Maria felt something licking at her feet, like the tongue of a great,
gentle dog. She bent down to fumble for the animal’s head, and felt
that it was water into which she was groping.
From where did the water come? It came silently. It did not splash.
Neither did it throw up waves. It just rose—unhurriedly, yet
persistently. It was not colder than the air round about. It lapped
about Maria’s ankles.
She snatched her feet back. She sat, crouched down, trembling,
listening for the water which could not be heard.
From where did it come?
It was said that a river wound its way deep under the city. Joh
Fredersen had walled up its course when he built the subterranean
city, the wonder of the world, for the workmen of Metropolis. It was
also said that the stream fed a mighty water-basin and that there were
pump-works there, which were powerful enough, inside of less than ten
hours either completely to empty or to fill the water-basin—in which
there was room for a medium-sized city. One thing was certain—that,
in the subterranean, workmen’s city, the throbbing of these pumps was
constantly to be heard, as a soft, incessant pulse-beat, if one laid
one’s head against a wall—and that, if this pulse-beat should ever
become silent, no other interpretation would be conceivable than that
the pumps had stopped, and that then the river was rising.
But they had never—never stopped.
And now—? From where was the silent water coming?—Was it still
rising—?
She bent forward. She did not have to stretch her hand down very low to
touch the cool brow of the water.
Now she felt, too, that it was flowing. It was making its way with
great certainty of aim in one direction. It was making its way towards
the subterranean city—
Old books tell of saintly women, whose smile at the moment of preparing
themselves to gain the martyr’s crown, was of such sweetness that the
torturers fell at their feet and hardened heathens praised the name of
God.
But Maria’s smile was, perhaps, of a still sweeter kind. For, when
setting about her race with the silent water, she thought, not of the
crown of eternal bliss, but only of death and of the man she loved—
Yes, now the water seemed horribly cool, as her slender feet dipped
down into it, and it murmured as she ran along through it. It soaked
itself into the hem of her dress, clinging tight and making progress
more and more difficult. But that was not the worst. The worst was that
the water also began to have a voice.
The water quoth: “Do you know, beautiful Maria, that I am fleeter than
the fleetest foot? I am stroking your sweet ankles. I shall soon clutch
at your knees. No one has ever embraced your tender hips. But I shall
do so, and before your steps number a thousand more. And I do not know,
beautiful Maria, if you will reach your destination, before you can
refuse me your breast....
“Beautiful Maria, Doomsday has come! It is bringing the
thousand-year-old dead to life. Know, that I have flooded them out of
their niches and that the dead are floating along behind you! Do not
look round, Maria, do not look round! For two skeletons are quarrelling
about the skull which floats between them—swirling around and grinning.
And a third, to whom the skull really belongs, is rearing up within me
and falling upon them both....
“Beautiful Maria, how sweet are your hips.... Is the man whom you love
never to find that out? Beautiful Maria, listen to what I say to you:
only a little to one side of this way, a flight of stairs leads steeply
upward, leading to freedom.... Your knees are trembling ... how sweet
that is! Do you think to overcome your weakness by clasping your hands?
You call upon God, but believe me: God does not hear you! Since I came
upon the earth as the great flood, to destroy all in existence but
Noah’s ark, God has been deaf to the scream of His creatures. Or did
you think I had forgotten how the mothers screamed then? Have you more
responsibility on your conscience than God on His? Turn back, beautiful
Maria, turn back!
“Now you are making me angry, Maria—now I shall kill you! Why are you
letting those hot, salty drops fall down into me? I am clasping you
around your breast, but it no longer stirs me. I want your throat and
your gasping mouth! I want your hair and your weeping eyes!
“Do you believe you have escaped me? No, beautiful Maria! No—now I
shall fetch you with a thousand others—with all the thousand which you
wanted to save....”
She dragged her dripping body up from the water. She crawled upwards,
over stone slabs; she found the door. She pushed it open and slammed it
behind her, peering to see if the water were already lapping over the
threshold.
Not yet ... not yet. But how much longer?
She could not see a soul as far as her eye could reach. The streets,
the squares, lay as if dead—bathed in the whiteness of the moonlight.
But she was mistaken—or was the light growing weaker and yellower from
second to second?
An impact, which threw her against the nearest wall, ran through the
earth. The iron door through which she had come flew from its bolts and
gaped open. Black and silent, the water slipped over the threshold.
Maria collected herself. She screamed with her whole lungs:
“The water’s coming in—!”
She ran across the square. She called for the guard, which, being on
constant duty, had to give the alarm signal in danger of any kind.
The guard was not there.
A wild upheaval of the earth dragged the girl’s feet from under her
body and hurled her to the ground. She raised herself to her knees and
stretched up her hands in order, herself, to set the siren howling.
But the sound which broke from the metal throat was only a whimper,
like the whimpering of a dog, and the light grew more and more pale and
yellow.
Like a dark, crawling beast, in no hurry, the water wound its way
across the smooth street.
But the water did not stand alone in the street. Suddenly, in the midst
of a puzzling and very frightening solitude, a little half-naked child
was standing there: her eyes, which were still being protected, by some
dream, from the all too real, were staring at the beast, at the dark,
crawling beast, which was licking at its bare little feet.
With a scream, in which distress and deliverance were equally mingled,
Maria flew to the child and picked it up in her arms.
“Is there nobody here but you, child?” she asked, with a sudden sob.
“Where is your father?”
“Gone....”
“Where is your mother?”
“Gone....”
