It was with a strange mixture of eagerness and fear that I received the head physician's decision that I would henceforth recover my faculties more rapidly in the familiar environment of my own home.
A wooden-faced male nurse accompanied me in a closed vehicle that ran noiselessly through the vaulted interior streets of the completely roofed-in city. Once our vehicle entered an elevator and was let down a brief distance. We finally alighted in a street very like the one on which the hospital was located, and filed down a narrow passage-way. My companion asked for my keys, which I found in my clothing. I stood by with a palpitating heart as he turned the lock and opened the door.
The place we entered was a comfortably furnished bachelor's apartment. Books and papers were littered about giving evidence of no disturbance since the sudden leaving of the occupant. Immensely relieved I sat down in an upholstered chair while the nurse scurried about and put the place in order.
"You feel quite at home?" he asked as he finished his task.
"Quite," I replied, "things are coming back to me now."
"You should have been sent home sooner," he said. "I wished to tell the chief as much, but I am only a second year interne and it is forbidden me to express an original opinion to him."
"I am sure I will be all right now," I replied.
He turned to go and then paused. "I think," he said, "that you should have some notice on you that when you do go out, if you become confused and make mistakes, the guards will understand. I will speak to Lieut. Forrester, the Third Assistant, and ask that such a card be sent you." With that he took his departure.
When he had gone I breathed joyfully and freely. The rigid face and staring eye that I had cultivated relaxed into a natural smile and then I broke into a laugh. Here I was in the heart of Berlin, unsuspected of being other than a loyal German and free, for the time at least, from problems of personal relations.
I now made an elaborate inspection of my surroundings. I found a wardrobe full of men's clothing, all of a single shade of mauve like the suit I wore. Some suits I guessed to be work clothes from their cheaper texture and some, much finer, were evidently dress apparel.
Having reassured myself that Armstadt had been the only occupant of the apartment, I turned to a pile of papers that the hospital attendant had picked up from the floor where they had dropped from a mail chute. Most of these proved to be the accumulated copies of a daily chemical news bulletin. Others were technical chemical journals. Among the letters I found an invitation to a meeting of a chemical society, and a note from my tailor asking me to call; the third letter was written on a typewriter, an instrument the like of which I had already discovered in my study. This sheet bore a neatly engraved head reading "Katrina, Permit 843 LX, Apartment 57, K Street, Level of the Free Women." The letter ran:
"Dear Karl: For three weeks now you have failed to keep your appointments and sent no explanation. You surely know that I will not tolerate such rude neglect. I have reported to the Supervisor that you are dropped from my list."
So this was Katrina! Here at last was the end of the fears that had haunted me.
As I was scanning the chemical journal I heard a bell ring and turning about I saw that a metal box had slid forth upon a side board from an opening in the wall. In this box I found my dinner which I proceeded to enjoy in solitude. The food was more varied than in the hospital. Some was liquid and some gelatinous, and some firm like bread or biscuit. But of natural food products there was nothing save a dish of mushrooms and a single sprig of green no longer than my finger, and which, like a feather in a boy's cap, was inserted conspicuously in the top of a synthetic pudding. There was one food that puzzled me, for it was sausage-like in form and sausage-like in flavour, and I was sure contained some real substance of animal origin. Presuming, as I did at that moment, that no animal life existed in Berlin, I ate this sausage with doubts and misgivings.
The dinner finished, I looked for a way to dispose of the dishes. Packing them back in the container I fumbled about and found a switch which set something going in the wall, and my dishes departed to the public dishwasher.
Having cleared the desk I next turned to Armstadt's book shelves. My attention was caught by a ponderous volume. It proved to be an atlas and directory of Berlin. In the front of this was a most revealing diagram which showed Berlin to be a city of sixty levels. The five lowest levels were underground and all were labelled "Mineral Industries." Above these were eight levels of Food, Clothing and Miscellaneous industries. Then came the seven workmen's residence levels, divided by trade groups. Above this were the four "Intellectual Levels," on one of which I, as a chemist had my abode. Directly above these was the "Level of Free Women," and above that the residence level for military officers. The next was the "Royal Level," double in height of the other levels of the city. Then came the "Administrative Level," followed by eight maternity levels, then four levels of female schools and nine levels of male schools. Then, for six levels, and reaching to within five levels of the roof of the city, were soldiers' barracks. Three of the remaining floors were labelled "Swine Levels" and one "Green Gardens." Just beneath the roof was the defence level and above that the open roof itself.
It was a city of some three hundred metres in height with mineral industries at the bottom and the swine levels--I recalled the sausage--at the top. Midway between, remote from possible attack through mines or from the roof, Royalty was sheltered, while the other privileged groups of society were stratified above and below it.
Following the diagram of levels was a most informing chart arranged like a huge multiplication table. It gave after each level the words "permitted," "forbidden," and "permitted as announced," arranged in columns for each of the other levels. From this I traced out that as a chemist I was permitted on all the industrial, workmen's and intellectual levels, and on the Level of Free Women. I was permitted, as announced, on the Administrative and Royal Levels; but forbidden on the levels of military officers and soldiers' barracks, maternity and male and female schools.
I found that as a chemist I was particularly fortunate for many other groups were given even less liberty. As for common workmen and soldiers, they were permitted on no levels except their own.
The most perplexing thing about this system was the apparent segregation of such large groups of men from women. Family life in Germany was evidently wonderfully altered and seemingly greatly restricted, a condition inconsistent with the belief that I had always held--that the German race was rapidly increasing.
Turning to my atlas index I looked up the population statistics of the city, and found that by the last census it was near three hundred million. And except for the few millions in the mines this huge mass of humanity was quartered beneath a single roof. I was greatly surprised, for this population figure was more than double the usual estimates current in the outside world. Coming from a world in which the ancient tendency to congest in cities had long since been overcome, I was staggered by the fact that nearly as many people were living in this one city as existed in the whole of North America.
Yet, when I figured the floor area of the city, which was roughly oval in shape, being eight kilometres in breadth and eleven in length, I found that the population on a given floor area was no greater than it had been in the Island of Manhattan before the reform land laws were put into effect in the latter part of the Twentieth Century. There was, therefore, nothing incredible in these figures of total population, but what I next discovered was a severe strain on credence. It was the German population by sexes; the figures showed that there were nearly two and a half males for every female! According to the usual estimate of war losses the figure should have been at a ratio of six women living to about five men, and here I found them recorded as only two women to five men. Inspection of the birth rate showed an even higher proportion of males. I consulted further tables that gave births by sexes and groups. These varied somewhat but there was this great preponderance of males in every class but one. Only among the seventeen thousand members of Royalty did the proportion of the sexes approach the normal.
