Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  For more than twenty years this sensitive young Jew had consecrated himself to one special skill; he had made himself a slave to some pieces of wood, strips of pig’s intestine, and hairs from a horse’s tail. With such unlikely agencies Beethoven and Hansi contrived to express the richness, elegance, and variety of life. They took you into the workshop of the universe, where its miracles are planned and executed; the original mass-production process which turns out the myriad leaves of trees and the petals of flowers, the wings of insects and birds, the patterns of snow crystals and solar systems. Beethoven and Hansi revealed the operation of that machinery from which color and delicacy, power and splendor are poured forth in unceasing floods.

  Lanny had made so many puns upon the name of his brother-in-law that he had ceased to think of them as such. There was nothing in the physical aspect of Hansi to suggest the robin, but when you listened to his music you remembered that the robin’s wings are marvels of lightness and grace, and that every feather is a separate triumph. The robin’s heart is strong, and he flies without stopping, on and on, to lands beyond the seas. He flies high into the upper registers, among the harmonic notes, where sensations are keener than any known upon earth. The swift runs of Hansi’s violin were the swooping and darting of all the birds; the long trills were the fluttering of the humming-bird’s wings, purple, green, and gold in the sunlight, hovering, seeming motionless; each moment you expect it to dart away, but there it remains, an enchantment.

  IX

  Hansi was playing the elaborate cadenza. No other sound in the auditorium; the men of the orchestra sat as if they were images, and the audience the same. Up and down the scale rushed the flying notes; up like the wind through the pine trees on a mountain-side, down like cascades of water, flashing rainbows in the sunshine. Beethoven had performed the feat of weaving his two themes in counterpoint, and Hansi performed the feat of playing trills with two of his fingers and a melody with the other two. Only a musician could know how many years of labor it takes to train nerves and muscles for such “double-stopping,” but everyone could know that it was beautiful and at the same time that it was wild.

  The second movement is a prayer, and grief is mixed with its longing; so Hansi could tell those things which burdened his spirit. He could say that the world was a hard and cruel place, and that his poor people were in agony. “Born to sorrow—born to sorrow,” moaned the wood-winds, and Hansi’s violin notes hovered over them, murmuring pity. But one does not weep long with Beethoven; he turns pain into beauty, and it would be hard to find in all his treasury a single work in which he leaves you in despair. There comes a rush of courage and determination, and the theme of grief turns into a dance. The composer of this concerto, humiliated and enraged because the soldiers of Napoleon had seized his beloved Vienna, went out into the woods alone and reminded himself that world conquerors come and go, but love and joy live on in the hearts of men.

  “Oh, come, be merry, oh, come be jolly, come one, come all and dance with me!” Lanny amused himself by finding words for musical themes. This dance went over flower-strewn meadows; breezes swept ahead of it, and the creatures of nature joined the gay procession, birds fluttering in the air, rabbits and other delightful things scampering on the ground. Hand in hand came young people in flowing garments. “Oh, youths and maidens, oh, youths and maidens, come laugh, and sing, and dance with me!” It was the Isadora rout that Lanny would always carry in his memory. When the storm of the orchestra drowned out Hansi’s fiddle, the listener was leaping to a mountain-top and from it to the next.

  Others must have been having the same sort of adventure, for when the last note sounded they started to their feet and tried to tell the artist about it. Lanny saw that his brother-in-law had won a triumph. Such a sweet, gentle fellow he was, flushed from his exertions, but even thinner than usual, showing the strain under which he was living. People seemed to realize that here was one who was not going to be spoiled by adulation. He wasn’t going to enjoy himself and his own glory, he would never become blasé and bored; he would go on loving his art and serving it. Nobody in that hall failed to know that he was a Jew, and that this was a time of anguish for his people. Such anti-Semitism as there was in Paris was not among the art-lovers, and to shout “Bravo!” at this young virtuoso was to declare yourself for the cause of freedom and human decency.

  Lanny thought about the great composer, friend of mankind and champion of the oppressed. His concerto had been played badly in his own lifetime, and what a revelation it would have been to him to hear it rendered by a soloist and a conductor, neither having a score. But then Lanny thought: “What would Beethoven think if he could see what is happening in the land of his birth?” So the dreams of art fled, and painful reality took their place. Lanny thought: “The German soul has been captured by Hitler! What can he give it but his own madness and distraction? What can he make of it but an image of his distorted self?”

  X

  Hansi always wanted to be taken straight home after a performance; he was exhausted, and didn’t care for sitting around in cafés. He entered the palace and was about to go to his room, when the telephone rang; Berlin calling, and Hansi said: “That will be Papa, wanting to know how the concert went.”

  He was right, and told his father that everything had gone well. Johannes didn’t ask for particulars; instead he had tidings to impart. “The Reichstag building is burning.”

  “Herrgott!” exclaimed the son, and turned and repeated the words to the others.

  “The Nazis are saying that the Communists set fire to it.”

  “But, Papa, that is crazy!”

