Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  Thus the Honorable Hastings William Sackville Russell had come honestly by eccentricity. He himself was a lover of birds, and had specialized in the breeding of beautiful parrots. He had been an army officer, but at the outbreak of the World War had decided that he was a pacifist, and had become dishwasher in a Y.M.C.A. canteen. He was still a pacifist, but of that peculiar kind like Senator Nye of North Dakota, who seemed to except Hitler from his code. The Honorable was greatly interested in the Führer, and Lanny wondered if his haircut was intentionally identical with Adi’s. A dozen other noble ladies and gentlemen sat and listened to the questions he asked, and the American was left in no doubt as to the contents of their minds. The familiar problems: Which was the less dangerous, the Brown ogre or the Red, and what were the prospects for getting the pair of them to kill each other off? Lanny thought of that German fairy tale about the little tailor who threw clods at the two sleeping giants and thus provoked them to terrible combat with each other.

  VI

  The visiting father drove his little daughter back to Wickthorpe, with the governess and maid in the rear seat. All the way the little one chattered about the good time she had had; the beautiful horses, the long-haired shepherd dogs, the kind and friendly people. She asked a string of questions, and again Lanny watched the miracle of a young mind unfolding, a character and a point of view in process of making. He would have liked nothing so much as to take her away and teach her what he believed to be the truth about the world she was to live in. But, alas, he wasn’t free to speak a word of that truth, even to hint at it. When she asked about poor people, and why they were that way, what could he answer? If he said anything about the atrocious English land system, the two attendants would hear it and spread the news all over the castle. If he waited until he had the child alone, she would surely blurt it out to her mother: Papa says this, and Papa doesn’t think that. He would be breaking faith with Irma, and she would feel it her duty to warn her husband: “Be careful what you say in Lanny’s presence; he is still a Red at heart.”

  No, Frances Barnes Budd must have her mind so shaped that she could live under the English land system without any qualms of conscience. She must believe that by right of birth she was a superior being, entitled to draw off immense sums from the product of other people’s labor, and that whenever she returned any of those sums to the people it was an act of benevolence for which they were duty-bound to admire and even love her. There were kindhearted countesses and duchesses in England, and some who used their fortunes to carry on Be-Kind-to-Animals crusades. If an elderly white-haired lady leaped from her limousine to stop a carter from beating an old horse with a stick, it might be “Dear Portland’s” wife, whom Frances had met at Bluegrass, and who had told her about the pit ponies of the miners which she allowed to fatten themselves on the meadows of her estate at Welbeck. Little Frances might be made into a Lady Bountiful like that; she was being trained by tutors and family to become the proper bride of some one of the great nobles of England, and the best that Lanny could hope was that she wouldn’t happen upon one of the eccentrics.

  It was a system which had endured since the battle of Hastings, a period of eight hundred and seventy-two years. The dukes and earls and barons were descendants of the Norman conquerors, while the miners and tenants were descendants of the Saxon losers. The two languages had become merged, but in the everyday speech you could recognize the differences between the two groups from a single sentence, sometimes from a word. If the English system had survived and spread all over the world, so that now the sun never set on it, the reason was that the governing classes had possessed the wisdom to yield when they had to, and to treat all conquered peoples with a share of generosity.

  Lanny, reading history and watching the events of his time, decided that this was the difference between the British Empire and those which Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and the Son of Heaven were setting out to build. The British always took with them, wherever they went, a saving minority of dissidents, whereas the modern dictators shot theirs, or shut them up in concentration camps and suppressed their ideas. The British practice meant to Lanny that his little daughter had a chance to hear some humanitarian ideas—even without her father’s intervention.

  VII

  The visitor made himself agreeable to the family and guests of this well-run household. English fashion, he was let alone and let everybody else alone. He took long walks, read books from an extensive library, and when the guests wanted music he played for them—nothing too long or too noisy, but properly selected Salonmusik. And whenever the occasion presented itself he listened to discussions of the Empire’s affairs. He could hardly have chosen a better seat from which to view the procession of events, and to hear them interpreted by those who were directing them, or trying to.

