Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  How did Madame Zyszynski get such things? You could say that she sneaked about in the yacht and caught scraps of conversation, and perhaps rummaged about in people’s cabins. But it just happened that she didn’t. She was a rather dull old woman who had been first a servant and then the wife of the butler to a Warsaw merchant. She suffered from varicose veins and dropsy in its early stages. She understood foreign languages with difficulty and didn’t bother to listen most of the time, but preferred to sit in her own cabin playing endless games of solitaire. When she read, it was the pictures in some cheap magazine, and the strange things she did in her trances really didn’t interest her overmuch; she would answer your questions as best she could, but hardly ever asked any of you. She declared again and again that she did these things because she was poor and had to earn her living. She insisted, furthermore, that she had never heard the voice of Tecumseh, and knew about him only what her many clients had told her.

  But what a different creature was this Indian chieftain! He was not the Tecumseh of history, he said, but an Iroquois of the same name. His tribe had been all but wiped out by smallpox. Now he ruled a tribe of spirits, and amused himself at the expense of his former enemies, the whites. He was alert, masterful, witty, shrewd—and if there was anything he didn’t know, he would tell you to come back tomorrow and perhaps he would have it for you. But you had to be polite. You had to treat him as a social equal, and the best way to get along was to be a humble petitioner. “Please, Tecumseh, see if you can do me this great favor!”

  V

  What did it all mean? Was this really the spirit of an American aborigine dead more than two hundred years? Lanny didn’t think so. After reading a number of books and pondering over it for months, he had decided that Tecumseh was a genius; something of the sort which had worked in William Shakespeare, producing a host of characters which the world accepted as more real than living people. In the case of the poet, this genius had been hitched up with his conscious mind, so that the poet knew what it was doing and could put the characters into plays and sell them to managers. But the genius in Madame Zyszynski wasn’t hitched up; it stayed hidden in her unconscious and worked there on its own; a wild genius, so to speak, a subterranean one. What, old mole, work’st i’ the earth so fast!

  This energy played at being an Indian; also it gathered facts from the minds of various persons and wove stories out of them. It dipped into the subconscious mind of Lanny Budd and collected his memories and made them into the spirit of Marcel Detaze, painting pictures on the Cap d’Antibes or looking at ruins in ancient Greece. It dipped into the mind of Jascha Rabinowich and created the spirits of his relatives. Like children finding old costumes in a trunk, putting them on and making up stories about people they have heard of or read of in books—people alive or dead! Every child knows that you have to pretend that it’s true, otherwise it’s no fun, the imagination doesn’t work. If you put on a bearskin, get down on your hands and knees and growl. If you put on the headdress of an Indian chieftain, stalk about the room and command the other children in a deep stern voice—even if it has a Polish accent!

  All this seemed to indicate that there was some sort of universal pool of mindstuff, an ocean in which Lanny’s thoughts and Madame Zyszynski’s and other people’s merged and flowed together. Figure yourself as a bubble floating on the surface of an ocean; the sun shines on you and you have very lovely colors; other bubbles float near, and you come together and form a cluster of bubbles—the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example. One by one the bubbles break, and their substance returns to the ocean, and in due course becomes the substance of new bubbles.

  This theory obliged you to believe that a medium had the power to dip into this mind substance and get facts to which the medium did not have access in any normal way. Was it easier to believe that than to believe that the spirits of dead persons were sending communications to the living? Lanny found it so; for he had lived long enough to watch the human mind develop along with the body and to decay along with it. In some strange way the two seemed to be bound together and to share the same fate. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you knew what the nature of that union was; how a thought could make a muscle move, or how a chemical change in the body could produce cheerful or depressed thoughts. Those questions were going to take wiser men than Lanny Budd to answer them; he kept wishing that people would stop robbing and killing one another and settle down to this task of finding out what they really were.

