“Most interesting,” Lanny said. “So it’s possible you may have spoken words you don’t remember.”
“I am absolutely certain that I didn’t say the word Vernichtung. I had decided that to say Krieg and to shake a warning finger was as far as it was safe to go.”
“Your subconscious mind might have supplied the word, of course.”
“How could it, when I don’t know the word?”
“You have been reading a lot of German, and got the sense of words from the context, without having them consciously at your disposal. You know that the word Nicht means “not,” and if you read that the Germans were afraid of the Vernichtung of their country you would pretty well guess what it meant.”
“That might be, I suppose. If I was playing a role, I would quite probably go on with it, even if I fell asleep, or into a trance. People talk in their sleep, and I suppose they sometimes speak the words of dream characters.”
Lanny told of Hess’s invitation, and added: “That is something for you to think seriously about.”
“It is a most dangerous thing for me to be doing, Mr. Budd. I cannot be sure of controlling myself, and cannot guess what I might say or do.”
“I know,” he replied. “But, on the other hand, the world is hanging on the verge of a precipice, and it might be that you are the one person who can pull it back. You can speak words that nobody else can speak, and you can get a hearing for them.”
“Have mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “What a proposition to put up to a weak and frightened woman!”
VI
They made it a long walk, looking over their shoulders frequently to make certain that their voices reached only the squirrels and the birds. They discussed the state of Europe and the problems of appeasement versus resistance. Lanny was careful to preserve his aloof attitude. He said: “I will tell you what facts I know; but the conclusion must be your own, and the decision.”
“But I am involving your welfare as well as mine!”
“I will take a chance with you,” he replied. “You make up your mind what you want to do and say, and I’ll stay by you.”
In the end she said: “All right; I will have one more sitting with the important person; but positively no more. I will go the limit on that one.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I will let Bismarck come again, and also Hindenburg, if you can give me the data. The sitter can believe it or not, but it must be understood that he will have to be satisfied with what he gets tonight. Say that my mother is ill or anything you please.”
Lanny replied: “O.K. I’ll put it up to them. And now, for what you are going to say. You haven’t used Dietrich Eckart, and I suggest you start with him, to get on a warm personal basis. Then give them some Hindenburg—not so easy as Bismarck, because your sitter knew him; but a few words from him will produce a tremendous impression, and perhaps prevent the war—if you want to prevent it!”
He told her in low tones the story of the grim Junker General who had commanded in East Prussia during the World War and had destroyed the Russians at the Masurian lakes. He had become a German idol—almost literally, for a huge wooden image of him had been set, up in Berlin as a means of raising money for the aid of soldiers’ families; pious patriots bought a nail and drove it into the statue, and before the war was over it was made of iron. After the war “der alte Herr” had been made President of the Republic and used by the reactionaries as their “front”; he had despised an upstart politician whom he called “the Bohemian corporal”—which was somewhat inaccurate, since the politician had never been either Bohemian or corporal. In the end he had been forced to receive this upstart, and their first meeting had been embarrassing, since one had been rattled and neither had known what to say. Lanny could tell about it on the authority of that gossip-fountain, Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein.
“But don’t use that,” he said. “Tell about the breathtaking day when the upstart became Chancellor, and the old man attended the ceremony. Also, you can go back to the Osthilfe scandal, soon after the war, when the government put up funds to save East Prussian landlords from bankrupcy, and the money was misspent. The old gentleman was involved, since the grateful nation had presented an estate to him and he had passed it on to his son and the son had got his share of the gravy. The Nazis exploited this for all it was worth, so you can have the old gentleman defending himself and his family honor. That will make him real, and after that you can have him discuss the new war that is coming, and say what you please.”
VII
The medium retired to her hiding place, and Lanny rejoined the distinguished company in the public rooms of the Berghof. This company resembled a flowing stream, in that the water was changed while the stream remained the same. The morrow was the day on which, if Bernhardt Monck’s prediction was correct, the German armies would move into Poland. Now Lanny learned of a series of decrees which had been prepared, and were to be put into effect this night or the following day. Telephone communication with Britain and France was to be cut; airports in Germany were to be closed and civilian air traffic was to cease; the food rationing program was to go into effect. All these things meant war, the guests of the Berghof agreed.
News from the rest of the world came via radio. Last minute efforts were being made to avert the calamity. President Roosevelt felt compelled to butt in once more. He had gone on a fishing trip along the Maine coast, but now flew back to Washington and cabled a message to the Führer. He had received no reply to the one of the previous April, but even so, he was trying again; for, said he, “the cause of world peace—which is the cause of humanity itself—rises above all other considerations.” He urged both the Chancellor of Germany and the President of Poland to refrain from hostile actions “for a reasonable and stipulated period,” and stated that the United States was ready “to contribute its share to the solution of the problems which are endangering world peace.”
