where its miracles are planned and executed; the original mass-production process which
turns out the myriad leaves of trees and the petals of flowers, the wings of insects and birds,
the patterns of snow crystals and solar systems. Beethoven and Hansi revealed the operation of
that machinery from which color and delicacy, power and splendor are poured forth in
unceasing floods.
Lanny had made so many puns upon the name of his brother-in-law that he had ceased to
think of them as such. There was nothing in the physical aspect of Hansi to suggest the robin,
but when you listened to his music you remembered that the robin's wings are marvels of
lightness and grace, and that every feather is a separate triumph. The robin's heart is strong,
and he flies without stopping, on and on, to lands beyond the seas. He flies high into the upper
registers, among the harmonic notes, where sensations are keener than any known upon earth.
The swift runs of Hansi's violin were the swooping and darting of all the birds; the long trills
were the fluttering of the humming-bird's wings, purple, green, and gold in the sunlight,
hovering, seeming motionless; each moment you expect it to dart away, but there it remains, an
enchantment.
IX
Hansi was playing the elaborate cadenza. No other sound in the auditorium; the men of the
orchestra sat as if they were images, and the audience the same. Up and down the scale rushed
the flying notes; up like the wind through the pine trees on a mountain-side, down like
cascades of water, flashing rainbows in the sunshine. Beethoven had performed the feat of
weaving his two themes in counterpoint, and Hansi performed the feat of playing trills with
two of his fingers and a melody with the other two. Only a musician could know how many
years of labor it takes to train nerves and muscles for such "double-stopping," but everyone
could know that it was beautiful and at the same time that it was wild.
The second movement is a prayer, and grief is mixed with its longing; so Hansi could tell
those things which burdened his spirit. He could say that the world was a hard and cruel
place, and that his poor people were in agony. "Born to sorrow—born to sorrow," moaned the
wood-winds, and Hansi's violin notes hovered over them, murmuring pity. But one does not
weep long with Beethoven; he turns pain into beauty, and it would be hard to find in all his
treasury a single work in which he leaves you in despair. There comes a rush of courage and
determination, and the theme of grief turns into a dance. The composer of this concerto,
humiliated and enraged because the soldiers of Napoleon had seized his beloved Vienna, went
out into the woods alone and reminded himself that world conquerors come and go, but love
and joy live on in the hearts of men.
"Oh, come, be merry, oh, come be jolly, come one, come all and dance with me!" Lanny
amused himself by finding words for musical themes. This dance went over flower-strewn
meadows; breezes swept ahead of it, and the creatures of nature joined the gay procession,
birds fluttering in the air, rabbits and other delightful things scampering on the ground. Hand
in hand came young people in flowing garments. "Oh, youths and maidens, oh, youths and
maidens, come laugh, and sing, and dance with me!" It was the Isadora rout that Lanny would
always carry in his memory. When the storm of the orchestra drowned out Hansi's fiddle, the
listener was leaping to a mountain-top and from it to the next.
Others must have been having the same sort of adventure, for when the last note sounded
they started to their feet and tried to tell the artist about it. Lanny saw that his brother-in-law
had won a triumph. Such a sweet, gentle fellow he was, flushed from his exertions, but even
thinner than usual, showing the strain under which he was living. People seemed to realize
that here was one who was not going to be spoiled by adulation. He wasn't going to enjoy
himself and his own glory, he would never become blase and bored; he would go on loving his
art and serving it. Nobody in that hall failed to know that he was a Jew, and that this was a
time of anguish for his people. Such anti-Semitism as there was in Paris was not among the
art-lovers, and to shout "Bravo!" at this young virtuoso was to declare yourself for the cause
of freedom and human decency.
Lanny thought about the great composer, friend of mankind and champion of the oppressed.
His concerto had been played badly in his own lifetime, and what a revelation it would
have been to him to hear it rendered by a soloist and a conductor, neither having a score. But
then Lanny thought: "What would Beethoven think if he could see what is happening in the
land of his birth?" So the dreams of art fled, and painful reality took their place. Lanny
thought: "The German soul has been captured by Hitler! What can he give it but his own
madness and distraction? What can he make of it but an image of his distorted self?"
X
Hansi always wanted to be taken straight home after a performance; he was exhausted, and
didn't care for sitting around in cafes. He entered the palace and was about to go to his room,
when the telephone rang; Berlin calling, and Hansi said: "That will be Papa, wanting to know
how the concert went."
He was right, and told his father that everything had gone well. Johannes didn't ask for
particulars; instead he had tidings to impart. "The Reichstag building is burning."
"Herrgott!" exclaimed the son, and turned and repeated the words to the others.
"The Nazis are saying that the Communists set fire to it."
"But, Papa, that is crazy!"
"I must not talk about it. You will find the news in the papers, and do your own guessing. The
building has been burning for a couple of hours, and they say that men were seen running
through it with torches."
"It is a plot!" exclaimed Hansi.
"I cannot say; but I am glad that you are not here. You must stay where you are for the
present. It is a terrible thing."
So Hansi did not go to bed for a long while. They sat and talked, and Lanny, who had
friends on Le Populaire, called up that paper to get further details. It was believed that the
great building was gutted, and the government was charging that it had been deliberately fired
by emissaries of the Red International.
All four of the young people were familiar with that elaborate specimen of the Bismarck style
of architecture, and could picture the scenes, both there and elsewhere in the city. "It is a
frame-up," said Bess. "Communists are not terrorists." Lanny agreed with her, and Irma,
whatever she thought, kept it to herself. It was inevitable that every Communist would call it a
plot, and every Nazi would be equally certain of the opposite.
"Really, it is too obvious!" argued Hansi. "The elections less than six days away, and those
scoundrels desperate for some means of discrediting us!"
