City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings (english novels for beginners TXT) 📗

the day of surrender to this life of shamefully commercialized love.

"And why should I not come?" returned Marguerite. "I had a chance to come, and I accepted it. Do you think life in the school for girls of forbidden birth is an enjoyable one?"

I wanted to press home the point of my argument, to proclaim my pride in Bertha's more heroic struggle with the system, for this girl with whom I now conversed was obviously a woman of superior intelligence, and it angered me to know that she had so easily surrendered to the life for which German society had ordained her. But I restrained my speech, for I realized that in criticizing her way of life I would be criticizing her obvious relation to Zimmern, and like all men I found myself inclined to be indulgent with the personal life of a man who was my friend. Moreover, I perceived the presumptuousness of assuming a superior air towards an established and accepted institution. Yet, strive as I might to be tolerant, I felt a growing antagonism towards this attractive and cultured girl who had surrendered without a struggle to a life that to me was a career of shame--and who seemed quite content with her surrender.

"Do you like it here?" I asked, knowing that my question was stupid, but anxious to avoid a painful gap in what was becoming, for me, a difficult conversation.

Marguerite looked at me with a queer penetrating gaze. "Do I like it here?" she repeated. "Why should you ask, and how can I answer? Can I like it or not like it, when there was no choice for me? Can I push out the walls of Berlin?"--and she thrust mockingly into the air with a delicately chiselled hand--"It is a prison. All life is a prison."

"Yes," I said, "it is a prison, but life on this level is more joyful than on many others."

Her lip curled in delicate scorn. "For you men--of course--and I suppose it is for these women too--perhaps that is why I hate it so, because they do enjoy it, they do accept it. They sell their love for food and raiment, and not one in all these millions seems to mind it."

"In that," I remarked, "perhaps you are mistaken. I have not come here often as most men do, but I have found one other who, like you, rebels at the system--who in fact, was starving because she would not sell her love."

Marguerite flashed on me a look of pitying suspicion as she asked: "Have you gone to the Place of Records to look up this rebel against the sale of love?"

A fire of resentment blazed up in me at this question. I did not know just what she meant by the Place of Records, but I felt that this woman who spoke cynically of rebellion against the sale of love, and yet who had obviously sold her love to an old man, was in no position to discredit a weaker woman's nobler fight.

"What right," I asked coldly, "have you to criticize another whom you do not know?"

"I am sorry," replied Marguerite, "if I seem to quarrel with you when I was left here to entertain you, but I could not help it--it angers me to have you men be so fond of being deceived, such easy prey to this threadbare story of the girl who claims she never came here until forced to do so. But men love to believe it. The girls learn to use the story because it pays."

A surge of conflicting emotion swept through me as I recalled the child-like innocence of Bertha and compared it with the critical scepticism of this superior woman. "It only goes to show," I thought, "what such a system can do to destroy a woman's faith in the very existence of innocence and virtue."

Marguerite did not speak; her silence seemed to say: "You do not understand, nor can I explain--I am simply here and so are you, and we have our secrets which cannot be committed to words."

With idle fingers she drummed lightly on the table. I watched those slender fingers and the rhythmic play of the delicate muscles of the bare white arm that protruded from the rich folds of the blue velvet cape. Then my gaze lifted to her face. Her downcast eyes were shielded by long curving lashes; high arched silken brows showed dark against a skin as fresh and free from chemist's pigment as the petal of a rose. In exultant rapture my heart within me cried that here was something fine of fibre, a fineness which ran true to the depths of her soul.

In my discovery of Bertha's innocence and in my faith in her purity and courage I had hoped to find relief from the spiritual loneliness that had grown upon me during my sojourn in this materialistic city. But that faith was shaken, as the impression Bertha had made upon my over-sensitized emotions, now dimmed by a brighter light, flickered pale on the screen of memory. The mere curiosity and pity I had felt for a chance victim singled out among thousands by the legend of innocence on a pretty face could not stand against the force that now drew me to this woman who seemed to be not of a slavish race--even as Dr. Zimmern seemed a man apart from the soulless product of the science he directed. But as I acknowledged this new magnet tugging at the needle of my floundering heart, I also realized that my friendship for the lovable and courageous Zimmern reared an unassailable barrier to shut me into outer darkness.