Alas, he couldn’t say what that share was, and to a P.A. in the Führer’s home it was made abundantly clear that no Nazi wanted any of it, and that empty words were regarded with contempt. It was up to Lanny to make plain that he considered “That Man in the White House” as a Jew-lover and Bolshevik in disguise, a calamity to his country and to the world. The art expert was not short of phrases, having listened to this sort of conversation in Paris and on the Riviera, in London, New York, and Newcastle, Connecticut—wherever wealthy Americans gathered to discuss income and excess profit taxes, and the whole New Deal scheme of robbing the rich for the benefit of the bureaucrats.
War was coming, and nothing on earth could stop it—so Lanny had concluded. Could anything in heaven or hell, paradise or purgatory, limbo or Walhalla stop it? Could the spirits of Heinzelmann and Bismarck and Hindenburg, of Strasser and Eckart and the other old companions stop it? That was a problem with which Lanny wrestled at odd moments all the day and part of the night. Could it be stopped even for a few days more? Was it Laurel Creston’s duty to risk her life, and Lanny Budd’s to risk his job, on the chance of being able to delay it? He told himself a grim No, for he didn’t believe that anything could permanently hold Adolf Hitler except a licking on the field of battle, and there was serious doubt whether delays did not help him more than they helped Britain and France.
This was a military question, and he was in a position to hear it discussed by the world’s best authorities. Fighting weather in Poland was ideal in the month of September, but in October came the autumn rains and the fields were turned into bogs. So, in the consultations which were going on in the Führer’s study, the military answer was “Now or never—or at any rate not until next summer.” The Reichswehr men differed among themselves, but the SS fanatics were like war horses, champing at their bits and dancing on their iron-shod hooves. They knew that everything was in readiness, and what could be holding the Führer back? When the whisper spread that it might be spirits, brought there by an American playboy and his female companion, there were glowering looks, and Lanny realized that it
might not much longer be safe for the pair of them to take long walks in the forests of the wild witch Berchta!
VIII
The sun in its rounds refuses to be influenced by human hopes or fears, agonies, yearnings, despairs. It seemed to linger, but the old-fashioned gold watch which Lanny had inherited from his Great-Great-Uncle Eli Budd was there to testify that the sun went down behind the Bavarian Alps at the moment proper for the 24th of August. The crisis had grown so tense that it seemed tactful for a stranger not to be conspicuous, so Lanny retired to his room and stretched out on his bed. As an exercise in self-control he buried himself in the latest number of the Journal of Parapsychology.
Those fellows at Duke University in North Carolina had got so deep into the subject of “extrasensory perception” that they had invented a lingo all their own, and you had to study a glossary—to say nothing of brushing up on mathematics which you had never expected to think about since leaving school. However, Lanny knew that this is the way to impress the scientific world, to flatter them by giving them something which only they themselves can understand. Having been laughed at by most of his friends for a matter of ten years, Lanny found it pleasant to be able to hand them a publication so impressively academic in appearance—and then to watch their faces when they opened it and tried to read it!
So for an hour or two Lanny Budd forgot about wars and rumors of wars. He learned about experiments, made by the hundreds of thousands, proving not merely that telepathy and clairvoyance are realities, but also the thing which Duke called “the psychokinetic effect”—that is to say, the ability of mind to move matter without any sort of physical contact. To be sure, it is a “psychokinetic effect” when a desire causes your hand to move; but that is a sort which men are used to, and therefore think they understand. What was here in question was whether the mind could influence the behavior of dice between the moment when they were thrown and the moment when they had settled into position on a table. That had been a notion hitherto confined to persons, for the most part dark of skin, known as “crap-shooters.” To make it the subject of academic investigation and report the results in words of Greek derivation was certainly a novelty, and had taken nerve on the part of Professor J. B. Rhine.
The next article dealt with a trance medium and some of her communications; and that brought Lanny back to the circumstances of this hour, which had been set for the Führer to try an experiment with Laurel Creston. She was merely going to pretend to enter a trance; but she might slip into a real one, and, if that happened—God only knew what she might say! All the will power in the world couldn’t keep that thought from leaping into Lanny Budd’s mind, and it caused his heart to hit him a blow underneath his windpipe—or so it seemed, and it was certainly a most unpleasant-psychokinetic effect. It suggested to Lanny that he himself was a psychokinetic construction, and not the purely mechanical object which a certain school of philosophers had been calling him for something like a century and a half.
IX
There came a tap on the door, and Lanny called: “Come in.” It was Hess, with a light in his dark eyes that was not often to be seen there. “Good God, Lanny! This has been the most amazing experience! I wish you might have been there!”
“You got real results?”
“Dietrich Eckart came, and it was just as if he was in the room.”
“Eckart?” said Lanny, in a tone of inquiry.
“You don’t know about him? He was one of our oldest associates, a member of the Thule Society.”
