Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  “Ah, yes!” exclaimed Adi. “I too, have been wounded, and know how a soldier feels about the women who nurse him. It would appear that great art comes only by suffering.”

  “So your Goethe has told us, Herr Reichskanzler.”

  A silence, while Hitler studied the painting some more. “A pure Aryan type,” he commented; “the spiritual type which lends itself to idealization.” He looked a while longer, and said: “Pity is one of the Aryan virtues. I doubt if the lesser races are capable of feeling it very deeply.”

  This went on for quite a while. The Führer looked, and then made a remark, and no one else ventured to speak unless it was a question. “This sort of art tells us that life is full of suffering. It should be the great task of mankind to diminish it as far as possible. You agree with that, Herr Budd?”

  “Indeed I do; and I know that it was the leading idea of Marcel’s life.”

  “It is the task of the master race. They alone can fulfill it, because they have both the intelligence and the good will.” Lanny was afraid he was going to repeat the question: “You agree with that?” and was trying to figure how to reply without starting an argument. But instead the Führer went on to inform him: “That should be our guiding thought in life. Here in this room we have three of the world’s great nationalities represented: the German, the French, the American. What a gain if these nations would unite to guard their Aryan purity and guarantee the reign of law throughout the world! Do you see any hope for that in our time?”

  “It is a goal to aim at, Herr Reichskanzler. Each must do what he can.”

  “You may be sure that I will, Herr Budd. Tell it to everyone you know.”

  The master of Germany returned to the seat at his desk. “I am obliged to you for bringing me this portrait. I understand that you are having an exhibition?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichskanzler; we should be honored if you would attend; or if you prefer, I will bring other samples of the work.”

  “I wish I could arrange it. Also”—turning to Kurt—“I was hoping to have you come to my apartment, where I have a piano. But I’m afraid I have to leave for Berlin. I was a happier man when I had only a political party to direct; now, alas, I have a government as well, and therefore a lover of music and art is compelled to give all his time and attention to the jealousies and rivalries of small men.”

  The picture-viewing was over, and the attendant carried it out, backing away and bowing at every step. The Führer turned to Kurt and asked about his music, and lifted a Komponist to the skies by saying that Kurt had rendered a real service to the cause. “We have to show the world that we National Socialists can produce talent and even genius, equal to the best of the past. Science must be brought to reinforce inspiration so that the Herrenvolk may ascend to new heights, and, if possible, raise the lesser tribes after them.”

  He turned to Heinrich. He wanted to hear all that a young official could tell him concerning the Hitler Jugend and its progress. The efficient head of a great organization was getting data about personalities and procedures over which he had control. He asked probing questions, watching the respondent through half-closed eyes. He could be sure that this official was telling him the truth, but it would be colored by the young man’s enthusiastic nature. Heinrich was hardly the one to report upon backstairs intrigue and treachery. “I wish I had more young men like you,” remarked the Reichskanzler, wistfully.

  “You have thousands of them, mein Führer,” replied the enraptured ex-forester; “men whom you have never had an opportunity to meet.”

  “My staff try to shut me up as though I were an oriental despot,” said Adi. “They talk to me about physical danger—but I know that it is my destiny to live and complete my work.”

  VII

  It was quite an interview, and Lanny was on pins and needles for fear the great man might rise and say: “I am sorry, but my time is limited.” Nobody could imagine anyone in a better humor; and Lanny looked at Kurt, and would have winked at him, only Kurt was keeping his eyes fixed upon his master and guide. Lanny tried telepathy, thinking as hard as he could: “Now! Now!”

  “Mein Führer,” said Kurt, “before we leave there is something which my friend Budd thinks I ought to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A great misfortune, but not his fault. It happens that his half-sister is married into a Jewish family.”

  “Donnerwetter!” exclaimed Adolf. “A shocking piece of news!”

  “I should add that the husband is a fine concert violinist.”

  “We have plenty of Aryan artists, and no need to seek anything from that polluted race. What is the man’s name?”

  “Hansi Robin.”

