Chapter XIX Bertha and Franz
On Forbidden Ground—A Talk on Brain-Curves—Bertha is Afraid—Shades of Krupp—“Charity Covers ——“—A Dramatic Exit
“Oh, Franz, tell me what it all means!”
If Bertha and the chief engineer had been real lovers, and had selected the moon for a place of rendezvous, they could not have been safer from intrusion than in the late Frederick Krupp’s library with the door unlocked, for the “room sacred to His Majesty” was a sort of Bluebeard chamber into which no eye but the War Lord’s and Bertha’s must look.
Bertha had shown her mother a parcel of documents which Uncle Majesty had ordered her to read carefully. “I will go to the library, where I will be undisturbed,” she said in her decisive tone, while the butler was serving early strawberries sent from Italy. Strawberries in January in a little Rhenish town! It reminds us that when Charles V., warrior and gourmet-gourmand, sucked an orange in winter-time, his Court was prostrate with astonishment and admiration.
And Alexis Orloff won Catherine the Great from his brother Gregory—temporarily, at least—by sending to the Semiramis of the North a plate of strawberries for the New Year. Yet nowadays any well-to-do person can indulge all the year round in the luxuries that made Charles and Catherine the envied of their Imperial class.
Bertha was in the War Lord’s chair, for she felt very Olympian since she had returned from the Berlin Court, while Franz sat on the tabouret affected by the Krupp heiress during the interviews with her guardian.
“What did Zara really mean?” repeated Bertha.
“Are you prepared to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” queried Franz.
Bertha Krupp moved uneasily in her high seat. Her mental stature had advanced rapidly under the War Lord’s teachings, disguised as coaxings, and while the sound principles implanted in her bosom by a good mother were at bottom unimpaired, she was beginning to learn the subtle art of putting her conscience to sleep when occasion demanded—a touch of Machiavellism!
Just now she would have loved to shut up Franz, as she was wont to silence her mother by a word or look, though less rudely, perhaps, but her fondness for the man—though she was not at all in love with Franz—forced her to be frank with him.
“Speak as a friend to a friend,” she said warmly.
“Well then——” began Franz.
Bertha covered his mouth with her hand. “A moment, please. May I tell Uncle Majesty?”
“What I have to say is no secret of mine and certainly it is not news to the War Lord. By all means tell him if you dare.”
“If I dare?” echoed Bertha.
“My own words.”
Franz spoke very earnestly, almost solemnly: “Will you hear me to the end, whether you like the tune or not?”
“If it relates to Zara’s prophecies, I will,” said Bertha. “But,” she added falteringly, “you know I mustn’t listen to criticism of my guardian.”
Franz shrugged. “I quite understand. Forbidden ground even for your Mother.”
Bertha felt the sting of reproval keenly, and did not like it. Indeed, at the moment she would have given up gladly a considerable portion of her wealth to be restored to Franz’s unconditional and unrestricted good graces. So, humbling herself, she temporarily abandoned her high estate and again became the unsophisticated girl whom Franz used to call sister. “Do go on,” she urged; “it was all so romantic, so strange, so mysterious, and you know I love to feel creepy.”
Franz had risen and approached the great central window. “May I draw the curtains?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
“They must not see you. I will.”
Bertha tugged the golden cords. “Working overtime again?” she queried, as she observed the blazing smoke-stacks.
“More’s the pity, for every pound of steam going up those chimneys means so many lives lost, and for all those lives, Bertha, you will have to account to God.”
“Old wives’ tales,” commented the Krupp heiress, as if the War Lord in person played souffleur. “On the contrary, as you well know, war preparedness means peace, means preservation; and with us in particular it means happiness and prosperity to the ten thousands of families in this favoured valley. It spells education, arts, music, care of children and of the sick and disabled. It means cheerfulness, such as ample wage and a future secured confer; it means care-free old age.” As she recounted these benefits her enterprises were actually dispensing Bertha looked at the chief engineer with a slightly supercilious air.
“Well rehearsed,” remarked Franz dryly.
“Oh, if you want to be rude——”
“I do,” said Franz, taking hold of her wrist; “I am sick of all this lying palaver about good coming out of evil, and I want you to be sick of it too, Bertha.”
The Krupp heiress leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. “At the American Embassy I heard rather a quaint saying day before yesterday: ‘Go as far as you like.’
