“But you must know, Mr. Budd, I don’t write about politics. I don’t have that sort of mind.”
“You have a mind that observes the faults and follies of the people about you; and if you were to write such things here, it would be taken as political—everything is so taken, and the consequences are more disagreeable than you would find it easy to imagine.”
“Really, do you believe that anybody would pay attention to my playful and mildly satirical pictures of foreign ways?”
“A lot of attention would be paid, and it might be some time before you found it out. People you met would be questioned, and might get into serious trouble. Some day you might be astonished to learn that somebody you had trusted had been set to watching you and had compiled a long list of your indiscretions.”
“Thank you for your kind thought,” said the lady. “It will comfort you to know that I have already considered the possibility, and have taken steps to meet it. Anything I write while I am staying in Germany will be published under a pen name.”
“That does not relieve my concern,” replied Lanny. “I am afraid that would only be taken as a sign that you were aware of what you were doing. It might increase the suspicion against you.”
“You mean to tell me the German authorities would read a fiction story in an American magazine, and take the trouble to find out the real name of the author?”
Lanny said: “Wait!” A pedestrian was approaching—one of those old-fashioned Berlin Bürger who insisted upon wearing a derby hat in midsummer, with a clasp in a vest buttonhole on which to hang the hat. Lanny remarked: “They feed the lions in the afternoon, and I am told that it is a very interesting sight. We must be sure not to miss it!” Then, after the old gentleman had passed out of hearing: “They watch everything that appears in America which they consider prejudicial to their regime—and especially if it shows signs of being based on information from here. They find out who wrote it and if they can get hold of him they make it hot for him.”
“In my case, Mr. Budd, the editor has agreed to keep my name secret.”
“My dear lady! Did you make that arrangement by mail? Have you any idea through how many hands your letter passed before it reached your editor? Have you any information about the editor’s secretary, and whom she goes out to lunch with? Your story is lively, and people talk about it. The editor’s secretary meets a cultured German gentleman who invites her out, and starts talking about the story. ‘There is somebody who really knows how things are in Germany now!’ he says, with a laugh; and the secretary replies: ‘Yes, indeed. The author is living in a pension in Berlin. Her name is Laurel Creston.’ That item of information is cabled to the Gestapo, and a woman who possesses wide culture and gracious manners, and who incidentally speaks good English, comes and engages a room in the Pension Baumgartner before that day is over. She meets everybody in the place and hears what they say about you; maybe she meets you and hears what you say about Germany—of course in the strictest confidence. It might end in somebody going to a concentration camp.”
“You seem to know a lot about the ways of the Gestapo.”
“I go about in German social circles, and while I don’t take part in such discussions, I listen and learn.”
“And do you like that sort of thing?”
“Why should you ask that? I am an art expert, and am here on business. I meet all sorts of people—yesterday I spent an hour or two with Marshal Göring, and received from him a commission to handle a number of art works in America. He talked and I listened.”
“And it doesn’t trouble your conscience at all to know that monstrous cruel things are going on all the time?”
“It troubles me when I see a fellow-countryman getting into trouble through ignorance of what the Old World is like. So I give you a friendly warning. But apart from that I have one simple rule, I leave the politics of each country I visit to the people who live in that country, and I talk to them about the difference between good and bad taste in art, and the prices I am willing to advise my clients in America to pay for this or that particular work. On that basis I am able to go everywhere and meet everybody. If ever the time should come that I decide to retire from art experting and settle down in Newcastle or Green Spring Valley—then I might write a book, or I might tell you things I have seen and let you write about them.”
IV
There he was, the troglodyte, stubborn and impermeable; he had got a safe cave and made himself comfortable in it, and was not to be lured outside by any device. Miss Creston gave up, and let him tell her about a new book he had been reading, Dr. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind. It was not the first time the phenomena of psychic research had been brought into the laboratory, but it was the latest, and Lanny asked her if she knew anything about this strange underground realm whose events you could not quite believe even after you had seen them happen. She admitted that she didn’t know much, so they resumed the relationship which a man finds most satisfactory—himself as teacher and the woman as attentive pupil.
He told her about the Polish woman who had been a guest in his mother’s home for the past ten years. Miss Creston had heard her spoken of, in a slightly derogatory way, a part of the queerness of the Budd household. Lanny said he was aware of that attitude; yet in the same company where it was expressed, you would find some person who had had an experience which could not be accounted for by any of the powers of body or mind as we take them for granted. People were content to exchange stories about apparitions, premonitions, mind reading, or whatever it might be, and then forget all about it. But Lanny had wanted to understand, and had tried experiments and read books, and from time to time had talked with scientists.
He told about Zaharoff and his dead duquesa, and the various other “spirits” who had haunted a munition king’s séances. He told about two mediums here in Berlin who had given Irma and himself what was known as a “cross-correspondence.” He told about Professor Pröfenik, an elderly mystagogue who practiced the occult arts, including the exorcising of werewolves. He told about the séances with Rudolf Hess in Berchtesgaden—for the Deputy’s interest in the occult was known to all Germany, and he had founded an institute for the study of mental healing. All this was interesting to a woman writer, and proof of the fact that a man could have serious intellectual interests, even while keeping himself aloof from political subjects.
