City of Endless Night Part 14

"What a funny book!" exclaimed Bertha, as she gazed at the round maps of the two hemispheres. "Of what is that a picture?"

"The world," I answered.

She stared at me blankly. "The Royal World?" she asked.

"No, no," I replied. "The world outside the walls of Berlin."

"The world in the sun," exclaimed Bertha, "on the roof where they fight the airplanes? A roof-guard officer" she paused and bit her lip--

"The world of the inferior races," I suggested, trying to find some common footing with her pitifully scant knowledge.

"The world underground," she said, "where the soldiers fight in the mines?"

Baffled in my efforts to define this world to her, I began turning the pages of the geography, while Bertha looked at the pictures in child-like wonder, and I tried as best I could to find simple explanations.

Between the lines of my teaching, I scanned, as it were, the true state of German ignorance. Despite the evident intended authoritativeness of the book--for it was marked "Permitted to military staff officers"--I found it amusingly full of erroneous conceptions of the true state of affairs in the outer world.

This teaching of a child-like mind the rudiments of knowledge was an amusing recreation, and so an hour pa.s.sed pleasantly. Yet I realized that this was an occupation of which I would soon tire, for it was not the amus.e.m.e.nt of teaching a child that I craved, but the companionship of a woman of intelligence.

As we turned the last page I arose to take my departure. "If I leave the book with you," I said, "will you read it all, very carefully? And then when I come again I will explain those things you can not understand."

"But it is so big, I couldn't read it in a day," replied Bertha, as she looked at me appealingly.

I steeled myself against that appeal. I wanted very much to get my mind back on my chemistry, and I wanted also to give her time to read and ponder over the wonders of the great unknown world. Moreover, I no longer felt so grievously concerned, for the calamity which had overshadowed her had been for the while removed. And I had, too, my own struggle to cherish her innocence, and that without the usual help extended by conventional society. So I made brave resolutions and explained the urgency of my work and insisted that I could not see her for five days.

Hungrily she pleaded for a quicker return; and I stubbornly resisted the temptation. "No," I insisted, "not tomorrow, nor the next day, but I will come back in three days at the same hour that I came tonight."

Then taking her in my arms, I kissed her in feverish haste and tore myself from the enthralling lure of her presence.

~5~

When I reached the cafe the following evening to keep my appointment with Zimmern, the waiter directed me to one of the small enclosed booths. As I entered, closing the door after me, I found myself confronting a young woman.

"Are you Col. Armstadt?" she asked with a clear, vibrant voice. She smiled cordially as she gave me her hand. "I am Marguerite. Dr. Zimmern has gone to bring Col. h.e.l.lar, and he asked me to entertain you until his return."

The friendly candour of this greeting swept away the grey walls of Berlin, and I seemed again face to face with a woman of my own people.

She was a young woman of distinctive personality. Her features, though delicately moulded, bespoke intelligence and strength of character that I had not hitherto seen in the women of Berlin. Framing her face was a luxuriant ma.s.s of wavy brown hair, which fell loosely about her shoulders. Her slender figure was draped in a cape of deep blue cellulose velvet.

"Dr. Zimmern tells me," I said as I seated myself across the table from her, "that you are a dear friend of his."

A swift light gleamed in her deep brown eyes. "A very dear friend," she said feelingly, and then a shadow flitted across her face as she added, "Without him life for me would be unbearable here."

"And how long, if I may ask, have you been here?"

"About four years. Four years and six days, to be exact. I can keep count you know," and she smiled whimsically, "for I came on the day of my birth, the day I was sixteen."

"That is the same for all, is it not?"

"No one can come here before she is sixteen," replied Marguerite, "and all must come before they are eighteen."

"But why did you come at the first opportunity?" I asked, as I mentally compared her confession with that of Bertha who had so courageously postponed as long as she could 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 a.s.suming a superior air towards an established and accepted inst.i.tution. 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 n.o.bler 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 una.s.sailable 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. h.e.l.lar of the Information Staff, a man of about Zimmern's age. Col. h.e.l.lar 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. h.e.l.lar 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.

h.e.l.lar to tell you more of the workings of the Information Service."

"It is a very complex system," began h.e.l.lar. "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 fict.i.tious 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."