Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  To the border guard Lanny said: “I have a sick lady. I am taking her to a maison de santé. Where shall I find the nearest?”

  He was an American, driving an expensive car; his papers were in order, and he had no luggage, so there was no reason for delay. They told him where to go, so in a short while Barbara was in a French private hospital with a doctor in attendance. This man had heard of the terrible blackshirts across the border, and fortunately was not a sympathizer of theirs. He examined the woman and made his report; evidently the squadristi had taken their time and made a thorough job of disciplining her; they had pounded the whole front of her body, and then rolled her over and worked on the back; hardly a square inch that was not bruised. There were several fractures of the skull, one of them basal, so there was no possibility of operating, nothing to do but leave it to nature. There was a little spark of life in her, and it might survive; they would give stumulants to keep the heart going.

  Lanny phoned his father as soon as possible in the morning and sent a telegram to his Uncle Jesse at his home. Bub took the morning train back to Genoa, promising to send Lanny’s clothes. The youth wrote to his mother and to Marie, telling what had happened, and then settled down to wait—there was nothing else to do. He slept, and then walked for a while, thinking about his life and what this new crisis meant to him. He had made certain that there were forces in the world which he hated with all his heart and wanted to fight; but just what they were, and how he could recognize them—that would take a bit of study.

  He decided that he wanted to talk to Rick, and telephoned his friend, who said that he had had all he needed of Genoa, and came by train and joined Lanny that evening. Uncle Jesse arrived from the other direction, so there were three social philosophers, with nothing to do but argue—for the poor gray-haired old woman still lay unconscious, and it would do no good to her or them to sit and look at her smashed face.

  Uncle Jesse had the whole problem laid out in his mind, as if it were a map. He said that Fascism was the answer of capitalism to the workers’ attempt at freedom; Mussolini was right in saying that it would spread to other lands, for capitalism was the same in all lands, and would defend itself by the same methods—that is, by subsidizing gangsters, to operate under the label of patriotism, that being the cheapest and easiest of all labels.

  Rick, on the other hand, insisted that Fascism was a reaction of the middle classes caught between the two millstones of capitalism and Communism; the white-collar workers suffered all the effects of social breakdown, unemployment, the high cost of living, loss of hope—and they turned for help to any demagogue who promised relief. These two arguers went at each other hammer and tongs, while Lanny sat and listened, and tried to figure out which he believed. He decided, in his usual uncomfortable way, that he believed both at the same time.

  It was the best chance he had ever had to understand the ideas of his forbidden uncle. He made up his mind once more that he didn’t like him, but also that that had nothing to do with the matter. Bald an wrinkled and harsh, Jesse Blackless was like some old bear of the forest that has fought his enemies until his hide is ragged, his ears missing, and his teeth broken—but still goes on fighting. Jesse Blackless had a cause that he believed in, and Lanny knew few such persons, and couldn’t help admiring his grit. Also, once the uncle’s bitter sarcasms had got into his mind, he found that it was hard to get them out. They stuck like burrs in wool.

  Lanny mentioned his father’s suggestion that he should find some peaceable and orderly way to change the world. Jesse said that was a pleasant phrase with which to evade an issue; Robbie had doubtless forgotten it already. When Lanny said he’d remind him, and try to convert him, the uncle said: “Then there’ll be two disillusioned idealists instead of one!” When Lanny pointed out that several of the Bolsheviks in Genoa had been members of the capitalist class, Jesse said: “Oh, sure; some individuals go over to the workers, but does that abolish the class struggle? When one rich man turns traitor, the rest of the rich men don’t follow him—they hate him.”