V
Lanny had had his turn, and good breeding now required that he should offer one to his companion. He asked if she had been reading anything important of late, and she answered that she, too, had been risking her reputation by taking up the study of an unpopular subject. “I have been investigating our economic system and what is the matter with it. I wanted to be impartial, so first I read a Socialist and then I read a Communist and now I am reading an Anarchist.”
“Good God!” said Lanny Budd. “I hope you don’t leave those books lying around on your dressing table in the pension!”
“No, I have been careful to lock them in my trunk.”
“Where on earth did you get them—if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I bought them in a Red bookshop in London: Kautsky’s The Social Revolution and After, Lenin’s The State and Revolution, and Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.”
“And may I ask, have you decided which you are, a Socialist, a Communist, or an Anarchist?”
“Kropotkin hasn’t had his full chance yet, but I feel pretty sure I’m going to turn out a Socialist. It seems to come naturally to an Anglo-Saxon to get what he wants by the method of majority consent.”
“I am relieved to hear you make that concession,” remarked the son of Budd-Erling.
“Of course there will have to be pressure,” added the sociological lady. “There has never been any social change without pressure from determined groups—and perhaps the threat of revolution in the background.”
“I see,” said Lanny, dryly. “And where are you expecting us to find ourselves when these pressure gro
ups have got through with us?”
“In a society without exploitation of man by man.” Then, challengingly: “Does that terrify you?”
“Not especially,” was the mild reply. “I figure that I have special knowledge, and there will be a use for it somewhere in the world. Perhaps your proletarian friends will put me in charge of an art gallery and let me make sure that the most important works are hung to advantage—something which isn’t always the case at present.”
“I’ll do my best to arrange it,” promised the woman.
“Assuming that you will be a Commissar, or whatever it is that the Socialists call it.” He smiled amiably as he said this, so that it wouldn’t have too much of a sting.
So began an interesting hour. Laurel Creston, too, had discovered a new world; not that of the subconscious mind, but that of social evolution, of the class struggle and the emerging co-operative society. She was all steamed up about it, eager for somebody to talk to; and Lanny was graciously pleased to listen. Of course he mustn’t make any concessions, he must remain the troglodyte; however, he could be one of the modern, agreeable sort, who has turned his cave inside out, so to say, and made it into the most beautiful of ivory towers filled with every sort of art treasure and pervaded by delicate perfumes and sounds of music and laughter. Lanny’s inquiries had to be skeptical, even mocking; enough to be provocative, but never rude.
Under the stimulation of this challenge, Laurel Creston came to life as Lanny had never seen her so far; she became the person which as a rule she kept for the hours before her typewriter. Eagerness lighted up her brown eyes and the color mounted into her cheeks which ordinarily were pale. He exasperated her by his stupidity, and she simply had to convince him, or at any rate to chastise him to her own satisfaction. God, how blind the bourgeois world could be! How self-satisfied, how arrogant in its assumption that society had been created for its sole comfort and convenience! Sometimes these people exasperate you so that you want to scream at them; but, of course, being well bred, you content yourself with annihilating sarcasm, or perhaps a bon mot which you carefully keep in memory and work into your next story.
VI
By this method of teasing, Lanny Budd learned how the dirty work would get itself done in a co-operative world. Machinery would do as much of it as possible, and the rest would be highly paid—precisely because there would be no other way of persuading people to do it. Wasn’t that fair, when you stopped to think about it? The important point was that modern techniques could turn out wealth so fast that there would be enough for everybody who was willing to do his share of productive labor. Incidentally, the amount of dirty Work could be greatly reduced by getting rid of the idlers and wasters. “You mean by liquidating them?” inquired the troglodyte, just to show how exasperating he could be. The exasperated one replied: “No, just by making it impossible for you to get any money that you do not earn.”
Now and then Lanny would say: “Wait!” and would begin some remarks about the collection of animals in the zoo which gave this park its name. He would continue until some passersby were out of hearing, and then he would resume: “What was that you were telling me about personal initiative under a Socialist regime?”
One time he said: “Don’t look; but I have an idea that someone is watching us. Let’s take a stroll.” So they got up and walked for a while, commenting on the beauty of the Tiergarten and the admirable conduct of public institutions in the Fatherland. When they came to a bench in a more isolated spot they seated themselves again and resumed their comparison of the social orders proposed by the Socialists, the Communists, and the Anarchists. Lanny said: “Don’t you think it is up to you to read at least one work in defense of Capitalism?” The reply was: “Dear me! I got that in every newspaper I ever read at home—to say nothing of the conversation of my Uncle Reverdy and the other elders of my tribe.”