  “Robin? Robin?” repeated Hitler. “Isn’t he the son of that notorious Schieber, Johannes?”

  “Yes, mein Führer.”

  “She should divorce him.” The great man turned upon Lanny. “My young friend, you should not permit such a thing to continue. You should use your authority, you and your father and the other men of the family.”

  “It happens that the couple are devoted to each other, Herr Reichskanzler; also, she is his accompanist, and is now playing with him in a tour of the United States.”

  “But, Herr Budd, it is sordid and shameful to admit considerations of worldly convenience in such a matter. Your sister is a Nordic blond like yourself?”

  “Even more so.”

  “Yet she gets upon public platforms and advertises her ignominy! And think of what she is doing to the future, the crime she commits against her children!”

  “They have no children, Herr Reichskanzler. They are devoting their lives to art.”

  “It is none the less an act of racial pollution. Whether she has children or not, she is defiling her own body. Are you not aware that the male seminal fluid is absorbed by the female, and thus her bloodstream is poisoned by the vile Jewish emanations? It is a dreadful thing to contemplate, and if it were a sister of mine, I would rather see her dead before my eyes; in fact, I would strike her dead if I knew she intended to commit such an act of treason to her race.”

  “I am sorry, Herr Reichskanzler; but in America we leave young women to choose their own mates.”

  “And what is the result? You have a mongrel race, where every vile and debasing influence operates freely, and every form of degradation, physical, intellectual, and moral, flourishes unhindered. Travel that highway into hell, if you please, but be sure that we Germans are going to preserve our purity of blood, and we are not going to let ourselves be seduced by tricky words about freedom and toleration and humanitarianism and brotherly love and the rest. No Jew-monster is a brother of mine, and if I find one of them attempting to cohabit with an Aryan woman I will crush his skull, even as our Stormtrooper song demands: ‘Crush the skulls of the Jewish pack!’ Pardon me if I speak plainly, but that has been my life’s habit, it is the duty which I have been sent to perform in this world. Have you read Mein Kampf?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichskanzler.”

  “You know what I have taught in it: ‘The Jew is the great instigator of the destruction of Germany.’ They are, as I have called them, ‘true devils, with the brain of a monster and not that of a man.’ They are the veritable Untermenschen. There is a textbook of Hermann Gauch, called Neue Grundlage der Rassenforschung, which is now standard in our schools and universities, and which tells with scientific authority the truths about this odious race. Our eminent scientist classifies the mammals into two groups, first the Aryans, and second, non-Aryans, including the rest of the animal kingdom. You have seen that book, by chance?”

  “I have heard it discussed, Herr Reichskanzler.”

  “You do not accept its authority?”

  “I am not a scientist, and my acceptance or rejection would carry no weight. I have heard the point raised that Jews must be human beings because they can mate with Aryans and Nordics, but not with non-human animals.”

  “Dr. Gauch says it has by no means been proved that Je
ws cannot mate with apes and other simian creatures. I suggest this as an important contribution which German science can make—to mate both male and female Jews with apes, and so demonstrate to the world the facts which we National Socialists have been proclaiming for so many years.”

  VIII

  The master of all Germany had got started on one of his two favorite topics, the other being Bolshevism. Again Lanny observed the phenomenon that an audience of three was as good as three million. The sleepy look went out of the speaker’s eyes and they became fixed upon the unfortunate transgressor in a hypnotic stare. The quiet voice rose to a shrill falsetto. Something new appeared in the man, demonic and truly terrifying; the thrust-out finger struck as it were hammer blows upon Lanny’s mind. A young American playboy must be made to realize the monstrous nature of the treason he was committing in condoning his sister’s defilement of the sacred Aryan blood. Somehow, at once, the evil must be averted; the man who had been commissioned by destiny to save the world must prove his power here and now, by bringing this strayed sheep back into the Nordic fold. “Gift!” cried the Führer of the Nazis. “Poison! Poison!”

