Part 32 (1/2)

”Dear child,” he whispered, ”you can always cry in my arms and I will understand. It is the way the world sometimes cries in my heart. I understand.... Yes ... yes....”

CHAPTER IV

A kaleidoscope of cities. A new garrulity. Words like busy little brooms sweeping up after a war. A world of foreigners. Europe was running about with empty pockets and a cracked head. England had had a nose-bleed, France a temporary castration, and the president of the United States was walking around in Paris in an immaculate frock-coat and a high silk hat. The President was closeted in a peace conference mumbling valorously amid lifted eyebrows, amused shoulder shruggings, ironic sighings. A long-faced virgin trapped in a bawdy house and calling in valiant tones for a gla.s.s of lemonade.

Erik Dorn drifted through a haze of weeks. This was London. This, Paris.

This, Rotterdam. And this, after a long, cold ride standing up in a windowless coach, Berlin. But all curiously alike. People in all of them who said, ”We are strangers to you.”

There was nothing to see. No impressions to receive. More cities, more people, more words and a detachment. The detachment was Europe. In his own country there was no detachment. He was a part of crowds, newspapers, buildings. Here he was outside. Familiar things looked strange. The eyes busied themselves trying to forget things before them, scurrying after details and worried by an unrelation in architecture, faces, gestures.

It was mid-December when he sat in a hotel room in Berlin one night and ate blue-colored fish, boiled potatoes, and black, soggy bread. He had been wandering for days through snow-covered streets. Now there was shooting in the streets.

”Germany is starving,” said an acquaintance. ”Our children are dying off by the thousands, thanks to the inhuman blockade.”

But despite even the shooting in the streets Dorn noticed the Germans had lost interest in the war. The idea of the war had collapsed. In England and France the idea was still vaguely alive. People kept it alive by discussing it. But even there it had become something unnatural.

One thing there was in common. Only a few people seemed to have been killed. London was jammed. Even though the newspapers summed it up now and then with ”a generation has been killed.” Paris, too, was jammed.

And Berlin now, jammed also. The war had been fought by people who were dead. And the people who were alive were living away its memory.

In Berlin a week, and he thought, ”A circus has pulled down its tent, carted off its gaudy wagons, its naphtha lights, and its boxes of sawdust. And a new show is staking out the lot.”

The new show was coming to Berlin. Fences and building walls were plastered with its lithographs ... ”The Spirit of Bolshevism Marches ... Beware the Wrecker of Mankind....” Posters of gorillas chewing on b.l.o.o.d.y knives, of fiends with stringy hair setting the torch to orphanages and other n.o.bly drawn edifices labeled ”Kultur, Civilization, Humanitat....” The spielers were already on the job. Machine-guns barked in the snow-covered streets. A man named Noske was a _Bluthund_. A man named Liebknecht was a _Schweinhund_.

In his hotel room Dorn, eating blue-colored fish, spoke to an acquaintance--an erudite young German who wore a monocle, whose eyes twinkled with an odd humor, and who under the influence of a bottle of Sekt was vociferating pa.s.sionately in behalf of a thing he called _Welt_ Revolution.

”I don't understand it yet, von Stinnes,” Dorn smiled. ”I will later. So far I've managed to do nothing more than enjoy myself. Profundity is diverting in New York, but a bore in Berlin. There's too much of it.

Good G.o.d, man, there are times when I feel that even the buildings of the city are wrapped in thought.”

Von Stinnes gestured with an almost English awkwardness. His English contained a slight French accent. His words, amused, careless, carried decision. He spoke knowingly, notwithstanding the Sekt and the smile with which he seemed to be belying his remarks. Thus, the Majority Socialists were traitors. Scheidemann had sold the revolution for a kiss from Graf Rantzau. The ma.s.ses.... ”Ah, m'sieur, they are arming. There will be an overthrow.” And then, Ludendorff had framed the revolution--actually manufactured it. All the old officers were back.

Noske was allowing them to reorganize the military. The thing was a farce. Social Democracy had failed. The country was already in flames.

There would be things happening. ”You wait and see. Yes, the Spartikusten will do something ...”

Dorn nodded appreciatively. He felt instinctively that he had stumbled upon a man of value and service. But he listened carelessly. As yet the scene was more absorbing than its details. The local politik boiling beneath the collapse of the empire had not yet struck his imagination.

There were large lines to look at first, and absorb.

Snow in unfamiliar streets, night soldier patrols firing at shadows, eager-eyed women in the hotel lobbies, marines carousing in the Kaiser's Schloss--a nation in collapse. Teutonia on her rump, helmet tilted over an eye, hair down, comely and unmilitary legs thrust out, showing her drawers and laughing. Yes, the Germans were laughing. Where was there gayety like the Palais de Danse, the Fox Trot Klubs, Pauligs; gayety like the drunken soldiers patrolling Wilhelmstra.s.se where a paunchy harness-maker sat in Bismarck's chair?

Gayety with a rumble and a darkness underneath. But such things were only wilder accents to laughter. If the detachment would leave him, if he could familiarize himself, he could lay hands on something; dance away in a macabre mardi-gras.

Two bottles of Sekt had been emptied. A polite Ober responded with a third. Von Stinnes grew eloquent.

”Not before March, Mr. Dorn. It will come only then. This that you hear now, pouf! Hungry men looking for crumbs with hand-grenades. The revolution is only picking its teeth. But wait. It will overturn, when it comes. And even if it does not overturn, if it fails, it will not end, but pause. You hear it whispering now in the streets. Hungry men with hand-grenades. Ah, m'sieur, if you wish we will work together. I am a man of many acquaintances. I am von Stinnes, Baron von Stinnes of a very old, a very dissolute, a very worthless family. I am the last von Stinnes. The dear G.o.d Himself glows at the thought. I will work for you as secretary. How much do you offer for a scion of the n.o.bility?”

”Three hundred marks.”

”A month?”

”No, weekly,” laughed Dorn, ”and you buy half the liquor.”