Apparently I had found an explanation of the careful segregation of German women--there were not enough to go around!
Turning the further pages of my atlas I came upon an elaborately illustrated directory of the uniforms and insignia of the various military and civil ranks and classes. As I had already anticipated, I found that any citizen in Berlin could immediately be placed in his proper group and rank by his clothing, which was prescribed with military exactness.
Various fabrics and shades indicated the occupational grouping while trimmings and insignia distinguished the ranks within the groups. In all there were many hundreds of distinct uniforms. Two groups alone proved exceptions to this iron clad rule; Royalty and free women were permitted to dress as they chose and were restricted only in that they were forbidden to imitate the particular uniforms of other groups.
I next investigated the contents of Armstadt's desk. My most interesting find was a checkbook, with receipts and expenditures carefully recorded on the stubs. From this I learned that, as Armstadt, I was in receipt of an income of five thousand marks, paid by the Government. I did not know how much purchasing value that would amount to, but from the account book I saw that the expenses had not equalled a third of it, which explained why there was a bank balance of some twenty thousand marks.
Clearly I would need to master the signature of Karl Armstadt so I searched among the papers until I found a bundle of returned decks. Many of the larger checks had been made out to "Katrina," others to the "Master of Games,"--evidently to cover gambling losses. The smaller checks, I found by reference to the stubs, were for ornaments or entertainment that might please a woman. The lack of the more ordinary items of expenditure was presently made clear by the discovery of a number of punch marked cards. For intermittent though necessary expenses, such as tonsorial service, clothing and books. For the more constant necessities of life, such as rent, food, laundry and transportation, there was no record whatever; and I correctly assumed that these were supplied without compensation and were therefore not a matter of personal choice or permissible variation. Of money in its ancient form of metal coins and paper, I found no evidence.
In my mail the next morning I found a card signed by Lieut. Forrester of the hospital staff. It read:
"The bearer, Karl Armstadt, has recently suffered from gas poisoning while defending the mines beneath enemy territory. This has affected his memory. If he is therefore found disobeying any ruling or straying beyond his permitted bounds, return him to his apartment and call the Hospital for Complex Gas Cases."
It was evidently a very kindly effort to protect a man whose loss of memory might lead him into infractions of the numerous rulings of German life. With this help I became ambitious to try the streets of Berlin alone. The notice from the tailor afforded an excuse.
Consulting my atlas to get my bearings I now ventured forth. The streets were tunnel-like passage-ways closed over with a beamed ceiling of whitish grey concrete studded with glowing light globes. In the residence districts the smooth side walls were broken only by high ventilating gratings and the narrow passage halls from which led the doors of the apartments.
The uncanny quiet of the streets of this city with its three hundred million inhabitants awed and oppressed me. Hurriedly I walked along occasionally passing men dressed like myself. They were pale men, with blanched or sallow faces. But nowhere were there faces of ruddy tan as one sees in a world of sun. The men in the hospital had been pale, but that had seemed less striking for one is used to pale faces in a hospital. It came to me with a sense of something lost that my own countenance blanched in the mine and hospital would so remain colourless like the faces of the men who now stole by me in their felted footwear with a cat-like tread.
At a cross street I turned and came upon a small group of shops with monotonous panelled display windows inserted in the concrete walls. Here I found my tailor and going in I promptly laid down his notice and my clothing card. He glanced casually at the papers, punched the card and then looking up he remarked that my new suit had been waiting some time. I began explaining the incident in the mine and the stay in the hospital; but the tailor was either disinterested or did not comprehend.
"Will you try on your new suit now?" he interrupted, holding forth the garments. The suit proved a trifle tight about the hips, but I hastened to assure the tailor that the fit was perfect. I removed it and watched him do it up in a parcel, open a wall closet, call my house number, and send my suit on its way through one of the numerous carriers that interlaced the city.
As I walked more leisurely back to my apartment by a less direct way, I found my analytical brain puzzling over the refreshing quality of the breezes that blew through those tunnel-like streets. With bits of paper I traced the air flow from the latticed faces of the elevator shafts to the ventilating gratings of the enclosed apartments, and concluded that there must be other shafts to the rear of the apartments for its exit. It occurred to me that it must take an enormous system of ventilating fans to keep this air in motion, and then I remembered the liquid air engine I had seen in the mine, and a realization of the economy and efficiency of the whole scheme dawned upon me. The Germans had solved the power problem by using the heat of the deeper strata of the earth to generate power through the agency of liquid air and the exhaust from their engines had automatically solved their ventilating problem. I recalled with a smile that I had seen no evidence of heating apparatus anywhere except that which the miners had used to warm their food. In this city cooling rather than heating facilities would evidently be needed, even in the dead of winter, since the heat generated by the inhabitants and the industrial processes would exceed the radiation from the exterior walls and roof of the city. Sunshine and "fresh air" they had not, but our own scientists had taught us for generations that heat and humidity and not lack of oxygen or sunshine was the cause of the depression experienced in indoor quarters. The air of Berlin was cool and the excess of vapor had been frozen out of it. Yes, the "climate" of Berlin should be more salubrious to the body, if not to the mind, than the fickle environment of capricious nature. From my reasoning about these ponderous problems of existence I was diverted to a trivial matter. The men I observed on the streets all wore their hair clipped short, while mine, with six weeks' growth, was getting rather long. I had seen several barber's signs but I decided to walk on for quite a distance beyond my apartment. I did not want to confront a barber who had known Karl Armstadt, for barbers deal critically in the matter of heads and faces. At last I picked out a shop. I entered and asked for a haircut.
"But you are not on my list," said the barber, staring at me in a puzzled way, "why do you not go to your own barber?"
Grasping the situation I replied that I did not like my barber.
"Then why do you not apply at the Tonsorial Administrative Office of the level for permission to change?"
Returning to my apartment I looked up the office in my directory, went thither and asked the clerk if I could exchange barbers. He asked for my card and after a deal of clerical activities wrote thereon the name of a new barber. With this official sanction I finally got my hair cut and my card punched, thinking meanwhile that the soundness of my teeth would obviate any amateur detective work on the part of a dentist.
