Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  Who would help Lanny Budd? He thought first of his powerful father. Robbie had said that he would be coming to Germany before long. If Lanny had cabled: “I am in serious trouble please come immediately,” Robbie would have taken the first steamer. If Lanny had added: “Bring Bub Smith,” Robbie would have understood that the trouble was serious indeed, and would have put someone else in charge of his company police force at the Budd-Erling plant and brought with him an ex-cowboy from Texas who was a straightshooter in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. Bub was getting on in years, but he could still toss a silver dollar into the air and hit it with a pistol shot. He had done many kinds of confidential work for Robbie in France, including the bodyguarding of Baby Frances. He had learned to talk the lingo, also to know many kinds of people, including the flics both in Paris and on the Riviera.

  If Robbie had said: “Bub, I want to know all about the Château de Belcour, which the German Graf Herzenberg maintains in Seine-et-Oise, and where I understand they have a woman prisoner,”—Bub would have said: “O.K., Boss, I’ll see what can be done.” Robbie would put some new one-thousand-franc notes into Bub’s hands, and add: “There’s more where these came from, but don’t spend them without changing them, for they can be traced.” Bub would grin and say: “I’m no sucker, Boss,” and that would be enough. Lanny would have been willing to wager that before the week was over Bub Smith would have one of the Graf’s servants drunk, and it might be right in the servants’ quarters of the château.

  Lanny, being of an imaginative temperament, lived through this whole episode. Having included in his cable a request to his father to bring the sealed letter from the safe, Lanny opened the letter and showed the marriage certificate and the photograph of Trudi. Robbie, who had been raised in New England where they grow saints and ascetics wholesale, looked at the portrait—all this in Lanny’s imagination, of course—and recognized the sort of woman his susceptible son had “fallen for.” He understood without argument the peril in which the wife now stood, for he had been in Germany and knew the Nazis, and had heard the story of Johannes Robin from Johannes himself, and the story of Freddi from Lanny. He was ready with his answer even before his son had finished outlining the situation. “Yes, Son. It looks pretty black but I’ll do what I can for you. But you’ll have to understand that this is the last straw, and I won’t move a finger unless you give me your word that both you and your wife will settle down and drop all sorts of radical activities from now on.”

  And of course Lanny couldn’t say that. Trudi would never make such a promise, and wouldn’t admit Lanny’s right to make it for her. As for Lanny himself, he had given up one wife because of his unwillingness to make that same promise, and now, apparently, he would have to give up another. He said: “I’m sorry, Robbie; it’s no go.” The father demanded: “Then what on earth did you bring me across the ocean for?” Lanny replied: “I didn’t”—and so ended that abortive piece of imagination!

  VII

  The bewildered husband’s thoughts turned to Léon Blum, who had ceased to be Premier of France a couple of months ago but had become Vice-Premier, and therefore was still chained to the whims of a Cabinet. Lanny had had with Blum much the same sort of session as recently with Roosevelt: that is, he had challenged Blum on the issue of the Spanish war, and heard the defense of a Socialist who held power only on the sufferance of capitalist politicians; of a pacifist and humanitarian who found himself confronted by a many-headed hydra of war; of a Jew who saw anti-Semitism being spread like an artificial plague all around him, and who questioned his right to put that added burden upon his overburdened party.

  But Blum was still the leader of that party, and still dreaming of justice in a world of maniacal greeds; still pleading for peace with two psychopathic dictators bent upon war. Privately he could be a friend and wise adviser; if Lanny should go to his apartment and tell him the painful story, Blum would respect his confidence and might be able to give helpful advice. He might name some trustworthy police agent who knew the ropes in Paris and could go to work among the Nazis. It would cost money, of course, but Lanny wouldn’t mind that—the money he had brought with him was burning a hole in his pocket, and it seemed to him he would never again have use for it if he couldn’t save Trudi. But the more he thought over the plan, the more unlikely it seemed that any police official could permanently keep such a secret as Lanny had to impart. Sooner or later there would be a leak; and anyhow, Lanny would be always in dread of it, and would no longer dare go into Naziland and do his work. He had pledged Trudi that never under any circumstances would he imperil this privilege he enjoyed; and now, since he had become a “presidential agent,” he was more than ever committed to preserving it.

  So it would have to be some comrade, and preferably someone of the underground. An image arose in Lanny’s mind, and he relived a scene of three years ago when he had sat in a tiny second-story bedroom of a workingman’s home in the Limehouse district of London, talking in whispers to a German sailor with a round shaven head and a typical Prussian neck that came up in a straight line in back. A tough, hardfisted fellow, this Bernhardt Monck, and Lanny had been suspicious of him; but Trudi had sent him from Berlin, and Lanny had given him money for Trudi’s work, and since then nothing had happened to Lanny—which would hardly have been the case if Monck had been a spy of the Nazis. Less than a year ago Lanny had seen him marching at the head of a company of the International Brigade on that forever glorious day when it entered Madrid and stopped the Moors of Franco at the little Manzanares River. Certainly no man was going to walk into any such deadly scrimmage unless he believed in the cause for which it was fought!