“I must have heard of him—the name sounds familiar—”
“He was a genius of a sort—poet, actor, orator—in Munich just after the war. Between you and me he was a bit of a bounder, but he made a great impression upon the Führer and so became the grand old man of our movement, and is now a sort of tradition. The Negro described him to the very life, and said he spoke good English, so it was possible to talk to him. Really, it was just like old times.”
“What did he say?”
“He talked quite a lot about the early days, and several friends who were there. It seems that our Parteigenossen keep together in the other world. The Führer, of course, wanted him to talk about the present situation. It appears that Dietrich knows about it. I asked him how, and he says they can hear the radio. Imagine that!”
“It must be rather confusing to them at present.”
“They wouldn’t listen to the foreign stations. But here’s the significant thing—all the spirits seem to have the idea that the Führer is going too fast.”
“Well, you and I are inclined to agree with that, aren’t we?”
“May I tell you something in the strictest confidence?”
“Everything you tell me is in confidence, Rudi—unless it is something you authorize me to repeat.”
“All preparations have been completed, and for the past week the army has had orders to march into Poland tomorrow midnight.”
If Lanny felt any shock he did not reveal it. “I had gathered as much from the conversation downstairs,” he remarked. “I had guessed that you would prefer otherwise, but didn’t feel that you had the power to change the decision.”
“That is correct. But this woman has come at precisely the critical moment. The Führer didn’t say definitely, but I could see that he has been shaken in his resolution.”
“I trust the Führer is not going to hold the woman or myself responsible for what comes in these séances.”
“Oh, of course not; he knows too much about the subject for that. It is Dietrich he is thinking about—the man who thrilled and inspired him when he was so beaten and depressed by the collapse of Germany and the triumph of the Reds.”
“What did the spirit say on the subject?”
“He said: ‘You can win without fighting. You can get what you want by noisy persistence. Keep on shouting, wear your enemies down, outlast them.’ You understand, all this had to be got through the agency of the old Negro, and it was slow and took a lot of time. But even so, you couldn’t doubt that Dietrich was there; he had been an inspired man—he came of good family, and had money, only he didn’t take much care of it, or of himself.”
“Genius is a strange thing,” commented the son of Budd-Erling, sagely. “There have been many who could help everybody in the world but themselves.”
“Exactly! But I haven’t finished telling you. Hindenburg came.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“Just as real as Dietrich, but of course not so free-spoken. He was never a man of many words.”
“What did he want?”
“First of all, he praised the Führer’s work. In life he had misjudged a great German. He, der Alte, had been ill and tired, and badly advised by self-seeking men. But now he had renewed his powers, and saw clearly, and hailed a great Führer. You can imagine how that thrilled both of us; truly, it made chills run up and down my spine.”
“I never met the old gentleman in real life,” remarked Lanny; “but I heard him speak over the radio. Of course you couldn’t get the effect of his voice by the vocal cords of a woman.”
“We got a description of him, and it was convincing. I really believe he was there. And the important thing is, he gave the same advice as Dietrich. He said: ‘Go slow, Adolf. Don’t let them put you in the wrong. Germany is eternally right, and they must see it if you give them time. Force is good, but it must never be used until necessary.’ The Führer wanted him to answer questions, but apparently he couldn’t. The Negro said: ‘It takes a lot of power to speak for such a man,’ and then faded away. That was most disappointing.”
“I have found it so,” Lanny said, “not merely with this medium but with others. Apparently you have to wait for some sort of battery to be recharged.”
“The Führer is most urgent that this woman should not leave. It means so much to him.”
“I put it up to her, and she says that her mother is ill, and that she has positive engagements. I could only persuade her to come here on the
promise that we would stay two days and then I would drive her home again. The prospect of war reinforces her determination.”
“You can go out by way of Switzerland at any time without trouble. We can surely arrange that. Think what it means, Lanny! The Führer may decide tonight to cancel the order to the army. He has gone to his study to think it over. He didn’t say, and I didn’t venture to ask him; but I know that his will has been shaken. He may decide to wait, and there may be negotiations—the British may force the Poles to give way.”
“I know that they have been trying to do it,” Lanny admitted.
“Exactly! So it might mean the difference between war and peace. What are this woman’s views on the subject?”
“I have never talked politics with her. But I don’t suppose any woman wants war—certainly no American woman.”
“Well, put it up to her. Tell her the fate of Europe may hang on her decision.”
“But, Rudi! You don’t want me to give her any idea of what has come out in the séances! That would destroy their value. With all the honesty in the world, her conscious mind could not fail to influence her subconscious.”
“I can see that; but you can give her an intimation—say that the Führer is getting communications of world significance at this critical moment. Don’t say on which side, or what about.”
“All right,” Lanny answered. “I’ll see what I can do.”
X
He tapped on Laurel Creston’s door, and she admitted him. She had been lying on the bed, resting, and the little print dress was beginning to look dowdy. He closed the door behind him and said: “I thought you would be interested to know that your séance was successful, and that your auditors are pleased.”