Between Two Worlds

by Upton Sinclair

  This Turkish victory was a grave blow to British prestige. The weakest of the Central Powers, overwhelmingly defeated less than four years earlier, was now publicly tearing up the treaty which had been forced upon it. The triumphant Turkish armies, having captured great quantities of Vickers motorized artillery and tanks, all made by Zaharoff, came to the gates of Constantinople and were kept out only by fear of British naval guns—also made by Zaharoff. It looked for a while as if Britain had another war on its hands, and without any help from the French; it was poor consolation to see France apparently headed for another war with Germany, without any help from the British. The outcome was that in October Lloyd George was forced to resign—the last of the Versailles statesmen, the “Big Four” who had set out with so much authority to settle the problems of the world!

  Lanny and Marie were back in Bienvenu when that happened. They were happy, because Lanny was “behaving,” according to the standards of the ladies of his family and their friends. He kept the worst of his Red literature buried among the respectable books of a New England clergyman, who was not in position to protest against such treatment. He kept his Red ideas buried in his own head, and did nothing about them except to make cynical remarks concerning statesmen. That shocked nobody, it being the fashion in the smart world to accuse political persons of venality as well as stupidity. There was even a fringe of the well-to-do, those who went in for advanced ideas, who were beginning to find good things to say for the Reds. They had been able to survive for five years, in spite of civil wars and famines, and that seemed a miracle. Also, they had the support of popular writers such as Barbusse and Rolland and Anatole France. The last-named came to a hotel on the Cap, and Lanny went to call on him. The old man was showing his many years, but his brain was as clear as ever and his tongue as incisive; the things he said about the situation in Europe differed but little from what Lanny had heard in the establishment of his Red uncle.

  Lanny was as happy as one could have expected a sensitive person to be in those troubled days. His amie was all that he needed, and he never looked a second time at any of the fashionable ladies, married or unmarried, who spread their charms before him. He dutifully put on the proper clothes and attended the social functions which his mother gave, and some of those of Emily and Sophie when they made a special point of inviting him. He was proud of the success of his two best friends. Rick was working that autumn on a play about the war, and the scenes which Lanny read interested him, and he made suggestions, and thought well of himself when some of them were accepted. Kurt had completed another suite, this time having to do with a soldier’s life, and Lanny watched the parturition and birth of an art-work, having all the pleasures of the event and none of the pains. Also there was Marceline, five years old and growing fast; she was by now the liveliest little dancer you ever saw, and knew most everything that Lanny had to teach her along that line. She was a little duck in the water, and a little enchantress everywhere. Very amusing to watch her use her eyes, and practice her arts on every new person who came along. Kurt might be ever so stern a stepfather, but this was a fundamental instinct of the female organism, and he might as well have tried to stop the bougainvillaea in the patio from putting the purple color into its blossoms.

  V

  In this autumn there came an event whose importance in the history of Europe was realized only gradually. The workers of Italy called a general strike in protest against the permitted cruelties of the blackshirts; the strike failed because the workers had no arms and were powerless against unlimited violence. In this hour of confusion the Fascisti took their opportunity and began to assemble; their editor, that Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon at whom Lanny and Rick had laughed, sounded his slogans of glory and summoned his youth to the building of a new Roman Empire.

  The American ambassador, “Cradle,” played an important part in these events, and was so proud of it that he came home and boasted about it in print. Mussolini came to the embassy and had tea with him, and charmed him so greatly that he defended the dictator and everything he did from that time on. A new government, to have any success, has to have funds, and the editor was seeking support for a movement to restore law and order to his strike-ridden land. Surely an Italy without labor unions, without the co-operatives which deprived businessmen of their profits, ought to be a sound investment! The ambassador thought so, and perausded the great House of Morgan to promise a loan of two hundred million dollars to the government which Mussolini was planning. Let no one say that America wasn’t doing its part in building defenses against the Reds!

  There were said to be a hundred and sixty thousand former army officers in Italy, most of them out of jobs and in need of funds. Many had joined the Fascisti, and they now led the “March on Rome” which skilled propaganda would make into a heroic episode. Their founder did not walk with them, but traveled more quickly and safely in a sleeping-car. Eight thousand dusty and bedraggled youths could, of course, have accomplished nothing without the acquiescence of police and army. The pint-sized king with the democratic sympathies was told that his cousin had joined the Fascisti and was ready to take his throne unless he obeyed orders; therefore he refused to sign the order declaring a state of seige, and the blackshirts entered the capital unopposed.

  That “cheap actor” whom Lanny and Rick had interviewed in Cannes now made his appearance before his sovereign, wearing a black shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and a sash of the Fiume colors, and was invited to form a government; later he appeared before the Parlamento and told them that he was the master. No longer was it difficult for him to play the pouter pigeon, for he had had several years’ practice in thrusting out his jaw and expanding his chest. The name of Benito Mussolini was flashed around the world, and that interview which Rick had peddled in vain among British editors now suddenly became “spot news.” Rick dug it out and rewrote it with fresh trimmings, and his editor paid for it gladly.

