Chapter VI

IN WHICH I LEARN THAT COMPETITION IS STILL THE LIFE OF THE OLDEST TRADE IN THE WORLD

~1~

When I told Dr. Zimmern that I should solve the problem of the increase of the supply of protium I may have been guilty of speaking of hopes as if they were certainties. My optimism was based on the discovery that the exact chemical state of the protium in the ore was unknown, and that it did not exist equally in all samples of the ore.

After some further months of labour I succeeded in determining the exact chemical ingredients of the ore, and from this I worked rapidly toward a new process of extraction that would greatly increase the total yield of the precious element. But this fact I kept from my assistants whose work I directed to futile researches while I worked alone after hours in following up the lead I had discovered.

During the progress of this work I was not always in the laboratory. I had become a not infrequent visitor to the Level of the Free Women. The continuous carnival of amusement had an attraction for me, as it must have had for any tired and lonely man. But it was not merely the lure of sensuous pleasures that appealed to me, for I was also fascinated with the deeper and more tragic aspect of life beneath the gaudy surface of hectic joy.

Some generalities I had picked up from observation and chance conversations. As a primary essential to life on the level I had quickly learned that money was needed, and my check book was in frequent demand. The bank provided an aluminum currency for the pettier needs of the recreational life, but neither the checks nor the currency had had value on other levels, since there all necessities were supplied without cost and luxuries were unobtainable. This strange retention of money circulation and general freedom of personal conduct exclusively on the Free Level puzzled me. Thus I found that food and drink were here available for a price, a seeming contradiction to the strict limitations of the diet served me at my own quarters. At first it seemed I had discovered a way to defeat that limitation--but there was the weigher to be considered.

It was a queer ensemble, this life in the Black Utopia of Berlin, a combination of a world of rigid mechanistic automatism in the regular routine of living with rioting individual license in recreational pleasure. The Free Level seemed some ancient Bagdad, some Bourbon Court, some Monte Carlo set here, an oasis of flourishing vice in a desert of sterile law-made, machine-executed efficiency and puritanically ordered life. Aided by a hundred ingenious wheels and games of chance, men and women gambled with the coin and credit of the level. These games were presided over by crafty women whose years were too advanced to permit of a more personal means of extracting a living from the grosser passions of man. Some of these aged dames were, I found, quite highly regarded and their establishments had become the rendezvous for many younger women who by some arrangement that I could not fathom plied their traffic in commercialized love under the guidance of these subtler women who had graduated from the school of long experience in preying upon man.

But only the more brilliant women could so establish themselves for the years of their decline. There were others, many others, whose beauty had faded without an increase in wit, and these seemed to be serving their more fortunate sisters, both old and young, in various menial capacities. It was a strange anachronism in this world where men’s more weighty affairs had been so perfectly socialized, to find woman retaining, evidently by men’s permission, the individualistic right to exploit her weaker sister.

The thing confounded me, and yet I recalled the well known views of our sociological historians who held that it was woman’s greater individualism that had checked the socialistic tendencies of the world. Had the Germans then achieved and maintained their rigid socialistic order by retaining this incongruous vestige of feminine commercialism as a safety valve for the individualistic instincts of the race?

They called it the Free Level, and I marvelled at the nature of this freedom. Freedom for licentiousness, for the getting and losing of money at the wheels of fortune, freedom for temporary gluttony and the mild intoxication of their flat, ill-flavoured synthetic beer. A tragic symbol it seemed to me of the ignobility of man’s nature, that he will be a slave in all the loftier aspects of living if he can but retain his freedom for his vices and corruptions. Had the Germans then, like the villain of the moral play, a necessary part in the tragedy of man; did they exist to show the other races of the earth the way they should not go? But the philosophy of this conception collapsed when I recalled that for more than a century the world had lost all sight of the villain and yet had not in the least deteriorated from a lack of the horrible example.

From these vaguer speculations concerning the Free Level of Berlin that existed like a malformed vestigial organ in the body of that socialized state, my mind came back to the more human, more personal side of the problem thus presented me. I wanted to know more of the lives of these women who maintained Germany’s remnant of individualism.

To what extent, I asked myself, have the true instincts of womanhood and the normal love of man and child been smothered out of the lives of these girls? What secret rebellions are they nursing in their hearts? I wondered, too, from what source they came, and why they were selected for this life, for Zimmern had not adequately enlightened me on this point.

