Passenger to Frankfurt by Passenger to Frankfurt

Author:Passenger to Frankfurt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-27T08:54:37.470000+00:00

'What do you think of them?' she said. 'My boys, my youth corps, my children. Yes, my children. Have you a word that can describe them?'

'I think so,' said Stafford Nye. 'Magnificent.' He spoke to her as to Royalty. 'Magnificent, ma'am.'

'Ah!' She bowed her head. She smiled, the wrinkles multiplying all over her face. It made her look exactly like a crocodile.

A terrible woman, he thought, a terrible woman, impossible, dramatic. Was any of this happening? He couldn't believe it was. What could this be but yet another festival in which a production was being given.

The doors clashed open again. The yellow-haired band of the young supermen marched as before through it. This time they did not wield swords, instead they sang. Sang with unusual beauty of tone and voice.

After a good many years of pop music Stafford Nye felt incredulous pleasure. Trained voices, these. Not raucous shouting. Trained by masters of the singing art. Not allowed to strain their vocal cords, to be off key. They might be the new Heroes of a New World, but what they sang was not new music. It was music he had heard before. An arrangement of the Preislied, there must be a concealed orchestra somewhere, he thought, in a gallery round the top of the room. It was an arrangement or adaptation of various Wagnerian themes. It passed from the Preislied to the distant echoes of the Rhine music.

The Elite Corps made once more a double lane where everybody was expected to make an entrance. It was not the old Empress this time. She sat on her dais awaiting whoever was coming.

And at last he came. The music changed as he came. It was a motif which by now Stafford Nye had got by heart. The melody of the Young Siegfried. Siegfried's horn in all its glory and its triumph, its mastery of a world in which the young Siegfried came through the doorway, marching up between the lines to conquer.

Out of what were clearly his followers, came one of the handsomest young men Stafford Nye had ever seen. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, perfectly proportioned, conjured up as it were by the wave of a magician's wand, he came forth out of the world of myth. Myth, heroes, resurrection, rebirth, it was all there. His beauty, his strength, his incredible assurance and arrogance.

He strode through the double lines of his bodyguard until he stood before the hideous mountain of womanhood that sat there on her throne; he knelt on one knee, pressed her hand to his lips, and then rising to his feet, he threw up one arm in salutation and uttered the cry that Stafford Nye had heard from the others. 'Heil!' His German was not very clear, but Stafford Nye thought he distinguished the syllables 'Heil to the great mother!'

Then the handsome young hero looked from one side to the other. There was some faint recognition, though an uninterested one, of Renata, but when his gaze turned to Stafford Nye, there was definite interest and appraisal.

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