  VI

  The founder of Fascismo had proved his thesis of the beneficence of violence. The Americans had a phrase, “climbing onto the bandwagon,” and Lanny could imagine all the time-servers, the petty officials and bourgeois “intellectuals,” who would hasten to pay homage to the new Roman emperor and make him drunk upon his own glory. A master actor by now, he had served first the left and then the right, and had carefully selected the best phrases of both. Every day he would produce new stunts to delight the Roman mob; he would jump over hurdles to show how lively he was, and be photographed in a cage with a toothless lion cub to show how brave he was.

  But woe to those who had fought him, and taught him to hate them! There is no one who hates with such bitterness as a renegade, who has to keep the flame hot that its roaring may be louder than the voice of his conscience. The Socialists, the pacifists, and even the harmless co-operators were shot in their beds or hunted in the mountains; and meanwhile the new ruler in whose honor this Roman holiday was celebrated would stand before the Chamber of Deputies and solemnly ordain: “There shall be no reprisals.” That was the pattern of this new society, as Lanny came to know it; boundless cruelty combined with bland and pious lying. The Fascisti would develop falsehood into a new science and a new art; they would teach it to one dictator after another, until half the human race would no longer have any means of telling truth from falsehood.

  Lanny knew what was happening in Italy, because he was continually meeting victims of it. That was the heritage which his friend Barbara Pugliese had left him; she had told some of her friends about this generous-hearted American youth, and now they had his address. Lanny remembered what his father had said about the practice of hobos in the United States; he had got a mark on his gatepost, and there would be no way ever to get it rubbed out!

  The first who came was that young Giulio who had been with Barbara in San Remo and had shouted his contempt at Mussolini in the trattoria. The squadristi wouldn’t overlook a person like that; they gave him his dose of castor oil, and Lanny could hardly recognize the wreck of a human
being who appeared at the gate of Bienvenu one morning. He was put into a hospital for a few weeks, but nothing could help him very much, for his digestive tract had been ruined; Giulio was a medical student, so he knew about his own case. He was the first of many who came, each with a more harrowing story; and of course this wasn’t pleasant to the ladies of a villa on the Cap d’Antibes. They were sorry for these unfortunates, but also afraid of them, for who would have wanted to treat them that way unless they had done something very terrible? Anyhow, it kept the place in an uproar, and they couldn’t see what Lanny had to do with it, or how he expected to set himself single-handed against the new Roman Empire.

  Lanny had been able to hide his Red literature, but he tried in vain to hide his Red refugees. It got so that Beauty and Marie worried every time he went to Cannes, for fear that he was meeting some evil companions; it could hardly have been worse if he had been suspected of having another mistress! The people in the village were talking about it, and Beauty was afraid the police authorities might take cognizance. France was a free republic, and proud of its reputation as a home for the oppressed of other lands; all the same, no police like to have swarms of Reds pouring into a country over all the mountain passes and even in rowboats. Beauty could never forget that she herself was a suspected person, living with a German whose past would not bear investigation.

  VII

  There was another conference, this time at Lausanne, on the other side of the beautiful Lake Geneva. The British had to make a new treaty with the Turks; and of course the French had to be there to get their share. The new Italian Premier had to be there, because the day of glory had arrived, and never again would anybody decide any question about the Mediterranean without consulting him. The new emperor revived the phrase of the old ones—it was Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” To make sure that the world didn’t miss the point he kept a long-nosed British nobleman, the “ineffable” Earl Curzon, and with him a Premier of France, waiting like a couple of office boys for a chance to see him and find out what he wanted. A revolution in conferences!

  The Turkish treasures were at stake, and that included Mosul, an even more magical name than Baku; so Robbie Budd came again, and all the other oil men. In order to punish the French for having aided the Turks, the British had recognized the Emir Feisal as ruler of Syria; at long last a promise was partly kept, and that dark brown replica of Christ whom Lanny had met and admired during the Peace Conference would come into a part of his own—but not the part with the oil! Tom Lawrence, the blue-eyed, sandy-haired young British agent, had changed his name and was Aircraftsman Shaw, blacking the boots of some minor officer at home. Would he now go back to the desert and resume his place as companion of one who scorned to be called king because he was a descendant of the Prophet? This world that Lanny Budd had been born into was full of strange stories, and travelers from the Mediterranean lands were listened to with interest in his home.

  Lanny hadn’t planned to go to Lausanne; but the conference adjourned for the Christmas holidays, and there were Robbie and Rick available. The former had business in Berlin; also, Kurt was planning to spend another Christmas at Stubendorf, and Marie was going north to be with her boys. So Lanny, with the Fortunatus purse of his father, laid out a journey for himself and his friends. He and Kurt would escort Marie to Paris, and then go to Lausanne and pick up Robbie and Rick and take them to Berlin, where Lanny and Rick would visit the Robins, and Kurt his brother; then Kurt and Lanny and Rick would go to Stubendorf—Rick’s first visit to that place. They would come back to Lausanne and leave Rick for the second stage of the conference, while Lanny and Kurt proceeded to Paris to pick up Marie again.