Pondering thus on the secret workings in the hearts of these girls, I sat one evening amid the sensuous beauty of the Hall of Flowers. I marvelled at how little the Germans seemed to appreciate it, for it was far less crowded than were the more tawdry places of revelry. Here within glass encircling walls, preserved through centuries of artificial existence, feeding from pots of synthetic soil and stimulated by perpetual light, marvellous botanical creations flourished and flowered in prodigal profusion. Ponderous warm-hued lilies floated on the sprinkled surface of the fountain pool. Orchids, dangling from the metal lattice, hung their sensuous blossoms in vapour-laden air. Luxurious vines, climatized to this unreal world, clambered over cosy arbours, or clung with gripping fingers to the mossy concrete pillars.

~2~

I was sitting thus in moody silence watching the play of the fountain, when, through the mist, I saw the lonely figure of a girl standing in the shadows of a viny bower. She was toying idly with the swaying tendrils. Her hair was the unfaded gold of youth. Her pale dress of silvery grey, unmarred by any clash of colour, hung closely about a form of wraith-like slenderness.

I arose and walked slowly toward her. As I approached she turned toward me a face of flawless girlish beauty, and then as quickly turned away as if seeking a means of escape.

“I did not mean to intrude,” I said.

She did not answer, but when I turned to go, to my surprise, she stepped forward and walked at my side.

“Why do you come here alone?” she asked shyly, lifting a pensive questioning face.

“Because I am tired of all this tawdry noise. But you,” I said, “surely you are not tired of it? You cannot have been here long.”

“No,” she replied, “I have not. Only thirty days”; and her blue eyes gleamed with childish pride.

“And that is why you seem so different from them all?”

Timidly she placed her hand upon my arm. “So you,” she said gratefully, “you understand that I am not like them-that is, not yet.”

“You do not act like them,” I replied, “and what is more, you act as if you did not want to be like them. It surely cannot be merely that you are new here. The other girls when they come seem so eager for this life, to which they have long been trained. Were you not trained for it also?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “they tried to train me for it, but they could not kill my artist’s soul, for I was not like these others, born of a strain wherein women can only be mothers, or, if rejected for that, come here. I was born to be a musician, a group where women may be something more than mere females.”

“Then why are you here?” I asked.

“Because,” she faltered, “my voice was imperfect. I have, you see, the soul of an artist but lack the physical means to give that soul expression. And so they transferred me to the school for free women, where I have been courted by the young men of the Royal House. But of course you understand all that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know something of it; but my work has always so absorbed me that I have not had time to think of these matters. In fact, I come to the Free Level much less than most men.”

For a moment, it seemed, her eyes hardened in cunning suspicion, but as I returned her intent gaze I could fathom only the doubts and fears of childish innocence.

“Please let us sit down,” I said; “it is so beautiful here; and then tell me all about yourself, how you have lived your childhood, and what your problems are. It may be that I can help you.”

“There is not much to tell,” she sighed, as she seated herself beside me. “I was only eight years old when the musical examiners condemned my voice and so I do not remember much about the music school. In the other school where they train girls for the life on the Free Level, they taught us dancing, and how to be beautiful, and always they told us that we must learn these things so that the men would love us. But the only men we ever saw were the doctors. They were always old and serious and I could not understand how I could ever love men. But our teachers would tell us that the other men would be different. They would be handsome and young and would dance with us and bring us fine presents. If we were pleasing in their sight they would take us away, and we should each have an apartment of our own, and many dresses with beautiful colours, and there would be a whole level full of wonderful things and we could go about as we pleased, and dance and feast and all life would be love and joy and laughter.

“Then, on the ‘Great Day,’ when we had our first individual dresses--for before we had always worn uniforms--the men came. They were young military officers and members of the Royal House who are permitted to select girls for their own exclusive love. We were all very shy at first, but many of the girls made friends with the men and some of them went away that first day. And after that the men came as often as they liked and I learned to dance with them, and they made love to me and told me I was very beautiful. Yet somehow I did not want to go with them. We had been told that we would love the men who loved us. I don’t know why, but I didn’t love any of them. And so the two years passed and they told me I must come here alone. And so here I am.”