  VI

  The hundred-dollar-an-hour cruise was continued eastward, and presently they were approaching the Peninsula of Gallipoli, where so many Englishmen had paid with their lives for the blundering of their superiors. Great ships had gone down, and the beaches had been piled with mangled bodies. Among the many wounded had been the father of Lanny’s amie, Rosemary Codwilliger, Countess of Sandhaven. He had “passed over” not long ago, and Lanny wondered, did his spirit haunt this place? He asked Tecumseh about it, and it wasn’t long before Colonel Codwilliger was “manifesting”; but unfortunately Lanny hadn’t known him very well, and must write to Rosemary in the Argentine to find out if the statements were correct.

  They passed through the Dardanelles on a gusty, rainy afternoon, and the shores looked much like any other shores veiled in mist. Lanny and Bess walked for a while on deck, and then went into the saloon and played the Schubert four-hand piano sonata. Then Lanny came out again, for somewhere ahead was the Island of Prinkipo which had been so much in his thoughts at the Peace Conference eleven years before. It had been chosen as the place for a meeting with the Bolsheviks, in President Wilson’s effort to patch up a truce with them. The elder statesmen had found it difficult to believe there existed a place with such a musical-comedy name.

  It might as well have been a musical-comedy performance—such was Lanny’s bitter reflection. The statesmen didn’t go to Prinkipo, and when later they met the Russians at Genoa they didn’t settle anything. They went home to get ready for another war—Lanny was one of those pessimistic persons who were sure it was on the way. He told people so, and they would shrug their shoulders. What could they do about it? What could anybody do? C’est la nature!

  Perhaps it was the rain which caused these melancholy thoughts; perhaps the spirits of those tens of thousands of dead Englishmen and Turks; or perhaps of the dogs of Constantinople, which during the war had been gathered up and turned loose on this musical-comedy island to starve and devour one another. Under the religion of the country it was not permitted to kill them, so let them eat one another! The Prophet, born among a nomadic people, had loved the dog and praised it as the guardian of the tent; he had endeavored to protect it, but had not been able to foresee great cities with swarms of starveling curs and a dénouement of cannibalism.

  The southern hills of this Sea of Marmora had been the scene of events about which Lanny had heard his father talking with Zaharoff. The munitions king had financed the invasion of Turkey by his fellow-Greeks, spending half his fortune on it, so he had said—though of course you didn’t have to assume that everything he said was true. Anyhow, the Greeks had been routed and hosts of them driven into the sea, after which the victorious Turkish army had appeared before the British fortifications and the guns of the fleet. This critical situation had brought about the fall of the Lloyd George government and thus played hob with the plans of Robbie Budd for getting oil concessions. Robbie was one of those men who use governments, his own and others’, threatening wars and sometimes waging them; while Lanny was an amiable playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music, reading books of history and psychic research, and being troubled in his conscience about the way the world was going.’ He asked his friends very earnestly what ought to be done. Some thought they knew; but the trouble was, their opinions differed so greatly.

  VII

  The company went ashore in the crowded city, which had once been the capital of the Moslem world, and now was known as Istanb
ul. They got cars, as usual, and were driven about to see the sights. They visited the great cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the seraglio of the late sultan they inspected the harem, in which now and then a faithless wife had been strangled with a cord, tied in a sack, and set afloat in the Bosporus. They strolled through the bazaars, where traders of various races labored diligently to sell them souvenirs, from Bergama rugs to “feelthy postcards.” Through the crowded street came a fire-engine with a great clangor; a modern one, painted a brilliant red—but Lanny saw in imagination the young Zaharoff riding the machine, busy with schemes to collect for his services. Were they still called tulumbadschi? And did they still charge to put out your fire—or to let it burn, as you preferred?

  The unresting Bessie Budd stole northward along the coast of the immensely deep Black Sea, called by the ancient Greeks “friendly to strangers.” The Soviet Union was in the middle of the Five-Year Plan, and miracles were confidently expected. The travelers’ goal was Odessa, a city with a great outdoor stairway which they had seen in a motion picture. Their passports had been visaed and everything arranged in advance; they had only to make themselves known to Intourist, and they would have automobiles and guides and hotels to the limit of their supply of valuta.