  A jolly thing to plan journeys with the help of a selfrenewing purse! You and your friends would be transported from country to country, would talk to the people, gather the news, visit operas and theaters and art-shows; ride on fast and comfortable trains, stop at de luxe hotels, eat food novelties in the most elegant restaurants, have all your burdens carried for you, and by the magic of a pocketful of paper money see everybody smiling, obsequious, and delighted. But pay no attention to the signs of bitter poverty on the way; half-starved children begging for bread, women selling their bodies for it—and now and then a Red being hanged or beaten into insensibility!

  VIII

  Another of those great international gatherings, with diplomats from a score of countries and publicists and journalists from twice as many. Lanny knew so many of them that it was like a larger, outside family, a fluid periphery of friendship. You didn’t know who was coming, but there they were; then presently they were gone and others had come. Life consisted of talking and listening to talk; there was a modern, perfected method whereby you hammered out your talk on little typewriter keys, and “filed it,” and next morning it would be on a million breakfast tables, or maybe ten million. Moving in that world you were close to the seats of power, and something you said or did might help to “make history.”

  Mr. Child was there, with a large staff. America had come back into the affairs of Europe, after three years of vowing “Never again!” Mr. Child announced America’s policy regarding the Near East; it was “the open door,” and who could deny that this was a delicate and tactful way of asserting Standard’s claim to twenty-five percent of Mosul oil? The Russians were there, still trying for their loan, and dangling an empty oilcan in front of the noses of Robbie Budd and others. Deterding and the rest of the big fellows had agreed upon a boycott; they had formed an organization called the Groupement, pledging themselves to buy no Russian oil, and now they were waiting to see who would break it first. Robbie predicted that it would be Deterding himself; and sure enough, within two or three months he had bought seventy thousand tons of kerosene and taken an option for another hundred thousand. He had thought, so naively, that the agreement applied only to crude!

  Berlin would have a poor Christmas this year. The mark stood at nearly one thousand to the dollar, and all but the very rich were poor. Everybody was fear-stricken, for the quarrel with France had come to a crisis; the reparations payments were long since overdue, the coal deliveries in arrears, and there was that round, pasty-faced Poincaré with his jaws clenched, determined to move in and seize the Ruhr, industrial heart of the Reich, without which half the Germans would starve. Rick, eager journalist, wanted to interview people of all classes and write an article after he came out; he found them glad to talk to him, for the hymn of hate had been forgotten and they thought of Britons as friends and protectors against French avarice.

  Lanny and Rick went to stay with the Robins. Comfort and safety in that warm nest, and Papa Robin a mine of information about everything that was going on, political and economic. Trust a Schieber to know! The hard-working man of affairs was troubled by the bad name which people gave him, and defended himself with vigor. It wasn’t he who was going to invade the Ruhr and drive the mark still lower; all he did was to know it was going to happen. People who believed that it wouldn’t happen were eager to buy marks for future delivery; if Johannes didn’t sell them, others would, and what difference would it make?

  But the Robins didn’t spend all their time talking about money. Far from it; there were Hansi’s fiddle and Freddi’s clarinet, and a great stack of accompaniments which Lanny would play or make a stab at. Hansi had had a year of drill by the best teacher in Germany, and it was astonishing how he had grown; he played with authority, and Lanny was greatly delighted, and the others were delighted with his delight. Touching to see how they all praised one another, adored one another, forming a solid family phalanx. The father would conquer the world of finance and the son that of art, and there would be two ways to reduce the handicap under which the Jews labored in this part of the world.

  IX

  Lanny had written to the boys about Barbara, and now he told them details of that dreadful story, and saw horror in their faces and the tears in their eyes. Their abhorrence of the blackshirts was instinctive, and their sympathy with the rebel refu
gees complete; they had none of that inner conflict which Lanny perceived in himself. Was it because they were members of a persecuted race, with ancient memories of exile deeply buried in their souls? Or was it that they were more completely artists than Lanny? The artist is by nature, one might say by definition, an anarchist. He lives in the freedom of his own imagination, and represents the experimental element of life. If “authority” should intervene and tell him what to think or to feel, the experiment would not be tried, the brain-child would be born dead.

  To the sons of Johannes Robin it seemed the most natural thing in the world to accept those ideas which so greatly troubled the son of Robbie Budd. Of course it was wrong that some should be born to privilege while others did not have enough to eat. Of course it was right that the disinherited should protest and try to change the ancient evils of the world. Who would not demand food when he was starving? Who would not fight for liberty when he was oppressed? Who could fail to hate cruelty and injustice, and cry out for it to be ended? So asked Hansi, and Freddi knew that his adored elder brother must be right.

  They asked what Lanny thought, and he was ashamed to tell them of his hesitations and bewilderments. It seemed cowardly not to believe what was so obviously true; it seemed weakness to consider such questions as what would offend your father or imperil your mother’s social position. Having met Lanny’s Red uncle, the Jewish lads didn’t think of him as a dangerous man, but as an amazingly understanding one, and they wanted to know where he was and what he was doing and what he had said about the present state of Germany and France and Russia. Lanny mentioned books that he had read, and Hansi declared that when the summer came and he had free time, he was going to learn the difference between Communists and Socialists, and try really to understand the tormented world in which he lived.