So all these groups, the three great monotheistic religions which had become the bases of Western civilization, had hardened and become dogma-ridden; they had forgotten mercy and brotherhood, and had become the means of livelihood for ecclesiastical establishments, and, worse yet, a means whereby the propertied classes kept the poor contented with their lot. Every Church organization fought for its own, and made a virtue out of excluding the others; so Jerusalem, the Holy City of God, had become a caldron of seething hatreds, a nest of vipers—even worse, for vipers do not sting one another. Here as elsewhere Lanny observed that it was the young Socialists, many of whom called themselves materialists, who were preaching peace and reconciliation, and it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was proclaiming a holy war throughout all the Arab world. The rabbis and the priests passed one another on the streets and glared with hatred hardly to be restrained.
Lanny spent an evening with Rabbi Judah Magnes, who had been head of the richest congregation in New York City, and was now President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A rare spirit and an independent thinker, he pointed out that there was a precedent for a multilingual free nation in the case of Switzerland, where people of German, French, and Italian descent had managed to live together in peace for six or seven centuries. He maintained that the partition plan so widely recommended would be ruinous, because every section of the chopped-up land would have its discontented minorities. First of all, there must be education in tolerance. Said he, “The very idea of compromise—the word itself—has been made abhorrent to too many of the inhabitants of this little land. Their political education has not yet taught them that political compromise is the very breath of life of the Western democracies.”
Lanny wrote a report once a week, telling what he had observed, and making it short for the busiest man in the world to read. According to orders, he sealed these reports and turned them over to the American Consul, to go in a diplomatic pouch by air mail. He gave his conclusions as he arrived at them: that after the war there would have to be some sort of international government to control the hostile forces throughout Palestine and the district immediately surrounding it. Either that, or there would surely be a civil war. The same thing was true of many strategic points on the globe—Trieste, for example, and the Dardanelles, not to mention China and India and the East Indies. There would have to be some international organization, a revived League of Nations, with real powers to prevent civil wars and to keep the peace in areas where rival claims were not especially hot. “Either that,” wrote the P.A., “or we have got nothing out of the war.”
X
All this time Laurel was making notes, of a different sort and for a different purpose; some day she would write stories about Palestine, fact stories and fiction based on the facts. Landscapes and buildings, costumes, faces, and the tragic and touching episodes which people told her, all were being stored away for future use. The impressions of a mature woman were being mingled with those of a child—for before she was old enough to read there had been read to her a book called “The Story of the Bible,” profusely illustrated with drawings of this Holy Land and its people, their flocks and herds and tents and temples. Such impressions are indelible, and now, day after day, Laurel’s own childhood and that of the Jewish people were mingled with the present and the guessed-at future.
Manifestly, her subconscious mind would be deeply involved in all this; and Lanny had suggested that they try a séance. They tried two or three, but nothing of interest came. Then, just as they were getting ready to leave—the early springtime was spreading over this storied land—they had a strange experience. It developed that Madame Zyszynski had traveled with them to Palestine, by whatever means of transportation these psychic entities use, and here she declared that she was sitting on a hillside in bright sunshine, and on the top of the ridge, outlined against the sky, was a small flock of sheep, tended by a half-grown boy. As it happened, that was exactly the view which Lanny and Laurel had commented upon that morning, standing at the window of a little inn on the outskirts of the Galilean village of Capernaum; so Lanny was not greatly impressed. He said politely, “Could you speak to the boy, Madame, and ask who he is?”
The boy was too far away, the old woman answered; but perhaps he could come to her. Presently she said that he was standing by her side; he was rather tall and thin, had a staff in his hand, and black hair which hung to his shoulders. That was the way Lanny had pictured the Robin boys in his fancy, and he wondered if he had ever told that to Madame. He said, “Ask him his name,” and she replied, “He speaks, but it is a strange language and I cannot understand a word.”
Very baffling; after a few tries Lanny suggested, “Try pointing to him repeatedly and perhaps he will give his name.” Madame tried that and reported, “He says ‘Peretz.’” Lanny said, “I don’t know what language that name belongs to. Speak to him one word at a time, and perhaps he will do the same, and I will write it down.”
Laurel was lying on the bed in her trance, and Lanny was sitting by the bedside with a dim light, making notes with a pad and pencil as he always did. The voice which came from Laurel’s lips began to speak strange syllables one by one, and Lanny wrote the way they sounded, hurriedly, and without any idea what the language might be. “Ani Peretz ben Jehuda,” he wrote; and then, “M’shephet Jehuda.” This went on for several minutes and Lanny recorded every sound he heard. He couldn’t ask any questions—at least not until Madame stopped speaking. Finally she said, “The boy waved his hand and called his dog and now he has faded away.”
“Have you any idea where you are, Madame?” inquired the observer.
“No,” she replied, “but it’s a different land and it’s warm. I feel that I know it very well, but I don’t know how.”
“Could it be the Bible land, where Christ lived?”
“It might be that; I cannot tell.”