Nothing, it seemed, was left for the individual to decide for himself. His every want was supplied by orderly arrangement and for everything he must have an authoritative permit. Had I not been classed as a research chemist, and therefore a man of some importance, this simple business of getting a hair-cut might have proved my undoing. Indeed, as I afterwards learned, the exclusive privacy of my living quarters was a mark of distinction. Had I been one of lower ranking I should have shared my apartment with another man who would have slept in my bed while I was at work, for in the sunless city was neither night nor day and the whole population worked and slept in prescribed shifts--the vast machinery of industry, like a blind giant in some Plutonic treadmill, toiled ceaselessly.
The next morning I decided to extend my travels to the medical level, which was located just above my own. There were stairs beside the elevator shafts but these were evidently for emergency as they were closed with locked gratings.
The elevator stopped at my ring. Not sure of the proper manner of calling my floor I was carried past the medical level. As we shot up through the three-hundred-metre shaft, the names of levels as I had read them in my atlas flashed by on the blind doors. On the topmost defence level we took on an officer of the roof guard--strangely swarthy of skin--and now the car shot down while the rising air rushed by us with a whistling roar.
On the return trip I called my floor as I had heard others do and was let off at the medical level. It was even more monotonously quiet than the chemical level, save for the hurrying passage of occasional ambulances on their way between the elevators and the various hospitals. The living quarters of the physicians were identical with those on the chemists' level. So, too, were the quiet shops from which the physicians supplied their personal needs.
Standing before one of these I saw in a window a new book entitled "Diseases of Nutrition." I went in and asked to see a copy. The book seller staring at my chemical uniform in amazement reached quickly under the counter and pressed a button. I became alarmed and turned to go out but found the door had been automatically closed and locked. Trying to appear unconcerned I stood idly glancing over the book shelves, while the book seller watched me from the corner of his eye.
In a few minutes the door opened from without and a man in the uniform of the street guard appeared. The book seller motioned toward me.
"Your identification folder," said the guard.
Mechanically I withdrew it and handed it to him. He opened it and discovered the card from the hospital. Smiling on me with an air of condescension, he took me by the arm and led me forth and conducted me to my own apartment on the chemical level. Arriving there he pushed me gently into a chair and stepped toward the switch of the telephone.
"Just a minute," I said, "I remember now. I was not on my level--that was not my book store."
"The card orders me to call up the hospital," said the guard.
"It is unnecessary," I said. "Do not call them."
The guard gazed first at me and then at the card. "It is signed by a Lieutenant and you are a Captain--" his brows knitted as he wrestled with the problem--"I do not know what to do. Does a Captain with an affected memory outrank a Lieutenant?"
"He does," I solemnly assured him.
Still a little puzzled, he returned the card, saluted and was gone. It had been a narrow escape. I got out my atlas and read again the rules that set forth my right to be at large in the city. Clearly I had a right to be found in the medical level--but in trying to buy a book there I had evidently erred most seriously. So I carefully memorized the list of shops set down in my identification folder and on my cards.
For the next few days I lived alone in my apartment unmolested except by an occasional visit from Holknecht, the laboratory assistant, who knew nothing but chemistry, talked nothing but chemistry, and seemed dead to all human emotions and human curiosity. Applying myself diligently to the study of Armstadt's books and notes, I was delighted to find that the Germans, despite their great chemical progress, were ignorant of many things I knew. I saw that my knowledge discreetly used, might enable me to become a great man among them and so learn secrets that would be of immense value to the outer world, should I later contrive to escape from Berlin.
By my discoveries of the German workings in the potash mines I had indeed opened a new road to Berlin. It was up to me by further discoveries to open a road out again, not only for my own escape, but perhaps also to find a way by which the World Armies might enter Berlin as the Greeks entered Troy. Vague ambitious dreams were these that filled and thrilled me, for I was young in years, and the romantic spirit of heroic adventure surged in my blood.
These days of study were quite uneventful, except for a single illuminating incident; a further example of the super-efficiency of the Germans. I found the meals served me at my apartment rather less in quantity than my appetite craved. While there was a reasonable variety, the nutritive value was always the same to a point of scientific exactness, and I had seen no shops where extra food was available. After I had been in my apartment about a week, some one rang at the door. I opened it and a man called out the single word, "Weigher." Just behind him stood a platform scale on small wheels and with handles like a go-cart. The weigher stood, notebook in hand, waiting for me to act. I took the hint and stepped upon the scales. He read the weight and as he recorded it, remarked:
"Three kilograms over."
Without further explanation he pushed the scales toward the next door. The following day I noticed that the portions of food served me were a trifle smaller than they had been previously. The original Karl Armstadt had evidently been of such build that he carried slightly less weight than I, which fact now condemned me to this light diet.
However, I reasoned that a light diet is conducive to good brain work, and as I later learned, the object of this systematic weight control was not alone to save food but to increase mental efficiency, for a fat man is phlegmatic and a lean one too excitable for the best mental output. It would also help my disguise by keeping me the exact weight and build of the original Karl Armstadt.
After a fortnight of study, I felt that I was now ready to take up my work in the laboratory, but I feared my lack of general knowledge of the city and its ways might still betray me. Hence I began further journeyings about the streets and shops of those levels where a man of my class was permitted to go.
After exhausting the rather barren sport of walking about the monotonous streets of the four professional levels I took a more exciting trip down into the lower levels of the city where the vast mechanical industries held sway. I did not know how much freedom might be allowed me, but I reasoned that I would be out of my supposed normal environment and hence my ignorance would be more excusable and in less danger of betraying me.
Alighting from the elevator, I hurried along past endless rows of heavy columns. I peered into the workrooms, which had no enclosing walls, and discovered with some misgiving that I seemed to have come upon a race of giants. The men at the machines were great hulking fellows with thick, heavy muscles such as one would expect to see in a professional wrestler or weight-lifter. I paused and tried to gauge the size of these men: I decided that they were not giants for I had seen taller men in the outer world. Two officials of some sort, distinguishable by finer garb, walking among them, appeared to be men of average size, and the tops of their heads came about to the workers' chins. That there should be such men among the Germans was not unbelievable, but the strange thing was that there should be so many of them, and that they should be so uniformly large, for there was not a workman in the whole vast factory floor that did not over-top the officials by at least half a head.
"Of course," I reasoned, "this is part of German efficiency";--for the men were feeding large plates through stamping mills--"they have selected all the large men for this heavy work." Then as I continued to gaze it occurred to me that this bright metal these Samsons were handling was aluminum!