Lanny had run into revolutionary theories at the age of fourteen, when his Uncle Jesse had taken him to meet a woman Syndicalist agitator; the Syndicalists were close to the Anarchists—at least in the Mediterranean lands. In Newcastle he had encountered a Budd Gunmakers strike and listened to the arguments of both Reds and Pinks. This had continued in the workers’ school in Cannes, and at the one in Berlin where Lanny had met Trudi and her first husband. But of all this not a word to Laurel! Let her use him as a grindstone to sharpen her wits upon, and let her have the pleasure of winning every argument—but never of convincing the troglodyte!
Lanny kept thinking: “This is the way Nina told me I was to get married!” He had taken Rick’s wife into his confidence to some extent, and she had suggested how a supposed reactionary might make headway with some woman of the Left. “Let her argue with you, and if you fall in love with her you can give her the satisfaction of converting you!” Nina, matter-of-fact and straightforward, hadn’t seen anything funny in this; she had offered to find the right sort of girl and produce her at The Reaches—just as Beauty kept picking out the wrong sort and producing them at Bienvenu. But Nina hadn’t known about F.D.R. and the critical information that Lanny was collecting and transmitting. No, it just couldn’t be arranged, and Lanny wasn’t playing fair with this newly fledged comrade when he allowed her to think that their acquaintance might ripen into intimacy.
VII
He realized that more clearly before that summer’s day had come to an end. He strolled back with her to the pension, and it was his plan to deliver her to the door as politeness required, and then go on without attracting attention. It happened, however, that the postman arrived just ahead of them, and delivered the afternoon mail to the maid. There wasn’t much of it, and the largest item was a package of magazines wrapped flat in brown paper and open at the ends. “Die sind für Sie, Fräulein Creston,” said the maid, and put the package into the guest’s hands. Miss Creston glanced at them, and said to Lanny: “The Bluebook. They send me three copies. Would you like to have one?”
“Why, yes,” he answered, “if you have no need of it.”
“You might return it when you are through.” That might be a bid or might not—for, after all, a magazine that had been mailed once could be mailed again.
Lanny accepted the loan, and walking to the Adlon, he glanced at its contents. An idea had occurred to him: a magazine would hardly send three copies unless there was a special reason. His eye ran over the table of contents and observed that the name of Laurel Creston did not appear. He noted that the first story was by “Mary Morrow,” which sounded more like a stage or pen name than a real one. He glanced at it and read the opening words: “‘Bitte einsteigen,’ said the conductor of the train; ‘bitte Platz nehmen.’” Lanny needed no occult powers to guess that the scene of this story was laid in Germany. The title was “Aryan Journey.”
Passing one of the outdoor cafés on the Kurfürstendamm, he took a seat at a table and ordered a lemonade with plenty of ice—these eccentric Amerikaner! While waiting for it he read, and one paragraph was enough for him to recognize the style of Laurel Creston. Nobody who had read her previous work in this magazine could doubt it, and the promise of an editor to keep the secret must have been the cause of smiles to the staff.
It was a story of a train trip from the interior of Germany to an outside destination. The central figure was a little Jew, who had in an inside coat pocket a small envelope containing money or jewels or something else that he wanted to hide. Apparently it had been his plan to stick it down between the seat cushions; but the compartment was filled and he couldn’t find a chance to do this. His uneasiness became apparent to the other passengers, pure Aryans all. Jews were not wanted in Germany, and yet one going out was presumptuous and insulting. The Aryans watched him furtively, and observed his anxiety increase as the train neared the border; they saw beads of perspiration standing on his forehead, and were sure that he must have something very precious indeed.
At last he got up and went into the toilet. Aryans did that, and locked themselves in, but for a Jew to do it was a conf
ession of guilt. Was he swallowing his jewels, or was he tearing up his money and sending it down underneath the train? The Aryans discussed the problem in whispers; no Jew would throw away money—they loved it too much; he would be hiding it somewhere in that tiny compartment, planning to get it after the train had passed the border. When the Jew came back they never took their eyes off him; and when the Polizei came through—SS men, always—to examine exit permits and make certain that no passenger carried more than the lawful sum of money, the Aryans reported their suspicions.
The other passengers were put out of the compartment and the terrified Jew was searched. His protests counted for nothing—they dumped out the contents of his bags and scattered them over the floor. One of the SS men was sent to search the toilet, and when he could find nothing the head man went and repeated the search. When the train came to the border station the unhappy wretch was led off, carrying the two bags into which he had been permitted to stuff such of his belongings as he could pick up in a hurry.
VIII
Lanny could see where this story had come from. The external details might have been invented, or put together from watching pure Aryans anywhere; but the emotions of it, the accumulating sense of terror which gripped you in the first paragraph and mounted to the end—that was Mary Morrow alias Laurel Creston being driven in a motor car toward the German border and trembling in every nerve at the imagining of what might lie ahead of her. Lanny had said that the experience would “give her something to write about”; and sure enough, it had fathered a little masterpiece of the short story art! Lanny could picture her sitting down in the London hotel, dashing it off in a few hours and sending it to New York by air mail; he could picture what happened when the editor read it—he had jerked out some leading article or story which was already in type, and here was “Aryan Journey” to send shivers up and down the spines of a sensation-hungry public!