  Among other guests at the next week-end came an elderly gentleman who until recently had been plain Mr. Walter Runciman, but now had succeeded to the title of Baron. He was a tremendously rich shipowner and had been a member of the Asquith Cabinet. He had just been yachting at Cowes, where he had acquired a healthful coating of tan; but now the Prime Minister had summoned him and put upon him a duty, which Runciman himself whimsically described as being put adrift in a small boat in mid-Atlantic. He was one of those Englishmen with a wry sense of humor, the sort who read Alice in Wonderland and frequently quote it. His forehead was high and wrinkled, his round head visible with little interference from hair. His thin lips smiled frequently, but his eyes betrayed anxiety, for he was going to Prague, supposedly unofficially, but really to persuade the Czech government to assent to the settlement which the British Cabinet had worked out through Gerald Albany and other emissaries.

  He had come to Wickthorpe to consult with Gerald and other persons familiar with the fine points of the negotiations. They didn’t invite the son of Budd-Erling to their conferences, but they couldn’t keep from dropping hints, and then Lord Runciman abandoned pretenses by drawing Lanny off into the library on Sunday afternoon and plying him with questions about the different Nazi leaders whom he might expect to encounter on his mission. Did Lanny by any chance know Henlein? Lanny replied that he didn’t, but had heard much about this former bankclerk turned agitator; he told what he knew of such fanatics.

  And Ribbentrop? Yes, Lanny had met him several times, but only casually. Doubtless Lord Runciman knew the story of how he had behaved when he had been appointed Ambassador to London; presented to the King, he had given the Nazi salute and exclaimed: “Heil Hitler!” The King had gazed at him in amazement, and twice more he had repeated the performance, apparently trying to force His Majesty to return or at least acknowledge the salute. He had been treated to the iciest of English frosts, and ever since then hatred of the country has been his principal diplomatic motive.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Lanny, “he is the Führer’s most evil counselor. Göring is cautious, and pulls back on the reins whenever he can; but Ribbentrop is brash, and tireless in insisting that England will not fight, and cannot if she wishes. Unfortunately the champagne salesman is on top at present, so I am told.”

  “How can such a man be handled?” asked his lordship; and Lanny had to say: “I am afraid that the program of appeasement which you wish to promote is only likely to encourage his arrogance.”

  Impossible for anyone to ask questions like these and not betray the secret thoughts of his heart. What was apt to be Hitler’s reaction to this proposal and to that? Manifestly, these were the proposals which Baron Runciman of Doxford had been commissioned to make; and before their talk was over he had pretty well abandoned the pretense that the details of the settlement were secret. The British Cabinet didn’t want Hitler to get Skoda, for example; but they wanted to give him the mountains in which the Czechs had built fortifications from which alone the Bohemian plain could be defended. “Why,” asked Lanny, “should a burglar take the trouble to break into a safe unless he means to carry off the treasure?”

  VIII

  Rosemar
y, Countess of Sandhaven, wrote a little note: “Why don’t you come to see me, Lanny?” She had a right to ask, being one of his oldest friends, and he having been in the neighborhood for a month. He couldn’t think of an excuse, so he went and had tea. How lovely she looked in a light summer dress, with those bold flowered patterns the women were wearing! They sat on a shaded terrace, with two big dogs sleeping at her feet, and drank their tea and chatted about families and friends, and what they had both been doing. Rosemary was interested in people, and events had a tendency to become personal when she talked about them, because she knew the persons who were making the events, and explained everything according to the persons’ temperaments and desires.

  She was a year older than Lanny, and had three nearly grown children, but showed none of the effects of age; her skin was as fair as when he had first known her, and her two ropes of straw-colored hair had never been cut, but were wound like a coronet about her head. She had taken good care of herself all these years, and had never engaged in any conflict with her fate. She was kind, gentle, serene, and to Lanny a boyhood dream. Her husband had other women, and she had let him go his way, according to the modern custom; she had always been easy-going in sexual matters. Why did Lanny stay away from her?