I went on and came to a different work hall where men were tending wire winding machinery, making the coils for some light electrical instruments. It was work that girls could easily have done, yet these men were nearly, if not quite, as hulking as their mates in the stamping mill. To select such men for light-fingered work was not efficiency but stupidity,--and then it came to me that I had also thought the soldiers I had seen in the hospital to be men picked for size, and that in a normal population there could not be such an abundance of men of abnormal size. The meaning of it all began to clear in my mind--the pedigree in my own identification folder with the numerous fraternity, the system of social castes which my atlas had revealed, the inexplicable and unnatural proportion of the sexes. These gigantic men were not the mere pick from individual variation in the species, but a distinct breed within a race wherein the laws of nature, that had kept men of equal stature for countless centuries, even as wild animals were equal, had been replaced by the laws of scientific breeding. These heavy and ponderous labourers were the Percherons and Clydesdales of a domesticated and scientifically bred human species. The soldiers, somewhat less bulky and more active, were, no doubt, another distinct breed. The professional classes which had seemed quite normal in physical appearance--were they bred for mental rather than physical qualities? Otherwise why the pedigree, why the rigid castes, the isolation of women? I shuddered as the whole logical, inevitable explanation unfolded. It was uncanny, unearthly, yet perfectly scientific; a thing the world had speculated about for centuries, a thing that every school boy knew could be done, and yet which I, facing the fact that it had been done, could only believe by a strained effort at scientific coolness.
I walked on and on, absorbed, overwhelmed by these assaulting, unbelievable conclusions, yet on either side as I walked was the ever present evidence of the reality of these seemingly wild fancies. There were miles upon miles of these endless workrooms and everywhere the same gross breed of great blond beasts.
The endless shops of Berlin's industrial level were very like those elsewhere in the world, except that they were more vast, more concentrated, and the work more speeded up by super-machines and excessive specialization. Millions upon millions of huge, drab-clad, stolid-faced workmen stood at their posts of duty, performing over and over again their routine movements as the material of their labors shuttled by in endless streams.
Occasionally among the workmen I saw the uniforms of the petty officers who acted as foremen, and still more rarely the administrative offices, where, enclosed in glass panelled rooms, higher officials in more bespangled uniforms poured over charts and plans.
In all this colossal business there was everywhere the atmosphere of perfect order, perfect system, perfect discipline. Go as I might among the electrical works, among the vast factories of chemicals and goods, the lighter labor of the textile mills, or the heavier, noisier business of the mineral works and machine shops the same system of colossal coordinate mechanism of production throbbed ceaselessly. Materials flowed in endless streams, feeding electric furnaces, mills, machines; passing out to packing tables and thence to vast store rooms. Industry here seemed endless and perfect. The bovine humanity fitted to the machinery as the ox to the treadmill. Everywhere was the ceaseless throbbing of the machine. Of the human variation and the free action of man in labour, there was no evidence, and no opportunity for its existence.
Turning from the mere monotonous endlessness of the workshops I made my way to the levels above where the workers lived in those hours when they ceased to be a part of the industrial mechanism of production; and everywhere were drab-coloured men for these shifts of labour were arranged so that no space at any time was wholly idle. I now passed by miles of sleeping dormitories, and other miles of gymnasiums, picture theatres and gaming tables, and, strikingly incongruous with the atmosphere of the place, huge assembly rooms which were labelled "Free Speech Halls." I started to enter one of these, where some kind of a meeting was in progress, but I was thrust back by a great fellow who grinned foolishly and said: "Pardon, Herr Captain, it is forbidden you."
Through half-darkened streets, I again passed by the bunk-shelved sleeping chambers with their cavernous aisles walled with orderly rows of lockers. Again I came to other barracks where the men were not yet asleep but were straggling in and sitting about on the lowest bunks of these sterile makeshift homes.
I then came into a district of mess halls where a meal was being served. Here again was absolute economy and perfect system. The men dined at endless tables and their food like the material for their labours, was served to the workers by the highly efficient device of an endless moving belt that rolled up out of a slot in the floor at the end of the table after the manner of the chained steps of an escalator.
From the moving belts the men took their portions, and, as they finished eating, they cleared away by setting the empty dishes back upon the moving belt. The sight fascinated me, because of the adaptation of this mechanical principle to so strange a use, for the principle is old and, as every engineer knows, was instrumental in founding the house of Detroit Vehicle Kings that once dominated the industrial world. The founder of that illustrious line gave the poorest citizen a motor car and disrupted the wage system of his day by paying his men double the standard wage, yet he failed to realize the full possibilities of efficiency for he permitted his men to eat at round tables and be served by women! Truly we of the free world very narrowly escaped the fetish of efficiency which finally completely enslaved the Germans.
Each of the long tables of this Berlin dining hall, the ends of which faced me, was fenced off from its neighbours. At the entrance gates were signs which read "2600 Calories," "2800 Calories," "3000 Calories"--I followed down the line to the sign which read "Maximum Diet, 4000 Calories." The next one read, "Minimum Diet 2000 Calories," and thence the series was repeated. Farther on I saw that men were assembling before such gates in lines, for the meal there had not begun. Moving to the other side of the street I walked by the lines which curved out and swung down the street. Those before the sign of "Minimum Diet" were not quite so tall as the average, although obviously of the same breed. But they were all gaunt, many of them drooped and old, relatively the inferior specimens and their faces bore a cowering look of fear and shame, of men sullen and dull, beaten in life's battle. Following down the line and noting the improvement in physique as I passed on, I came to the farthest group just as they had begun to pass into the hall. These men, entering the gate labelled "Maximum Diet, 4000 Calories," were obviously the pick of the breed, middle-aged, powerful, Herculean,--and yet not exactly Herculean either, for many of them were overfull of waistline, men better fed than is absolutely essential to physical fitness. Evidently a different principle was at work here than the strict economy of food that required the periodic weighing of the professional classes.
Turning back I now encountered men coming out of the dining hall in which I had first witnessed the meal in progress. I wanted to ask questions and yet was a little afraid. But these big fellows were seemingly quite respectful; except when I started to enter the Free Speech Hall, they had humbly made way for me. Emboldened by their deference I now approached a man whom I had seen come out of a "3800 Calories" gate, and who had crossed the street and stood there picking his teeth with his finger nail.
He ceased this operation as I approached and was about to step aside. But I paused and smiled at him, much, I fear, as one smiles at a dog of unknown disposition, for I could hardly feel that this ungainly creature was exactly human. He smiled back and stood waiting.
"Perhaps, I stammered," you will tell me about your system of eating; it seems very interesting."
