Streets and stairs and streets and at last the cathedral square. Black in the background, the cathedral, ungodded, unlighted, the place before the broad steps swarming with human beings—and amid them, surrounded by gasps of madly despairing laughter, the howling of songs of fury, the smouldering of torches and brands, high up on the pyre …
“Maria—!”
Freder fell on his knees as though his sinews were sawn through.
“Maria—!”
The girl whom he took to be Maria raised her head. She sought him. Her glance found him. She smiled—laughed.
“Dance with me, my dearest—!” flew her voice, sharp as a flashing knife, through uproar.
Freder got up. The mob recognised him. The mob lurched towards him, shrieking and yelling.
“Jooooo—oh! Joh Fredersen’s son—! Joh Fredersen’s son—”
They made to seize him. He dodged them wildly. He threw himself with his back against the parapet of the street.
“Why do you want to kill her, you devils—? She has saved your children!”
Roars of laughter answered him. Women sobbed with laughter, biting into their own hands.
“Yes—yes—she has saved our children—! She saved our children with the song of the dead machines! She saved our children with the ice cold water—! High let her live—high and three time high!”
“Go to the ‘House of the Sons’—! Your children are there!”
“Our children are not in the ‘House of the Sons!’ There lives the brood, hatched out by money. Sons of your kind, you dog in white-silken skin!”
“Listen, for God’s sake—do listen to me—!!!”
“We don’t want to hear anything—!”
“Maria—beloved!!!—Beloved!!!”
“Don’t bawl so, son of Joh Fredersen! Or we’ll stop your mouth!”
“Kill me, if you must kill—but let her live—!”
“Each in his turn, son of Joh Fredersen! First you shall see how your beloved dies a beautiful, hot magnificent death!”
A woman—Grot’s woman—tore a strip off her skirt and bound Freder’s hands. He was bound fast to the parapet with cords. He struggled like a wild beast, shouting that the veins of this throat were in danger of bursting. Bound, impotent, he threw back his head and saw the sky over Metropolis, pure, tender, greenish-blue, for morning would soon follow after this night.
“God—!” he shouted, trying to throw himself on his knees, in his bonds. “God—! Where art thou—?”
A wild, red gleam caught his eyes. The pyre flamed up in long flames. The men, the women, seized hands and tore around the bonfire, faster, faster and faster, in rings growing ever wider and wider, laughing, screaming with stamping feet, “Witch—! Witch!”
Freder’s bonds broke. He fell over on his face among the feet of the dancers.
And the last he saw of the girl, while her gown and hair stood blazing around her as a mantle of fire, was the loving smile and the wonder of her eyes—and her mouth of deadly sin, which lured among the flames:
“Dance with me, my dearest! Dance with me—!”
XXI
Rotwang awoke; but he knew quite well he was dead. And this consciousness filled him with the deepest satisfaction. His aching body no longer had anything to do with him. That was perhaps the last remains of life. But something worried him deeply, as he raised himself up and looked around in all directions: Hel was not there.
Hel must be found …
An existence without Hel was over at last. A second one?—No! Better than to stay dead.
He got up on his feet. That was very difficult. He must have been lying as a corpse for a good long time. It was night, too. A fire was raging out there, and it was all very noise … Shrieking of human beings …
Hm …
He had hoped to have been rid of them. But, apparently the Almighty Creator could not get along without them. Now—but one purpose. He just wanted his Hel. When he had found Hel, he would—he promised himself this!—never again quarrel with the father of all things, about anything at all …
So now he went … The door leading to the street was open and hanging crookedly on its hinges. Strange. He stepped in front of the house and looked deliberatingly around. What he saw seemed to be a kind of Metropolis; but a rather insane kind of Metropolis. The houses seemed as though struck still in St. Vitus’ dance. And an uncommonly rough and impolite sort of people was ramping around a flaming bonfire, upon which a creature of rare beauty was standing, seeming, to Rotwang, to be wondrously at ease.
Ah—It was that, ah yes—that, in the existence which, thank the Lord, lay far behind him, he had tried to create, to replace his lost Hel—just to make the handiwork of the Creator of the world look rather silly … Not bad for a beginning … hm … but, good God, compared with Hel; what an object; what a bungle …
The shrieking individuals down there were quite right to burn the thing. Though it appeared to him to be rather a show of idiocy to destroy his test-work. But perhaps that was the custom of the people in this existence, and he certainly did not want to argue with them. He wanted to find Hel—his Hel—and nothing else …
He knew exactly where to look for her. She loved the cathedral so dearly, did his pious Hel. And, if the flickering light of the bonfire did not deceive him—for the greenish sky gave no glimmer—Hel was standing, like a frightened child in the blackness of the cathedral door, her slender hands clasped firmly upon her breast, looking more saint-like than ever.
Past those who were raving around the bonfire—always politely avoiding getting in their way—Rotwang quietly groped his way to the cathedral.
Yes, it was his Hel … She receded into the cathedral. He groped his way up the steps. How high the door looked … Coolness and hovering incense received him … All the saints in the pillar niches had pious and lovely faces, smiling gently, as though they rejoiced with him that he was now, at last, to find Hel, his Hel, again.
She
