Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  “Such bombs might do great damage in a city like London which covers an immense area. We want every possible kind of information about them: the structure of the bomb, where it is manufactured, the location of the launching sites. They will be camouflaged, of course, and difficult to get at. We have heard reports that the Nazis are putting some of their more important manufacturing plants under the ground, or in caves.”

  “We have many caves in our country. I am told that some of them have been turned into comfortable working places.”

  “We have saboteurs who are training to go into Germany, and no doubt we shall soon be dropping them from parachutes. Get us every scrap of information you can about war industries and their products, about military plans, about transportation, about German connections here in Switzerland—”

  “This is quite a task you are setting me,” said this Socialist Party member. He said it with no trace of a smile.

  “Get what you can,” said Lanny. “No one will ask more. Give me the name you are using here and where a note can reach you. That will be in President Roosevelt’s hands in three or four days. How soon there will be a man to contact you, I cannot say, but it should not be long. And above all, put anxieties out of your mind; you will have a new and fresh organization behind you, more powerful than anything the Hitlerites have ever dreamed. We Americans may be too confident, and we may get more than one bloody nose in this war; but it has never occurred to us as a people that we can fail, and I promise you that we won’t forget those who have helped us.”

  Backing up these confident words, Lanny transferred to his friend’s pockets a lot of Swiss banknotes of various denominations—he had established his bank credit here long ago for his purposes of picture purchasing. “I took the liberty of buying a diamond ring for your wife,” he added. “She will probably not wish to wear it under present circumstances, but it is a convenient thing to have hidden away in case of emergency.” He told Monck about his own marriage, and received his congratulations.

  VI

  Next morning the P.A. took the train to Bern, a lovely old city nestled in a U-bend of the young river Aar. He got himself a room in the Bernerhof, with a fine view of all the Bernese Alps, still covered with snow. However, he didn’t see them, because he was absorbed in typing out a report, somewhat longer than usual. He double-sealed it in the usual way, addressed it to the Honorable Leland Harrison, and caused it to be handed in at the door of the American Embassy. Then, his mind at peace, he paid visits to the art dealers, to impress them with his agreeable manner and discriminating taste. He spent part of a day in the Art Museum, and another part inspecting a private collection to which he had no trouble in gaining access. Then he returned to Geneva and took the night train back to Cannes, quite certain that he had re-established himself as a respectable member of society, and that he would have no trouble in getting another visa should he wish to return and inspect other works of art in the Helvetian Republic.

  He had promised his mother to telegraph her of his coming, and he did so. One could never be sure whether a telegram would arrive, but this one did, and when he stepped from the train, could you believe your eyes? Marceline! “For crying out loud!” he said, in the slang of his youth, and caught her in his arms and gave her a good substantial kiss. She was an artiste, a danseuse, used to public appearances, and not bound by stiff bourgeois notions of propriety. She was twenty-five, but to him she would always be “Little Sister,” whom he had first greeted when she was two years old, and to whom he had taught dancing steps, just as he had recently been teaching them to her son. She hadn’t turned out exactly the way he would have preferred, but she could say that she had never done harm to anybody but herself, and certainly none to him.

  They had two stories to tell on that drive behind the ambling family nag. Ladies first, and she chose to ask questions: What sort of wife had he got himself, and for God’s sake, why had he come away and left her? Couldn’t he make enough money selling the Detaze paintings in America? She had a one-third interest in the proceeds of such sales, so it wasn’t precisely disinterested, advice—he had learned that her advice seldom was. He had put a lot of money to her credit in a New York bank, and she thanked him for this, but then wanted to know what were the chances of her being cut off from it. Did he think that Beauty was wise in defying the State Department’s instructions, and what did he think that she, Marceline, ought to do?