"I eat thirty-eight," he grinned, "pretty good, yes? I am twenty-five years old and not so tall either."
I eyed him up--my eyes came just to the top button of his jacket.
"I began thirty," continued the workman, "I came up one almost every year, one year I came up two at once. Pretty good, yes? One more to come."
"What then?" I asked.
The big fellow smiled with a childish pride, and doubling up his arm, as huge as an average man's thigh, he patted his biceps. "I get it all right. I pass examination, no flaws in me, never been to hospital, not one day. Yes, I get it."
"Get what?"
"Paternity," said the man in a lower voice, as he glanced about to see if any of his fellows was listening. "Paternity, you know? Women!"
I thought of many questions but feared to ask them. The worker waited for some men to pass, then he bent over me, grinning sardonically. "Did you see them? You have seen women, yes?"
"Yes," I ventured, "I have seen women."
"Pretty good, beautiful, yes?"
"Yes," I stammered, "they are very beautiful." But I was getting nervous and moved away. The workman, hesitating a little, then followed at my side.
"But tell me," I said, "about these calories. What did you do to get the big meals? Why do some get more to eat than others?"
"Better man," he replied without hesitation.
"But what makes a better man?"
"You don't know; of course, you are an intellectual and don't work. But we work hard. The harder we work the more we eat. I load aluminum pigs on the elevator. One pig is two calories, nineteen hundred pigs a day, pretty good, yes? All kind of work has its calories, so many for each thing to do.
"More work, more food it takes to do it. They say all is alike, that no one can get fat. But all work calories are not alike because some men get fatter than others. I don't get fat; my work is hard. I ought to get two and a half calories for each pig I load. Still I do not get thin, but I do not play hard in gymnasium, see? Those lathe men, they got it too easy and they play hard in gymnasium. I don't care if you do report. I got it mad at them; they got it too easy. One got paternity last year already, and he is not as good a man as I am. I could throw him over my shoulder in wrestling. Do you not think they get it too easy?"
"Do the men like this system," I asked; "the measuring of food by the amount of work one does? Do any of them talk about it and demand that all be fed alike?"
"The skinny minimum eaters do," said the workman with a sneer, "when we let them talk, which isn't often, but when they get a chance they talk Bellamism. But what if they do talk, it does them no good. We have a red flag, we have Imperial Socialism; we have the House of Hohenzollern. Well, then, I say, let them talk if they want to, every man must eat according to his work; that is socialism. We can't have Bellamism when we have socialism."
This speech, so much more informative and evidencing a knowledge I had not anticipated, quite disturbed me. "You talk about these things," I ventured, "in your Free Speech Halls?"
The hitherto pleasant face of the workingman altered to an ugly frown.
"No you don't," he growled, "you don't think because I talk to you, that you can go asking me what is not your right to know, even if you are an officer?"
I remained discreetly silent, but continued to walk at the side of the striding giant. Presently I asked:
"What do you do now, are you going to work?"
"No," he said, looking at me doubtfully, "that was dinner, not breakfast. I am going now to the picture hall."
"And then," I asked, "do you go to bed?"
"No," he said, "we then go to the gymnasium or the gaming tables. Six hours' work, six hours' sleep, and four hours for amusement."
"And what do you do," I asked, "the remainder of the day?"
He turned and stared at me. "That is all we get here, sixteen hours. This is the metal workers' level. Some levels get twenty hours. It depends on the work."
"But," I said, "a real day has twenty-four hours."
"I've heard," he said, "that it does on the upper levels."
"But," I protested, "I mean a real day--a day of the sun. Do you understand that?"
"Oh yes," he said, "we see the pictures of the Place in the Sun. That's a fine show."
"Oh," I said, "then you have pictures of the sun?"
"Of course," he replied, "the sun that shines upon the throne. We all see that."
At the time I could not comprehend this reference, but I made bold to ask if it were forbidden me to go to his picture hall.
"I can't make out," he said, "why you want to see, but I never heard of any order forbidding it.
"I go here," he remarked, as we came to a picture theatre.
I let my Herculean companion enter alone, but followed him shortly and found a seat in a secluded corner. No one disputed my presence.
The music that filled the hall from some hidden horn was loud and, in a rough way, joyous. The pictures--evidently carefully prepared for such an audience--were limited to the life that these men knew. The themes were chiefly of athletic contests, of boxing, wrestling and feats of strength. There were also pictures of working contests, always ending by the awarding of honours by some much bespangled official. But of love and romance, of intrigue and adventure, of pathos and mirth, these pictures were strangely devoid,--there was, in fact, no woman's likeness cast upon the screen and no pictures depicting emotion or sentiment.
As I watched the sterile flittings of the picture screen I decided, despite the glimmering of intelligence that my talking Hercules had shown in reference to socialism and Bellamism and the secrets of the Free Speech Halls, that these men were merely great stupid beasts of burden.
They worked, they fed, they drank, they played exuberantly in their gymnasiums and swimming pools, they played long and eagerly at games of chance. Beyond this their lives were essentially blank. Ambition and curiosity they had none beyond the narrow circle of their round of living. But for all that they were docile, contented and, within their limitations, not unhappy. To me they seemed more and more to be like well cared for domestic animals, and I found myself wondering, as I left the hall, why we of the outer world had not thought to produce pictures in similar vein to entertain our dogs and horses.
As I returned to my own quarters, I tried to recall the description I had read of the "Children of the Abyss," the dwellers in ancient city slums. There was a certain kinship, no doubt, between those former submerged workers in the democratic world and this labour breed of Berlin. Yet the enslaved and sweated workers of the old regime were always depicted as suffering from poverty, as undersized, ill-nourished and afflicted with disease. The reformers of that day were always talking of sanitary housing, scientific diet and physical efficiency. But here was a race of labourers whose physical welfare was as well taken care of as if they had been prize swine or oxen. There was a paleness of countenance among these labourers of Berlin that to me seemed suggestive of ill health, but I knew that was merely due to lack of sun and did not signify a lack of physical vitality. Mere sun-darkened skin does not mean physiological efficiency, else the negro were the most efficient of races. Men can live without sun, without rain, without contact with the soil, without nature's greenery and the brotherhood of fellow species in wild haunts. The whole climb of civilization had been away from these primitive things. It had merely been an artificial perfecting of the process of giving the living creature that which is needed for sustenance and propagation in the most concentrated and most economical form, the elimination of Nature's superfluities and wastes.
