in the psychic laboratories; if you should pass the test you might be elected as a father of soldiers; it would surely set a good example to our impecunious Hohenzollern bachelors for whom there are no wives.’

  The young Count evidently did not comprehend his mother’s spirit of raillery. ‘Has that not been tried?’ he asked, turning toward Dr. Zimmern.

  ‘It has,’ stated the Eugenist, ‘more than a hundred years ago. There was once an entire regiment of such Hohenzollern soldiers in the Bavarian mines.’

  ‘And how did they turn out?’ I asked, my curiosity tempting me into indiscretion.

  ‘They mutinied and murdered their officers and then held an election –’ Zimmern paused and I caught his eye which seemed to say, ‘We have gone too far with this.’

  ‘Yes, and what happened?’ queried the Countess.

  ‘They all voted for themselves as Colonel,’ replied the Doctor dryly.

  At this I looked for an outburst of indignation from the orthodox Admiral, but instead he seemed greatly elated. ‘Of course,’ he enthused; ‘the blood breeds true. It verily has the quality of true divinity. No wonder we super-men repudiated that spineless conception of the soft Christian God and the servile Jewish Jesus.’

  ‘But Jesus was not a coward,’ spoke up Marguerite. ‘I have read the story of his life; it is very wonderful; he was a brave man, who met his death unflinchingly.’

  ‘But where did you read it?’ asked the Countess. ‘It must be very new. I try to keep up on the late novels but I never heard of this “Story of Jesus”.’

  ‘What you say is true,’ said the Admiral, turning to Marguerite, ‘but since you like to read so well, you should get Prof. Ohlenslagger’s book and learn the explanation of the fact that you have just stated. We have long known that all those great men whom the inferior races claim as their geniuses are of truth of German blood, and that the fighting quality of the outer races is due to the German blood that was scattered by our early emigrations.

  ‘But the distinctive contribution that Prof. Ohlenslagger makes to these long established facts is in regard to the parentage of this man Jesus. In the Jewish accounts, which the Christians accepted, the truth was crudely covered up with a most unscientific fable, which credited the paternity of Jesus to miraculous interference with the laws of nature.

  ‘But now the truth comes out by Prof. Ohlenslagger’s erudite reasoning. This unknown father of Jesus was an adventurer from Central Asia, a man of Teutonic blood. On no other conception can the mixed elements in the character of Jesus be explained. His was the case of a dual personality of conflicting inheritance. One day he would say: “Lay up for yourself treasures” – that was the Jewish blood speaking. The next day he would say: “I come to bring a sword” – that was the noble German blood of a Teutonic ancestor. It is logical, it must be true, for it was reasoned out by one of our most rational professors.’

  The Countess yawned; Marguerite sat silent with troubled brows; Dr. Ludwig Zimmern gazed abstractedly toward the cold electric imitation of a fire, above which on a mantle stood two casts, diminutive reproductions of the figures beside the door of the Emperor’s palace, the one the likeness of William the Great, the other the Statue of the German God. But I was thinking of the news I had heard that afternoon from my Ore Chief – that Captain Grauble’s vessel had returned to Berlin.

  In which a Woman Accuses Me of Murder and I Place a Ruby Necklace About Her Throat

  I

  Anxious to renew my acquaintance with Captain Grauble at the earliest opportunity, I sent my social secretary to invite him to meet me for a dinner enga
gement in one of the popular halls of the Free Level.

  When I reached the dining hall I found Captain Grauble awaiting me. But he was not alone. Seated with him were two girls and so strange a picture of contrast I had never seen. The girl on his right was an extreme example of the prevailing blonde type. Her pinkish white skin seemed transparent, her eyes were the palest blue and her hair was bright yet pale gold. About her neck was a chain of blue stones linked with platinum. She was dressed in a mottled gown of light blue and gold, and so subtly blended were the colors that she and her gown seemed to be part of the same created thing. But on Grauble’s left sat a woman whose gown was flashing crimson slashed with jetty black. Her skin was white with a positive whiteness of rare marble and her cheeks and lips flamed with blood’s own red. The sheen of her hair was that of a raven’s wing, and her eyes scintillated with the blackness of polished jade.

  The pale girl, whom Grauble introduced as Elsa, languidly reached up her pink fingers for me to kiss and then sank back, eyeing me with mild curiosity. But as I now turned to be presented to the other, I saw the black-eyed beauty shrink and cower in an uncanny terror. Grauble again repeated my name and then the name of the girl, and I, too, started in fear, for the name he pronounced was ‘Katrina’ and there flashed before my vision the page from the diary that I had first read in the dank chamber of the potash mine. In my memory’s vision the words flamed and shouted: ‘In no other woman have I seen such a blackness of hair and eyes, combined with such a whiteness of skin.’

  The girl before me gave no sign of recognition, but only gripped the table and pierced me with the stare of her beady eyes. Nervously I sank into a seat. Grauble, standing over the girl, looked down at her in angry amazement. ‘What ails you?’ he said roughly, shaking her by the shoulder.

  But the girl did not answer him and annoyed and bewildered, he sat down. For some moments no one spoke, and even the pale Elsa leaned forward and seemed to quiver with excitement.