CHAPTER VIII

I went outdoors with some trepidation, striving to assume a natural air and dreadfully conscious of a feeling of guilt. But instead of Acquilla’s Dionysian figure I found no one. I returned and summoned Mag.

“Why did you interrupt me with this cock-and-bull excuse,” I said severely.

“You’d talked long enough with that hardened woman,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

“Then you were listening at the door?”

“Yes, I was,” she said sulkily.

“And who permits you to judge my actions,” I continued angrily.

The girl’s eyes filled with tears, she stammered, tried to meet my eyes and ran away.

“Good heavens, here’s a bit of comedy,” I thought, suddenly enlightened. “Mag jealous! Acquilla, Dianne, Gallia and now even Mag! Is it possible that the mere sight of a man as he used to be is going to work such havoc?”

I must confess that my anger vanished in a laugh, and though I have always held myself without much vanity this revelation of my devastating attractions was not at all displeasing.

I presently repaired to the library, which I found to consist of thousands of carefully packed reels, all arranged according to subjects. For instance, I found under ancient history that the siege of Troy was given with a faithful visualization of the Homeric legend accompanied by a lecture explanatory of customs and traditions; the French revolution and the Civil War were not only historically analyzed but actually laid before my eyes. My curiosity was naturally directed to the fate of my native city. I searched in the section entitled 20th Century and found a reel, labelled Apotheosis of Material Civilization, which I immediately placed in the projection and returned to my seat, with what emotion may be imagined.

Before my eyes rose the colossal city of my dreams, a vast intricate triple metropolis, with superimposed avenues, crowded with traffic; the two lower strata vibrantly brilliant in an electric flood; the upper interlaced with vertiginous spans that supported great concourses, lined with trees and parkways. The Pennsylvania and Grand Central Stations, trebled in stature, discharged passengers on the concourses of the middle stage which was reserved for pedestrians solely. The scene which had evidently been filmed at the opening of business, showed the ceaseless inflow of vast multitudes which were regimented according to destination and marched in military formation under the vigilant control of thousands of traffic officers. Heavy traffic and incoming automobiles were rigorously kept on the lower avenue, and only private automobiles of the greatest luxury circulated above. Each block was treated as an architectural entity rising five hundred feet and flanked with enormous towers at each corner with a central landing place for aeroplanes which swarmed over the sky. Seen thus with its standardized armies of workers it resembled nothing else than a cross section of an ant hill or a beehive.

But, abruptly, when my curiosity was just aroused, the scene shifted to the new capital, Europa, showing the great woman scientist, Selma Benegal, in her laboratory, experimenting with electronic disassociation and the startling discovery of the deadly electroid ray. Next came the declaration of war by the feminine controlled states of Europe on the Americas; the consternation in New York, the panic in the Senate at Washington as President McGuffy at the wireless telephone, indignantly demanded of Europa some justifying explanation.

Reply of the European Council. An epochal note relegating to the dust heap all the hypocrisies of the old man-made diplomacy:--“Europe makes war because Europe is ready to conquer!”

Then, while my head swam, came in quick succession shots of the hasty assemblage of the volunteer air forces of America; politicians proclaiming that America was rising like one man; while all the time the great European armada of the air was seen embarking in the night, a hundred armored aeroplanes equipped with the new Z-ray destroyers.

While I sat thus twisting my hands, I beheld the dreadful meeting at dawn and the sickening destruction of the feeble American forces as the Z-rays, with the crash of thunderbolts withered everything that opposed them. I saw the armada sweep on toward New York; the panic in Babylon; the first bolts toppling over the skyscrapers; crazed multitudes flinging themselves from the topmost windows. I saw New York collapse like an ant hill under the fall of an immense foot.