“You don’t know how you came to be here?”
“I came because I wanted to be with you. You know that I promised to come whenever I could.”
“Can you stay a while now?”
“No because your wife is tired; she is complaining that she has no more power.”
Sure enough, Laurel had begun to moan, and that was always the end She came out of her trance; and this time Lanny could tell her everything that had happened. He read over the strange syllables to her, and she exclaimed, “Did I really speak all that? And can it be a language?”
XI
Lanny had read of numerous cases of persons in a trance who had spoken languages which they had never known or heard; it was a common phenomenon—but no matter how much you may have read, it gave you a thrill when you came upon it in the flesh, or, to be more accurate, in the atmosphere activated by flesh. They went to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Lanny introduced himself to a scholar connected with the library, an elderly gentleman with a black beard turning gray. Lanny didn’t say, “My wife is a psychic medium and spoke these words in a trance.” No, for he didn’t want to attract attention to himself, and possibly get his name in the newspapers; he was still a secret agent, and the first word in his code was silence. He said, “I wrote down these syllables at the dictation of a little shepherd boy out in the country. I wonder if you can tell me what they mean.”
The grave old gentleman took the paper and glanced at it. A look of great surprise came upon his face. “But this is ancient Hebrew!” he exclaimed.
“Indeed!” said Lanny, and did not have to pretend his own emotion.
“This phrasing has not been used by our people for many centuries, Mr. Budd. Where was this boy?”
“He was on the road to Capernaum. I did not make any special note of the place. What do the words mean?”
“‘I am Peretz, son of Jehuda. We are of the tribe of Jehuda. We are descendants of Abraham. We have seven sheep and eleven goats. I have a twin brother.’” And so on. “That is really a very strange thing, Mr. Budd.”
“Perhaps the boy heard
the words in a school, sir.”
“They are not words that would be taught in any school. They sound like a boy’s conversation. In English it would be Phares, son of Judas, and we have such a person in our Book of Genesis; there is a story about him—that he was the first-born of a pair of twins, and the midwife tied a red string upon his wrist when he was the first to emerge from the womb. The name means ‘the breach.’ That was well over three thousand years ago, according to our reckoning.”
“Very curious,” remarked this unimpressionable American. “We must suppose that the lad was told the story in his Sabbath school, and perhaps had been required to compose a dialogue as an exercise in Hebrew.”
“It must be,” said the learned gentleman. “But it is not what we do in our schools and it seems hard to believe.”
Lanny wrote the translation in his notebook. He wanted to learn all he could about this Peretz, alias Phares, and in the library he obtained an English Bible and a Concordance. It took but a moment to learn that the ancient one was named in the New Testament as well as in the Old. As Pharez, son of Judas, he was in that long line of ancestors who had been listed for Jesus by both Matthew and Luke, and listed differently—thus providing ammunition for the scoffers. It had seemed strange indeed to Tom Paine and Robert Ingersoll that a man who had been miraculously conceived should have had his paternal ancestry traced back through an earthly father to Jacob and Abraham.
But Lanny was on the trail of a different mystery from that. They tried one more séance before leaving Palestine, but this time it was the oversophisticated international banker who came upon the scene, demanding to know what the devil they were doing in this unlikely place. He didn’t know anything about the shepherd boy out of ancient Judea, and when Lanny told him the story he exclaimed, “Really. I don’t see how you can believe such foolishness! It is unworthy of an educated man.”
BOOK SEVEN
Humanity with All Its Fears
19
Lull before Storm
I
From Palestine Lanny had written a letter to Captain Denis de Bruyne, who had been fighting at the front in Italy. He had received a reply, telling him that Denis was in Algiers, wounded again, this time severely. Lanny and Laurel planned their return trip by way of that city, so that Lanny might visit the capitaine, also Robert Murphy, and other friends he had made there. He was in no hurry, for his report had gone in and he had nothing to add to it except anecdotes and sociability.
First Cairo. They took a trip up the Nile to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx; they were driven along the banks of the river and permitted the driver to show them the precise clump of bulrushes in which the infant Moses had been found by the Egyptian princess; they explored excavated tombs, and in the great museum in the city inspected the relics of the Pharoahs. They might have seen as interesting specimens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they hadn’t found time in busy New York. They rode on camels, and Lanny forbore to say that he had ever done this before; he kept all his misadventures to himself, for there was no use supplying his wife’s imagination with fuel.
When friends meet in strange places, they always remark that it is a small world. They forget that they make it small by promoting more and more travel. This war had shrunk the world to the dimensions of an Air Force officers’ club. The P.A. seldom stopped at an airport without meeting some man whom he had chatted with in some far place, Hollywood or Hongkong, Bermuda or Belém. This time it was the banks of the River Thames in Buckinghamshire; there came striding through the lobby of the picturesque Shepheard’s Hotel a British officer in khaki shorts and shirt with wings on the sleeve and the desert tan on his arms and legs; an officer extremely young and what the British call “leggy,” meaning that he hadn’t had time to fill out his sudden growth. When Lanny had last seen him he had been a schoolboy, punting on the river while a girl read some modern poetry to him; she had read some to Lanny and he had wondered what the deuce it was about, but had been too polite to say so. Evidently words are wonderful things in themselves, and if you string enough of them together they exercise an intoxicating effect upon the young.
