And incidentally to drive the Nazis wild! It was hard for Lanny to believe that the author could have failed to realize what offense this picture of train travel in the Fatherland would give. The Regierung was trying so hard to get tourists this summer, and to convince them that everything in Germany was courtesy and kindness, modern convenience combined with Old World charm! Of course they would find out who wrote that story, and who were her friends and what were her sources of information.
That settled it, Lanny told himself. He could not go near Laurel Creston again, nor must she have a scrap of his handwriting in her possession. He rolled up the magazine and addressed it with printed letters, taking the precaution to drop it into a street box with his own hands. Very rude indeed; but he would just have to leave it that way. Let her suppose that he did not desire the acquaintance of a woman who hadn’t made up her mind whether to be a Socialist, a Communist, or an Anarchist.
IX
The Deputy Führer came back to town, and invited Lanny out to a little place in the country, where they could be in seclusion and talk to a late hour. This was the summer of decision, and no one knew it better than Rudolf Hess. He was a deeply worried man, and Lanny Budd was one whom he permitted to know it; he listened to all that his guest had to tell about London, about New York and Washington and Detroit, about Paris, even about Berlin. Had he seen Göring, and told these things to him? And what had been Göring’s reactions? Göring had wanted Hess to “nag,” and now Lanny discovered that Hess thought that Göring ought to “nag”! After all, Göring was Number Two, while Hess was a mere Number Three!
“Rudi”—so he bade Lanny call him—was the most pro-British of any of the Nazis Lanny had met. Born in a British port, he spoke English as well as German and had read English literature. The dream of his life was an alliance between Britain and Germany to take charge of the lesser tribes without the law. Inside, he included “Amerika,” by which he meant the United States and Canada. “No use to fool ourselves,” he declared. “Whatever side Britain goes on, Amerika will follow. They are clever propagandists, and our people will be swept aside. That is why you and I are equally concerned—we don’t want to wake up some morning and find our two countries fighting each other.”
“God knows, I will do all I can to prevent it,” responded the visitor from overseas—he didn’t mind a little blasphemy when necessary.
“The Führer has never been outside Gross Deutschland,” continued Hess—and Lanny wondered, in passing, what Mussolini, who had been Der Führer’s host, would think of that statement! “At present he is being advised by men like Ribbentrdp and Goebbels and Himmler, who hate Britain. They tell him not to worry about Amerika, because the fighting will all be over before Amerika can even get started to arm. They tell him that we can roll over France in a few weeks—there is plenty of time left this summer.”
“What will they use for provocation?” inquired the guest.
“They argue that the Russian alliance is provocation enough—what purpose can it have but the encirclement of Germany? We would serve an ultimatum, either the alliance is canceled, or we march in three days.”
“They mean to fight France ahead of Poland, then?”
“Poland does not count at all; we all know that we can take Warsaw in two or three weeks of fighting weather—in the summer or autumn.”
“But the British have agreed to defend the Poles!”
“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. In any case, what can they do? If they land in France, we can wipe them out. You understand, I am telling you the arguments which are being dinned into the Führer’s ears. We must find some way to counter them.”
“Do you want me to see him?”
“I am uncertain about it. He is very bitter against Amerika now—that wretched telegram that Roosevelt sent him. What do you make of that?”
“It was a piece of propaganda,” declared the visitor. “He was thinking of the home front, the left-wing vote.”
“To us it could seem nothing but a hostile act; and there have been others behind the scenes. I don’t know how much you have heard about the intrigues that are going on—Bullitt, for example, is ceaseless in trying to make trouble for us. The French have been allowed to get military planes, but we can no longer have any.”
That was the cue for Lanny to repeat the sad story which he had brought to Göring. Hess apparently hadn’t heard it, but would be bound to hear it soon. He took it hard, more so even than the Air Marshal, Lanny thought. “There you have it!” he exclaimed. “All these are acts of war against us. Poland, France, Britain and Amerika make one front. The expulsion of Abetz is a blow in the face, and tells us that we no longer have anything to hope for from the present French government. The Führer sees these incidents piling up—no, Lanny, I am afraid you had better not see him right now. But then, on the other hand, a little later may be too late.” It was indeed a dilemma!