As I thought of these things it came over me that this unholy imprisonment of a race was but the logical culmination of mechanical and material civilization. This development among the Germans had been hastened by the necessities of war and siege, yet it was what the whole world had been driving toward since man first used a tool and built a hut. Our own freer civilization of the outer world had been achieved only by compromises, by a stubborn resistance against the forces to which we ascribed our progress. We were merely not so completely civilized, because we had never been wholly domesticated.
As I now record these thoughts on the true significance of the perfected civilization of the Germans I realize that I was even more right than I then knew, for the sunless city of Berlin is of a truth a civilization gone to seed, its people are a domesticated species, they are the logical outcome of science applied to human affairs, with them the prodigality and waste of Nature have been eliminated, they have stamped out contagious diseases of every kind, they have substituted for the laws of Nature the laws that man may pick by scientific theory and experiment from the multitude of possibilities. Yes, the Germans were civilized. And as I pondered these things I recalled those fairy tales that naturalists tell of the stagnant and fixed society of ants in their subterranean catacombs. These insect species credited for industry and intelligence, have in their lesser world reached a similar perfection of civilization. Ants have a royal house, they have a highly specialized and fixed system of caste, a completely socialized state--yes, a Utopia--even as Berlin was a Utopia, with the light of the sun and the light of the soul, the soul of the wild free man, forever shut out. Yes, I was walking in Utopia, a nightmare at the end of man's long dream--Utopia--Black Utopia--City of Endless Night--diabolically compounded of the three elements of civilization in which the Germans had always been supreme--imperialism, science and socialism.
I had returned from my adventure on the labour levels in a mood of sombre depression. Alone again in my apartment I found difficulty in getting my mind back upon chemical books. With a sense of relief I reported to Holknecht that I thought myself sufficiently recovered to return to work.
My laboratory I found to be almost as secluded as my living quarters. I was master there, and as a research worker I reported to no man until I had finished the problem assigned me. From my readings and from Holknecht's endless talking I had fairly well grasped the problem on which I was supposed to be working, and I now had Holknecht go carefully over the work he had done in my absence and we prepared a report. This I sent to headquarters with a request for permission to start work on another problem, the idea for which I claimed to have conceived on my visit to the attacked potash mines.
Permission to undertake the new problem was promptly granted. I now set to work to reproduce in a German laboratory the experiments by which I had originally conquered the German gas that had successfully defended those mines from the world for over a century. Though loath to make this revelation, I knew of no other "Discovery" wherewith to gain the stakes for which I was playing.
Events shaped themselves most rapidly along the lines of my best hopes. The new research proved a blanket behind which to hide my ignorance. We needed new material, new apparatus, and new data and I encouraged Holknecht to advise me as to where to obtain these things and so gained requisite working knowledge.
The experiments and demonstrations finished, I made my report. My immediate superior evidently quickly recognized it as a matter too important for his consideration and dutifully passed it up to his own superiors. In a few days I was notified to prepare for a demonstration before a committee of the Imperial Chemical Staff.
They came to my small laboratory with much eager curiosity. From their manner of making themselves known to me I realized with joy that they were dealing with a stranger. Indeed it was improbable that it should have been otherwise for there were upwards of fifty thousand chemists of my rank in Berlin.
The demonstration went off with a flourish and the committee were greatly impressed. Means were at once taken to alter the gas with which the Stassfurt mines were flooded, but I realized that meant nothing since I believed that my companions had abandoned the enterprise and the secret that had enabled me to invade mines had not been shared with any one in the outer world.
As I anticipated, my revelation was accepted by the Chemical Staff as evidence of profound scientific genius. It followed as a logical matter that I should be promoted to the highest rank of research chemists with the title of Colonel. Because of my youth the more was made of the honour. This promotion entitled me to double my previous salary, to a larger laboratory and larger and better living quarters in a distant part of the city.
My assistant would now be of the rank I had previously been and as Holknecht was not eligible to such promotion I was removed entirely from all previous acquaintances and surroundings and so greatly decreased the chance of discovery of my true identity.
After I had removed to my new quarters I was requested to call at the office of the Chemical Staff to discuss the line of research I should next take up. My adviser in this matter was the venerable Herr von Uhl, a white haired old patriarch whose jacket was a mass of decorations. The insignia on the left breast indicating the achievements in chemical science were already familiar to me, but those on the right breast were strange.
Perhaps I stared at them a little, for the old man, noting my interest, remarked proudly, "Yes, I have contributed much glory to the race and our group,--one hundred and forty-seven children,--one hundred and four of them sons, fifty-eight already of a captain's rank, and twenty-nine of them colonels--my children of the second and third generation number above two thousand. Only three men living in Berlin have more total descendants--and I am but seventy-eight years of age. If I live to be ninety I shall break all records of the Eugenic Office. It all comes of good breeding and good work. I won my paternity right, when I was but twenty-eight, just about your age. If you pass the physical test, perhaps you can duplicate my record. For this early promotion you have won qualifies you mentally."
Astonished and alarmed beyond measure I could find no reply and sat staring dumbly, while Herr von Uhl, beginning to speak of chemical matters, inquired if I had any preference as to the problem I should now take up. Incapable of any clear thinking I could only ask if he had any to suggest.
Immediately the old man's face brightened. "A man of your genius," he said, "should be permitted to try his brain with the greatest problems on which the life of Germany depends. The Staff discussed this and has assigned you to original research for the finding of a better method of the extraction of protium from the ore. To work on this assignment you must of necessity share grave secrets, which, should they be disclosed, might create profound fears, but your professional honour is a sufficient guarantee of secrecy. In this research you will compete with some of the most distinguished chemists in Berlin. If you should be successful you will be decorated by His Majesty and you will receive a liberal pension commensurate with the value of your discovery."
I was profoundly impressed. Evidently I had stumbled upon something of vital importance, the real nature of which I did not in the least comprehend, and happily was not supposed to. The interview was ended by my being entrusted with voluminous unpublished documents which I was told to take home and study. Two armed men were ordered to accompany me and to stand alternate guard outside my apartment while I had the documents in my possession.
In the quiet of my new abode I unsealed the package. The first sheet contained the official offer of the rewards in store for success with the research. The further papers explained the occasion for the gravity and secrecy, and outlined the problem.
The colossal consequence of the matter with which I was dealing gripped and thrilled me. Protium, it seemed, was the German name for a rare element of the radium group, which, from its atomic weight and other properties, I recognized as being known to the outside world only as a laboratory curiosity of no industrial significance.