  “I am not going back into Germany,” she declared, and there her questioning of Lanny halted and his questioning of her began. Had she ceased to love Oskar? She made a sort of moue and said that she loved him as much as she was willing to love any man, but she couldn’t stand the Germans, especially since America had entered the war. Graf von Herzenberg, Oskar’s father, had used his influence to make it possible for her to go on dancing and to enjoy complete freedom, but he couldn’t keep the German women from making snide remarks whenever she came near them, and asking her how her countrymen dared to bomb the most beautiful cities in the world and to kill the most cultured people in the world.

  “You know, Lanny, I never had the least idea of being patriotic. I’m only half an American, and that by accident; nationalities meant nothing to me, and I hardly bothered to know where the countries were. This war has been horrid, I just didn’t want to know about it. But now some Germans have cut me dead, and Oskar can’t bring himself to blame them, and I’m not supposed to blame him, and I don’t—only I do.” This wasn’t exactly clear, but it was feminine, and Lanny understood. Many years ago he had read a translation of some Latin verses which had come down from old times, and he remembered a part of them:

  The Germans in Greek are sadly to seek …

  All save only Hermann, and Hermann’s a German.

  In short, Marceline had got tired of her young Prussian aristocrat. He was brave and had killed many Russians, and she didn’t mind that, but it was a messy business, and none of hers; quite the contrary, she said, for the Russians loved the dance, and up to a year ago she had rather fancied the idea of going to Moscow. Now, of course, all that was fini; all Europe was fini, it seemed to her. What sort of reception did Lanny think the daughter of Marcel Detaze would get in New York? Was she an American citizen, or what? And would they give her a passport? What a mess this world was!—

  VII

  “Social life” had come pretty nearly to a stop on the Riviera. It was so much trouble to get to any place, and only the very rich could get the food and wine for entertainment. The Americans were nearly all gone, and the English who hadn’t gone were interned. In spite of the best efforts of the government, Frenchmen and Germans did not mix very well; those French who tried it were expecting to get something out of it and were looked upon with suspicion by the rest of the population. The fortunate people were those who could be happy with a book, a violin, a garden, a child.

  Parsifal Dingle was one of these, and Beauty was learning to be another. Lanny watched to see what his impatient half-sister would do with the problem. Marceline had a raging appetite for pleasure, and to be in what she called the “social whirl.” She hated the war, not because it was killing millions of men and reducing other millions to destitution, but because it was destroying that brightly shining world in which she had won a place by much effort of body and brain. To be an artist did not mean to the daughter of Marcel Detaze what it had meant to her father, to express the deep longings of the human soul for beauty and understanding; it meant to be “somebody,” to have a place in the world of wealth and fashion, to be talked about, and to have eyes turn to follow her when she entered a public place. Now the public places were mostly dark because fuel was so scarce, and a dancer at the height of her career was expected to be content with sitting at home and making up a bridge four with people who had formerly been elegant but now were dependent upon her mother for a place to lay their heads.

  Marceline was enraptured with her lovely little boy and found the role of an adored mother most intriguing; but she soon ti
red of answering his questions and decided that this duty was more appropriate to a grandmother. She was pleased to talk with Lanny, so long as he would tell her about people of the fashionable world. She would question him for hours about Robbie’s family in Newcastle, the Holdenhursts in Baltimore, and the other important Americans for whom he collected paintings; about Lord and Lady Wickthorpe in London, and Rosemary, Countess of Sandhaven, who had been Lanny’s old flame; about Baron Schneider and Mme. de Broussailles and other smart friends in Paris; about the Laval family and the ladies of the Vichy government—anybody, so long as they had “succeeded.”

  Marceline’s attitude was not consciously Fascist; she truly didn’t want to have anything to do with politics. She was like so many other people Lanny had known, who were Fascists by instinct, or as you might say, a priori. They didn’t call themselves Fascists, in many cases they didn’t have any idea of being that; the basis of their thinking was the axiom that the Reds must be held down. Three great men had shown how to do it—Der Führer, Il Duce, and El Caudillo. Who else?

