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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