  Back in New England, Lanny’s Great-Great-Uncle Eli Budd had told him the story of the witch-hunt in early Massachusetts. “Fanaticism is a destroyer of mind,” he had said. Here it was in another form—the terrors, the fantasies born of soul torment, the vision of supernatural evil powers plotting the downfall of all that was good and fair in human life. Adi really loved the Germans: their Gemütlichkeit, their Treue und Ehre, their beautiful songs and noble symphonies, their science and art, their culture in its thousand forms. But here was this satanic power, plotting, scheming day and night to destroy it all. Die Juden sind schuld!

  Yes, literally, the Jews were to blame for everything; Hitler called the roll of their crimes for the ten thousandth time. They had taught revolt to Germany, they had undermined her patriotism and discipline, and in her hour of greatest peril they had stabbed her in the back. The Jews had helped to shackle her by the cruel Diktat of Versailles, and then had proceeded to rivet the chains of poverty upon her limbs. They had made the inflation, they had contrived the Dawes Plan, the Young Plan, the systems of interest and reparations slavery; the Jewish bankers in alliance with the Jewish Bolsheviks! They had seduced all German culture—theater, literature, music, journalism. They had sneaked into the professions, the sciences, the schools, and universities—and, as always, they had defiled and degraded whatever they touched. Die Juden sind unser Unglück!

  This went on for at least half an hour; and never once did anybody else get in a word. The man’s tirade poured out so fast that his sentences stumbled over one another; he forgot to finish them, he forgot his grammar, he forgot common decency and used the words of the gutters of Vienna, where he had picked up his ideas. The perspiration stood out on his forehead and his clean white collar began to wilt. In short, he gave the same performance which Lanny had witnessed in the Bürgerbräukeller of Munich more than a decade ago. But that had been a huge beerhall with two or three thousand people, while here it was like being shut up in a small chamber with a hundred-piece orchestra including eight trombones and four bass tubas playing the overture to The Flying Dutchman.

  Suddenly the orator stopped. He didn’t say: “Have I convinced you?” That would have been expressing a doubt, which no heaven-sent evangelist ever admits. He said: “Now, Herr Budd, go and do your duty. Make one simple rule that I have maintained ever since I founded this movement—never to speak to a Jew, even over the telephone.” Then, abruptly: “I have other engagements and have to be excused.”

  The three quickly said their adieus; and when they were outside, Lanny, in his role of secret agent, remarked: “No one can wonder that he stirs his audiences.”

  When he was back in the hotel with his wife and mother, he exclaimed: “Well, I know now why Göring is keeping Freddi.”

  “Why?” they asked, with much excitement.

  Lanny answered, in a cold fury: “He is going to breed him with a female ape!”

  IX

  Lanny had to play out the game according to the rules. He must not let either of these friends discover that he had brought them here solely in the hope of persuading Hitler to release a Jewish prisoner. It was for friendship, for sociability, for music and art. Lanny and Kurt must play piano duets as in the old days. Zoltan must take them through the two Pinakotheks and give them the benefit of his art knowledge. Beauty and Irma must put on their best togs and accompany them to the Hof-und-National Theater for Die Meistersinger, and to the Prinz-Regenten Theater for Goethe’s Egmont. There must be a dinner at which distinguished personalities in the musical world were invited to meet a leading Komponist. After a symphony concert in the Tonhalle, Lanny listened to Kurt’s highly technical comments on the conductor and the sounds produced. The tone was hard, cold, and brilliant; it lacked “body,” by which Kurt explained that he meant a just proportion of low and middle to high registers. He accused the too-ardent Kapellmeister of exaggerating his nuances, of expanding and contracting his volume unduly, fussing over his orchestra like an old hen with a too-large brood of chicks—certainly an undignified procedure, and by no means suitable to the rendition of Beethoven’s Eroica.