  “I must not talk about it. You will find the news in the papers, and do your own guessing. The building has been burning for a couple of hours, and they say that men were seen running through it with torches.”

  “It is a plot!” exclaimed Hansi.

  “I cannot say; but I am glad that you are not here. You must stay where you are for the present. It is a terrible thing.”

  So Hansi did not go to bed for a long while. They sat and talked, and Lanny, who had friends on Le Populaire, called up that paper to get further details. It was believed that the great building was gutted, and the government was charging that it had been deliberately fired by emissaries of the Red International.

  All four of the young people were familiar with that elaborate specimen of the Bismarck style of architecture, and could picture the scenes, both there and elsewhere in the city. “It is a frame-up,” said Bess. “Communists are not terrorists.” Lanny agreed with her, and Irma, whatever she thought, kept it to herself. It was inevitable that every Communist would call it a plot, and every Nazi would be equally certain of the opposite.

  “Really, it is too obvious!” argued Hansi. “The elections less than six days away, and those scoundrels desperate for some means of discrediting us!”

  “The workers will not be fooled!” insisted Bess. “Our party is monolithic.”

  Lanny thought: “The old phonograph record!” But he said: “It’s a terrible thing, as Papa says. They will be raiding Communist headquarters all over Germany tonight. Be glad that you have a good alibi.”

  But neither of the musicians smiled at this idea. In their souls they were taking the blows which they knew must be falling upon their party comrades.

  XI

  What happened in the Reichstag building on that night of February 27 would be a subject of controversy inside and outside of Germany for years to come; but there could be no doubt about what happened elsewhere. Even while the four young people were talking in Paris, the leader of the Berlin S.A., Count Helldorf, was giving orders for the arrest of prominent Communists and Socialists. The list of victims had been prepared in advance, and warrants, each with a photograph of the victim in question. The Count knew that the Marxists were the criminals, he said; and Göring announced that the demented Dutchman who was found in the building with matches and fire-lighters had a Communist party membership card on him.
The statement turned out to be untrue, but it served for the moment.

  Next day Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the safeguarding of the state from the Communist menace,” and after that the Nazis had everything their own way. The prisons were filled with suspects, and the setting up of concentration camps began with a rush. The Prussian government, of which Göring was the head, issued a statement concerning the documents found in the raid on Karl Liebknecht Haus three days before the fire. The Communists had been plotting to burn down public buildings throughout Germany, and to start civil war and revolution on the Russian model; looting had been planned to begin right after the fire and terrorist acts were to be committed against persons and property. The publication of these documents was promised, but no one ever saw them, and the story was dropped as soon as it had served its purpose—which was to justify the abolishing of civil liberties throughout what had been the German Republic.

  XII

  As the evidence began to filter into the newspapers of Britain and France, the young Reds and Pinks spent many an hour trying to make up their minds about one of the great “frame-ups” of history. What brain had conceived it? What hand had carried it out? For the former role their suspicions centered upon a German World War aviator who had fled to Sweden, where he had become a dope addict and had been in a psychopathic institution. Hermann Göring was a great hulk of a man, absurdly vain, with a fondness for gaudy uniforms which was to make him the butt of Berlin wits; he was also a man of immense energy, brutal and unscrupulous, the perfect type of those freebooters who had ravaged the borders of the German empire in medieval times, had given themselves titles, and now had huge white marble statues of themselves in the Siegesallée, known to the Berlin wits as “the Cemetery of Art.”

  Hermann Göring had got his titles: Minister without Portfolio, Federal Commissioner for Air Transport, Prussian Minister of the Interior. They carried the same grants of power as in the old free-booting days, but unfortunately they were subject to elections; on the following Sunday the proletariat might go to the polls and strip Hermann of his glories—and this would be extremely annoying to a man of aristocratic tastes, a friend of the former Crown Prince and of Thyssen. As it happened, the man of action was in position to act, for his official residence was connected with the Reichstag building by a long underground passage; also he had at his command a well-trained army, eager to execute any command he might give. What did a building amount to, in comparison with the future of the N.S.D.A.P.?

  The man whom the Nazis were finally to convict of the crime was a feeble-minded Dutchman who had been expelled from the Communist party of that country and had been a tramp all over Europe. The police maintained that at his original examination he had told a detailed story of setting fire to the curtains of the restaurant with matches and fire-lighters. But the restaurant wasn’t the only room that burned; there had been a heavy explosion in the session chamber, and that vast place had become a mass of flames and explosive gases. The head of the Berlin fire department had observed trains of gasoline on the floors of the building. Immediately after the fire he announced that the police had carted away a truckload of unburned incendiary materials from the scene of the fire; and immediately after making this announcement he was dismissed from his post.

  Such were the details which the young radicals abroad put together and published in their papers. But the papers which might have spread such news in Germany had all been suppressed; their editors were in prison and many were being subjected to cruel tortures. A sickening thing to know that your comrades, idealists whom you had trusted and followed, were being pounded with rubber hose, danced upon with spiked boots, having their kidneys kicked loose and their testicles crushed. Still more terrible to know that civil rights were being murdered in one of the world’s most highly developed nations; that the homeland of Goethe and Bach was in the hands of men who were capable of planning and perpetrating such atrocities.