“A most apt saying,” admitted Franz. “Thank you for the licence. As I was going to point out, you did attach too little significance to Zara’s words, thought them mere piffle of the kind for sale in necromancers’ tents. There is enough of that, God knows, but do not lose sight of the fact that at all times and in all walks of life there have existed persons having the gift of prophecy. Who knows but Zara has?”
Bertha was now rigid with attention. She had moved knee from knee; her feet were set firmly on the carpet, while the upper part of her body straightened out. “I don’t follow,” she said almost pleadingly.
“Let me explain,” continued Franz. “You and I and the vast majority of people can look into the past—a certain curvature of our brain facilitating the privilege. Another similar or dissimilar set of brain-cells, or a single curvature, might lift for us the veil that now obscures the future.”
“The future?” gasped Bertha.
“Indeed, the future; and, practically considered, there is nothing so very extraordinary about it, for what will happen to-morrow, or the day after to-morrow, is in the making now. If, for instance, the Krupp works were going into bankruptcy a year hence, the unfavourable conditions that constitute the menace to our prosperity would be at their destructive work now. Do you follow?” added Franz.
“I think I do,” said Bertha.
“Hence I say the gift of prophecy presupposes a correct interpretation of the past and present as well as the peculiar gift of extraordinary brain development—a rare gift, so sparsely distributed that in olden times prophets were credited with interpreting the will of the Almighty.”
“Franz,” cried Bertha, her face pallid and drawn, her hands twitching. “Oh, my God!” she screamed, as if nerve-shattered by an awful thought suddenly burst upon her; “you don’t believe—no, you can’t——! Tell me that you do not think it was God’s voice speaking through Zara?” And, as if to shut out some horrible vision, the Girl-Queen of Guns covered her face with both hands.
“It is not for me to pronounce on things I don’t know,” replied Franz. “Judged by what you have told me, Zara suited her prophecy for the most part to facts and to existing tendencies, conditions and ambitions on the part of political parties and high personages.”
“She called me the coming arch-murderess of the age, insisted that the warrior-queens of past times, even the most heartless and most cruel, had been but amateurs compared with me in taking human lives—— Oh, Franz, tell me it is not true! She was romancing, was she not? She lied to frighten me and to get a big trinkgeld.”
“I wish it were so,” said Franz earnestly; “but, unfortunately, she had a clear insight into the future as it may develop, unless you call a halt to incessant, ever-increasing, ever-new war preparations.”
Many years ago I read a manuscript play by a Dutch author, in the opening scenes of which a Jew tried to sell another Jew a bill of goods. Shylock number two wanted the stuff badly, but calculated that by a show of indifference he might obtain them for a halfpenny less. On his part, Isaac was as eager to sell as the other was to buy, but the threatened impairment of his fortune called for strategy. So he feigned that he did not care a rap whether the goods changed hands or not, and the two shysters remained together a whole long act engaging in a variety of business that had nought to do with the original proposition, each, however, watching for opportunity to re-introduce it, now as a threat, again as a bait, and the third and seventh and tenth time in jest. So Bertha, having once disposed of the war preparation bogey, according to Uncle Majesty’s suggestion, now returned to it in slightly different form. She was determined to discount Zara’s prophecies at any cost.
Getting ready to fight was tantamount to backing down; spending billions for guns and ammunition and chemicals and fortifications and espionage and war scares and whatnots was mere pretext for keeping the pot boiling in the workman’s cottage, and the golden eagles rolling in the financier’s cash drawer, and so on ad infinitum. When Bertha had finished she thought Zara’s prophecies very poor stuff.
Franz came in for the full quota of that sort of argument out of a bad conscience so warped by hypocrisy. Our Lady of the Guns no doubt believed every word she said, or rather repeated—dear woman’s way! She always firmly trusts in what suits her, logic, proof to the contrary, stubborn facts notwithstanding. Instinct or intuition, she calls it.
“That is no way to dispose of so grave a subject,” said Franz.
“But what can I do?”
“Prevent more wholesale family disintegration, forestall future mass-murder, future dunging of the earth with blood and human bones.”
Franz put both hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Bertha,” he said impressively, “make up your mind not to sign any more death-warrants, stop making merchandise intended to rob millions of life and limb and healthy minds, while those coming after them are destined physical or moral cripples that one man’s ambition may thrive.”