  “I have seen the future and it works.” So Lincoln Steffens had said to Lanny Budd. Stef had had the eyes of faith, and so had Hansi and Bess and Rahel. When they looked at buildings much in need of repair and people wearing sneakers and patched sweaters, they said: “Wait till the new factories get going.” They told the girl guides that they were “comrades,” and they were taken off to inspect the latest styles in day nurseries and communal kitchens. They were motored into the country to visit a co-operative farm; when Hansi was asked about his occupation at home, he admitted that he was a violinist, and the people rushed to provide an instrument. All work on the place stopped while he stood on the front porch and, played Old Folks at Home and Kathleen Mavourneen and Achron’s Hebrew Melody. It was heart-warming; but would it help get tractors and reapers into condition for the harvest soon to be due?

  VIII

  Irma went on some of these expeditions, and listened politely to the enthusiasms of her friends; but to Mama Robin she confessed that she found “the future” most depressing. Mama shrugged her shoulders and said: “What would you expect? It’s Russia.” She had learned about it as a child, and didn’t believe it could ever be changed. In the days of the Tsar people had been so unhappy they had got drunk and crawled away into some hole to sleep. The Bolsheviks had tried to stop the making of liquor, but the peasants had made it and smuggled it into the towns—“just like in America,” said Mama. She would have preferred not to have these painful old memories revived.

  Odessa had changed hands several times during the revolution and civil war. It had been bombarded by the French fleet, and many of its houses destroyed. One of the sights of the city was the Square of the Victims, where thousands of slain revolutionists had been buried in a common grave, under a great pyramid of stones. The young people went to it as to a shrine, while their elders sought entertainment without success. The young ones insisted upon visiting some of the many sanatoriums, which are built near bodies of water formed by silted-up river mouths. These too were shrines, because they were occupied by invalided workers. That was the way it was going to be in the future; those who produced the wealth would enjoy it! “They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat.” Thus the ancient Hebrew prophet, and it sounded so Red that in Canada a clergyman had been indicted by the grand jury for quoting it. Hansi and Rahel had the blood of these ancient prophets in their veins, and Bess had been taught that their utterances were the word of God, so this new religion came easily to them. It promised to save the workers, and Lanny hoped it would have better success than Mohammed had had in his efforts to help the watch-dogs of the tents.

  Lanny was in his usual position, between the two sets of extremists. During this Russian visit he served as a sort of liaison officer to the Robin family. Johannes didn’t dare to discuss Communism with any of his young people, for he had found that by doing so he injured his standing; he talked with Lanny, hoping that something could be done to tone them down. In the opinion of the man of money, this Bolshevik experiment was surviving on what little fat it had accumulated during the old regime. People could go on living in houses so long as they stood up, and they could wear old clothes for decades if they had no sense of shame—look about you! But the making of new things was something else again. Of course, they could hire foreign experts and have factories built, and call it a Five-Year Plan—but who was going to do any real work if he could put it off on somebody else? And how could any business enterprise be run by politicians? “You don’t know them,” said Johannes, grimly. “In Germany I have had to.”

  “It’s an experiment,” Lanny admitted. “Too bad it had to be tried in such a backward country.”

  “All I can say,” replied the man of affairs, “is I’m hoping it doesn’t have to be tried in any country where I live!”

  IX

  This was a situation which had been developing in the Robin family for many years, ever since Barbara Pugliese and Jesse Blackless had explained the ideals of proletarian revolution to the young Robins in Lanny’s home: an intellectual vaccination which had taken with unexpected virulence. Lanny had watched with both curiosity and concern the later unfoldment of events. He knew how Papa and Mama Robin adored their two boys, centering all their hopes upon them. Papa made money in order that Hansi and Freddi might be free from the humiliations and cares of poverty. Papa and Mama watched their darlings with solicitude, consulting each other as to their every mood and wish. Hansi wanted to play the fiddle; very well, he should be a great musician, with the best teachers, everything to make smooth his path. Freddi wished to be a scholar, a learned person; very well, Papa would pay for everything, and give up his natural desire to have the help of one of his sons in his own business.