  The political views he now professed were those which Rosemary took for granted, so they could have got along quite harmoniously. If he needed any particular item of information, she would have helped him to get it. They would have had to be what the world called “discreet,” meeting in London and traveling together only on the Continent; their friends would have known about it, and no one would have been shocked save a few old-fashioned persons who did not count in their world. The arrangement would have been comfortable, and, from the world’s point of view, sensible.

  The wrong lay in the fact that Lanny had come to hate that rich and smart world; a parasitic group which didn’t even know itself to be that, which hadn’t enough brains to realize what it was costing the human race. Some day Lanny was going to break with that group, openly and completely; he couldn’t foresee how or when, but meantime he didn’t want to compromise with it in his soul, he didn’t want to take any chance of weakening his inner resistance. To hold in his arms a woman whose ideas he despised was fair neither to the woman nor himself.

  So, talk about the Budd-Erling business, in which Rosemary had a few shares of stock; about paintings which Bertie owned, and for which he wanted too much money; about the Runciman mission-Rosemary knew “Old Walter,” as she called him, and said that he was a shrewd trader, for all his whimsical manner, and would probably come away with Ribbentrop’s shirt. Rosemary knew the champagne salesman, too, and reported with a smile that he had tried to make a date with her the last time they had met. That had been at Cliveden, and Rosemary talked freely about the visitors there, and what they had said as to the importance of getting France away from the Russian alliance and into some kind of settlement with Germany.

  All this was important to Lanny, and he wished the damned business of sex hadn’t stood in the way. He had to think up an excuse that wouldn’t hurt an old sweetheart’s feelings, and on the spur of the moment he told her that he had found a happy love, but was under solemn pledge not to breathe a word about it. Of course that set her on edge with curiosity, but he stuck to his story: Not a word! He could soothe his qualms of conscience by telling himself that it was Trudi he meant. It was really the Trudi-ghost who stood between him and the Countess of Sandhaven.

  IX

  Lanny studied the newspapers, not only those of London, but those he got from Paris and Berlin. The Runciman mission arrived in Prague and was received at the railway station by the entire Czech Cabinet in top hats. The German papers did their best to make it appear an official effort at “mediation,” despite Runciman’s own insistence that he was “a purely private person.” Also the Berlin papers were full of atrocities in the Sudeten—which meant that the Nazis were determined to have what they wanted, and were beating up the threat of war.

  Hitler invited Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, made a secret pact with him, and showed him a review of the new German battle-fleet, a hundred and ten modern vessels, with the dreadnaught Gneisenau at their head. Then he put on a military parade which included huge field guns built so that they could be taken apart and the four parts carried on separate vehicles and reassembled in two hours. Hundreds of thousands of laborers rushed work on the Rhine-land fortifications against France. There was a “trial mobilization” of trucks and motorcars, and a million Germans were reported under arms. Deutschland über Alles!

  Zoltan Kertezsi arrived in London at this juncture. “Everybody” was out of town in late August, but he had some paintings to look at in a country house in East Riding, and Lanny drove him. Zoltan himself didn’t drive, and looked upon motorcars as dangerous toys; but he trusted Lanny, and they liked to be together. They had no end of shop to talk, and the Hungarian revealed that he had a nibble at a couple of Göring’s paintings which Lanny had listed with him; he would have to see them, and how about Lanny’s motoring him to Berlin?

  The political pot seemed likely to boil over any day in Germany and it might be a good thing to be there. No doubt existed in Lanny’s mind that Hitler was going to be presented with the western portions of Czechoslovakia, but the question remained, how long was he going to be content with them, and what would he take next, Prague or the Polish Corridor. This would be an important item of information for F.D.R., and Lanny would enjoy being the first to transmit it. It is that way with secret agents; they develop a competitive spirit, and number 103 wants to get ahead of his hundred and two rivals. Lanny said: “It’s a date,” and got a stenographer and sent off a batch of letters and cablegrams, informing his father and mother and various clients, including Feldmarschall Göring, that his address until further notice would be the Hotel Adlon.

