Metropolis | Page 6

touchingly, that all agreed the saints must have
forgiven the sinner already, to ring the heavenly bells, thus, to receive him.
The bells still rang with their old, ore voices but when Metropolis roared, then Saint
Michael itself was hoarse. The New Tower of Babel and its fellow houses stretched their
sombre heights high above the cathedral spire, that the young girls in the work-rooms and
wireless stations gazed down just as deep from the thirtieth story windows on the
star-crowned virgin as she, in earlier days, had looked down on the pious red rooves. In
place of doves, flying machines swarmed over the cathedral roof and over the city,
resting on the rooves, from which, at night glaring pillars and circles indicated the course
of flight and landing points.
The Master of Metropolis had already considered, more than once, having the cathedral
pulled down, as being pointless and an obstruction to the traffic in the town of fifty
million inhabitants.
But the small, eager sect of Gothics, whose leader was Desertus, half monk, half one
enraptured, had sworn the solemn oath: If one hand from the wicked city of Metropolis
were to dare to touch just one stone of the cathedral, then they would neither repose nor
rest until the wicked city of Metropolis should lie, a heap of ruins, at the foot of her
cathedral.
The Master of Metropolis used to avenge the threats which constituted one sixth of his
daily mail. But he did not care to fight with opponents to whom he rendered a service by
destroying them for their belief. The great brain of Metropolis, a stranger to the sacrifice
of a desire, estimated the incalculable power which the sacrificed ones and martyrs
showered upon their followers too high rather than too low. Too, the demolition of the
cathedral was not yet so burning a question as to have been the object of an estimate of
expenses. But when the moment should come, the cost of its pulling down would exceed
that of the construction of Metropolis. The Gothics were ascetics; the Master of
Metropolis knew by experience that a multi-millionaire was more cheaply bought over
than an ascetic.
Freder wondered, not without a foreign feeling of bitterness, how many more times the
great Master of Metropolis would permit him to look on at the scene which the cathedral
would present to him on every rainless day: When the sun sank at the back of Metropolis,
the houses turning to mountains and the streets to valleys; when the stream of light,
which seemed to crackle with coldness, broke forth from all windows, from the walls of
the houses, from the rooves and from the heart of the town; when the silent quiver of
electric advertisments began; when the searchlights, in all colours of the rainbow, began
to play around the New Tower of Babel; when the omnibuses turned to chains of
light-spitting monsters, the little motor cars to scurrying, luminous fishes in a waterless
deep-sea, while from the invisible harbour of the underground railway, an ever equal,
magical shimmer pressed on to be swallowed by the hurrying shadows-then the cathedral
would stand there, in this boundless ocean of light, which dissolved all forms by
outshining them, the only dark object, black and persistant, seeming, in its lightlessness,

to free itself from the earth, to rise higher and ever higher, and appearing in this
maelstrom of tumultous light, the only reposeful and masterful object.
But the Virgin on the top of the tower seemed to have her own gentle starlight, and
hovered, set free from the blackness of the stone, on the sickle of the silver moon, above
the cathedral.
Freder had never seen the countenance of the Virgin and yet he knew it so well he could
have drawn it: the austere countenance of the Virgin, the sweet countenance of the
mother.
He stooped, clasping the burning palms of his hands around the iron railing.
"Look at me, Virgin," he begged, "Mother, look at me!" The spear of a searchlight flew
into his eyes causing him to close them angrily. A whistling rocket hissed through the air,
dropping down into the pale twilight of the afternoon, the word: Yoshiwara...
Remarkably white, and with penetrating beams, there hovered, towering up, over a house
which was not to be seen, the word: Cinema.
All the seven colours of the rainbow flared, cold and ghostlike in silently swinging circles.
The enormous face of the clock on the New Tower of Babel was bathed in the glaring
cross-fire of the searchlights. And over and over again from the pale, unreal-looking sky,
dripped the word: Yoshiwara. Freder's eyes hung on the clock of the New Tower of
Babel, where the seconds flashed off as sparks of breathing lightning, continuous in their