  XIII

  The fire had the intended effect of throwing all Germany into a panic of fear. Not merely the Nazis, but Papen and Hugenberg were denouncing the Red conspirators over the radio. All the new techniques of propaganda were set at work to convince the voters that the Fatherland stood in deadly peril of a Communist revolution. Friday was proclaimed the “Day of the Awakening Nation.” The Nazis marched with torchlights, and on the mountain-tops and on high towers in the cities great bonfires burned—fires of liberation, they were called. “O Lord, make us free!” prayed Hitler over the radio, and loud-speakers spread his words in every market-square in every town.

  On Sunday the people voted, and the Nazi vote increased from nearly twelve million to more than seventeen million. But the Communists lost only about a million, and the Socialists practically none. The Catholics actually gained, in spite of all the suppressions; so it appeared that the German people were not so easy to stampede after all. The Nazis still didn’t have a majority of the Reichstag deputies, so they couldn’t form a government without the support and approval of the aristocrats. What was going to come out of that?

  The answer was that Adi Hitler was going to have his way. He was going right on, day after day, pushing to his goal, and nobody was going to stop him. Objections would be raised in the Cabinet, and he would do what he had done in party conferences—argue, storm, plead, denounce, and threaten. He would make it impossible for anyone else to be heard, raise such a disturbance as could not be withstood, prove that he could outlast any opposition, that his frenzy was uncontrollable, his will irrepressible. But behind this seeming madness would be a watchful eye and a shrewd, calculating brain. Adi would know exactly what he was doing and how far he could go; if the opposition became too strong, he would give way, he would make promises—and then next day it would be discovered that his followers were going right ahead doing what he wanted done, and he would be saying that he couldn’t control them. If it was something serious, like the Reichstag fire, he would know nothing about it, he would be completely taken aback, astounded, horrified; but it would be too late—the building would be burned, the victim would be dead, the die would be cast.

  For more than a decade he had been training his followers to these tactics. They must be a band of desperadoes, stopping at nothing to get their way. Nothing on earth or in heaven was sacred except their cause; nothing was wrong that helped their cause and nothing was right that delayed it for a single hour. Individually and collectively they must be the most energetic and capable of criminals, also the most shameless and determined liars. They must be able to say anything, with the most bland and innocent expression, and if they were caught they must admit nothing, but turn the charge against the other fellow; he was the liar, he was the crook, he alone was capable of every wrongdoing. Adolf Hitler had never admitted anything to anybody; he had never told a lie in his life, had never committed any improper action; he was a consecrated soul, who lived and was ready to die for one single cause, the triumph of National Socialism and the liberation of the German Volk.

  For ten years he had been organizing two private armies of young men, several hundred thousand fanatics imbued with that spirit: the Sturm Abteilung, or Storm Division, and the Schutz Staffel, or Defense Formation. They were the men who were going to carry out his will, and by now they knew it so well that they could act while he was eating, resting, sleeping—even while he was telling the world that he didn’t want them to do what they were doing. Even if he told them to stop they would go right ahead to crush the last foe of National Socialism inside the Fatherland, and make the streets free to the brown battalions—the promise of that Horst Wessel Lied which Hitler had taught them to sing.

  XIV

  A dreadful series of events to watch; and the fact that you were physically safe from them wasn’t enough for persons with any sensitiveness of soul. Hansi and Bess couldn’t eat, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t think about anything except what was happening to their friends and associates at home. The Stormtroopers came when the
y pleased and did what they pleased; the police had orders to co-operate with them. They came to people’s homes at night and took them away, and nothing more was heard of them. But gradually, through secret channels, word began to leak out concerning the dreadful happenings in the cellars of the Nazi headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse, in the Columbus-Haus, and in the old military prison in the General-Papen-Strasse.

  Papa wrote brief notes, carefully guarded; he said: “Don’t worry about us, we have friends.” But Hansi and Bess knew a hundred people to worry about, and they read all the papers they could get and tried to put this item of news together with that and guess about the fate of their “monolithic party.” They wrote anxious letters and then worried because no replies came. What had become of this leader and of that? Surely some must have escaped, and it didn’t take long to get from Berlin to Paris.

  Very difficult to practice music under such circumstances. What did the turn of a phrase matter, when madmen were loose in one’s homeland, when a great civilization was being strangled. But the young couple had made engagements and had to keep them. They had to let Lanny and Irma drive them to Juan, dress themselves properly, and go to Emily’s villa and play a program, not too mournful. When an encore was called for, Hansi played one of his favorites, Achron’s Jewish Prayer, and he put two thousand years of weeping and wailing into it; it was quite wonderful, and the fashionable audience was deeply moved. The tears ran down Hansi’s own cheeks, and he would have liked to say: “It is my people, weeping now in Germany.”