Maria could understand nothing. Since her flight from Rotwang’s house,
she had been hurled from horror to horror, without grasping a single
thing. She still took the grating of the earth, the jerking impacts,
the roar of the awful, tearing thunder the water which gushed up from
the shattered depths, to be the effects of the unchained elements. Yet
she could not believe that there existed mothers who would not throw
themselves as a barrier before their children when the earth opened her
womb to bring forth horror into the world.
Only—the water which crawled up nearer and nearer, the impacts which
racked the earth, the light which became paler and paler, gave her no
time to think. With the child in her arms, she ran from house to house,
calling to the others, which had hidden themselves.
Then they came, stumbling and crying, coming in troops, ghastly
spectres, like children of stone, passionlessly begotten and grudgingly
born. They were like little corpses in mean little shrouds, aroused
to wakefulness on Doomsday by the voice of the angel, rising from out
rent-open graves. They clustered themselves around Maria, screaming
because the water, the cool water, was licking at their feet.
Maria shouted—hardly able to shout any more. There was in her voice
the sharp cry of the mother-bird which sees winged Death above its
brood. She waded about among the child-bodies, ten at her hands, at
her dress, the others following closely, pushed along, torn along,
with the stream. Soon the street was a wave of children’s heads above
which the pale, raised-up hands flitted like seagulls. And Maria’s cry
was drowned by the wailing of the children and by the laughter of the
pursuing water.
The light in the Neon-lamps became reddish, flickering rhythmically
and throwing ghostly shadows. The street sloped. There was the
mustering-ground. But the huge elevators hung dead on their cables.
Ropes, twisted from ropes—metal ropes, thick as a man’s thigh, hung in
the air, torn asunder. Blackish oil was welling in a leisurely channel
from an exploded pipe. And over everything lay a dry vapour as if from
heated iron and glowing stones.
Deep in the darkness of distant alleys the gloom took on a brownish
hue. A fire was smouldering there....
“Go up—!” whispered Maria’s dry lips. But she was not able to say the
words. Winding stairs led upwards. The staircase was narrow—nobody
used the staircase which ran by the certain, infallible elevators.
Maria crowded the children up the steps. But, up there, there reigned
a darkness of impenetrable gloom and density. None of the children
ventured to ascend alone.
Maria scrambled up. She counted the steps. Like the rushing of a
thousand wings came the sound of the children’s feet behind her, in
the narrow spiral. She did not know how long she had been climbing
up. Innumerable hands were clutching her damp dress. She dragged her
burdens upward, praying, moaning the while—praying only for strength
for another hour.
“Don’t cry, little brothers!” she stammered. “My little sisters, please
don’t cry.”
Children were screaming, down in the depths—and the hundred windings
of the stairway gave echo’s trumpet to each cry:
“Mother—! Mother—!”
And once more:
“The water’s coming—!”
Stop and lie down, halfway up the stairs—? No!
“Little sisters! Little brothers—do come along!”
Higher—winding ever and always higher upward; then, at last, a wide
landing. Greyish light from above. A walled-in room; not yet the upper
world, but its fore-court. A short, straight flight of stairs upon
which lay a shaft of light. The opening, a trap-door, which seemed to
be pressed inwards. Between the door and the square of the wall, a
cleft, as narrow as a cat’s body.
Maria saw that. She did not know what it meant. She had the uncertain
feeling of something not being as it ought to be. But she did not want
to think about it. With an almost violent movement she tore her hands,
her gown, free from the children’s tugging fingers, and dashed, hurled
forward far more by her desperate will than by her benumbed feet,
through the empty room and up the steep stairway.
She stretched out her hands and tried to raise the pressed-in door. It
did not budge. Once more. No result. Head, arms, shoulders pushing,
hips and knees pressing, as if to burst their sinews. No result. The
door did not yield by a hair’s breadth. If a child had tried to push
the cathedral from its place it could not have acted more foolishly nor
ineffectually.
For, upon the door, which alone led the way out of the depths, there
towered, as high as houses, the corpses of the dead engines, which,
when madness first broke out over Metropolis, had been the terrible
playthings of the mob. Train upon train, with carriages thundering
along, all lights burning and on full power, had rushed along the
rails, lashed by the bawling of the mob, had fallen upon each other,
had become mixed and piled up together, had burnt down and were now
lying, half-melted, still smouldering, a mass of ruins. And one, single
lamp, remaining undamaged, threw the shaft of its sharp, corrosive
light over the chaos, from the steel breast of the hindmost engine.
But Maria knew nothing of all this. She did not need to know.
Sufficient for her that the door, which was the only means of
deliverance for her and the children she wanted to save, remained
inexorable, immovable, and finally, with bleeding hands and shoulders,
with battered head, and feet crippled with numbness, she was obliged to
resign herself to the incomprehensible, to the murderous.
She raised her face to the ray of light which fell upon her. The words
of a little, childish prayer, now no longer intelligible, ran through
her head. She dropped her head and sat down on the stairs.
The children stood in silence, crowded closely together, under the
curse of something which, though they could not understand it, was very
close above them.
“Little brothers, little sisters,” said Maria’s voice, very
affectionately, “can you all understand what I am saying?”
“Yes,” floated up from the children.
“The door is closed.... We must wait a little.... Someone is sure to
come and open it for us. Will you be patient and not be frightened?”
“Yes,” came an answer, as a sigh.
“Sit down as well as you can....”
The children obeyed.
“I am going to tell you a story,” said Maria.