But, as used by the Germans, this element was the essence of life itself, for by the influence of its emanations, they had achieved the synthesis of protein capable of completely nourishing the human body--a thing that could be accomplished in the outside world only through the aid of natural protein derived from plants and animals.
How I wished, as I read, that my uncle could have shared with me this revelation of a secret that he had spent his life in a fruitless effort to unravel. We had long since discovered how the Germans had synthesized the carbohydrate molecule from carbon dioxide and water and built therefrom the sugars, starches and fat needed for human nutrition. We knew quite as well how they had created the simpler nitrogen compounds, that this last step of synthesizing complete food proteins--a step absolutely essential to the support of human life wholly from synthetic foods--the chemists of the outer world had never mastered.
But no less interesting than the mere chemistry of all this was the history of it all, and the light it threw on the larger story of how Germany had survived when the scientists of the world had predicted her speedy annihiliation. The original use of protium had, I found, been discovered late in the Twentieth Century when the protium ores of the Ural Mountains were still available to the German chemists. After Russia had been won by the World Armies, the Germans for a time suffered chronic nitrogen starvation, as they depended on the protium derived from what remained of their agriculture and from the fisheries in the Baltic. As the increasing bombardment from the air herded them within their fast building armoured city, and drove them beneath the soil in all other German territory and from the surface of the sea in the Baltic; they must have perished miserably but for the discovery of a new source of protium.
This source they had found in the uninhabited islands of the Arctic, where the formation of the Ural Mountains extends beneath the sea. Sending their submarines thence in search of platinum ores they had not found platinum but a limited supply of ore containing the even more valuable protium. By this traffic Germany had survived for a century and a half. The quantity of the rare element needed was small, for its effect, like that of radium, was out of all proportion to its bulk. But this little they must have, and it seems that the supply of ore was failing.
Nor was that all to interest me. How did the German submarine get to the Arctic since the World State had succeeded, after half a century of effort, in damming the Baltic by closing up several passes among the Danish Islands and the main pass of the sound between Zealand and Sweden? I remember, as a youngster, the great Jubilee that celebrated the completion of that monumental task, and the joy that hailed from the announcement that the world's shipping would at last be freed from an ancient scourge.
But little had we of the world known the magnitude of the German fears as the Baltic dam neared completion. We had thought merely to protect our commerce from German piracy and perhaps to stop them from getting a little copper and rubber in some remote corner of the earth. But we did not realize that we were about to cut them off from an essential element without which that conceited and defiant race must have speedily run up the white flag of absolute surrender or have died to the last man, like rats in a neglected trap.
But the completion of the Baltic dam evidently had not shut off the supply of Arctic ore, for the annual importation of ore was given right up to date though the Baltic had been closed for nearly a score of years. Eagerly I searched my papers for an item that would give some hint as to how the submarines got out of the dammed-up Baltic. But on that point the documents before me were silent. They referred to the Arctic ore, gave elaborate details as to mineralogy and geology of the strata from which it came, but as to the ways of its coming into Berlin there was not the slightest suggestion. That this ore must come by submarine was obvious. If so, the submarine must be at large in the Atlantic and Arctic seas, and those occasional reports of periscopes sighted off the coast of Norway, which have never been credited, were really true. The submarines, or at least their cargoes, must reach Berlin by some secret passage. Here indeed was a master mystery, a secret which, could I unravel it and escape to the outer world with the knowledge, would put unconditionally within the power of the World State the very life of the three hundred millions of this unholy race that was bred and fed by science in the armoured City of Berlin, or that, working like blind moles of the earth, held the world at bay from off the sterile and pock-marked soil of all that was left of the one-time German Empire.
That night I did not sleep till near the waking hour, and when the breakfast container bumped into the receiving cupboard I was nodding over the chemical papers amid strange and wonderful dreams.
Next day with three assistants, themselves chemists of no mean rank, I set to work to prepare apparatus for repeating all the known processes in the extraction and use of the rare and vital element. This work absorbed me for many weeks, during which time I went nowhere and saw no one and slept scarce one hour out of four.
But the steady application told upon me, and, by way of recreation, I decided to spend an evening on the Level of Free Women, a place to which, much though it fascinated me, I had not yet mustered the courage to go.
My impression, as I stepped from the elevator, was much as that of a man who alights from a train in a strange city on a carnival night. Before me, instead of the narrow, quiet streets of the working and living quarters of the city, there spread a broad and seemingly endless hall of revelry, broken only by the massive grey pillars that held up the multi-floored city. The place was thronged with men of varied ranks and professions. But more numerous and conspicuous were the women, the first and only women that I had seen among the Germans--the Free Women of Berlin, dressed in gorgeous and daring costumes; women of whom but few were beautiful, yet in whose tinted cheeks and sparkling eyes was all the lure of parasitic love.
The multi-hued apparel of the throng dazzled and astonished me. Elsewhere I had found a sterile monotony of dress and even of stature and features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from all the professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre--a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade.
I wondered if the rule of convention and tyranny of style had lost all hold upon these women. And yet I decided, as I watched more closely, that there was not an absence of style but rather a warfare of styles. The costumes varied from the veiled and beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, both seemingly equally successful.
But it was not alone in the matter of dress that the women of the Free Level varied. They differed even more strikingly in form and feature, for, as I was later more fully to comprehend, these women were drawn from all the artificially specialized breeds into which German science had wrought the human species. Most striking and most numerous were those whom I rightly guessed to be of the labour strain. Proportionally not quite so large as the males of the breed, yet they were huge, full-formed, fleshly creatures, with milky white skin for the most part crudely painted with splashes of vermilion and with blued or blackened brows. The garishness of their dress and ornament clearly bespoke the poorer quality of their intellect, yet to my disgust they seemed fully as popular with the men as the smaller and more refined types, evidently from the intellectual strains of the race.
Happily these ungainly women of the labour strain were inclined to herd by themselves and I hastened to direct my steps to avoid as much as possible their overwhelming presence.
The smaller women, who seemed to be more nearly human, were even more variegated in their features and make-up. They were not all blondes, for some of them were distinctively dark of hair and skin, though I was puzzled to tell how much of this was inborn and how much the work of art. Another thing that astonished me was the wide range of bodily form, as evidently determined by nutrition. Clearly there was no weight-control here, for the figures varied from extreme slenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mild obesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the world began that the women of all races by natural selection become relatively fatter than men.
For the most part I found these women unattractive and even repellent, and yet as I walked about the level I occasionally caught fleeting glimpses of genuine beauty of face and form, and more rarely expressions of a seeming high order of intelligence.