  But to Lanny it seemed more important to try to understand what the composer of that noble symphony was trying to tell him than to worry about details of somebody’s rendition. The last time Lanny had heard this work had been with the Robin family in Berlin, and he recalled Freddi’s gentle raptures. Freddi wasn’t one of those musicians who have heard so much music that they have got tired of it, and can think about nothing but technicalities and personalities and other extraneous matters. Freddi loved Beethoven as if he had been the composer’s son; but now father and son had been torn apart. Freddi wasn’t fit to play Beethoven, by Heinrich’s decree, because he was a Jew; and certainly he wasn’t having any chance to hear Beethoven in Dachau. Lanny could think of little else, and the symphony became an appeal to the great master for a verdict against those who were usurping his influence and his name.

  In Beethoven’s works there is generally a forceful theme that tramples and thunders, and a gentle theme that lilts and pleads. You may take it as pleading for mercy and love against the cruelties and oppressions of the world. You may take it that the grim, dominating theme represents these cruelties, or perhaps it represents that which rises in your own soul to oppose them. Anyhow, to Lanny the opening melody of the Eroica became the “Freddi theme,” and Beethoven was defending it against the hateful Nazis. The great democrat of old Vienna came into the Tonhalle of Munich and laid his hand on Lanny’s burning forehead, and told him that he was right, and that he and his Jewish friend were free to march with Beethoven on the battlefields of the soul and to dance with him on the happy meadows.

  Was it conceivable that Beethoven would have failed to despise the Nazis, and to defy them? He had dedicated his symphony to Napoleon because he believed that Napoleon represented the liberating forces of the French revolution, and he had torn up the title page of his score when he learned that Napoleon had got himself crowned Emperor of France. He had adopted Schiller’s Hymn to Joy, sending a kiss to the whole world and proclaiming that all men became brothers where the gentle wing of joy came to rest. Very certainly he had not meant to exclude the Jews from the human race, and would have spurned those who built their movement out of hate.

  That was what this urgent music was about; that was what gave it drive and intensity. The soul of Beethoven was defending itself, it was defending all things German from those who would defile them. The “Freddi theme” pleaded, it stormed and raged, heaving itself in mighty efforts as the kettledrums thundered. The young idealist had told his friends that he wasn’t sure if he had within him the moral strength to withstand his foes; but here in this symphony he was finding it; here he would prevail, and rejoice—but then would come the rushing hordes and bowl him over and trample him. When the first movement came to its tremendo
us climax Lanny’s hands were tightly clenched and perspiration stood on his forehead.

  The poignant, majestic march was Beethoven walking through the Nazi concentration camps—as Lanny had walked so many times in imagination. It was the grief and suffering of fifty or a hundred thousand of the finest and best-trained minds of Germany. It was Beethoven mourning with them, telling them that the blackest tragedy can be turned to beauty by the infinite powers of the soul. The finale of the symphony was a victory—but that was a long way off, and Lanny couldn’t imagine how it would come; he could only cling to the hand of the great master like a little child to its father.

  After hearing this concert Lanny had to face the fact that his love for Kurt and Heinrich had come to an end. He found it hard to be polite to his old friends; and he decided that being a spy, or secret agent, or whatever you chose to call it, was first and foremost a damnable bore. The greatest of all privileges in this life is saying what you think; and your friends have to be people who can at least give decent consideration to your ideas. Lanny was glad when he got Kurt and Heinrich on their separate trains for home. He thanked them for what they had done, assured them that it had been worth while, and thought: “I am going to get Freddi out of this hell, and then get myself out and stay out.”

  X

  For a week Lanny had been living in close proximity to that mass of human misery known as Dachau; he had pretended to be indifferent to it, and had spoken of it only when he and Irma were alone in their car. Dachau is a small market-town nine miles northwest of the city, and a well-paved highway leads to it. Inevitably their thoughts had turned there, and the car had taken them at the first opportunity. They didn’t, like most tourists, inspect the castle on the height; they looked for the concentration camp, which wasn’t hard to find, as it occupied a square mile of ground. It had been a World War barracks and training camp, disused since the peace. A concrete wall seven feet high ran around it, having on top a tangle of barbed wire, no doubt electrically charged. Lanny thought about somebody trying to climb that wall; it seemed less possible when he came at night, and saw a blaze of white searchlights mounted in towers, moving continually along the walls.