Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  “I don’t understand,” said Hermann, almost in despair. “Why should we have to be told things and then helped? Why can’t he let us alone? Why did you say I was to be told?”

  “Do you want me to hear things from the Knight that you’re left out of-like a boy of twelve who’s left out of men’s conversation?”

  “Well, no; but—why not someone else? Oh, I mean—I don’t know.”

  “Hermann, you love me, don’t you? You trust me?”

  “Yes,” said Hermann in a low voice.

  “In spite of my being an Englishman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, if you can love and trust an Englishman, can you grasp the idea that there might be something important, some knowledge, some wisdom, that’s for all of us, for all men alike?”

  “Yes—I think I see—but not, Alfred”—Hermann’s voice dropped to a whisper—“not if it’s against Germany.”

  “The Knight is German.”

  “I know—oh, I know it can’t be.”

  “I mean the Knight never could be against what is good in Germany. Indeed, Hermann, he’s a very wonderful man, your family Knight. But shall we go to sleep now? It’s getting late.”

  “Yes,” Hermann said thankfully. “You’re to have the bed.”

  “No, no. The sacks will do beautifully for me.”

  “Because of your knee, please, Alfred,” Hermann pleaded. “Now you might just do that for me if I’ve got to be made wretched in some frightful way to-morrow.”

  “Oh, all right, lad. Have it your own way.”

  Hermann took off his boots, lay down on the sacks and turned his face to the wall. Soon, in spite of his fear and anxiety, he was fast asleep. Alfred, contrary to his custom, lay awake for some time.

  And in his big house, on his comfortable bed, old von Hess also lay awake with a pain in his side and icy doubt shivering up and down his spine. Emotionalism gripped him, who thought he had done with it for ever long before, and would not be dispersed. His discarded childhood religion and ethic rose up like giants, and he himself, reduced to the dimensions of a child, cowered before them in impotence. Not for many hours could he nerve himself to do battle, and when he did there was no decisive result. When at last he went to sleep, exhausted, the illusion and the doubts were still there, but when he woke up in the healing daylight they had vanished.

  In the morning he looked rather hollow-eyed, and the slightly swollen pink look of his fine aquiline nose gave him a dissipated air. But he was perfectly calm, and when Alfred and Hermann were ushered into his writing-room, Hermann knew that whatever he was, he was not insane. His grey eyes looked soberly over both men, and then at the Nazi servant who had brought them in.

  “Henrich.”

  “My lord.”

  “No one is to disturb me, or to come any nearer this room than the door at the end of the passage. Stay there yourself till I send for you. You understand? On no account am I to be disturbed.”

  “My lord,” the servant clicked his heels and saluted.

  “Dismiss.”

  Heinrich went out. Hermann and Alfred were still at attention.

  “At ease. No, I mean sit down, both of you.”

  Hermann gasped. Never before had he sat in the presence of this or any other Knight.

  “Sit down, Hermann,” said the Knight testily. “Do what I tell you, can’t you?” His temporary irritation was the first sign he had given of any nervous strain.

  Hermann hastily sat down on the chair next to Alfred’s. The Knight was facing them, sitting behind a big desk, with his elbows on it and his hands lightly clasped. Hermann, painfully embarrassed by sitting before a Knight, fixed his eyes on the big ruby in the ring. Alfred watched the Knight’s face with concentrated attention.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” he said, with a little cough. “Especially as neither of you will be able to understand all I’m going to tell you. Alfred may be able to understand about half, Hermann almost nothing. Perhaps I had better start with a personal explanation. Hermann, have you ever heard the expression in these parts, ‘mad as a von Hess’?”

  “Yes, highly-born, I—er—have heard it once or twice.”

  “My family is eccentric. It is not mad, none of them have ever been mad, though I really don’t know why not, but they are eccentric, and for a good reason. Some of them,” he added, “have committed suicide. Also for a good reason. A far better one than causes the very numerous other suicides among German men.”

