City of Endless Night Part 15

"And that," said h.e.l.lar, "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 h.e.l.lar, "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 pa.s.sion 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 h.e.l.lar, "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 h.e.l.lar, "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, h.e.l.lar, 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 h.e.l.lar, "they have nothing to think with."

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

"But," said h.e.l.lar, "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 a.s.sembled 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 h.e.l.lar, "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 h.e.l.lar, "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 'G.o.d's Anointed.' Through His Majesty's approval of my work I now owe my position on the Staff.

"His Majesty," continued h.e.l.lar, "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 'G.o.d'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 embarra.s.sing 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d.'"

h.e.l.lar 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 h.e.l.lar. "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 h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l.'

"'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 h.e.l.l?' I should have been shot for that but His Majesty did not see the implication. He replied coolly:

"'We must have a h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 h.e.l.lar 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 h.e.l.lar 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."

~7~

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 circ.u.mscribed 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 h.e.l.lar were intellectual giants of heroic proportions.

As I walked through a street of shops. I paused before the display window of a bookstore of the level. Most of these books I had previously discovered were lurid-t.i.tled tales of licentious love. But among them I now saw a volume bearing the t.i.tle "G.o.d's Anointed," and recalled that I had seen it before and a.s.sumed 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 favourite 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 G.o.d who had anointed the Hohenzollerns masters of the earth. h.e.l.lar's description had prepared me for a preposterous and absurd work, but I had not antic.i.p.ated 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.

"G.o.d's Anointed," as h.e.l.lar 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 humour.

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 G.o.d 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 encompa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 inst.i.tution of marriage had been discarded so this German faith had sc.r.a.pped 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 h.e.l.l.

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: