Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  X

  Interesting indeed to visit Wickthorpe Castle and hear what the ruling class of England had to say about all this! To hear the tall, lean, and long-faced Lord Halifax exclaim: “Horrible, horrible! I never thought they would do it!” Lanny would have liked to say: “Why did you go to Berlin four months ago and give them the green light?” Lanny learned that Ribbentrop had come to London in one of Germany’s fast bomber planes, only three days before the march into Austria, and had been wined and dined while carrying on “exploratory negotiations” for a permanent understanding between Germany and Britain. He had talked with Ceddy Wickthorpe and Gerald Albany, and told them about his session with Halifax on the previous day, also with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose endorsement of the Nazis as the future destroyers of Bolshevism was no secret from anybody at either Wickthorpe or Cliveden.

  On Friday, with Hitler’s troops poised on the border and ready to roll at dawn, the Nazi champagne salesman had seen the King, and had lunched at Number 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Chamberlain. Among the guests had been Lord Londonderry, who was Göring’s chum and perhaps the most ardent pro-Nazi in England; Sir Samuel Hoare, the friend of Franco; Sir Alexander Cadogan, pronounced Cadúggan, Undersecretary of State; also Lord Halifax and Sir John Simon and the wives of all these. Several of these noble ladies and gentlemen had revealed to Lanny Budd their belief that the onetime Gefreite or sub-corporal named Adi Schicklgruber offered the best hope of safety for the British Empire, provided he could be persuaded to give up his demand for colonies overseas and turn his attention to the east. These ladies and gentlemen were shocked by the rape of Austria, because they had supposed they were at the stage of “exploratory negotiations,” and hadn’t realized that it was the time for action. For them it was unlikely ever to be the time for action. Why should it be, when they had an Empire on which the sun never set, and all the estates and securities they personally needed; when they all spoke with the right accent, and enjoyed freedom to play the delightful game of political power inside their snug little preserve?

  These bitter observations were not Lanny’s; they were those of a baronet’s son who had the qualifications and might now have been a member of the Cabinet, had he been willing to be tamed and trained like other budding statesmen who had had socialistic inclinations in their youth. Lanny came back to The Reaches and reported what he had seen and heard in his ex-wife’s castle; and after he had listened to his friend for a while he said: “When you want to criticize the English, get an Englishman!”

  Rick answered, with a smile: “Don’t try it otherwise!”

  XI

  Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson had his man of all work, whose father and grandfather before him had been in the service of the family, take off those unusual car fixtures and cart them away to an electric furnace. Rick had made arrangements and went to see the job honestly done, and then to escort two or three hundred pounds of gold “pigs” to market. While this was going on, Lanny read and played the piano, took long walks and looked at the beautiful country of Hertfordshire which hadn’t changed a particle since his first view of it, a quarter, of a century ago. Also he thought a bit about his future, and in this had the advice of a wise gentlewoman who had known him since the days when the “Zepps” had been dropping bombs on London.

  Nina’s hair had been light brown in those days, and now was several shades darker; her complexion, too, had faded, but there was so much kindness in her face that she would always seem a lovely woman. She had managed to keep her interest in ideas, while carrying the burden of a household full of individualists. Sir Alfred had to be amiably checked in his impulse to let his collection of the contemporary British drama crowd out everything else in a rambling old houses in his private study there were so many manuscripts and documents which he intended to read and classify that often he could find no place to sit down. Rick also had a den, where nobody but himself could find anything; and there had been four children, now all at school, and eight servants to manage, and a score of fires to be kept going in the month of March. Yes, Nina had to be a firm and yet tactful character; she knew the facts of life, and looked into your eyes with a frank and steady gaze when she spoke of them.

  She came into the library while he was reading. She had her sewing with her, and when that happens, a man knows that he isn’t going to read any more. “Rick agrees that I ought to talk to you, Lanny,” she said.

  “There’s no law against it, old dear,” he replied. He had told them both the story of how he had got from Hess the definite news of Trudi’s death. So now he knew what Nina wanted to talk about. He said: “There’s no cure for grief but time.”

  “Friendship helps,” she answered, and he said: “You bet! And when I get too lonesome I head my car in this direction.”

  “I think you ought to let me advise you, Lanny. You know you won’t go on all the rest of your life without love; and neither Rick nor I want to see you make another bad guess like the Irma one.”

  “I’m not apt to, Nina. I’m older, and also, my circumstances have changed. I have a duty, and I’m doing it. But it makes me a hard matrimonial problem. No woman could get along with a husband who hops from England to New York, and then to Paris, Juan, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and so on all over again.”

  “A woman would want to know what her husband was doing on those journeys, of course; but if she was sure it wasn’t some other woman, she could stand it. Here on this island of sailors we have thousands of women who don’t see their men except at long intervals.”

  “I know, Nina; but my problem is a special one. I’m playing a role, and getting deeper and deeper into it. I have to be a Nazi; and how is any decent woman going to tolerate that? I can’t marry a woman who doesn’t know or care anything about politics, because she would bore me to death. I can’t marry a woman of the leisure class, because I’d be lying to her, as I was to Irma, and sooner or later she would find it out and be furious. I can’t marry a leftwinger; I can’t even meet one without risking the work I’ve pledged myself to do.”

  “It isn’t a simple problem, I admit, but you exaggerate the difficulty. You are known as an art expert, and that’s a respectable role. You don’t have to talk politics to a woman the first time you meet her.”

  “I have to before long. If she shows any serious interest in me, and I don’t tell her, I’m giving her a rotten deal.”

  “Not if she’s a leftist. You can keep your pose as a reactionary, tactfully and carefully, and let her try to convert you if she wants to.”

  “What she’d want to do is to tear my hair out,” said Lanny.

  “If she does that, you’d know that she was in love with you.”

  Lanny couldn’t keep from laughing. “I suppose it’s better to have our rows before we’re married than after,” he admitted. “You’re outlining a unique sort of courtship.”

  “I’m just showing you that you could meet some woman with brains and character, and find out about her without committing yourself or betraying your secret. If the time ever comes that you’re seriously interested, you can give her a hint that she is beginning to persuade you. If she’s a woman you want to marry, you would certainly have to trust her with your secret—at least as much of it as you have trusted to Rick and me. If you say to her: ‘I have given my word of honor that I will never tell my secret to anyone,’ that would be all right. Every Socialist knows there’s an underground against the Nazis, and every true Socialist would be eager and proud to help it.”

  “You would,” said Lanny, gallantly; “but I haven’t met many like you, Nina.” Then he added: “If you or Rick, either or both, know any woman you think I ought to know, I’ll be glad to meet her, and be as friendly and polite as I know how. But I can’t promise that either of us will fall in love.”

  “Of course not, Lanny. But it’s so much more sensible to talk about love and know what you’re doing, instead of just leaving it to chance, and a pretty face or the shape of an ankle.”

>   “One sees a lot of ankles nowadays,” said Lanny, with a grin, “but mostly what they support is a poor line of conversation.”

  XII

  Lanny Budd set sail on a Cunard liner, carrying in his pocket a bank draft for forty-two thousand, six hundred and seventeen pounds, seven shillings and fourpence, payable to Rahel Robin. He had deducted the costs of the operation, including a hundred pounds for his friend who had dutifully made sure that none of the gold disappeared at any stage. Lanny had a passage stormy but otherwise uneventful, and was met at the steamer by Johannes Robin and his daughter-in-law. While Rahel wept softly, he told them the sad story. The Jewish man of affairs, already acquainted with sorrow, had guessed the worst and had forewarned the woman. A sum of money for which she had no need would do nothing to compensate for the loss of her brother, and perhaps of her mother and father—for it was a part of the Nazi creed that the sins of any Jew should be visited upon all his relatives.

  And the three little ones—what did the master race do with children when they sent the parents to concentration camps? Were they turned out to feed out of garbage cans? Or were they painlessly asphyxiated, or perhaps sterilized and turned into slaves in some proper Aryan household? Lanny couldn’t answer those questions, and it was perhaps the worst of Nazi tortures that so many people could never know the fate of their loved ones.

  Lanny had invented a very exacting client in Washington, D. C., and said that as soon as he had satisfied this client he would visit his several families in Connecticut. He telephoned Gus Gennerich, and after some delay got an appointment for the following evening. He took the night train, and in the morning made himself comfortable in a hotel and typed out a summary of his recent political experiences—partly to put on the record, and partly to clarify his own memory. Later he took a walk in Rock Creek Park, going over in his mind everything he was planning to put into the mind of the most important man in the world. Mostly it had to be facts, but a certain amount of comment would be proper, and Lanny meant that every sentence should be a high-explosive shell, loaded with accuracy and care.

  XIII

  In newsreels and newspaper photographs Lanny could see President Roosevelt dressed as the rest of the world saw him; but when he met him face to face, it was always going to be in a pongee pajama coat, blue and white striped, with a knitted blue sweater or a blue cape over it. Apparently he liked to retire early and read in bed—or to hear reports from secret agents. He greeted his caller with a hearty handclasp and a wide smile; his face was rosy and his manner gay—amazing the way the man enjoyed his job and throve under it! Right now, with the stock market at the bottom of another slump, and the men whom he had helped now pouring blame and abuse upon him for the only kind of help that would have done them the least good—right now he was grinning with delight to see a visitor who had been in an ogre’s den and counted the piles of human bones in the corners. “Hello, Jack of the Beanstalk!” he exclaimed.

  Soon he became serious, and declared: “I want you to know, Lanny, I’ve read what you sent me. My actions may not show it now, but they will in the end.”

  “That’s what I have to hear, Governor,” said the secret agent. “With that, I can keep going for a while longer.”

  “Tell me what’s coming next, Lanny.”

  “Undoubtedly the Sudetenland.”

  “Was that taken from Germany?”

  “No, it belonged to Austro-Hungary; but Hitler tells the world that it was Germany’s, and that he is determined to have it back.”

  “What has it got?”

  “Minerals and forests, and positions vital for military defense. His excuse is a lot of Germans there.”

  “A majority?”