“Shut down the works, you mean?” cried Bertha; and, womanlike, indulged once more the soothing music of self-deception: “It would ruin the Ruhr Valley, throw a hundred thousand and more out of work; and what could they do, being skilled only in the industries created by my father and grandfather?
“Papa, Uncle Alfred, the first Krupp—God bless their souls!—were they founders of murder-factories, as you suggest? No, a thousand times no. Their skill, their genius, their enterprise has been the admiration of the world. Everybody admits that they were men animated by the highest motives and principles. They made Germany.”
“I don’t deny it; I underline every word you have said, Bertha. The foundations for Germany’s greatness were laid within a stone’s throw of this window; much of her supremacy in politics and economics was conceived between these four walls. But now that the goal is achieved, that the Fatherland enjoys unprecedented wealth and prosperity—let well enough alone.”
“You talk as if I were the War Lord!” cried Bertha.
“You are his right hand: the War Lady.”
“He is my guardian, my master.”
“Only for a while. You don’t have to submit to his dictation when of age.”
Carried away by emotion, Franz had spoken harshly at times, but now his tone became coaxing.
“When you come into your own, promise me, Bertha, to accept no more orders for armament and arms of any kind. Dedicate the greatest steel plant of the world to enterprises connected with progress, with the advancement of the human race! Build railways, Eiffel towers for observation, machinery of all sorts, ploughs and other agricultural implements, but for God’s sake taboo once and for all preparations for murder and destruction!”
Bertha covered her ears. “Don’t use such words; they are uncalled for, inappropriate.” Then, with a woman’s ill-logic, she repeated the last. “‘Destruction’—you don’t take into consideration what your ’destructive’ factors have done for my people, what they are doing for humanity right along. Auntie Majesty thinks our charities and social work superior to Rockefeller’s, and God forbid that I ever stop or curtail them.”
“Yes! Think of your charities,” said Franz; “take the Hackenberg case. What is he—a soldier blasted and crippled in mind and body by the war of 1870. Essen’s industry made a wreck of Heinrich, and he costs you one mark a day to keep for the rest of his life; three hundred and sixty-five marks per year, paid so many decades, what percentage of your father’s profits in the war of 1870-71 does the sum total represent?”
“A fraction of a thousandth per cent., perhaps. Another fraction pays for the son Johann’s keep, another for that of the two younger boys, another for Gretchen, etc., etc.”
“But if there had been no war, Heinrich would not have been disabled, and consequently would not have burdened charity with human wreckage! Do you see my point?”
“Go on,” said Bertha.
“Because you are used to it, maybe the Hackenberg case does not particularly impress you. You were not born when Heinrich sallied forth in the name of patriotism. But reflect: there are thousands of charitable institutions like yours, not so richly endowed, not so splendid to look upon, but charnel-houses for Essen war victims just the same. And all filled to overflowing—even as the Krupp treasury is. Yet that Franco-German war, that made the Krupps and necessitated the asylums and hospitals, was Lilliputian compared with the Goliath war now in the making—partly thanks to you, Bertha.”
“But I have told you time and again there will be no war, that I have the highest authority for saying so!” cried Bertha angrily.
“Authority,” mocked Franz. “The French of 1870 had the no-war ‘authority’ of Napoleon III., the Germans that of William I., before the edict went forth to kill, to maim, to destroy, to strew the earth with corpses and fill the air with lamentations! So it will be this month, this year, next year—for history ever repeats itself—until the hour for aggression, which will be miscalled a defence of our holiest principles and interests, has struck.
“The air pressure has increased,” continued Franz, parting the window curtains; “see the lowering clouds! And watch the storm coming up, lashing them in all directions. West and east they are spreading, and, look, north too! They are falling on Northern France, on the Lowlands and Russia like a black pall.”
“You prophesy a universal war?” shrieked Bertha.
“The answer is in your ledger. For thirty and more years your firm has been arming the universe. Since your father’s death you have distributed armaments on a vaster scale than ever, and now, I understand, the pace that killeth is to be still more increased.
“When you have furnished Germany with all the guns, the ammunition, the chemicals, the flying machines, the cruisers, the submarines, the hand grenades—what then? Presto! a pretext of the 1870 pattern, or something similar, and Zara’s prophecy will come true as sure as light will burst from this Welsbach now.”
Franz touched a button.
“Voilà, Madame War Lady,” he said, bowing himself out.