No words can picture the satanic grandeur of this destruction. The electroid rays seemed to have the quality of paralyzing all life, either because joined to some deadly chemical or because the immense concussion produced sudden deadly vacuums. From the air the tottering city swayed and crumbled into unrecognizable heaps of stone and steel, while great sheets of fire a hundred feet in height leaped over the destruction. Millions died instantly of suffocation or fright while the armada, passing on, swept the country like a plague of fiery locusts, destroying every vestige of plant and animal life.

I turned away in horror and rushed into the open air, where I must have swooned, for the next thing I remember I was in Acquilla’s arms and Acquilla’s voice, alarmed and compassionate, was calling my name.

I sat up, recollecting myself.

“What happened, Bogardus dear?” said Acquilla, passing her hand gently over my forehead.

“That awful picture,” I said with a shudder. “How could human beings be so fiendish?”

“Oh, you have been looking at the destruction of New York,” Acquilla said, looking at me curiously. “And it has upset you as much as that? And you are a representative of the war age--the age of war? So men were not so different after all?”

I put her arm from me indignantly and mastered my emotion, ashamed before a woman to have so betrayed my britannic ancestry.

“True, we made war but not on women and children. We left that to savages.”

“Your attitude surprises me,” said Acquilla reflectively. “What sentimental creatures you men were after all. What horrifies you? That you saw millions wiped out in an instant? But was there anything less horrible in men dying by the hundreds of thousands?”

“But a whole city, a nation, the women and children!”

“Really, Bogardus, do you believe that war was not always directed at the women and children? Is it easier to die suddenly or to live blankly and carry on the burden of life? Who suffered most in your romantic age, the lover who died or the lover who remained? As for the horror you imagine, stop and think on this. The destruction you saw was instantaneous, the vibration of the electroid ray paralyzes every nerve instantly. There is no more experience with pain than a bolt of lightning gives. Such a death was virtually an unconscious blotting out. Yet at the same epoch in your sentimentality, you gave to your criminals an instantaneous merciful death and allowed the ones you loved, to die in prolonged agonies. Isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know if it is true. It sounds logical,” I admitted unwillingly.

“And that is what you men never were!”

“At least we were consistent.”

“How so?”

“You have enslaved my sex, because you say, it lived only to kill. Yet on what have you founded your civilization of peace? On the most gigantic holocaust that the imagination could conceive. I call that inconsistent.”

“You have brought up the fundamental difference between the sexes. You men were ever slaves to tradition and your consistency on which you pride yourselves was after all only a servitude to a rooted idea which no longer served. There is woman’s superior mentality. We never ask is a thing right, but is it necessary. Your vanity made you believe you could foresee all future conditions. We simply say the present has no relation to the past, because new conditions and not old ones determine our decisions.”

“I have heard such stuff before,” I said, irritated at my own lack of resource.

For some reason Acquilla did not wish to further antagonize me. She took my hand tenderly and said:

“I must make allowance for your man’s point of view, dear Bogardus. I don’t want to annoy you. I am simply comparing different viewpoints. After all, remember that life is the cheapest thing in the world and it matters little how or when we go. You will do us the justice as you see us, to realize that if we have not yet conquered death, we never permit suffering, and though we had to decimate the world to do it, we have produced a state where hunger, poverty, sickness and suffering are unknown. You are not angry with me, Bogardus,” she concluded, holding out her arms with a charming gesture.

I yielded to the embrace but with a certain obstinacy which she must have felt, for she began to display the most tender solicitude to win me out of the stubbornness of my mood.

“Dianne is dining with us tonight and bringing Dulcina, the great composer, and Carrilla, who plays divinely. You will see that the aesthetics of living has not been lost in our feminine age. Come, we’ll plan the dinner together and you shall order the banquet as the Epicures of your day would have done. There you men remain supreme.”

I understood the reasons of her flattery, but was somewhat mollified by it. Yet as I took her hand and followed her to the culinary libraries, I was curiously conscious that in this scene I had behaved strangely like a woman and Acquilla had had all the masculine advantages. This irritated me and I resolved not to appear again at such a disadvantage.