“Freder—!!! Grot—!!! Freder—!!!”
Josaphat shouted so that his voice cracked, and raced with the bounds
of a harried wolf, through passages, across steps of the great
pump-works. His shouts were not heard. In the machine-rooms were
wounded machines in agony, wanting to obey and not being able. The door
was closed. Josaphat hammered against it with his fists, with his feet.
It was Grot who opened it to him, revolver in hand.
“What in the name of seething hell....”
“Get out of the way—! Where’s Freder—?”
“Here! What’s the matter?”
“Freder, they’ve taken Maria captive—”
“What?”
“They’ve taken Maria captive and they’re killing her—!”
Freder reeled. Josaphat dragged him towards the door. Like a log, Grot
stood in his way, his lips mumbling, his eyes glaring.
“The woman who killed my machine—!”
“Shut up, you fool—get out of the way!”
“Grot!” A sound born half of madness....
“Yes, Mr. Freder!”
“You stop with the machines!”
“Yes, Mr. Freder!”
“Come on, Josaphat—!”
The sound of running, running, retreating, ghost-like.
Grot turned round. He saw the paralysed machines. He lifted his arm and
struck the machine with the full of his fist, as one strikes a stubborn
horse between the eyes.
“The woman,” he shouted with a howl, “who saved my little children—!”
And he flung himself upon the machine with grinding teeth....
“Tell me—!” said Freder, almost softly. It was as if he did not want
to waste an atom of strength. His face was a white stone in which his
two eyes flamed like jewels. He jumped to the wheel of the little car
in which Josaphat had come. For the pump-works lay at the extreme end
of the great Metropolis.
It was still night.
The car started.
“We must go terribly out of our way,” said Josaphat, fixing the
flashlight. “Many bridges between the houseblocks are blown up....”
“Tell me,” said Freder. His teeth met, chattering, as if he were cold.
“I don’t know who found it out.... Probably the women, who were
thinking of their children and wanted to get home. You can’t get
anything out of the raving multitude. But anyway: When they saw the
black water running towards them from the shafts of the underground
railway, and when they realised that the pump-works, the safe-guard of
their city, had been destroyed by the stopping of the machines, then
they went mad with despair. They say that some mothers, blind and deaf
to all remonstrance, tried, as if possessed, to dive down through the
flooded shafts, and just the terrible absoluteness of the futility of
any attempt at rescue has turned them into beasts and they lust for
revenge....”
“Revenge ... on whom?”
“On the girl who seduced them....”
“On the girl...?”
“Go on....”
“Freder, the engine can’t keep up that speed....”
“Go on....”
“I do not know how it happened that the girl ran into their hands. I
was on my way to you when I saw a woman running across the cathedral
square, with her hair flying, the roaring rabble behind her. There has
been the very hell of a night anyway. The Gothics are parading through
the town scourging themselves, and they have put the monk Desertus on
the cross. They are preaching: Doomsday had come, and it seems that
they have converted a good many already, for September is crouching
before the smoking ruins of Yoshiwara. A troop of torch dancers joined
itself to the flagellants and, with frothing curses upon the Mother of
Abominations, the great whore of Babylon, they burned Yoshiwara down to
the ground....”
“The girl, Josaphat—”
“She did not reach the cathedral, Freder, where she wanted to take
refuge. They overtook her on the steps because she fell on the
steps—her gown hung down in ribbons from her body. A woman, whose
white eyes were glowing with insanity shrieked out, as one inspired
with the gift of prophecy:
“‘Look—! Look—! The saints have climbed down from their pedestals and
will not let the witch into the cathedral.’”
“And—”
“Before the cathedral they are erecting a bonfire on which to burn the
witch....”
Freder said nothing. He bent down lower. The car groaned and leapt.
Josaphat buried his hand in Freder’s arm.
“Stop—for God’s sake!!!”
The car stopped.
“We must go to the left—don’t you see? The bridge has gone!”
“The next bridge?”
“Is impassable!”
“Listen....”
“What is there to hear—”
“Don’t you hear anything?”
“No....”
“You _must_ hear it—!”
“But what, Freder—?”
“Shrieks ... distant shrieks....”
“I can’t hear anything....”
“But you _must_ be able to hear it—!!”
“Won’t you drive on, Freder?”
“And don’t you see that the air over there is getting bright red?”
“From the torches, Freder....”
“They don’t burn so brightly....”
“Freder, we’re losing time here—!”
Freder did not answer. He was staring at the tatters of the iron bridge
which were dangling down into the ravine of the street. He must cross
over, yes, he must cross over, to get to the cathedral by a short
cut....
