Once more Lanny thanked him and said, “What I am doing, Mr. Hearst, is for the cause of free government and the American way of life. Any help that I can give you is free of charge.” Speaking the words, he wondered: Would Mr. Hearst decide that he had met a social equal at last? Or would he conclude that the visitor was an FBI agent trying to get something on him? Lanny talked the problem over with his wife, and that observant lady said, “This is a child who has been hopelessly spoiled and will never grow up in this life.”
17
Always to Be Blest
I
Telephone service was slow and tedious in wartime, but Laurel had made it her practice to call Agnes once a week to make sure the baby was all right. Back in Hollywood, Lanny got his father on the phone and told him they were ready to start for home. How was everybody and how was business? This last was meant for a joke, since never in anybody’s memory had there been such business as Budd-Erling was doing.
Robbie had an item of news. “Hansi and Bess are back.” Lanny exclaimed, “Oh, good! How are they?” Robbie reported that they claimed to be well but looked undernourished; they were staying with Johannes Robin, Hansi’s father, until they could get the tenants out of their home.
Lanny’s half-sister, Bessie Budd, and her husband had been in Russia for more than two years, and Lanny hadn’t seen them since he and Laurel had passed through Moscow twenty months ago. Then the war situation had been black, and these musicians, friends of the Soviet people, had been heavy of heart. Now the tide had turned, and they ought to be happy; but what had this long sojourn in a foreign land done to their minds and bodies, their musical technique and their careers?
“Bienvenu” was hitched up and the Budds set out on the return trek. It was the second week in December, and they would stay in the south to avoid snow in the mountains. But they chose a different highway for the sake of variety. The novelty had worn off, and they traveled longer hours, to get it over with. Long ago an English poet had remarked that “man never is, but always to be, blest”; and this pair who had everything to make them content spent their time counting the miles and the hours. They talked about the things they were going to do when they got back to the crowded city—their baby, their musician relatives, and what they were likely to hear about the new world overseas, the Soviet world, in which they were trying so hard to believe.
II
They were almost home, Trenton, New Jersey, when a snowstorm hit them; impossible to see anything out of their windshield, and there was nothing to do but put up their trailer and car in a garage and themselves in a third-rate hotel, the only room they could get, small, dingy, and without a bath.
In that unpromising place they had an experience. They were tired of looking out of the window and seeing the soft silent flakes drifting down; they had heard all the war news several times over on the radio; they had read until their eyes hurt; and then had taken a walk and got lost for a while. Back in the room again Lanny suggested, “Let’s try a séance.”
They had about given up their psychic researches, for the husband had got tired of the fashionable banter of Otto H. Kahn; that important gentleman either couldn’t or wouldn’t oblige them any more, and he had a tendency to repeat himself. Lanny had the persistent idea that some tidings might come from or concerning Marceline or her Junker lover; he asked about them, and about other friends who were or might be in the “spirit world.” But each time, when Laurel came out of her trance, he had to report to her that he had got nothing of significance.
Infinite patience is the number-one lesson that has to be learned by every investigator in this strange underworld of the mind. Laurel said, “All right,” and stretched herself on a bed which was covered with an old-fashioned crazy quilt. Lanny put out the light, and sat and listened to her heavy breathing, and then to the stillness which meant that she was in her trance. The husband waited for more conversation of the Algonquin Hotel type, but nothing came, and he thought that Laurel had missed the bus again and fallen into ordinary slumber. However, he said, “Is anyone there?”
Then came a voice, a woman’s, low and gentle. As a rule the imitation of voices is the weakest point in the case of these mysterious entities; but this time there seemed to be something vaguely familiar in the tone. “Is that you, Lanny?” And Lanny, being of long acquaintance in this other world, did not ask rudely, “Who are you?” but considerately, “How are you, my dear?” Love appears to be the prevailing temper in that environment, and since there is supposed to be no marrying or giving in marriage, there can be no harm in endearments.
The voice said, “I have just arrived, and am a little confused.” To this the obvious reply was, “No harm can come to you here, and I hope you will stay and talk to me.”
Lanny was thinking of Marceline, thinking of her intently, with the idea that this might have some effect upon the séance. But no, it wasn’t Marceline; there was a decided foreign accent, and he thought of Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein, who might have got into trouble on Lanny’s account. As the conversation went on he decided that the tone was that of an older woman, and he thought of Hilde’s mother, who had been killed in the heavy bombardment of Berlin last March. She had hated Americans and had hardly been able to endure having one in her home. Strange indeed if she were to make her first appearance in a cheap hotel in the capital city of the State of New Jersey!
Lanny followed the line of conversation which he had learned from long contact with mediums and their “controls.” “You are not in any trouble, I hope,” and “You will soon find friends where you are,” and “Do come and talk to me whenever you feel able,” and “What can I do to help you?” This last brought a response that gave Lanny a jolt. Said the voice, “Deliver a message for me. Tell Baby Marcel that he is the one I miss the most.”