  “Are there——” Alfred started, then stopped. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Yes, there are, Alfred. But I shall come to that in due course. Suicides, yes, more and more every year. Well, the reason for the von Hess eccentricity is a family curse of an unusual kind, a family curse of knowledge. It’s the reason for the suicides among them. Weak men cannot bear knowledge.” His eyes rested on Hermann, then passed to Alfred. “I think,” he said, “that I will speak in English. Can you follow it well enough, Hermann?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want to make absolutely certain that Alfred understands everything I have to tell. I’m proud to say that most of the von Hess men have been strong. They were able to live with the curse and pass it on to their sons in due course. But though they have not let the knowledge kill them (except for a cowardly few) they have none of them passed it on to anyone else outside the family. I am the first to do so, because I am the last von Hess. Had I not been I should have evaded responsibility, like the others. But, as Hermann knows, my three sons were killed all together in an aeroplane crash many years ago, and by a curious fate none of them had at that time any male children themselves. I was not able to beget any more sons—the family in that crash came to an end. I could adopt a Knight’s orphan, but I do not wish to. I never considered it seriously. It is unfair to inflict a curse on other men’s blood. Besides, a family curse of this kind is a possession which happily or unhappily gives the von Hess Knights a different status from others of their order, and it was repugnant to me that another man’s son should share it. Men are, fortunately, so foolish that they can be proud of a curse so long as it is a family one, and no von Hess throughout these generations and centuries has, though many of them must have beensorely tempted, destroyed the curse itself.”

  “Can Knights’ families really maintain themselves from father to son for hundreds and hundreds of years?” asked Alfred, as the Knight paused.

  “They cannot. The ranks of the Knights are constantly being filled up with Nazi male infants, for whom no particular man claims paternity. But curb your shrewdness, Alfred. I shall come to things like that in time. The von Hess family, by some extraordinary luck, has never lacked male heirs. They have a crooked finger.” The Knight raised his left hand. “It comes and goes.”

  Hermann was dazedly thinking, “With Nazi infants? Nazi infants, Nazi infants. It comes and goes.”

  “The first von Hess,” said the Knight, “is supposed to have been a friend of Hitler’s. But I’m not certain about that. There were two men of the same name. Rudolf von Hess is in the heroes’ calendar, but the von Hess, the important one, lived about a hundred and fifty years after Hitler died.”

  (“Died?” thought Hermann. “Died? Men die. Oh, Holy Thunderer, if I could get away!”)

  “His name was Friedrich, like mine. Well, this von Hess left two things to the family. One he acquired. One he made. He acquired a photograph, and he made a book. I think that I had better show you the photograph first.”

  The Knight put his hand into a drawer in the desk and drew out a hard stiff sheet of something wrapped in thin paper. He laid it on the desk in front of him, resting his hands lightly upon it.

  “This is not, of course, the original print. It has been reproduced many times, and the plate itself has been renewed from time to time by photographing a particularly clear good print. But I give both you men my word that as far as I know this is an accurate photographic representation of our Lord Hitler as he was in his lifetime.
You have both seen innumerable statues and pictures; you know, as well as you know your best friend’s face, what his physical characteristics were. Colossal height, long thick golden hair, a great manly golden beard spreading over his chest, deep sea-blue eyes, the noble rugged brow—and all the rest. But this is he.”

  The Knight unwrapped the photograph and passed it to Alfred.

  “Hold it by the edge,” he said.