The frame-support of a ripped-open tower had fallen over from this side
of the street to the other, gleaming metallically in the uncertain
light of the fading night.
“Get out,” said Freder.
“Why?”
“Get out, I tell you....”
“I want to know why?”
“Because I’m going across there....”
“Across where?”
“Across the frame-support.”
“Going to drive across—?”
“Yes.”
“It’s suicide, Freder!”
“I didn’t ask you to accompany me. Get out!”
“I won’t permit it—it’s blazing lunacy!”
“The fire over there is blazing, man—!”
The words seemed not to come from Freder’s mouth.
Every wound of the dying city seemed to be roaring out of him.
“Drive on!” said Josaphat through clenched teeth.
The car gave a jump. It climbed. The narrow irons received the sucking,
skidding wheels, with an evil, maliciously hypocritical sound.
Blood was trickling from Freder’s lips.
“Don’t—don’t put the brake on—for God’s sake don’t put the brake
on!” shouted the man beside him making a clutch of madness at Freder’s
hand. The car, already half-slipping, shot forward again. A split in
the frame-work—over, onwards. Behind them the dead frame-work crashed
into space amid shrieks.
They reached the other side with an impetus which was no longer to
be checked. The wheels rushed into blackness and nothing. The car
over-turned. Freder fell and got up again. The other remained lying.
“Josaphat—!!”
“Run! It’s nothing!—I swear to God it’s nothing!” a distorted smile
upon the white face. “Think of Maria—and run!”
And Freder raced off.
Josaphat turned his head. He saw the blackness of the street flashing
bright red. He heard the screams of the thousands. He thought dully,
with a thrust of his fist in the air: “Shouldn’t I like to be Grot now,
to be able to swear properly....”
Then his head fell back into the filth of the street, and every
consciousness faded but that of pain....
But Freder ran as he had never run. It was not his feet which carried
him. It was his wild heart—it was his thoughts.
Streets and stairs and streets and at last the cathedral square. Black
in the background, the cathedral, ungodded, unlighted, the place before
the broad steps swarming with human beings—and amid them, surrounded
by gasps of madly despairing laughter, the howling of songs of fury,
the smouldering of torches and brands, high up on the pyre....
“_Maria—!_”
Freder fell on his knees as though his sinews were sawn through.
“_Maria—!_”
The girl whom he took to be Maria raised her head. She sought him. Her
glance found him. She smiled—laughed.
“Dance with me, my dearest—!” flew her voice, sharp as a flashing
knife, through uproar.
Freder got up. The mob recognised him. The mob lurched towards him,
shrieking and yelling.
“Jooooo—oh! Joh Fredersen’s son—! Joh Fredersen’s son—”
They made to seize him. He dodged them wildly. He threw himself with
his back against the parapet of the street.
“Why do you want to kill her, you devils—? She has saved your
children!”
Roars of laughter answered him. Women sobbed with laughter, biting into
their own hands.
“Yes—yes—she has saved our children—! She saved our children with
the song of the dead machines! She saved our children with the ice cold
water—! High let her live—high and three time high!”
“Go to the ‘House of the Sons’—! Your children are there!”
“Our children are not in the ‘House of the Sons!’ There lives the
brood, hatched out by money. Sons of your kind, you dog in white-silken
skin!”
“Listen, for God’s sake—do listen to me—!!!”
“We don’t want to hear anything—!”
“Maria—beloved!!!—Beloved!!!”
“Don’t bawl so, son of Joh Fredersen! Or we’ll stop your mouth!”
“Kill me, if you must kill—_but let her live_—!”
“Each in his turn, son of Joh Fredersen! First you shall see how your
beloved dies a beautiful, hot magnificent death!”
A woman—Grot’s woman—tore a strip off her skirt and bound Freder’s
hands. He was bound fast to the parapet with cords. He struggled like
a wild beast, shouting that the veins of this throat were in danger of
bursting. Bound, impotent, he threw back his head and saw the sky over
Metropolis, pure, tender, greenish-blue, for morning would soon follow
after this night.
“God—!” he shouted, trying to throw himself on his knees, in his
bonds. “God—! Where art thou—?”
A wild, red gleam caught his eyes. The pyre flamed up in long flames.
The men, the women, seized hands and tore around the bonfire, faster,
faster and faster, in rings growing ever wider and wider, laughing,
screaming with stamping feet, “Witch—! Witch!”
Freder’s bonds broke. He fell over on his face among the feet of the
dancers.
And the last he saw of the girl, while her gown and hair stood blazing
around her as a mantle of fire, was the loving smile and the wonder of
her eyes—and her mouth of deadly sin, which lured among the flames:
“Dance with me, my dearest! Dance with me—!”