  “It varies from district to district, from village to village; it’s all mixed up as if it had been shaken out of a pepper-pot. It’s exactly the same as in Stubendorf, where I used to visit my friend Kurt Meissner when I was a boy. That’s farther to the east, and was given to Poland. The Poles in the district are mostly peasants and laborers; the Germans are the property owners, the educated people, and so the ones who can make the propaganda.”

  “You are sure the Czechs will come first?”

  “Hitler didn’t say it in so many words. You have to listen while he raves and note whom he raves at longest. First came Schuschnigg, and then Beneš. That tells you.”

  “And will the Czechs fight?”

  “I can’t tell you that. You know Jan Masaryk—ask him.”

  “Of course he says they’ll fight, but that may be because he wants them to.”

  “If you’re asking for my guess—”

  “I’m asking.”

  “I think the British will make them give way.”

  “God Almighty, what is Europe coming to?”

  “It’s coming to Hitler. You can’t imagine the present British Cabinet until you listen to them talk. They aren’t ready for war, they don’t want it and they won’t believe it even when it comes. They have made up their minds that Hitler has to be like themselves, because that would be so convenient for them. They are going to ‘appease’ him, by letting him undo the blunders they made at Versailles—or that the French forced upon them. They are disgusted with the French politicians, because they are greedy and corrupt. They are afraid of the Russians, mainly because of the effect on British labor of letting the Communist experiment succeed. They are sure that sooner or later Hitler is going to come into conflict with the Reds, and then they are going to lie back in armchairs and sip whiskies and soda and enjoy the show.”

  “How do they think Hitler is going to get by Poland?”

  “They don’t talk about that very much, because it wouldn’t sound good. They expect to appease Poland with part of the Ukraine, which she claims. There’s enough land there to satisfy everybody, and it would be saving the world from Bolshevism.”

  The smile had gone out of the great man’s face, and he said in a grave voice: “Lanny, you can surely see why the American people are so determined to keep out of that mess.”

  “I can see why they want to,” replied the secret agent, “but whether they can do what they want is a different question. What will they do when Hitler takes Brazil?”

  “Is that on his schedule?”

  “Everything is on his schedule until he is stopped. If we let him take Spain, why not Northwest Africa? And when he has the bulge of Africa he’s within flying range of the bulge of Brazil.”

  “We should have to stop him before then.”

  “Yes, but could we? Remember, it would be air forces, not navies. I can’t find anybody in this country except my father who has realized the effect of aviation upon our military situation. From Africa, Hitler would be two or three times as near to Brazil as we are; and he has his agents and his German populations being organized all over South America. Those countries would fall into his lap like so many ripe plums; and we should have the job of landing armies there in the face of land-based aviation. It looks to me, Governor, as if you are going to share the fate of Woodrow Wilson and have to turn your attention from social reform to military strategy.”

  The frown on the “Governor’s” face showed that he didn’t relish this prospect; and the visitor went on to add: “It puts me on the spot personally, because my father is making fighter planes and it happens that I own a few shares of stock in the company; so I am one of those ‘merchants of death’ that I used to be so cross with a few years ago. I would sell the shares, only it would hurt my father’s feelings. I’m letting him have the idea that I agree with him these days.”

  “That’s all right, Lanny,” said the President, smiling again. “I’ll promise never to suspect you.”

  XIV

  A greatly overworked executive was concerned to know how much time he had before these new burdens fell upon his shoulders. Time was urgent, for he could get only limited amounts of military appropriations from Congress. “How long will Hitler wait before his next move?”

  “I’ll give him s
ix months to digest Austria. He has to put his men into the key positions, and they have to learn their jobs. He has to take over the big industries and fit them into his economy. There’s a mountain of iron ore, and Göring will have that; there are steel works, and he’ll put them to making cannon. There are huge forests, and Göring was telling my father just recently of the miracles their chemists are doing with wood; all kinds of substitutes, plastics, fibers, and even food, not merely starches but proteins. And food is a weapon, of course; you can say that everything is a weapon, one hundred per cent of the German economy, and it’s all working while we sleep.”

  This line of conversation was calculated to interfere with the sleep of the most powerful man in the world. Lanny was doing it with premeditation—it was why he had crossed a stormy ocean. He went ahead to explain that the “digestion” of Austria would not preclude the softening up of Czechoslovakia. “My guess is that as soon as Hitler has finished with his plebiscite the German press will start up about atrocities in the Sudeten. You understand how it is worked—they send their bullies into the country to provoke disturbances, and when the police put them down, that’s an atrocity. By next autumn Hitler will be ready to move; and of course he’ll do it legally if he can—but his Panzer divisions will be on the border, and he will be threatening to lay Prague in ashes in an hour. They have rehearsed it on a dozen cities and towns in Spain and they know exactly what they can do.”

  “Horrible, horrible!” exclaimed F.D.

  “Exactly what Lord Halifax said the other day,” replied Lanny. “The whole civilized world will say it, but that won’t worry Adolf Hitler. He would love to destroy Prague, because it is full of monuments of Czech culture, which he despises. But he won’t bomb Pilsen.”