  Lanny’s much indulged “Little Sister” had had her way and had married an Italian army officer, a Fascist devotee. Lanny had warned her that she wouldn’t be pleased with this husband’s attitude to women, and indeed she hadn’t been. She had decided at last that he was a rotter, but she hadn’t discovered any connection between his conduct and the political system under which he had been trained. Then she had tried an elegant and haughty Junker, with a dueling scar on his left cheek; this time Lanny hadn’t been free to warn her, for he was supposed to have changed his own ideology and couldn’t trust Marceline with his secret. She had to make her own mistakes and learn from them if she could.

  The idea had occurred to him that she might be an excellent person to go into Germany and collect secrets among the military and governmental classes. She would be paid well for it, and she would like that; but after watching her, he decided that he couldn’t trust her. Whether she went to Germany or stayed here on the Riviera she would meet some new man, and whatever his political coloration, she would adopt it, as the way to please him. Doubtless it would be some man of wealth; for after her experience with Vittorio di San Girolamo she had vowed that she would “make them pay.” If she broke with Oskar von Herzenberg she would surely decide that two “romances” were enough, and that next time it must be business.

  VIII

  As always, Lanny would have liked to stay at Bienvenu; but the “hound of heaven” bayed in his soul, and he had to be off again. He told the members of his family about the art commission which obliged him to travel in Algeria and Morocco. A land which he had not seen since boyhood, it shone in his memory with a glory of sunlight because Marcel had painted it. Lanny had been fourteen then, and no boy on earth could have been happier. He had visited all the Mediterranean lands on board the yacht Bluebird, made entirely of kitchen soap, or so its owner, Ezra Hackabury, had been wont to declare.

  Marcel had made it not merely a pleasure cruise, but a culture cruise, a floating university. He had opened the sensitive lad’s mind to the mysteries of human existence on this planet, to awe as well as beauty. For Lanny’s then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them.

  Lanny took the night train to Marseille, and from there a steamer to Algiers. The latter trip took a little more than a day and a night, and was supposed to be safe. The Allies permitted a supervised trade between Vichy France and its African colonies because they didn’t want to have to fight the French Fleet; the Germans permitted this trade because they were secretly getting a part of the goods. However, you could never be sure that a submarine might not make a mistake; so Lanny spent the night in a steamer chair on deck with a life preserver strapped to one wrist to make sure that nobody else carried it off. The weather was warm in mid-May, and when he was not asleep he could look at the stars and realize the infinite unimportance of the human insect; or he could think about the various North African insects to whom he bore letters of introduction, and how he was going to approach them, and what he expected to get out of them. Thus a philosopher lives upon various planes, and his theories and his practices are frequently not in accord.

  In midmorning the mountains of the “Dark Continent” loomed up blue-gray on the horizon, and presently the traveler saw the well remembered white city spread out on rapidly rising hills. Most Mediterranean cities are like that, for the sea was formed by the dropping of the land in some geologic convulsion. That is the reason real estate in Mediterranean harbors is high in both altitude and price. It is one of the reasons that the workers live in closely packed tenements of anywhere from four to six stories, many of them centuries old, and which have been repaired about once in a century. The harbor seemed smaller than Lanny remembered it, but that was because Lanny had changed, not the harbor. The city had spread along the shore for miles in both directions. There had been a building boom after World War I, and there was now a modern residential district, with villas and hotels for tourists who came to enjoy the winter climate. The population of the city had been doubled by refugees from France.