  Hermann was so wildly excited he could hardly see. His eyes blurred over, he rubbed them with furious impatience and looked again. He stared and stared, panting like a man running. He saw a group of four figures, two a little behind, two in front. The central figure of the picture was smallish (the two behind were taller than he), he was dark, his eyes were brown or a deep hazel, his face was hairless as a woman’s except for a small black growth on the upper lip. His hair was cropped short except for one lank piece a little longer which fell half over his forehead. He was dressed in uncomely tight trousers like a woman’s instead of the full masculine breeches of all the statues and pictures, and his form was unheroic, even almost unmale. Where were the broad shoulders, the mighty chest, the lean stomach and slender waist and hips? This little man was almost fat. He had, oh horror! an unmistakable bulginess below the arch of the ribs. He had a paunch. He had also a charming smile. Looking almost level-eyed at the young stripling beside him, his face was radiant, its ignoble rather soft features all made pleasing through happiness. The boy who basked in the sunshine of the God’s favour was looking, not at him, but straight at the camera. He, though immature, had more of the holy German physique than either the Lord Hitler or the two behind. He had great thick long plaits of hair so light that it must have been yellow falling forward over his shoulders and down over his chest, a noble open forehead, large blue or light grey eyes, a square jaw and a wide mouth open in a half smile, just showing big white strong front teeth. He was dressed rather like a Knight’s son at his First Blood Communion at fourteen, but the pale robe of this centuries-dead boy came down to little below his knees. His carriage was upright and graceful without being stiff. He looked, to Hermann’s staring, protruding eyes, more noble, more German, more manly, despite his youth, than the small dark soft-looking Lord Hitler.

  Alfred, as might have been expected, recovered himself first.

  “I don’t see,” he said, “that it’s very important really that he doesn’t look like what he’s supposed to. Thousands of Germans are small and dark, and if they have too much to eat they get fat. That doesn’t make him not a great man.”

  “He was a great man. But was he God?”

  “I never thought so. Not after I was sixteen.”

  “But there’s more in the picture than just his appearance,” said the Knight. “Who do you think he has been talking to and is smiling at?”

  “A handsome boy of about fourteen, a Knight’s son, but how should I know who he is? Is that Rudolf von Hess?”

  “Not,” said the Knight. “It’s a girl.”

  “A girl!” cried Alfred, wholly incredulous. Hermann merely gasped.

  “A girl of about fifteen or sixteen. A young woman. Look at her breasts.”

  What they had not before seen, being so certain that the figure almost touching the Lord Hitler’s must be male, now became plain to them. Under the folds of the soft short robe were full round feminine breasts.

  “A girl!” Alfred breathed softly. A girl as lovely as a boy, with a boy’s hair and a boy’s noble carriage, and a boy’s direct and fearless gaze. He and Hermann gazed and gazed, wholly ignoring the other people in the photograph. Alfred grew pale and Hermann very red. The Knight watched the younger men with much sympathy. He was too old to care now, but many a time when his blood was warmer had he got out his secret photograph to look at the face of that lovely German girl.

  Again Alfred recovered himself first. He took his eyes with difficulty away from the photograph and asked in a low, uncertain voice, “Is it a—a special girl? A Knight’s woman—daughter, something like that?”

  “It’s an ordinary German girl, a Nazi’s daughter. Only special perhaps in being so tall. You see, she’s nearly as tall as he is.”

  “The girls, just any girls, were like that?”

  “Yes. Dressed like that, with long hair, beautiful, by no means forbidden the presence of the Holy One. All that came afterwards, and it was not his fault.”

  “Then,” Hermann spoke for the first time in thick German, “it is a lie to say he had nothing to do with women. It’s a lie, a lie.”

  “In the sense that he avoided their presence completely, yes. In the sense that he was not born of a woman, yes. In the sense that he excluded them from the human race and its divisions, allowing them neither nationality nor class, yes. But you must remember that when Friedrich von Hess lived Hitler was already a legend. The records of his personal life, if there were any, were lost or destroyed. It is certain that he never married, but whether he had intercourse with women in a sexual sense or not, we do not know.”

  “Married?” said Alfred. “I’m sorry, sir, that’s a German word I don’t know.”

  “It’s a lost word. It occurs nowhere except in von Hess’s book. Being married means living in a house with one woman and your children, and going on living continually with her until one of you dies. It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? that men ever lived with women. But they did.”

  “The women were different,” said Alfred. “You can see that from this photograph.”

  “You can,” agreed the Knight. “Many a time I, and probably every other von Hess, have gone out after looking at that picture and seen how different women are. Thank God we were all very practical men. There had to be sons. There were sons. But about marriage, Alfred, you may not know it, but the Christians in their communities don’t live like we do, men and women separately. They live in families, that is the man, the woman, and their children, sons and daughters, all together. I don’t know how they do it, because their women look just like ours.”