  There had been many scrimmages since then; and was Monck still alive? If so, perhaps he had earned a furlough, and Lanny could bring him to Paris and put him to work, meeting him secretly and guiding his efforts. Lanny could find out about him through Raoul Palma, his Spanish comrade who for many years had run the workers’ school in Cannes, and who was now in Valencia with the Loyalist government. One of the letters which Lanny had found awaiting him in Paris had been from Raoul, telling him the news and pleading with him to move the British government so that the embargo might be lifted and the besieged people of Spain might purchase arms. Just a little thing like that was all a retired school director wanted from his one friend among the ruling classes of the world!

  If it hadn’t been for war and censorship, Lanny would have got Raoul on the telephone and asked him the whereabouts of Capitán Herzog, the name under which Monck was going in Spain. But with conditions as they were, mail, telegraph and telephone were “out” so far as this matter was concerned. Lanny would have to go to Spain; and the question which troubled him was, suppose he went, and in the meantime Trudi were to smuggle a letter to him, or try to get him on the phone at this hotel!

  VIII

  Lanny couldn’t sleep. He paced the floor of his room, tormenting himself with thoughts about his wife in the Château de Belcour. He had forgotten to eat; then he decided that he ought to eat, and ordered some food, but found that it had lost its savor. He went out and walked the pavements of Paris in the small hours of the morning; then he came back, and lay down on the bed without undressing; he had managed to exhaust his body but not his mind, and he lay with his eyes closed, thinking every terrible thought possible about Trudi.

  Did he doze, and then awaken? He would never be sure. People would tell him in after years that perhaps he had been asleep all the time; but he knew that he was awake and in full possession of his faculties. A strange feeling began to creep over him and he opened his eyes slowly, and there at the foot of his bed was what appeared to be a trace of light, a sort of pillar of cloud, so faint that he couldn’t be sure whether it was the first glimmer of dawn coming in at the window. But dawn doesn’t come and gather itself into one spot, nor does it make one begin to shiver. The thought flashed over Lanny: “It’s happening again!”

  It had waited twenty years to happen ag
ain. Twenty years ago to this very month Lanny had lain in bed in his father’s home and had had this same feeling, and seen a pillar of light turn into the form of Rick, who had been flying in battle over France. One of the most vivid memories of Lanny’s whole life, something he could never forget if he lived to be as old as Methuselah. Hundreds of times he had wondered if it would happen again, but it had never happened.

  This time it was Trudi; standing there, full size, dim, but otherwise real as life; wearing a plain blue gingham dress with which Lanny was familiar, a dress for which she had paid perhaps twenty-five francs, less than a dollar; with her blond hair drawn back tightly from her forehead and doubtless hanging in two braids—though Lanny couldn’t see these, because she was facing him and never moved. She was two or three feet from the foot of the bed, looking at him, slightly downwards; her face pale, her expression gentle, sad, not to say grief-stricken.

  When this had happened to Lanny the first time, he had been a youth, entirely uninformed in the strange field of psychic phenomena. The feeling of grief had overwhelmed him and he had thought: “Rick is dead!” But in the course of twenty years he had read many books on the subject and had tried series of experiments with various mediums, weighing evidence and trying one hypothesis against another. He knew that “apparitions” or “phantasms” have been appearing to men since the beginning of recorded history. What do they mean and how do they arise? From the mind of the beholder or of the person beheld? Are they hallucinations? If so, why do they so often correspond to facts which the beholder cannot normally know? If you say they are “hallucinations telepathically induced,” you have to decide what you mean by telepathy and how it works; otherwise you are just fooling yourself with a long word.

  Twenty years ago Lanny had said: “Rick is dead!” But Rick hadn’t been dead; Rick had been lying on the field of battle, badly hurt and near to death. The apparition had borne a bleeding wound across the forehead—and Rick carried the scar of that wound to this day. Rick had been in France and Lanny in Connecticut; a circumstance which took more explaining than either of them had ever been able to find in any book. Now Lanny looked at this vision of his wife and saw that she had no wound of any sort; just an expression of infinite sorrow. She would have felt that, of course, because she was separated from him, and knew that he would be suffering because of her; that he would forget to eat and wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  The vision of Rick had filled the youthful Lanny Budd with awe. For twenty years since then he had been thinking: “If I ever see another, how shall I behave?” He had decided that he would not have the least fear or excitement, only scientific curiosity; he would make the most of every instant, like an astronomer during an eclipse of the sun. The astronomer prepares for years and travels half-way around the earth—all for a few seconds. Now Lanny had the seconds and he found that he was awed, even frightened, in spite of himself. Trudi of course would never hurt him; but Trudi came from another world, Trudi represented a break in those veils which hide mankind from its destiny and conceal secrets which may well be unbearable. Lanny felt that his skin was creeping and crawling; he couldn’t know that his hair was rising, but it felt like that, a sort of tickling. He was staring hard, and at the same time thinking—the thoughts of twenty years in a few seconds.

  He had called out to Rick, and the apparition had faded. So he had decided that he wouldn’t speak the next time. But he found that the impulse to speak was hard to resist. To lie there staring at his wife and see her gazing at him—that wasn’t normal, it wasn’t the part of love. He had become familiar with the idea of thoughts being communicated without words, so he decided to try that. He said: “Trudi!”—moving his lips, perhaps, but not making any sound that he could hear. It seemed to him that the apparition leaned forward slightly and turned its head, as if trying to hear. He said again, soundlessly: “Trudi!”—and could it be that her lips were moving, that she was speaking to him without sound? He had no knowledge of lip-reading, but he imagined that she was saying his name. Afterwards, when he tried the experiment, he discovered that you do not move your lips in saying “Lanny”—you say it with the tongue.

  “What shall I do, Trudi?” he thought—and that takes a lot of moving. Did he deceive himself when he imagined that she answered: “Do what I have told you.” An obvious enough thing for her to say; any wife, alive or dead, would say it to her husband if she thought that by any chance he would heed. Did he imagine that he heard: “Talk to me in your mind”? That, too, was obvious enough—with a husband who for twenty years had been speculating about psychic phenomena, visiting mediums, persuading his friends to do the same, and making elaborate records of significant communications.

  Anyhow, there it was in Lanny’s mind, and it stayed while the apparition slowly faded into the light of dawning day. Lanny found himself with a dew of perspiration on his forehead and a chill which was in no way normal in Paris at the end of summer. He found himself with an almost irresistible conviction that Trudi had been there; at least something of Trudi, or from her, and that she had put something into his mind. Nothing that he had read or thought had inclined him toward “spiritualism,” but now he was thinking: “Suppose it could be!” And again: “Suppose the Nazis couldn’t kill her!” Lanny recalled the Visit of Emmaus, so vividly painted by Rembrandt. “And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? … These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled.”

  IX

  Intellectually Lanny didn’t know any more about apparitions after this experience than he had known before it. Had this been Trudi—the body, the mind, or the soul of Trudi—or had it been his own subconscious mind, building up a synthesis of ten thousand memories of Trudi? He would never be able to say. But emotionally, Trudi had been there. She had made herself real to him; she had brought his ten thousand memories into active life; and moreover, she had given him a directive.

  Lanny had always been, from earliest childhood, a ladies’ man. His father he had seen but rarely; it had been his beautiful and warmhearted mother who had shaped his personality, and when she had gone off to take her part in the social whirl, she had left the child with women servants. She had come back trailing clouds of glory—she and her lady friends, dazzling and fascinating creatures, birds of paradise, whose conversation resembled a gramophone wound up and set to run at its highest speed. They had made a pet out of one bright little boy, the only one in a household, and he had watched them primping and powdering, getting armed for their forays into the masculine world—Lanny drinking in words which would never have been spoken if the gay ladies had dreamed that a child could understand them.

  Then Rosemary had come into his life; a second mother, but more than a mother, initiating him into the mysteries of love. She had been gentle and kind—they were always that way with Lanny, because he was that way with them. She might have stayed with him for life, only the world wouldn’t let her. The world was far more powerful than any individual; it was stern and harsh and made demands upon you which you disobeyed at your peril. Le grand monde, le haut monde, le monde d’élite—Lanny had heard these phrases from childhood, and it had taken him many years to understand this monde, how it had come to be, and from what its overwhelming authority was derived.

  Then had come Marie de Bruyne, one of the creatures and agents of that authority. A lady of high position in Paris, she had been his amie in the French fashion, and had handled him with the tact of the woman who accepts intellectually the supremacy of the male creature and does not admit even to herself that she is managing the life of the man she loves. Whenever Lanny did or said anything that was not in accord with the conventions of Marie’s class, she had not scolded, she had not even mentioned it; she had just become unhappy, and when Lanny observed it, he decided that it was hardly worth while to do or say or even believe too strenuously that forbidden thing.

  And then Irma Barnes, who had come out of the so-called “New” world, and gave no heed
to the conventions which bound the women of aristocratic France. Irma had never hesitated to say what she thought; and far from considering herself subject to the male creature, she took it for granted that this creature existed to dance attendance upon her and keep her from being bored. But she had been placid and easygoing; out of her superabundance she had been willing to give Lanny anything he might want, and her only complaint was that he wouldn’t make adequate use of his opportunities. What had broken up their marriage was the black crisis which was now gathering over their world. No longer could one just live from day to day and ask no questions; one had to take sides—and Lanny had taken the side opposite to his wife’s.

  That was how Trudi had come into his life. She represented that other side of his nature, the side which Irma couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate; the gullible and softhearted side which made excuses for what called itself “social justice,” but which Irma called class jealousy and plain organized robbery. Trudi was—or had been—like Marie de Bruyne in that she had her creed, her set of beliefs and code of conduct from which it was unthinkable to depart. In Trudi’s view the workers of the world were struggling to release themselves from age-old servitude and to build a co-operative society, free from exploitation and war. That effort called for the utmost loyalty and consecration, and any weakening in one’s efforts was a form of moral decay. Trudi had managed her newly acquired man in much the same way as Marie; she never scolded or found fault, but Lanny would see the distress in her features and would hasten to withdraw the evil words and to suppress the evil tendencies which derived from his leisure-class upbringing and made it so difficult for him to become a singlehearted champion of the oppressed.