CHAPTER XV
For a long time the Transatlantic Banking Company, which I have mentioned on several occasions, puzzled me. I wondered if it was truly a big bank, and why it should hold an interest in Bulow and Company. My suspicion was that it might figure in the matter at hand as it did in Howard Byng's affairs fifteen years previously.
That point mystified me. It took a long time to reason it out, although I was looking for the cloven-hoof in banks, and even governments, and I did believe that the Kaiser had been planning a world conquest ever since he tucked France's thousand millions into his wallet and went away with his chest out.
I did believe that the Germans nourished and practiced morganatic marriage, the well-spring of most all forms of concubinage and degeneracy, liberally imported to New York and all other large cities of the world—the tap-root of the social evil. The entire German royal crowd are sexual degenerates. We allow the male as well as the female of this species to enter respectable residential sections, social clubs, and churches, there to rub elbows and even kiss with their scarlet lips girls and boys, thus encouraging further acquaintance with their kind of "morality."
We can see all that now, but I, like millions of others, didn't fall for its enormity until actually struck by lightning, so to speak.
The Kaiser's coterie had started out to seduce the world, and came with a clean, pink face. Kultur, music, art, science—frequently stolen—a stab at literature, and a big display of substance—money—were used as wedges. They began as the libertine always begins, by cloaking themselves as respectable. Hell's reward is ashes, bitter, acrid, scalding ashes, slow in coming and sometimes at the expense of blood and millions. Adjectives, adverbs and qualifying phrases have lost their power to convey a conception of the underground system of the Hun.
While we dislike sermons and smile sometimes at our own moralizing, and hate bristling, pregnant facts, nevertheless we have faced a wall of them, and it remains to be seen whether we smash it, thereby letting in the noonday sun, or shall walk cowardly around the truth to further plague ourselves and generations to come.
I took the early train to Canby's place next morning, convinced that Bulow and Company's cutter was going out on an expedition that meant harm to the little girl's father, whom I had not met. I wondered if his delightful daughter, whom I had learned to venerate, would allow me to use a motorboat so I could go to her father. I found myself thinking of her as an "oasis on a barren Key." Of how much self-interest was concealed in that who shall be the judge? I mean the possibility of excitement, lure of danger, of serving and making a record with the Government which signed my vouchers. This child would become a valuable witness. I recalled what the old judge had said about the odor the papers gave off to him—white paper and ink can give a terrible stench to our sixth sense if one has the nostrils to detect it.