  XII

  Two days passed, and they were in the midst of an argument in Lanny’s hotel room when a message came from the hospital: Barbara Pugliese was dead. They had to arrange for a funeral; a conspicuous and public one, as a matter of propaganda, a demonstration of working-class protest. The news of Barbara’s fate had been published in labor papers, and several journalists and labor leaders came; they took the body to Nice, and the coffin was placed on a truck draped with flowers, and thousands of workingmen and women marched behind it, carrying banners and signs denouncing the vicious Fascismo. Uncle Jesse had managed to keep his nephew’s name out of the affair, and nobody paid any attention to a well-dressed young American and an English journalist, the latter limping painfully with the procession.

  At the grave the throng stood with bared heads and listened to eloquent tributes. A bald-headed American painter told the story of a life consecrated to the cause of the humble and oppressed. Never had this heroic woman flinched from any duty or sacrifice; she had the courage of a lion with the sweetness of a child. Tears came into the orator’s eyes as he told of their long friendship, and then rage shook his voice as he denounced the Italian blackshirts. His nephew listened, and agreed with every word he said—and at the same time was ill at ease to find himself in such a company and in such a mood. He looked at these dark, somber people, unfashionably dressed, their faces distorted by violent passions; they were not his kind of people, and he was afraid of them—yet something drew him to them!

  “Labor has one more martyr to add to its roll, which is as long as human history.” So the speaker declared, and quoted the saying about the early Christians: “The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.” It sounded strange from one who hated religion as Jesse Blackless did, but Lanny realized that these Reds were founding another kind. They disliked to hear that, but so it was, and the more you persecuted them, the more you spread their faith over the earth. It was a hard way for truth to be taught, but maybe Uncle Jesse was right in his belief that human beings were ready for no other. An uncomfortable and irrational world that Lanny Budd had been born into! Once again it had dragged a young artist out of his ivory tower, and was buffeting him about in a fashion that interfered greatly with his convenience and his sense of dignity.

  15

  Roman Holiday

  I

  Lanny and Rick came back to Juan, and Marie came to join her friend. She knew that he was troubled in spirit, and she was gentle and sweet to him; listened sympathetically to the story of Barbara Pugliese, never tried to argue with him, dropped no hint that he had done anything wrong. But among themselves the ladies consulted anxiously; Marie and Beauty and Nina, and Sophie and Emily when they happened to drop in. How was an impressionable youth to be kept from falling into the hands of agitators, fanatics, and enemies of the public welfare? They were at one in the conviction that they had had a narrow escape from disagreeable publicity. Beauty trembled when she hard what Lanny had said to his father about changing his name; she knew out of what intense emotion such words must have come. She had buried the name of Blackless deep in the past, and got no pleasure out of the thought of its resurrection.

  Robbie, having failed to get what he wanted in Genoa, went back home to consult his associates. He stayed only a few days and then returned, for the conference had referred the problem of Russia and its oil to the Supreme Economic Council, summoned to The Hague in June. Rick, his reputation now established, had got an assignment from a daily newspaper to report this affair, and the natural thing would have been for Lanny to take him there, as he had to Geneva. But Marie said: “Oh, Lanny, no more conferences! I missed you so!”—and it was easy for her lover to give up the idea of going, because he was sick of the smell of oil. “Let’s stay at home and read some good books,” pleaded the woman, not realizing that there might be a difference between them as to what books were “Good.”

  Before they went north for thei
r summer, Lanny made a search of Eli Budd’s library. The old gentleman hadn’t gone in heavily for economics, and what he had was of the old school. But there were two books by a writer named Bellamy, of whom Lanny had never heard. He read Looking Backward, and it seemed surprising to him that this book wasn’t more talked about. He tried to find any of his friends who had read it, but there wasn’t one. He couldn’t see how anybody could fail to want to live in a world like that, a world in which human beings helped one another instead of wasting their efforts trying to keep others from succeeding. Lanny read Equality, a still less-known work, which gave him a scientific statement of how a co-operative economy might be organized and run. It seemed to him that this was the best thing that had come out of America, the genius of a practical people applied to the most important problem which confronted mankind.