This was one of the grandsons of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, Bart., and they called him “Scrubbie,” for what reason Lanny hadn’t inquired. Here he was, bubbling with delight to meet this old friend of the family. He was only nineteen, but what a story he had to tell! He had been wild to get into the “show,” and already at his age had been all the way through and come out at the far end; they had grounded him, because he had been on the maximum number of missions permitted to anybody. Beastly stupid, because he was quite fit, but all he could do now was to train others. He had piloted a bomber on that mission to wipe out the Ploesti oil fields in Rumania; few had come back unscathed. Oil fields had proved unexpectedly tough targets; but they had cut the German production by at least half for the present.
This sprig of the aristocracy wasn’t the typical Englishman, who is supposed to cultivate reticence as the greatest of dignities, and to discuss his military exploits only in monosyllables. At lunch Scrubbie told these Americans everything they wanted to hear; not merely what he himself had experienced, but what this wonderful Combined Air Force was achieving against the foe. They had got together under one command, and without rivalry or jealousy were giving everything they had. Now there were magnificent bases in Sicily and Italy; Egypt was becoming a training center, far behind the front. The driving back of Rommel had been an airmen’s job, and they were going to do the same all over Europe; more and more were getting ready, all around the perimeter. The Budd-Erling was the world’s wonder, and Lanny promised to pass that information on to his father.
Also, of course, talk about home. Lanny explained that he had taken his little daughter to America, and so didn’t get to England as often as previously. The bomber pilot had been home for a couple of weeks’ leave and reported that the Pater was working hard at his writing jobs. Alfy had got caught in a “tip and run” raid on an airfield in Hell’s Corner, and had got laid up but was all right again. There was a lot of talk about the Germans having a new weapon, a flying bomb, and did Lanny know when it was coming? Lanny knew more than he was free to tell.
II
From Cairo to Tripoli, a city where Mussolini had built monuments to his glory, and which now the British were well pleased with. From there to Algiers, a city which the French had taken from the Moors and now called a part of la France métropolitaine; a city like all the others on the Mediterranean shore, with an Old Town of wretched slums crowded with the poor, and suburban streets with modern apartment houses for the middle class, and up on the slopes overlooking the sea magnificent estates with villas and palaces for the rich. They became rich because they owned the productive land and the natural resources and the means of manufacturing and transportation; they stayed rich because they had “inherited that good part.” Lanny Budd, who moved freely among them, didn’t point this out, because they wouldn’t have liked it and he would no longer have been able to hear their conversation; instead he told them that they were elegant and gracious and possessed exceptionally good taste, and that he knew where there was a remarkably fine Ingres or Renoir or whatever would go well over their dining-room mantle.
Lanny’s first duty was to see Denis fils, in one of the hotels which had been taken over as a war hospital. Lanny didn’t take his wife, giving the excuse that Denis wouldn’t feel free to talk about military affairs in her presence; the real reason was, he wanted to tell the capitaine about having met Denis père, in Paris, and also the news about his younger brother. Lanny found the Frenchman pale and wan, having got a severe thigh wound from an exploding shell; his life had been saved by blood transfusions. Now he would have to be a desk man, he remarked sadly; but he had done his little bit to redeem the honor of la patrie. Had Lanny heard about the fine record which General Giraud’s men had been making all the way up the eastern coast of Italy? Yes, Lanny had heard it; they were all doing well, even the American Japan
ese, the Nisei, who had the special motive of proving themselves Americans and wiping out the shame of Pearl Harbor.
Lanny told about his meeting with the father, and the messages which the aged man had sent to his sons. There was nothing that either Lanny or the younger Denis could do about the situation. Lanny hadn’t been able to see the capitaine’s wife and children, and could only pass on the word of the père that they were alive and well. As to the younger brother, it was odd indeed that he was staying in Lanny’s old home in Juan-les-Pins. “Taking care of it!” Denis said. “We all know how troops take care of things; but no doubt Charlot will do his best. He is a conscientious fellow, even though his ideas are so cruelly perverted.”
Poor Denis! He couldn’t get it out of his head that if only he could get a chance to talk with his beloved younger brother, he could bring that lost sheep back into the fold. The capitaine brooded over it all the time. He was so sure that he was right in co-operating with the Americans, and so unable to conceive of any reason why a Frenchman should co-operate with the Nazis! Lanny took the part of the devil’s advocate for the nonce, explaining the younger man’s idea that the only victors in this war would be the Russian Reds, and that the French people would find that they had laid themselves open to the march of revolutionary Communism. Charlot had explained this in detail to Lanny, and Denis now explained why it wouldn’t necessarily be that way. But convincing Lanny was not the same thing as convincing Charlot.