“And now that you are here,” I said, “have you not, among all these men found one that you could love?”

“No,” she said, with a tremor in her voice, “but they say I must.”

“And how,” I asked, “do they enforce that rule? Does any one require you--to accept the men?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I must do that--or starve.”

“And how do you live now?” I asked.

“They gave me money when I came here, a hundred marks. And they make me pay to eat and when my money is gone I cannot eat unless I get more. And the men have all the money, and they pay. They have offered to pay me, but I refused to take their checks, and they think me stupid.”

The child-like explanation of her lot touched the strings of my heart. “And how long,” I asked, “is this money that is given you when you come here supposed to last?”

“Not more than twenty days,” she answered.

“But you,” I said, “have been here thirty days!”

She looked at me and smiled proudly. “But I,” she said, “only eat one meal a day. Do you not see how thin I am?”

The realization that any one in this scientifically fed city could be hungry was to me appalling. Yet here was a girl living amidst luxurious beauty, upon whom society was using the old argument of hunger to force her acceptance of the love of man.

I rose and held out my hand. “You shall eat again today,” I said.

“I would rather not,” she demurred. “I have not yet accepted favours from any man.”

“But you must. You are hungry,” I protested. “The problem of your existence here cannot be put off much longer. We will go eat and then we will try and find some solution.”

Without further objection she walked with me. We found a secluded booth in a dining hall. I ordered the best dinner that Berlin had to offer.

During the intervals of silence in our rather halting dinner conversation, I wrestled with the situation. I had desired to gain insight into the lives of these girls. Yet now that the opportunity was presented I did not altogether relish the rôle in which it placed me. The apparent innocence of the confiding girl seemed to open an easy way for a personal conquest--and yet, perhaps because it was so obvious and easy, I rebelled at the unfairness of it. To rescue her, to aid her to escape--in a free world one might have considered these more obvious moves, but here there was no place for her to escape to, no higher social justice to which appeal could be made. Either I must accept her as a personal responsibility, with what that might involve, or desert her to her fate. Both seemed cowardly--yet such were the horns of the dilemma and a choice must be made. Here at least was an opportunity to make use of the funds that lay in the bank to the credit of the name I bore, and for which I had found so little use. So I decided to offer her money, and to insist that it was not offered as the purchase price of love.

“You must let me help you,” I said, “you must let me give you money.”

“But I do not want your money,” she replied. “It would only postpone my troubles. Even if I do accept your money, I would have to accept money from other men also, for you cannot pay for the whole of a woman’s living.”

“Why not,” I asked, “does any rule forbid it?”

“No rule, but can so young a man as you afford it?”

“How much does it take for you to live here?”

“About five marks a day.”

I glanced rather proudly at my insignia as a research chemist of the first rank. “Do you know,” I asked, “how much income that insignia carries?”

“Well, no,” she admitted, “I know the income of military officers, but there are so many of the professional ranks and classes that I get all mixed up.”

“That means,” I said, “ten thousand marks a year.”

“So much as that!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “And I can live here on two hundred a month, but no, I did not mean that--you wouldn’t, --I couldn’t--let you give me so much.”

“Much!” I exclaimed; “you may have five hundred if you need it.”

“You make love very nicely,” she replied with aloofness.

“But I am not making love,” I protested.

“Then why do you say these things? Do you prefer some one else? If so why waste your funds on me?”

“No, no!” I cried, “it is not that; but you see I want to tell you things; many things that you do not know. I want to see you often and talk to you. I want to bring you books to read. And as for money, that is so you will not starve while you read my books and listen to me talk. But you are to remain mistress of your own heart and your own person. You see, I believe there are ways to win a woman’s love far better than buying her cheap when she is starved into selling in this brutal fashion.”

She looked at me dubiously. “You are either very queer,” she said, “or else a very great liar.”

“But I am neither,” I protested, piqued that the girl in her innocence should yet brand me either mentally deficient or deceitful. “It is impossible to make you understand me,” I went on, “and yet you must trust me. These other men, they approve the system under which you live, but I do not. I offer you money, I insist on your taking it because there is no other way, but it is not to force you to accept me but only to make it unnecessary for you to accept some one else. You have been very brave, to stand out so long. You must accept my money now, but you need never accept me at all--unless you really want me. If I am to make love to you I want to make love to a woman who is really free; a woman free to accept or reject love, not starved into accepting it in this so-called freedom.”