X
They didn’t decide anything that night, except that they would put off the decision. Hess said: “The Führer is at the Berghof, and expects to stay there. I will tell him you are here, and see how he takes it. Doubtless he will have to blow off some steam; then perhaps he will feel better. You understand how matters stand, Lanny—to me he is the greatest man in the world, and also he is my teacher, to whom I owe everything. Whatever decision he makes, I follow him. But in the course of the years I have learned to know his moods, and how—I won’t say to manage them, but to accommodate myself to them. The other side does that, and I have to do it better.”
“I understand,” said Lanny, with a smile. “Don’t forget that I was at the Berghof when Schuschnigg paid his visit; also when Tecumseh or some of his spirits misbehaved themselves.”
This seemed to offer an easy way to change a distressing line of conversation. Lanny remarked: “By the way, Rudi, you will be interested to know that I have been trying more experiments with Madame, and also with a crystal ball. I had a curious experience—I was shut up in my studio on the Riviera, and looking into the ball, I saw a white yacht rounding the point and passing along the shore. When I got up and went to the door and looked out, there was the yacht, one that I had never seen before.”
“That interests me greatly,” responded the Deputy. “It happens that I have had the same sort of experience, and more than once.”
“The spirits,” continued Lanny, “appear to have taken up the idea that the young lady whose father owns the yacht is the one I am destined to marry. So far I haven’t been able to see it that way, but one can never be sure.”
“So long as she does not take you to Hongkong!”
“Thanks for reminding me. I have never heard from that astrologer since, and I often wonder what became of him.” It was a hint, but the Deputy did not see fit to take it. If the Gestapo had put the young Rumanian where he couldn’t do mischief, they had from their point of view a sufficient excuse. Those who played the dangerous game of casting horoscopes did so only by the favor of Hess or some other of the higher-ups; and their horoscopes must be right!
The host called his wife in to meet this American guest. Ilse Maria was her name, and she was a mature woman, tall and lean, and, oddly enough, with stern features resembling her husband’s. Gossip had it that Adi had brought about this marriage to quiet the evil gossip about himself and his Rudi. Maria shared all her spouse’s beliefs in the occult, and with even more ardor; she was a Buchmanite, and also learned in Tibetan lore. Lanny, who had sat at the feet of Parsifal Dingle, was able to impress her as a person of profound wisdom.
XI
Lanny spent the night at Hess’s retreat; and on their way back to town his host asked about his plans. Lanny said: “I have some art business to attend to; one deal is in Geneva, and I might drive there and then come back to Munich. How would it do if I call you up from there, say in three or four days, and you can let me know how the wind is blowing?” The other answered: “Fine!”
So Lanny went back to the hotel and packed hi
s bags, got his car and his exit permit, and set out on the familiar Autobahn to Munich. Very pleasant to look at the countryside in its green midsummer dress; to see men and women busy in the fields and all the factory chimneys smoking. If only there had not been so many regiments of men tramping in goosestep, and tanks rushing about in dusty exercise grounds, and little boys with rucksacks on their backs, marching, shouting Hoch! and Sieg heil!, and singing about blood and soil and the uses of their daggers of honor. If only it had been possible to turn on the radio and listen to the lovely music of old Germany, without hearing the raucous voices of Juppchen Goebbels’s propagandists scolding at the criminal Einkreisung.
Gradually the land began to rise, and there were foothills, and then mountain passes with the dark fir trees above and streams of clear green water rushing below. “To me high mountains are a feeling,” Byron had written; and always on these trips the melodies of Heine’s Harzreise were in Lanny’s heart. That non-Aryan poet was in disgrace in Germany, and to admire his singing lines was a political offense. Adi Schicklgruber boasted that he was building for a thousand years, but if Lanny Budd had expected to be present at the end of that time, he would have put his money on Heine’s simple-seeming verses to outlast the boastful slogans of the NSDAP. Ich bin ein deutscher Dichter, bekannt im deutschen Land!