  There had been few months in Lanny Budd’s life in the course of which he hadn’t put his belongings into bags and stowed his bags into a car and driven to some other part of the earth. The procedure had become automatic, so that he could perform it while chatting, or meditating upon the problems of his own life and of the world. Indeed, he had developed two sections of his subconscious mind, one for Britain and the other for the continent of his birth and also for the land of his forefathers; he never forgot which place he was in and gave the wrong signal or got onto the wrong side of the road. It took a few moments’ attention to enter a ferry on the left side and come off on the right, but once that was done it was as if a key had been turned, and the British section of Lanny’s driving mind was locked away for the duration.

  He never tired of rolling along the beautifully paved highways of France, Belgium, Holland, and so into Germany. The world became a panorama unwinding before his eyes; sometimes he noticed it in swift glances, sometimes it was absorbed into his subconscious mind through the skin, as it were. From years of experience he had learned where good food was to be had, and waited till he came to those places; the proprietors remembered and greeted him, and it was pleasant to let his eyes roll over a menu and his appetite indicate a choice. Yes, the world was a pleasant place in the year 1938—if you had looked out for yourself and put money in your purse, and refused to get into a dither over the troubles of the rest of mankind!

  X

  Arriving at his hotel, Lanny found an invitation from Der Dicke to visit him at Karinhall. He called up Furtwaengler and accepted, and at the same time arranged for Zoltan to view the paintings. If he had tried, he could have got an invitation for his colleague to Karinhall; but he didn’t, because it was for him a business visit and its secrets could not be shared. The Hungarian was well content; he had affairs of his own, and would learn about die grosse Welt of the Nazis from his friend’s lively accounts.

  Lanny drove himself to the Schorfheide, and there was the fat Nummer Zwei and his fair lady, a trinity now, with a tiny baby girl who had been publicized all over Germany as an unprecedented achieveme
nt. Lanny, well-trained courtier, knew the proper ritual under such circumstances. He must ask and not wait to be invited to see this royal mite; he must cry out with pleasure the moment the sight burst upon his eyes; he must study every feature and debate whether it was derived from the father or the mother; he must overlook no charm which any of the three possessed, and must end by declaring that in all his experience with bundles fresh from heaven he had seen no one so promising of all the virtues. When he had completed this rite, with every evidence of intense sincerity, Karinhall would be his, and anything in it he chose to ask for.

  What he wanted was no earthly treasure, but information, and he began by giving it in generous measure. What could be a better opening than to say that he had spent a week-end with a certain “purely private person,” only a day or two before that person had set out on his purely public mission? Göring at once began to ply his visitor with questions. What sort of emissary was this, whose last act before leaving home had been a public prayer in Holy Trinity Church for the success of his mission? Did he really believe in that, or was it just politics in a land of Dummköpfe—blockheads? Was he really as rich as reported? He had brought his wife along, presumably to keep other women away from him. Did he drink or gamble, and was he fond of good food, or of money? And how did it happen that he had been prominent in the Liberal Party, but now was working with the Tories? A puzzling thing, this British political system!

  XI

  Once more it was proved that a man cannot ask questions without revealing what is on his mind. The fat Marshal betrayed to his visitor that behind the Nazi façade of bluff and defiance was a group of greatly confused men, sharply divided among themselves. Before Lanny departed from Der Dicke’s country place, he managed to bring him to the point of frankness on the subject of Joachim von Ribbentrop; at least to the extent of stating that his country’s Foreign Minister was a vain fool, a snob and a charlatan, an upstart, an intriguer, and a sycophant. He had become suddenly wealthy by marriage, and that eminence had gone to his head; he had managed to persuade the Führer by his glib tongue, and had been sent to England, where the aristocracy had twisted him around its finger—making him think that he, not they, controlled the foreign policy of the Empire, and that they were as clay in the potter’s hands—a champagne potter!