Baby Marcel! Lanny’s mind leaped to the Hotel Mamounia, where he had spent a night only four months ago. The voice was that of Madame Zyszynski, the stout and amiable old Polish woman who had been the cause of Lanny’s taking an interest in psychical matters. He had been too rushed to have a séance with her on that last trip, and his conscience troubled him for fear that he had hurt her feelings. She had adored him as a son, and had been so pathetically happy whenever he told her that her work was good and that he had learned much from his sessions with her; apparently it was necessary to her success that she should believe this. And now she had passed over into this new world, peopled with the beings who had used her voice, but of whom she had had no conscious knowledge. Would she know them now?
III
Lanny recognized this as an event of importance to him, and he handled it with tact acquired during a lifetime of diplomacy. “Madame,” he said, “this is the first word I have heard about the change in your situation. I am glad, because it saves me having to grieve about you. Can you be my friend in the new world, as you were in the old?”
“I will try, Lanny.” The voice was clearer, perhaps under the encouragement of love. He talked to her as he had done in real life, gently, affectionately, as to a second mother; with a little humor, just a trace of skepticism, to stimulate her and keep her on her mettle. “Perhaps you will be my control now,” he said; and when she promised to try, he added, “I wonder if you will be able to find Tecumseh.” Lanny would be sorry to lose that old Indian chieftain who had been Madame’s “control” for most of her life and had carried on queer arguments and quarrels with the son of Budd-Erling over a period of fourteen years. Many people had told Madame about him, and she promised now to try to make contact with him.
One question more: “Have you seen or heard anything of Marceline?” The voice expressed surprise at this idea; had Marceline passed over? Lanny explained that he did not know, but that she had been in trouble when he last spoke to her. He didn’t say where or how—that would be for the “spirits” to report. Madame Zyszynski had lived in the household with Marceline off and on for years and knew well her virtues and her faults. How she would find her was a question tha
t Lanny did not ask. Madame had passed away of a slowly creeping anaemia, she declared, and she still felt a confusion of mind. He replied that he would not press her any more. The voice died away, and Laurel began that quiet moaning which indicated her coming out of a trance.
He had a story to tell her now! She too had visited Bienvenu and knew the simple-minded, rather dull old woman, an ex-servant who had married a butler, and who was wholly incapable of making up or even understanding the strange communications which passed her lips. If Lanny had been conducting a psychic investigation, he wouldn’t have told Laurel what had happened; but he wasn’t trying to convince an uninterested world, he was dealing with the wife he loved. So he told, but of course without mentioning Marceline.
IV
The storm let up next day and they drove to New York. Robbie sent a man with a car to get the trailer, and the very next day it would become the home of a family which had come from Quebec or Oklahoma to put rivets in the newest Budd-Erling model. Meantime the traveling couple had hugged and kissed Baby Lanny, and grown-up Lanny had danced with him to music which magically filled the air or the ether or whatever it was, all over the North American continent. The same Toscanini and the same Bing Crosby, the same Major Eliot and the same H. V. Kaltenborn, and the same Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed always by the same “Star-Spangled Banner”—of which everybody knew the first three lines and the last two, but few knew the rest.
Laurel presented her faithful friend Agnes with a beautiful Navaho blanket which they had picked up on the outskirts of the town of Budd; they had used it on the last stage of the journey, but that hadn’t hurt it. They had bought Indian products for all the Budd tribe and for Laurel’s relatives, none of whom needed anything; also for the Robin family. The first telephoning they did was to the Hansibesses, who came in to town the next day, and what a time they had exchanging reminiscences!
Hansi Robin was now thirty-nine and Bess was thirty-five. They were a pair of finished musicians, and had played together in concerts in most of the capitals of Europe and in cities and towns all over America. They were devotedly in love after some eighteen years of married life, but they had been through a period of desperate strain because of their disagreement over the political problems of the time. The only daughter of Robbie and Esther Budd had become, to the otter dismay of her parents, a stern and Calvinistic member of the Communist party, while her husband was a gentle soul who demanded a kind and decent world right away and could not face the grim realities of the class struggle. They had been wearing each other out with arguments when the attack of Hitler upon the Soviet Union had solved the problem for the time being.
Of course the Russians had to defend themselves, and every right-minded person had to help them. A violin virtuoso and his accompanist wife had betaken themselves to this land of music lovers to play for them and express the sympathy that was in their hearts. For more than two years they had been doing this, all the way from besieged Leningrad to Vladivostok and back; from the mining and factory towns of the Urals to the camps of the Red Army behind the front, where you could hear the guns day and night. And what had the experience done to them? The P.A. and his wife were most eager to find out.
The first thing was obvious, the pair were thinner and paler. The lad whom Lanny had called a shepherd boy out of ancient Judea was a man, still slender and sensitive, with pain, his own and mankind’s, written all over his features. The news of what the Nazis were doing to wipe out the Jewish race had been reported everywhere, but it was something so monstrous that most people in America were unable to believe it. Hansi knew that it was true, and there was death in his soul; in Russia he had put such sorrow into his music that tears ran down people’s cheeks as they listened. He didn’t know if that would happen in America, and talked sometimes of playing only for Jewish audiences. Only a people which had been persecuted for a score of centuries could understand what he was saying. “Even Bess cannot understand,” he said.