  But, alas, how few Americans were heeding their great social prophet! There was another America, not so different from the Europe in which Lanny lived; a land of poverty and unemployment, of desperate strikes and labor revolts—all the phenomena of that “class struggle” about which Jesse Blackless talked incessantly, which he made the core of all of his social thinking. While Robbie was trying to get the oil of the Russians, other “petroletarians” at home were engaged in appropriating the reserves of their country’s navy—with the help of purchased members of President Harding’s Cabinet. That was Robbie’s own administration, which he had helped to choose and elect. He defended it stubbornly, refusing to believe the story until it was forced into the newspapers by a Senate investigation. Then Robbie belittled it, talking about it sourly as the work of agitators, Red sympathizers, enemies of private business. Lanny didn’t argue, but he saw clearly that the oil game was the same, whether it was played in Washington and California or in Italy and Holland.

  II

  Lanny motored his amie to Seine-et-Oise, and Rick took his family by train to Flushing, put them on a packet-boat, and then went to The Hague. Lanny subscribed to the paper for which Rick was writing, so it was the same as receiving long letters from his friend. Also he got news from Robbie, who came to Paris to consult with Zaharoff at his home on the Avenue Hoche. Robbie told about the swarms of oil men at The Hague, and the struggle going on among them, and with the Russians, and with the Supreme Economic Council. The building of the Tower of Babel was the only thing with which you could compare the effort to allot the world’s petroleum supply.

  The Russians wanted a loan for the reconstruction of their country, and they were using the oil as a bait, saying that without the loan they would prefer to struggle along and repair their own fields as best they could. The British wanted to make the loan, but the French and Belgians and many of the Americans insisted that Bolshevism must be starved out and made to fail. What would become of the intellectual defenses of private property if every street-corner orator could claim that the Communists were rebuilding their country? The oil men would get together and pledge themselves to negotiate as a whole and make no separate offers; then they would wait to see who would be first to break the agreement, and each would be afraid of being the last.

  Johannes Robin was at The Hague. He had to know what was going to be decided, not only about oil, but about Germany. The mark’s future depended upon the outcome of these negotiations; and of course a speculator had to be on the spot and keep his “pipelines” in repair. The statesmen who had the decision in their hands had secretaries and clerks who got inside information, and would pass out tips to a dependable person. The statesmen themselves had powerful friends who knew how to make use of their opportunities, and were generous and discreet in seeing to it that public servants were not left to suffer destitution in their old age.

  So Lanny, reading imaginative tales of a perfect world, lived in contact with one which was tragically different. Settled in the comfortable menage of the Chateau de Bruyne, reading, practicing the piano, playing tennis with two happy youths, enjoying the society of a lovely and devoted woman, Lanny knew that he was among the most fortunate of men. He tried to keep himself in a mood of gratitude, but on the twenty-fifty of June of that year 1922 he picked up a morning newspaper and read that Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister of the German Republic, being driven to his office in a large open car, had been startled by a smaller car rushing up beside him, with two men in it wearing leather jackets and helmets; one of them had produced a repeating-gun and fired five bullets into the minister’s body, and immediately afterward the other had thrown a hand-grenade into the car.

  They had done that because he was a Jew, and was presuming to manage the affairs of Germany and to seek appeasement with both France and Russia. They had done it because it was a violent and cruel world, in which men would rather hate than understand one another, would rather do murder than fail to have their own way. To Lanny it seemed the most dreadful thing that had happened yet, and he bowed his face in his arms to hide his tears. He would never forget his memories of that kind and gentle man, the wisest he had found among the statesmen, the best heart and the best brain that Germany had had in this crisis. To Lanny it was as if he heard the tolling of a bell of doom; the best were going down and the worst were coming to the top in this corrupt and unhappy civilization.