The thought proved the harbinger of the reality, for Dr. Zimmerman himself now entered. He was accompanied by Col. Hellar of the Information Staff, a man of about Zimmern's age. Col. Hellar bore himself with a gracious dignity; his face was sad, yet there gleamed from his eye a kindly humor.

Marguerite, after exchanging a few pleasantries with Col. Hellar and myself, tenderly kissed the old doctor on the forehead, and slipped out.

"You shall see much of her," said Zimmern, "she is the heart and fire of our little group, the force that holds us together. But tonight I asked her not to remain"--the old doctor's eyes twinkled with merriment,--"for a young man cannot get acquainted with a beautiful woman and with ideas at the same time."

~6~

"And now," said Zimmern, after we had finished our dinner, "I want Col. Hellar to tell you more of the workings of the Information Service."

"It is a very complex system," began Hellar. "It is old. Its history goes back to the First World War, when the military censorship began by suppressing information thought to be dangerous and circulating fictitious reports for patriotic purposes. Now all is much more elaborately organized; we provide that every child be taught only the things that it is decided he needs to know, and nothing more. Have you seen the bulletins and picture screens in the quarters for the workers?"

"Yes," I replied, "but the lines were all in old German type."

"And that," said Hellar, "is all that the workers and soldiers can read. The modern type could be taught them in a few days, but we see to it that they have no opportunity to learn it. As it is now, should they find or steal a forbidden book, they cannot read it."

"But is it not true," I asked, "that at one time the German workers were most thoroughly educated?"

"It is true," said Hellar, "and because of that universal education Germany was defeated in the First World War. The English contaminated the soldiers by flooding the trenches with democratic literature dropped from airplanes. Then came the Bolshevist regime in Russia with its passion for revolutionary propaganda. The working men and soldiers read this disloyal literature and they forced the abdication of William the Great. It was because of this that his great grandson, when the House of Hohenzollern was restored to the throne, decided to curtail universal education.

"But while William III curtailed general education he increased the specialized education and established the Information Staff to supervise the dissemination of all knowledge."

"It is an atrocious system," broke in Zimmern, "but if we had not abolished the family, curtailed knowledge and bred soldiers and workers from special non-intellectual strains this sunless world of ours could not have endured."

"Quite so," said Hellar, "whether we approve of it or not certainly there was no other way to accomplish the end sought. By no other plan could German isolation have been maintained."

"But why was isolation deemed desirable?" I enquired.

"Because," said Zimmern, "it was that or extermination. Even now we who wish to put an end to this isolation, we few who want to see the world as our ancestors saw it, know that the price may be annihilation."

"So," repeated Hellar, "so annihilation for Germany, but better so--and yet I go on as Director of Information; Dr. Zimmern goes on as Chief Eugenist; and you go on seeking to increase the food supply, and so we all go on as part of the diabolic system, because as individuals we cannot destroy it, but must go on or be destroyed by it. We have riches here and privileges. We keep the labourers subdued below us, Royalty enthroned above us, and the World State at bay about us, all by this science and system which only we few intellectuals understand and which we keep going because we can not stop it without being destroyed by the effort."

"But we shall stop it," declared Zimmern, "we must stop it--with Armstadt's help we can stop it. You and I, Hellar, are mere cogs; if we break others can take our places, but Armstadt has power. What he knows no one else knows. He has power. We have only weakness because others can take our place. And because he has power let us help him find a way."

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

"But they can not think," replied Hellar, "they have nothing to think with."

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

"But," said Hellar, "the labourer can not 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 can not 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 favours 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 favoured 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 honour 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