V
This was meant half playfully, but Lanny guessed that it was half true. The attack upon the “Soviet Fatherland” had brought this pair together intellectually; and now, what had been the effect of actual daily contact with that country over a long period? Neither Hansi nor Bess mentioned the subject, and Lanny waited until he got Hansi alone; the man would tell the man and the woman would tell the woman.
The violinist revealed that the breach had opened again and was as wide as ever; they never spoke of politics to each other. “I love the Russian people,” he declared; “they are a great people, warmhearted and generous, and their response to music is instinctive and overwhelming. But I can’t bring myself to tolerate their government.”
“Would you like any government, Hansi?” asked the brother-in-law.
“You have to be there to understand the difference, Lanny. It is not like anything in our world. You meet some official, you visit in his home, you like him, and play music for him; and then someday you go to his office and find his desk vacant; you ask where he is and nobody knows; you discover that you are troubling them by your questions. You go to his home and learn that he has disappeared off the face of the earth; his own family doesn’t know what has happened. You can see that they have been weeping, but also you see that they wish you wouldn’t press them; they are afraid to talk to you. You discover that they are afraid to be known to associate with a foreigner; they are embarrassed to say so, but they don’t invite you to their homes any more. All their lives are dominated by fear.”
“I have been told that, Hansi; I thought it was explained by the national peril.”
“America is at war too, but I meet all sorts of foreigners here in New York, and I hardly know the difference. In Russia I was welcomed by tumultuous audiences—you can hardly imagine such scenes; but I had very few friends, and I had the feeling that most of those were selected persons. They were Bess’s sort of friends, not mine; they were the party-sort of people, who could not be corrupted by any unorthodox thing I might say. Some of them pretended not to be party members, but I had the feeling that they were playing a role, and of course I didn’t enjoy that. Even your Uncle Jesse did not talk frankly to us; and then he went away to Irkutsk, and since then has not written us a line. He too feels himself distrusted, I am sure.”
Such was Hansi’s story; and Lanny argued with him, not for the sake of the Communist government, but for Hansi’s marriage. “This war is a grim and terrible thing. It is my hope that when it’s won the pressure may be relaxed. I have recently been rereading Lenin’s argument that under Socialism the state would wither away in the end.”
“It may be, Lanny, and I hope so. But the way I see it, when men get power, they hold on to it; they come to like it, and think they are the only people who are really capable of using it; if anyone suggests otherwise he becomes an enemy, and he disappears off the face of the earth. I do not care about waging a war to remove one kind of totalitarian government and set up another. I think it is just as wicked to liquidate the bourgeoisie as to liquidate Jews and Poles.”
VI
Lanny got Bess’s side of the argument from his wife. Bess had spent the time trying to persuade Laurel to become a Communist. There was no other road to freedom for the workers, and it was childish to imagine that the capitalists would ever consent peacefully to giving up their grip upon the workers’ lives and fortunes. Of course the Soviet government used force; all governments used force, whatever amount was necessary to preserve their own power. The amount and kind of force depended upon the resistance the government had to meet. The American capitalist class didn’t need much because they owned practically the entire press, screen, and radio, from which the masses derived their ideas. But how long would the American political system endure if ever the workers made up their mind to break the chains of the profit system?
That was a subject for argument, and the two ladies had it. Bessie Budd Robin had never heard, or had forgotten, that Karl Marx had admitted it might be possible for So
cialism to be obtained by parliamentary means in the Anglo-Saxon lands; when she was confronted with this citation from the gospel, she took the argument back to Russia, where the people had never been accustomed to the use of the ballot and would have to learn by slow stages. Or to Spain—the classic example of what would happen when big business and the landed interests was threatened by a political protest. The Spanish people had trusted to the ballot and had won their freedom and set up a people’s republic—and what happened? With the tacit consent of the world democracies the capitalist groups of Italy and Germany, acting through their Fascist agents, had sent in gangster armies and destroyed the people’s government of Spain, and had committed cruelties exceeding anything ever charged against the Soviet Union.
“I had to admit that she has a case,” said Laurel, and her husband asked, “Are you going to let her make a true-believer out of you?”
“What I am going to do,” said the wife, “is to wait and see what happens. Bess is sure of her formula; she insists that after this war we shall see a dozen small nations having to make a choice between a murderous White government and a Red government. I asked her if that too would be ‘murderous,’ and she answered that it would do whatever was necessary to protect the workers trying to break their chains. You see how it is, each side applies all the bad words to the other; neither side will hear anything of the other side’s case, and if you try to present it you get called the bad names—a Red or fellow traveler on the one hand, a reactionary or Social-Fascist on the other.”
Lanny replied, “I am putting my hopes in Roosevelt. He’s been trying his charm on Stalin, and I’m eager to hear what happened.”