"The workers will not be fooled!" insisted Bess. "Our party is monolithic."
Lanny thought: "The old phonograph record!" But he said: "It's a terrible thing, as Papa
says. They will be raiding Communist headquarters all over Germany tonight. Be glad that you
have a good alibi."
But neither of the musicians smiled at this idea. In their souls they were taking the blows
which they knew must be falling upon their party comrades.
XI
What happened in the Reichstag building on that night of February 27 would be a subject of
controversy inside and outside of Germany for years to come; but there could be no doubt
about what happened elsewhere. Even while the four young people were talking in Paris, the
leader of the Berlin S.A., Count Helldorf, was giving orders for the arrest of prominent
Communists and Socialists.
The list of victims had been prepared in advance, and warrants, each with a photograph of
the victim in question. The Count knew that the Marxists were the criminals, he said; and
Goring announced that the demented Dutchman who was found in the building with matches
and fire-lighters had a Communist party membership card on him. The statement turned out
to be untrue, but it served for the moment.
Next day Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree "for the safeguarding of the state
from the Communist menace," and after that the Nazis had everything their own way. The
prisons were filled with suspects, and the setting up of concentration camps began with a
rush. The Prussian government, of which Goring was the head, issued a statement concerning
the documents found in the raid on Karl Liebknecht Haus three days before the fire. The
Communists had been plotting to burn down public buildings throughout Germany, and to
start civil war and revolution on the Russian model; looting had been planned to begin right
after the fire and terrorist acts were to be committed against persons and property. The
publication of these documents was promised, but no one ever saw them, and the story was
dropped as soon as it had served its purpose—which was to justify the abolishing of civil
liberties throughout what had been the German Republic.
XII
As the evidence began to filter into the newspapers of Britain and France, the young Reds
and Pinks spent many an hour trying to make up their minds about one of the great "frame-
ups" of history. What brain had conceived it? What hand had carried it out? For the former
role their suspicions centered upon a German World War aviator who had fled to Sweden,
where he had become a dope addict and had been in a psychopathic institution. Hermann
Goring was a great hulk of a man, absurdly vain, with a fondness for gaudy uniforms which
was to make him the butt of Berlin wits; he was also a man of immense energy, brutal and
unscrupulous, the perfect type of those freebooters who had ravaged the borders of the German
empire in medieval times, had given themselves titles, and now had huge white marble statues of
themselves in the Siegesallee, known to the Berlin wits as "the Cemetery of Art."
Hermann Goring had got his titles: Minister without Portfolio, Federal Commissioner for Air
Transport, Prussian Minister of the Interior. They carried the same grants of power as in the
old free-booting days, but unfortunately they were subject to elections; on the following
Sunday the proletariat might go to the polls and strip Hermann of his glories—and this would
be extremely annoying to a man of aristocratic tastes, a friend of the former Crown Prince and
of Thyssen. As it happened, the man of action was in position to act, for his official residence
was connected with the Reichstag building by a long underground passage; also he had at his
command a well-trained army, eager to execute any command he might give. What did a
building amount to, in comparison with the future of the.N.S.D.A.P.?
The man whom the Nazis were finally to convict of the crime was a feeble-minded Dutchman
who had been expelled from the Communist party of that country and had been a tramp all
over Europe. The police maintained that at his original examination he had told a detailed
story of setting fire to the curtains of the restaurant with matches and fire-lighters. But the
restaurant wasn't the only room that burned; there had been a heavy explosion in the session
chamber, and that vast place had become a mass of flames and explosive gases. The head of
the Berlin fire department had observed trains of gasoline on the floors of the building.
Immediately after the fire he announced that the police had carted away a truck-load of
unburned incendiary materials from the scene of the fire; and immediately after making this
announcement he was dismissed from his post.
Such were the details which the young radicals abroad put together and published in their
papers. But the papers which might have spread such news in Germany had all been
suppressed; their editors were in prison and many were being subjected to cruel tortures. A
sickening thing to know that your comrades, idealists whom you had trusted and followed,
were being pounded with rubber hose, danced upon with spiked boots, having their kidneys
kicked loose and their testicles crushed. Still more terrible to know that civil rights were being
murdered in one of the world's most highly developed nations; that the homeland of Goethe
and Bach was in the hands of men who were capable of planning and perpetrating such
atrocities.
XIII
The fire had the intended effect of throwing all Germany into a panic of fear. Not merely the
Nazis, but Papen and Hugenberg were denouncing the Red conspirators over the radio. All
the new techniques of propaganda were set at work to convince the voters that the Fatherland
stood in deadly peril of a Communist revolution. Friday was proclaimed the "Day of the
Awakening Nation." The Nazis marched with torchlights, and on the mountain-tops and on
high towers in the cities great bonfires burned—fires of liberation, they were called. "O Lord,
make us free!" prayed Hitler over the radio, and loud-speakers spread his words in every
market-square in every town.
On Sunday the people voted, and the Nazi vote increased from nearly twelve million to more
than seventeen million. But the Communists lost only about a million, and the Socialists
practically none. The Catholics actually gained, in spite of all the suppressions; so it appeared
that the German people were not so easy to stampede after all. The Nazis still didn't have a
majority of the Reichstag deputies, so they couldn't form a government without the support
and approval of the aristocrats. What was going to come out of that?
The answer was that Adi Hitler was going to have his way. He was going right on, day after
day, pushing to his goal, and nobody was going to stop him. Objections would be raised in the
Cabinet, and he would do what he had done in party conferences—argue, storm, plead,
denounce, and threaten. He would make it impossible for anyone else to be heard, raise such a
disturbance as could not be withstood, prove that he could outlast any opposition, that his
frenzy was uncontrollable, his will irrepressible. But behind this seeming madness would be a