  IX

  Lanny put up at the St. George Hotel, high up on the hillside, overlooking the sea; it was old, English, and very respectable, with beautiful gardens where Marcel had once made sketches. Lanny presented letters of introduction and established his credit at one of the city’s banks. He knew how to make himself agreeable, and it wasn’t many days before he was in the châteaux and elaborate villas which the plutocracy of Algiers maintained in private parks on the hill slopes surrounding the city. He was not surprised to find these people pro-Fascist in sentiment. It had been his observation that all colonial peoples are conservative, even reactionary. In Hongkong he had found the English more Tory than all but a small handful of diehards in London, and now he found the businessmen of French North Africa asking nothing but to be let alone. They were doing a brisk trade with the Germans; everything they could lay hands on was in demand at the highest prices ever known. It didn’t take a P.A. many days to realize that these merchants were not going to hold out welcoming arms to an invading army of democracy.

  But they were pleased to welcome a visiting art expert whose pockets were well lined, who had lived in the great capitals of the Old World and the New, and who seemed to know everybody you could mention. He presented himself to the director of the Museum of Antiquities, which is in Mustapha Supérieur, a pleasant garden near the Governor’s summer palace; he gave attention to Algerian antiquities and Arab art, such as it was, and charmed the director by the knowledge he had acquired in the New York Public Library. He made inquiry as to private collections, and when he inspected these he tactfully intimated that he might find American purchasers for worth-while items. He displayed no special interest in political affairs, but when such subjects were brought up he knew what a proper gentleman was expected to say. As a result he gained the confidence of important persons, and it took him only a short while to form a clear picture of the situation.

  In the days when the propaganda of Le Couple France-Allemagne had been at its height, the son of Budd-Erling had been guest of honor at a dinner party in the Paris mansion of Baron Schneider-Creusot. This “armaments king of Europe” had been a greatly worried monarch, fearing not merely for his crown but for his head, and he had invited a dozen or so of the leading entrepreneurs to meet an American who knew Adolf Hitler and might be able to explain this new portent risen to the east. Among the guests had been M. Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, an ardent collaborationist and one of the most active businessmen of the country. He was a director of the Banque de France, he published the reactionary
newspaper Le Jour, and his wife was the heiress of Huiles Lesieur, the great vegetable-oil trust. More important yet, he was organizer and head of the most powerful pressure group in France, the League of Taxpayers, which was something like the National Association of Manufacturers in the United States, at once a propaganda and a “slush-fund” group for turning the heat on politicians and legislators to make sure that they did what the “two hundred families” wanted.

  Now, at a social gathering, Lanny encountered this gentleman and was remembered and greeted with cordiality. M. Lemaigre-Dubreuil was a stocky, solidly built man with an odd husky voice and an aggressive, direct manner, like that of an American “go-getter.” When he learned that Lanny had recently been in New York and Washington he saw another opportunity to get information. He invited the visitor to lunch at the ultra-smart Golf Club and treated him with great distinction—how charming a Frenchman can be when he takes the trouble! The pair sat on a shaded piazza overlooking a splendid view, and chatted about common friends and the parlous state of the world. M. Lemaigre-Dubreuil found nothing peculiar in the fact that an art expert should be here for the purchasing of Roman and Moorish mosaics. Lanny, on the other hand, didn’t have to be surprised by his host’s presence in Algiers, for he knew that the principal raw material from which Huiles Lesieur derived its products was the peanut crop of French West Africa. The firm had a great refining plant in Dunkerque, and the Germans had permitted the machinery to be moved to the south, so that it might produce edible oils for the people of France, and not entirely forgetting the firm’s German friends.

  Lanny asked about Schneider and learned that this owner of several hundred munitions plants was still in Paris; he was feeling his years, which were over seventy. He was ill-content with the kind of gratitude the Germans had shown him; he was distressed as to the fate of France, and, in short, Lanny’s informant considered that he was worrying himself into his grave. This was still more true of poor Denis de Bruyne, who was over eighty and in no position to cope with events such as were now overwhelming his country. He was in his château in Seine-et-Oise, near Paris, with his two daughters-in-law and their children. Lemaigre-Dubreuil knew him intimately and Lanny knew from Denis’s lips that some five years ago, when the Cagoulards had been planning to overthrow the French Republic, Lemaigre had been one who knew what was going on.