  “I know they do,” said Alfred absently. “I found out about Christians years ago. It’s part of their religion to live with the women.”

  “I think,” said the Knight, “that you had better give me back the photograph, you are not attending.”

  “May we see it again before we go?” Alfred asked. Hermann said nothing. He released a long breath and followed the photograph avidly with his eyes until the Knight had wrapped it up and put it away.

  “Yes, Alfred. But it’s no good, you know. It only makes one sad and empty and full of discontent. Perhaps a quarter of the burden of the curse on my family results in knowing what women used to be. There are none like that now, not anywhere in the world. There could be none for hundreds of years, no matter what happened. It must take generations and generations to make a woman like that one in the photograph.”

  “But why have they let themselves go down so?” Alfred asked.

  “They acquiesced in the Reduction of Women, which was a deliberate thing deliberately planned by German men. Women will always be exactly what men want them to be. They have no will, no character, and no souls; they are only a reflection of men. So nothing that they are or can become is ever their fault or their virtue. If men want them to be beautiful they will be beautiful. If men want them to appear to have wills and characters they will develop something that looks like a will and a character though it is really only a sham. If men want them to have an appearance of perfect freedom, even an appearance of masculine power, they will develop a simulacrum of those things. But what men cannot do, never have been able to do, is to stop this blind submission and cause the women to ignore them and disobey them. It’s the tragedy of the human race.”

  “I can’t see that, sir,” said Alfred. “It must be right for women to submit to men. Anything else would be unnatural.”

  “It would be all right,” said the Knight slowly, “if men were infallible: if they always caused the women to be what best suits the health and happiness of
the race. But they have made a mistake in their leadership. Little local mistakes do not matter, but a mistake which includes the whole world—for the Japanese with their slavish imitativeness copied it from us—is an appalling and ghastly tragedy. We Germans have made women be what they cannot with all their good will go on being—not for centuries on end—the lowest common denominator, a pure animal—and the race is coming to extinction. The men are committing suicide, but the women, whose discouragement is entirely unconscious, are not being born.”

  Hermann was gazing with his mouth open, but Alfred sat thoughtful and very serious. “Yes,” he said. “There are too many men. I thought it was local. But we don’t kill ourselves like you do.”

  “It doesn’t really matter whether you do or not. Even in Germany there is not, by a long way, a woman for every man; in England the balance is worse, that’s all. You will get no more children than we shall.”

  “I cannot think,” said Alfred, after a pause, “why men should ever have wanted girls to be different from that girl in the photograph. They must have been all mad, the men.”

  “They had a reason. The girl in that picture, with her beauty which is like the beauty of a boy, has also the power of choice and rejection. You men think of yourselves as seeing her and having her. But she need not have you. I don’t mean that she can resist you as a child can, but that the law, made by men, will protect her. She can reject any man even though he plead with her in a way that is quite outside our sense of manly dignity; she can reject every man throughout her life. She has the right to reject der Fuehrer, though probably she would not. But she has the right to refuse any or every man, and if any man infringes it he is a criminal. How would you like that, Alfred?”

  “It’s a new idea to me,” Alfred confessed. “Couldn’t they be beautiful and have no rejection right?”

  “I don’t think so. You could, of course, let women grow their hair and dress in clothes which display their intrinsically ill-balanced bodies to the very best advantage. But I think that the haunting loveliness of that German girl comes partly from her knowledge that she has the power of choice and rejection, and partly because she knows she can be loved. Men cannot love female animals, but they can and have loved women whom they have moulded to a more human and masculine pattern, just as we love our friends. Men in those days could love their women, could feel weary for their presence, even when they were old and far past child-bearing. It’s incomprehensible, but it’s true. And now I will expose one more lie, and then I will go back to von Hess. You, Hermann and Alfred, have both been taught that the Christians are a race of subhuman people, ranking even below women in general.”