This revelling multitude of men and girls was uproariously engaged in the obvious business of enjoying themselves by means of every art known to appeal to the mind of man--when intelligence is abandoned and moral restraint thrown to the winds.
I wended my way among the multitude, gay with colour, noisy with chatter and mingled music, redolent with a hundred varieties of sensuous perfume. I came upon a dancing floor. Whirling and twisting about the columns, circling around a gorgeous scented and iridescent fountain, officers and scientists, chemists and physicians, each clasping in his arms a laughing girl, danced with abandon to languorous music.
As I watched the dance I overheard two girls commenting upon the appearance of the dancers. Whirling by in the arms of a be-medalled officer, was a girl whose frizzled yellow hair fell about a dun-brown face.
"Did you see that, Fedora, tanned as a roof guard and with that hair!"
"Well, you know," said the other, "it's becoming quite the fashion again."
"Why don't you try it? Three baths would tan you adorably and you do have the proper hair."
"Oh, yes, I have the hair, all right, but my skin won't stand it. I tried it three years ago and I blistered outrageously."
The talk drifted to less informing topics and I moved on and came to other groups lounging at their ease on rugs and divans as they watched more skilful girls squirming through some intricate ballet on an exhibition platform.
Seeing me stand apart, a milk-white girl with hair dyed pink came tugging at my arm. Her opalescent eyes looked from out her chalky countenance; but they were not hard eyes, indeed they seemed the eyes of innocence. As I shook my head and rebuffed her cordial advance I felt, not that I was refusing the proffered love of a painted woman, but rather that I was meanly declining a child's invitation to join her play. In haste I edged away and wandered on past endless gaming tables where men in feverish eagerness whirled wheels of chance, while garishly dressed girls leaned on their shoulders and hung about their necks.
Announced by shouts and shrieking laughter I came upon a noisy jumble of mechanical amusement devices where men and girls in whirling upholstered boxes were being pitched and tumbled about.
Beyond the noise of the childish whirligigs I came into a space where the white ceiling lights were dimmed by crimson globes and picture screens were in operation. It did not take long for me to grasp the essential difference between these pictured stories and those I had seen in the workmen's level. There love of woman was entirely absent from the screen. Here it was the sole substance of the pictures. But unlike the love romances of the outer world, there were no engagement rings, no wedding bells, and never once did the face or form of a child appear.
In seating myself to see the pictures I had carefully chosen a place where there was only room for myself between a man and one of the supporting columns. At an interlude the man arose to go. The girl who had been with him arose also, but he pushed her back upon the bench, saying that he had other engagements, and did not wish her company. The moment he was gone the girl moved over and proceeded to crowd caressingly against my shoulder. She was a huge girl, obviously of the labour strain. She leaned over me as if I had been a lonely child and she a lonelier woman. Crowded against the pillar I could not escape and so tried to appear unconcerned.
"Did you like that story?" I asked, referring to the picture that had just ended.
"No," she replied, "the girl was too timid. She could never have won a roof guard captain in that fashion. They are very difficult men, those roof guard officers."
"And what kind of pictures do you prefer?" I asked.
"Quartettes," she answered promptly. "Two men and two girls when both girls want the other man, and both men want the girl they have. That makes a jolly plot. Or else the ones where there are two perfect lovers and the man is elected to paternity and leaves her. I had a man like that once and it makes me sad to see such a picture."
"Perhaps," I said, speaking in a timorous voice, "you wanted to go with him and be the mother of his children?"
She turned her face toward me in the dim light. "He talked like that," she said, "and then, I hated him. I knew then that he wanted to go and leave me. That he hadn't tried to avoid the paternity draft. Yes, he wanted to sire children. And he knew that he would have to leave me. And so I hated him for ever loving me."
A strange thrill crept over me at the girl's words. I tried to fathom her nature, to separate the tangle of reality from the artificial ideas ingrained by deliberate mis-education. "Did you ever see children? Here, I mean. Pictures of them, perhaps, on the screen?"
"Never," said the girl, drawing away from me and straightening up till my head scarce reached her shoulder. "And I never want to. I hate the thought of them. I wish I never had been one. Why can't we--forget them?"
I did not answer, and the labour girl, who, for some technical flaw in her physique had been rejected for motherhood, arose and walked ponderously away.
After this baffling revelation of the struggle of human souls caught in the maw of machine-made science, I found the picture screen a dull dead thing, and I left the hall and wandered for miles, it seemed, past endless confusion of meaningless revelry. Everywhere was music and gaming and laughter. Men and girls lounged and danced, or spun the wheels of fortune or sat at tables drinking from massive steins, a highly flavoured variety of rather ineffectual synthetic beer. Older women served and waited on the men and girls, and for every man was at least one girl and sometimes as many as could crowd about him. And so they sang, and banged their mugs and sloshed their frothy beverage.
A lonely stranger amidst the jostling throngs, I wandered on through the carnival of Berlin's Level of Free Women. Despite my longing for human companionship I found it difficult to join in this strange recrudescent paganism with any ease or grace.
Girls, alone or in groups, fluttered about me with many a covert or open invitation to join in their merry-making, but something in my halting manner and constrained speech seemed to repulse them, for they would soon turn away as if condemning me as a man without appreciation of the value of human enjoyment.
My constraint and embarrassment were increased by a certain sense of guilt, a feeling which no one in this vast throng, either man or woman, seemed to share. The place had its own standard of ethics, and they were shocking enough to a man nurtured in a human society founded on the sanctification of monogamous marriage. But merely to condemn this recreational life of Germany, by likening it to the licentious freedom that exists in occasional unrestrained amusement places in the outer world, would be to give a very incorrect interpretation of Berlin's Level of Free Women. As we know such places elsewhere in the world there is always about them some tacit confession of moral delinquency, some pretence of apology on the part of the participants. The women who so revel in the outer world consider themselves under a ban of social disapproval, while the men are either of a type who have no sense of moral restraint or men who have for the time abandoned it.
But for this life in Berlin no guilt was felt, no apology offered. The men considered it as quite a normal and proper part of their life, while the women looked upon it as their whole life, to which they had been trained and educated and set apart by the Government; they accepted the rôle quite as did the scientist, labourer, soldier, or professional mother. The state had decreed it to be. They did not question its morality. Hence the life here was licentious and yet unashamed, much, as I fancy was the life in the groves of Athens or the baths of ancient Rome.