  It had seemed not surprising that young people should be set afire with hopes of justice for the poor, and the ending of oppression and war. Every Jew in the world knows that his ancient prophets proclaimed such a millennium, the coming of such a Messiah. If Hansi and Freddi were excessive in their fervor, well, that was to be expected at their age. As they grew older, they would acquire discretion and learn what was possible in these days. The good mother and the hard-driving father waited for this, but waited in vain. Here was Hansi twenty-five, and his brother only two years younger, and instead of calming down they appeared to be acquiring a mature determination, with a set of theories or dogmas or whatever you chose to call them, serving as a sort of backbone for their dreams.

  To the Jewish couple out of the ghetto the marriage of Hansi to Robbie Budd’s daughter had appeared a great triumph, but in the course of time they had discovered there was a cloud to this silver lining. Bess had caught the Red contagion from Hansi, and brought to the ancient Jewish idealism a practicality which Johannes recognized as Yankee, a sternness derived from her ancestral Puritanism. Bess was the reddest of them all, and the most uncompromising. Her expression would be full of pity and tenderness, but it was all for those whom she chose to regard as the victims of social injustice. For those others who held them down and garnered the fruits of their toil she had a dedicated antagonism; when she talked about capitalism and its crimes her face became set, and you knew her for the daughter of one of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

  Lanny understood that in the depths of his soul Johannes quailed before this daughter-in-law. He tried to placate her with soft words, he tried to bribe her with exactly the right motor-car, a piano of the most exquisite tone, yachting-trips to the most romantic places of the seven seas, and not a single person on board who would oppose her ideas; only the members of her own two families and their attendants. “Look!” the poor man of millions seemed to be saying. “Here is Rahel with a baby who has to be nursed, and here is the lovely baby of your adored bro
ther; here is this ship of dreams which exists for the happiness of all of you. It will go wherever you wish, and the service will be perfect; you can even break the rules of discipline at sea, you and Hansi can go into the forecastle and play music for the crew, or invite them up into the saloon once a week and play for them—in spite of the horror of an old martinet trained in the merchant marine of Germany. Anything, anything on earth, provided you will be gracious, and forgive me for being a millionaire, and not despise me because I have wrung my fortune out of the toil and sweat of the wage-slaves!”

  This program of appeasement had worked for four years, for the reason that Bess had laid hold of the job of becoming a pianist. She had concentrated her Puritan fanaticism upon acquiring muscular power and co-ordination, in combining force with delicacy, so that the sounds she produced would not ruin the fine nuances, the exquisite variations of tone, which her more highly trained husband was achieving. But Johannes knew in his soul that this task wasn’t going to hold her forever; some day she and Hansi both would consider themselves musicians—and they meant to be Red musicians, to play for Red audiences and earn money for the Red cause. They would make for themselves the same sort of reputation that Isadora Duncan had made by waving red scarves at her audiences and dancing the Marseillaise. They would plunge into the hell of the class struggle, which everyone could see growing hotter day by day all over Europe.

  X

  Besides Mama, the only person to whom Johannes Robin unbosomed himself of these anxieties was Lanny Budd, who had always been so wise beyond his years, a confidant at the age of fourteen, a counselor and guide at the age of nineteen. Lanny had brought Johannes together with his father, and listened to their schemes, and knew many of the ins and outs of their tradings. He knew that Johannes had been selling Budd machine guns to Nazi agents, to be used in the open warfare these people carried on with the Communists in the streets of Berlin. Johannes had asked Lanny never to mention this to the boys, and Lanny had obliged him. What would they do if they found it out? They might refuse to live any longer in the Berlin palace, or to travel in the hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht. Bess might even refuse to let it carry her name. Thus Jascha Rabinowich, standing in front of his private wailing wall. Oi, oi!