“It is all very wonderful,” she repeated; “a minute ago I thought you deceitful, and now I want to believe you. I can not stand out much longer and what would be the use for just a few more days?”

“There will be no need,” I said gently, “your courage has done its work well--it has saved you for yourself. And now,” I continued, “we will bind this bargain before you again decide me crazy.”

Taking out my check book I filled in a check for two hundred marks payable to--”To whom shall I make it payable?” I asked.

“To Bertha, 34 R 6,” she said, and thus I wrote it, cursing the prostituted science and the devils of autocracy that should give an innocent girl a number like a convict in a jail or a mare in a breeder’s herd book.

And so I bought a German girl with a German check--bought her because I saw no other way to save her from being lashed by starvation to the slave block and sold piecemeal to men in whom honour had not even died, but had been strangled before it was born.

With my check neatly tucked in her bosom, Bertha walked out of the café clinging to my arm, and so, passing unheeding through the throng of indifferent revellers, we came to her apartment.

At the door I said, “Tomorrow night I come again. Shall it be at the café or here?”

“Here,” she whispered, “away from them all.”

I stooped and kissed her hand and then fled into the multitude.

~3~

I had promised Bertha that I would bring her books, but the narrow range of technical books permitted me were obviously unsuitable, nor did I feel that the unspeakably morbid novels available on the Level of Free Women would serve my purpose of awakening the girl to more wholesome aspirations. In this emergency I decided to appeal to my friend, Zimmern.

Leaving the laboratory early, I made my way toward his apartment, puzzling my brain as to what kind of a book I could ask for that would be at once suitable to Bertha’s child-like mind and also be a volume which I could logically appear to wish to read myself. As I walked along the answer flashed into my mind--I would ask for a geography of the outer world.

Happily I found Zimmern in. “I have come to ask,” I said, “if you could loan me a book of description of the outer world, one with maps, one that tells all that is known of the land and seas and people.”

“Oh, yes,” smiled Zimmern, “you mean a geography. Your request,” he continued, “does me great honour. Books telling the truth about the world without are very carefully guarded. I shall be pleased to get the geography for you at once. In fact I had already decided that when you came again I would take you with me to our little secret library. Germany is facing a great crisis, and I know no better way I can serve her than doing my part to help prepare as many as possible of our scientists to cope with the impending problems. Unless you chemists avert it, we shall all live to see this outer world, or die that others may.”

Dr. Zimmern led the way to the elevator. We alighted on the Level of Free Women. Instead of turning towards the halls of revelry we took our course in the opposite direction along the quiet streets among the apartments of the women. We turned into a narrow passage-way and Dr. Zimmern rang the bell at an apartment door. But after waiting a moment for an answer he took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door.

“I am sorry Marguerite is out,” he said, as he conducted me into a reception room. The walls were hung with seal-brown draperies. There were richly upholstered chairs and a divan piled high with fluffy pillows. In one corner stood a bookcase of burnished metal filigree.

Zimmern waved his hand at the case with an expression of disdain. “Only the conventional literature of the level, to keep up appearances,” he said; “our serious books are in here”; and he thrust open the door of a room which was evidently a young lady’s boudoir.

Conscious of a profane intrusion, I followed Dr. Zimmern into the dainty dressing chamber. Stepping across the room he pushed open a spacious wardrobe, and thrusting aside a cleverly arranged shield of feminine apparel he revealed, upon some improvised shelves, a library of perhaps a hundred volumes. He ran his hand fondly along the bindings. “No other man of your age in Berlin,” he said, “has ever had access to such a complete fund of knowledge as is in this library.”

I hope the old doctor took for appreciation the smile that played upon my face as I contrasted his pitiful offering with the endless miles of book stacks in the libraries of the outer world where I had spent so many of my earlier days.

“Our books are safer here,” said Zimmern, “for no one would suspect a girl on this level of being interested in serious reading. If perchance some inspector did think to perform his neglected duties we trust to him being content to glance over the few novels in the case outside and not to pry into her wardrobe closet. There is still some risk, but that we must take, since there is no absolute privacy anywhere. We must trust to chance to hide them in the place least likely to be searched.”