Presently it was Switzerland, the home of free men; but a P.A. couldn’t relax his precautions even here, for there were Germans coming and going, and many were paid observers. It was the height of the tourist season, and hotels and pensions were crowded with Americans and English, thinking about nothing more important than mountain climbing and tennis and boating and swimming in wonderful clear blue lakes; the Germans were supposed to be doing the same, but it is well known that they are a serious-minded people, with a fondness for mathematics, especially as applied to such purposes as surveying and the making of maps. When one of them finds an isolated spur of mountain and sits there studying with a pair of the best Zeiss binoculars, it may be that he is watching the mountain climbers among the high peaks, a favorite diversion of those who have passed the age of activity; but again, it may be that he is looking for gun emplacements already installed by the Swiss, or for sites where they might be installed by a theoretical invader.
Lanny got a room in a pleasant inn, and shut himself up with his little portable machine; it was supposed to be noiseless but he helped it out by putting a folded towel under it. He prepared a report, revealing that Number One was at this moment trying to make up his mind whether to move first against Poland or France, and that in either case he would make a deal with Russia if he could get the Russian terms reduced. This effort was being aided by the fact that Poland still refused to agree that Russian troops might enter the country to defend it against Germany, and that the Baltic states refused any form of alliance with Russia; also that the British kept delaying in sending a staff mission for consultations, or even in naming the members of the mission. Having sealed and addressed this letter, the mysterious traveler moved on, and in another town stopped at the post office and dropped the letter and sped away.
XII
He headed for Geneva, where he had friends, also paintings which had been on his list for a decade or more, and for which he had found a prospective purchaser in Cincinnati. The friends were Sidney Armstrong and his wife: the husband an important official of the League of Nations, and the wife a lady who had started to fall in love with Lanny Budd, but fortunately for her had stopped. She was now the mother of two children in their teens, and a successful hostess to the eminent personalities who were still coming to the old city of watchmakers and moneylenders, to discuss the calamities which kept falling upon various other parts of the world.
It was the hundred-and-fifth time that the Council of the League had met in the course of twenty years. The Germans and Italians and Japanese came no more, for they had retired and formed themselves into an “Axis.” This was fortunate, in a way—so Sidney explained—for it saved the need of listening to the scoldings and threats of these ruffianly fellows; the only trouble was, the fellows went on with their lawless conduct in Manchuria and China, in Abyssinia and Albania, in Danzig and Memel.
But in spite of everything, this earnest and hardworking official wouldn’t believe in the possibility of another European war. A middle-aged and paunchy chairwarmer—so Lanny couldn’t help but think of him, even while liking him—had built his very life into this League of Nations; it had become not merely his job and his wife’s—it was their religion, and their home both physically and intellectually. They were living in the dream of Woodrow Wilson, who had hypnotized them in Paris two decades ago. The great horror simply could not befall the world again; at the last moment, on the very edge of the precipice, the nations would recoil, come to their senses, and return here to have their differences adjudicated in a fifteen-million-dollar temple of reason and justice!
Lanny found that the same utopian hope was not shared by the ruling class of this city of John Calvin. He dined in the home of an elderly capitalist who had been one of his clients for years, and was now glad to turn some of his paintings into American cash. Terrible times were at hand, declared Herr Fröder—he looked German and spoke German, but hated the Prussians as a brutal race, and hated the Nazis as tools of the Generalstab. To an old acquaintance he talked freely, for he wanted an art expert to go back to Germany and report that every Swiss, whether of German, French, or Italian descent, was an armed soldier ready to fight the invaders of his country, from north, east, south, or west. Every road was guarded day and night, and stores of food had been sunk in immense watertight caissons in the icy depths of mountain lakes. Every pass was mined, so that avalanches could be loosed upon invaders, and more important yet, every one of the great railroad tunnels was stocked with dynamite and could be destroyed by the pressing of a button. So the Axis would be cut in half; Germany would get no guns from Milan and Turin, and Milan and Turin would get no coal from Germany. “That is the sort of consideration the dictators respect,” said Herr Fröder. “We keep reminding them of it!”
