"Hence I say the gift of prophecy presupposes a correct interpretation of the past and present as well as the peculiar gift of extraordinary brain development—a rare gift, so sparsely distributed that in olden times prophets were credited with interpreting the will of the Almighty."
"Franz," cried Bertha, her face pallid and drawn, her hands twitching. "Oh, my God!" she screamed, as if nerve-shattered by an awful thought suddenly burst upon her; "you don't believe—no, you can't——! Tell me that you do not think it was God's voice speaking through Zara?" And, as if to shut out some horrible vision, the Girl-Queen of Guns covered her face with both hands.
"It is not for me to pronounce on things I don't know," replied Franz. "Judged by what you have told me, Zara suited her prophecy for the most part to facts and to existing tendencies, conditions and ambitions on the part of political parties and high personages."
"She called me the coming arch-murderess of the age, insisted that the warrior-queens of past times, even the most heartless and most cruel, had been but amateurs compared with me in taking human lives—— Oh, Franz, tell me it is not true! She was romancing, was she not? She lied to frighten me and to get a big trinkgeld."
"I wish it were so," said Franz earnestly; "but, unfortunately, she had a clear insight into the future as it may develop, unless you call a halt to incessant, ever-increasing, ever-new war preparations."
Many years ago I read a manuscript play by a Dutch author, in the opening scenes of which a Jew tried to sell another Jew a bill of goods. Shylock number two wanted the stuff badly, but calculated that by a show of indifference he might obtain them for a halfpenny less. On his part, Isaac was as eager to sell as the other was to buy, but the threatened impairment of his fortune called for strategy. So he feigned that he did not care a rap whether the goods changed hands or not, and the two shysters remained together a whole long act engaging in a variety of business that had nought to do with the original proposition, each, however, watching for opportunity to re-introduce it, now as a threat, again as a bait, and the third and seventh and tenth time in jest. So Bertha, having once disposed of the war preparation bogey, according to Uncle Majesty's suggestion, now returned to it in slightly different form. She was determined to discount Zara's prophecies at any cost.
Getting ready to fight was tantamount to backing down; spending billions for guns and ammunition and chemicals and fortifications and espionage and war scares and whatnots was mere pretext for keeping the pot boiling in the workman's cottage, and the golden eagles rolling in the financier's cash drawer, and so on ad infinitum. When Bertha had finished she thought Zara's prophecies very poor stuff.
Franz came in for the full quota of that sort of argument out of a bad conscience so warped by hypocrisy. Our Lady of the Guns no doubt believed every word she said, or rather repeated—dear woman's way! She always firmly trusts in what suits her, logic, proof to the contrary, stubborn facts notwithstanding. Instinct or intuition, she calls it.
"That is no way to dispose of so grave a subject," said Franz.
"But what can I do?"