“And how,” I asked, “are these books accumulated?”

“It is the result of years of effort,” explained Zimmern. “There are only a few of us who are in this secret group but all have contributed to the collection, and we come here to secure the books that the others bring. We prefer to read them here, and so avoid the chance of being detected carrying forbidden books. There is no restriction on the callers a girl may have at her apartment; the authorities of the level are content to keep records only of her monetary transactions, and that fact we take advantage of. Should a man’s apartment on another level be so frequently visited by a group of men an inquiry would be made.”

All this was interesting, but I inferred that I would again have opportunity to visit the library and now I was impatient to keep my appointment with Bertha. Making an excuse for haste, I asked Zimmern to get the geography for me. The stiff back of the book had been removed, and Zimmern helped me adjust the limp volume beneath my waistcoat.

“I am sorry you cannot remain and meet Marguerite tonight,” he said as I stepped toward the door. “But tomorrow evening I will arrange for you to meet Colonel Hellar of the Information Staff, and Marguerite can be with us then. You may go directly to my booth in the café where you last dined with me.”

~4~

After a brief walk I came to Bertha’s apartment, and nervously pressed the bell. She opened the door stealthily and peered out, then recognizing me, she flung it wide.

“I have brought you a book,” I said as I entered; and, not knowing what else to do, I went through the ridiculous operation of removing the geography from beneath my waistcoat.

“What a big book,” exclaimed Bertha in amazement. However, she did not open the geography but laid it on the table, and stood staring at me with her child-like blue eyes.

“Do you know,” she said, “that you are the first visitor I ever had in my apartment? May I show you about?”

As I followed her through the cosy rooms, I chafed to see the dainty luxury in which she was permitted to live while being left to starve. The place was as well adapted to love-making as any other product of German science is adapted to its end. The walls were adorned with sensual prints; but happily I recalled that Bertha, having no education in the matter, was immune to the insult.

Anticipating my coming she had ordered dinner, and this was presently delivered by a deaf-and-dumb mechanical servant, and we set it forth on the dainty dining table. Since the world was young, I mused, woman and man had eaten a first meal together with all the world shut out, and so we dined amid shy love and laughter in a tiny apartment in the heart of a city where millions of men never saw the face of woman--and where millions of babies were born out of love by the cold degree of science. And this same science, bartering with licentious iniquity, had provided this refuge and permitted us to bar the door, and so we accepted our refuge and sanctified it with the purity that was within our own hearts--such at least was my feeling at the time.

And so we dined and cleared away, and talked joyfully of nothing. As the evening wore on Bertha, beside me upon the divan, snuggled contentedly against my shoulder. The nearness and warmth of her, and the innocence of her eyes thrilled yet maddened me.

With fast beating heart, I realized that I as well as Bertha was in the grip of circumstances against which rebellion was as futile as were thoughts of escape. There was no one to aid and no one to forbid or criticize. Whatever I might do to save her from the fate ordained for her would of necessity be worked out between us, unaided and unhampered by the ethics of civilization as I had known it in a freer, saner world.

In offering Bertha money and coming to her apartment I had thrust myself between her and the crass venality of the men of her race, but I had now to wrestle with the problem that such action had involved. If, I reasoned, I could only reveal to her my true identity the situation would be easier, for I could then tell her of the rules of the game of love in the world I had known. Until she knew of that world and its ideals, how could I expect her to understand my motives? How else could I strengthen her in the battle against our own impulses?

And yet, did I dare to confess to her that I was not a German? Would not deep-seated ideals of patriotism drilled into the mind of a child place me in danger of betrayal at her hands? Such a move might place my own life in jeopardy and also destroy my opportunity of being of service to the world, could I contrive the means of escape from Berlin with the knowledge I had gained. Small though the possibilities of such escape might be, it was too great a hope for me to risk for sentimental reasons. And could she be expected to believe so strange a tale?

And so the temptation to confess that I was not Karl Armstadt passed, and with its passing, I recalled the geography that I had gone to so much trouble to secure, and which still lay unopened upon the table. Here at least was something to get us away from the tumultuous consciousness of ourselves and I reached for the volume and spread it open upon my knees.

“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 passed pleasantly. Yet I realized that this was an occupation of which I would soon tire, for it was not the amusement 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.”