Lanny phoned to Hess in Berlin, and the answer was: “Better to wait a little longer.” That suited Lanny, for every time he entered Hitler-land it cost him a moral effort. He telephoned to Rick, who had said that he and Nina might take a holiday on the Continent. “Come to Geneva,” Lanny said, “I have my car and we’ll ride on the top of the world.” So much pleasanter than going into an ogre’s den and watching him mumble human bones!
XIII
Here came the couple with whom Lanny most liked to be, old friends who loved him and understood him, who saw things exactly a$ he saw them, who knew that he had a deep secret, and possibly had guessed it, but kept away from the subject. They drove through Alpine passes, and down into valleys where the lakes lay still and cold and clear. They watched the snow-capped peaks turn pink and then purple in the twilight. They drove all the way around the lake of Zurich and that of Lucerne; this was the country of the William Tell legend, and it was nice to believe it, even if it had never happened.
On Lac Léman they inspected the castle of Chillon, and Lanny would have liked to tell the legend of Laurel Creston, but of course he mustn’t. He recited the sonnet, which they had once known but partly forgotten. The historians agreed with the poets that freedom is a dweller of the heights, and this trio read in their Baedeker of the struggles which had been waged through half a dozen centuries in these valleys. What would they not have given for a guidebook of the next ten years, so as to read what the historians would then be telling! For a ride on an H. G. Wells’s time machine, around one of the curves of Einstein’s space-time!
They would buy some food in the morning and at noon would picnic by the side of some fast-tumbling stream. They would read aloud—Lanny always had several books in the car, and in the towns they could buy others, for the cheap little Tauchnitz books were still available, and Penguin books from England made up for what the Nazis suppressed. After the sun had dis
appeared behind the high mountains they would drive, and if one inn was crowded they would go on to the next—any time before midnight would do.
A delightful way to spend a holiday; and while they gave a lot of their conversation to worries about the fate of Europe, that didn’t keep them from enjoying themselves; for nature has constructed the human animal so that his conscious mind is only a small part of his total make-up, and he goes on digesting his food and sharing the satisfactions of all created beings, even though he cannot be sure that he will be alive next year. They had no financial worries, for Lanny had earned the price by a deal which had taken him only an hour or two, and he insisted upon being the bearer of the royal purse. “Where else could I buy so much fun for so little money?” he asked; and it was literally true that for him the rarest of pleasures was to be able to speak his real thoughts.
What friends thou hast, and their adoption tried! Twenty-six years had passed since Lanny had met Rick in the Dalcroze school at Hellerau; twenty-two years since he had met Nina in London, while Rick was flying in France, soon to come near to death and to be larned for life. In the years that had passed they had shared ideas and ambitions, hopes and fears—and if the fears had been justified more than the hopes, that was true of most men and women in the world. The collective intelligence of mankind just hadn’t evolved to the point where it was equal to the problems created by modern machinery and technical processes. To believe that it ever would be equal was an act of faith.
They ran into a few people whom they knew, but most of the time they stayed by themselves, talked out the problems which troubled them, and recalled episodes which they would have liked to share at the time. Nina told about the children and what they were doing and thinking, a subject that never bores a mother. Rick told about his writings, and the play he was planning to start when he got home; about his editors, and the politicians he knew, his father’s old friends who gave him information, the younger Leftists to whom he transmitted it, and the personalities of the governing world of Britain, most of whom he despised. But they were there, and they held the fate of the Empire in their hands; it was important for Lanny to add to his knowledge about them.