  III

  Jesse Blackless had taken up his painting again, perhaps in despair concerning the human race. He had come to Paris and set up housekeeping with a young woman who worked on the Communist newspaper L’Humanité. He seemed happier that way, and it was pleasanter for his friends, for there were now chairs for them to sit on, and no longer a frying-pan decorating the center table. In fact, the painter and his amie set up a sort of salon for Reds, who would come at all hours and drink his wine and smoke his cigarettes and tell him the news of the underground movement in the various parts of Europe.

  Lanny had declared his independence, and the form it took was to visit his Communist uncle and meet some of these dangerous and yet fascinating personalities. It was Lanny’s form of a “spree”; vicious or not, according to your point of view—but he told himself that he wanted to understand the world he lived in, and to hear all opinions about it. Maybe he was fooling himself, and it was just a seeking of sensation, a playing with fire, with what the Japanese police authorities call “dangerous thoughts.” Certainly it was a mistake if he wished to remain an ivory-tower dweller, for a bull in a china shop can do no greater damage than one idea inside a human psyche.

  There were bookstores in Paris in which Red literature was sold; Lanny visited one of these and got several pamphlets, including an English translation of Lenin’s The State and Revolution. He took these home and smuggled them into his room, keeping them out of sight and reading them surreptitously, as if they had been pornography; he knew that both Marie and Denis would have been shocked by it, and that it would have been polluting the minds of two innocent lads to let them know that such printed material existed.

  The Soviet leader was another victim of the practice, so widespread in Europe, of shooting bullets into the body of anyone with whose political beliefs you disagreed; he had been an invalid ever since the shooting, and was soon to die. But here was his powerful mind, beyond the reach of any assassin’s bullet; he gave what seemed to Lanny a mathematical demonstration of the forces which were destroying the capitalist system and making it necessary for the organized workers to take control of society. The Russian thesis was that there was no way this change could be brought about except by the overthrow and destruction of that bourgeois state which was the policeman of the exploiting classes. This thesis apparently applied to a land like Russia, whose people had never known free institutions; but did it apply equally to France and Britain and America, which had enjoyed the use of the ballot for long periods? This was an important question, because if you were applying the Russian technique to countries where it didn’t fit, you might be making a costly blunder.

  When Lanny suggested this to Uncle Jesse’s friends, they laughed at him and said he had a bourgeois mind; but he wa
nted to hear all sides, and took to reading Le Populaire, the organ of the Socialists. These disagreed violently with the Communists, and each called the other bad names, which seemed to Lanny the great tragedy of the workers’ movement; he thought they had enemies enough among the capitalist class, without dividing among themselves. Yet he was forced to realize that if you believed revolutionary violence to be necessary, you were apt to be violent in advocating it; while if you believed in peaceable methods—well, apparently the men of violence would force you to be violent against them!

  IV

  Robbie Budd didn’t get the concessions upon which he had expended such efforts. All the oil men were vexed, and all the governments; the dream of the bourgeois world, to solve its problems at the expense of Russia, wasn’t working out. The Bolsheviks were in danger of losing their temporary status of genial conversationalists and resuming that of diabolical monsters. Robbie went back home without seeing his son again, and without giving him any further warning about his conduct. Could it be that the father had thought it over, and was really going to try to let him have his freedom, as Lincoln Steffens had suggested?

  In the month of August the Greek army in the heart of the Anatolian hills sustained a terrible defeat, and fled in rout to Smyrna on the coast, where the Turkish cavalry followed them, driving them into the sea and slaughtering tens of thousands. “Our friend on the Avenue Hoche has lost his concessions,” wrote Robbie, and explained that Standard would probably get them from the Turks. “Also the stock of his Banque de la Seine has fallen from 500 to 225.” Rick, at home in England, reported an underground convulsion in politics. For the first time it was being asked publicly what was the connection between the Prime Minister and the mysterious Greek trader who had become Europe’s armament king. Presently it was asked in the House of Commons—which meant that the newspapers could repeat it. This was like taking Sir Basil by the scruff of his crimson velvet robe and dragging him into the glare of a spotlight, something which Lanny knew would cause him intense distress.