Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  “Herr Meissner has treated me as if I were another of his sons,” replied Lanny, modestly.

  “Ein braver Mensch,” said Seine Hochgeboren. “His sons have rendered admirable service.” He went on to speak of the family of his Comptroller-General, upon whose capability and integrity he depended as had his father before him. While hearing this formal speech, Lanny guessed what must have happened. The dowager Valkyrie had reminded the General Graf that this was the lucky young Taugenichts who had married the fabulously wealthy heiress. Not, as Seine Hochgeboren had supposed, some young snipe trying to make himself important by claiming intimacy with one of a nobleman’s employees!

  So here was a great aristocrat manifesting condescension, noblesse oblige. He knew all about Mr. Budd, oh, of course! “Kurt Meissner composed much of his music in your home, I have heard.” He didn’t add: “Kurt Meissner was your mother’s lover for many years, I have heard.” He talked about Kurt’s compositions and showed that he really knew about them; echt deutsche Musik which could be praised without reserve. A young Franco-American who had built a studio for a musical genius to work in could meet on equal terms a Junker who had furnished a cottage for the genius to raise his family in.

  Presently it came out that Lanny had served as a secretary-translator on the staff of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. “I should be interested to talk to you about those Paris days,” remarked the officer. “You might be able to explain some points about the American attitude which have always been a mystery to me.”

  “I should be pleased to do my best,” said Lanny, politely. “You must realize that your beautiful Schloss made a great impression upon a small boy, and your father and yourself appeared to me as very grand personalities.”

  Seine Hochgeboren smiled graciously. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that his father had been a grand personality, or that he was one now. “Are you planning to come to Stubendorf this Christmas?” he inquired.

  “Kurt has been inviting us,” was the reply. “I am not sure if we can arrange it.”

  “I would be happy if you and your wife would visit the Schloss as my guests,” said the General Graf.

  “Thank you very much,” replied the younger man. “I should have to ask the Meissners to give us up.”

  “I think they would do so,” the other suggested, dryly.

  “I will let you know a little later. I must consult my wife.” Another peculiarity of Americans—they consulted their wives instead of telling them! But of course when the wife was as rich as this one—what was her name?

  XIV

  They watched that valuable wife, dancing with a handsome young attaché of the American embassy staff. She was more than ever the young brunette Juno; some skilled couturier must have had the thought, for he had made her a gown of white silk chiffon with a hint of ancient Greece in it. For jewels she wore only her double rope of pearls; a fortune such as hers was beyond any quantity of stones to symbolize, and had better be left to the newspapers to proclaim. She danced with stately grace, smiled gently, and never chattered; yes, a young goddess, and an ornament to any Schieber’s ballroom.

  When the party was over, Lanny escorted her upstairs. She had promised to have no more than two glasses of champagne, and had kept her word, but was not a little excited by the presence of so many distinguished persons, all of whom had costumes, manners, and modes of speech calculated to impress the daughter of a onetime Wall Street errand-boy. She and her husband talked about this one and that while the maid helped her off with her gown. After she had rested for the required fifteen minutes, the baby was brought in for a nursing; quite a bundle now, nearly eight months old, and full of kicks and squirms and gurgles. She never needed any invitation, but took hold promptly, and while she worked away, Lanny told the mother about the invitation to Stubendorf. He had talked a lot about the “Christmas-card castle” with its snow-covered roofs gleaming in the early morning sunshine, and had made it seem as romantic to Irma as it had to him seventeen years ago.

  “Shall we go?” she asked.

  “If you would enjoy it.”

  “I think it would be ducky!” Then, after some reflection: “You and I really make a pretty good social team, don’t we, Lanny!”

  7

  I Have Seen Tempests

  I

  The results of the election had set Heinrich Jung in a seat of authority. He called Lanny on the telephone and poured out his exultation. There was no party but the N.S.D.A.P., and Heinrich was its prophet! Therefore, would Lanny come to his home some evening and meet his wife and one of his friends? Lanny said he would be happy to do so; he had just received a letter from Rick, saying that the German vote had made a great impression in England, and if Lanny would send a bunch of literature and some of his own notes as to the state of mind of the country, Rick could write an article for one of the weeklies. Lanny wanted to help his friend, and thought the English people ought to understand what the new movement signified. This, of course, was right down Heinrich’s alley; he volunteered to assemble a load of literature—and even to have the article written and save Rick the bother!

  Lanny left his wife in a comfortable family bridge game while he drove out to the suburbs toward Potsdam, where the young official lived in a modest cottage. Heinrich had chosen himself a proper deutsches Mädel with eyes as blue as his own, and according to the Nazi-Nordic principles they had set to work to increase the ruling race. They proudly showed two blond darlings asleep in their cribs, and one glance at Ilsa Jung was enough to inform Lanny that another would soon be added. There was a peculiarity of the Nazi doctrine which Lanny had observed already among the Italian Fascists. Out of one side of their mouths they said that the nation had to expand in order to have room for its growing population, while out of the other side they said that their population must be increased in order that they might be able to expand. In the land of Mussolini this need was known as sacro egoismo, and Lanny had tried in vain to puzzle out why a quality which was, considered so offensive in an individual should become holy when exhibited by a group. He hoped that a day might come when nations would be gentlemen.

  Heinrich had invited to meet his guest a sports director of one of the youth groups in Berlin. Hugo Behr was his name, and he was another exemplar of the Nordic ideal—which oddly enough a great many of the party leaders were not. There was a joke going the rounds among Berlin’s smart intellectuals that the ideal “Aryan” was required to be as blond as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Göring, and so on, as far as your malicious memory would carry you. But Hugo had smooth rosy cheeks and wavy golden hair, and doubtless when in a gym costume presented a figure like that of a young Hermes. He had until recently been an ardent Social-Democrat, a worker in the youth movement in that party; not only could he tell all its scandals, but he knew how to present National Socialism as the only true and real Socialism, by which the German workers were to win freedom for themselves and later for the workers of the world.

  The human mind is a strange thing. Both this pair had read Mein Kampf as their holy book, and had picked out what they wanted from it. They knew that Lanny had also read the book, and assumed that he would have picked out the same things. But Lanny had noted other passages, in which the Führer had made it clear that he hadn’t the slightest interest in giving freedom to the workers of other nations or races, but on the contrary was determined to put them all to work for the benefit of the master race. “Aryan” was merely a fancy word for German—and for other persons of education and social position who were willing to join with the Nazis and help them to seize power.

  However, Lanny wasn’t there to convert two Nazi officials. He permitted Hugo Behr to speak to him as one comrade to another, and now and then he made notes of something which might be of interest to the reading public of Britain. Hugo was newer in the movement than Heinrich, and more naïve; he had swallowed the original Nazi program, hook, line, and sinker; that was the creed, and when you had quoted it, you had settle
d the point at issue. Lanny Budd, cynical worldling, product of several decadent cultures, wanted to say: “How can Hitler be getting funds from von Papen and the other Junkers if he really means to break up the great landed estates of Prussia? How can he be getting funds from Fritz Thyssen and the other steel kings if he means to socialize big industry?” But what good would it do? Hugo doubtless thought that all the party funds came from the pfennigs of the workers; that banners and brassards, brown shirts and shiny boots, automatic pistols and Budd machine guns were purchased with the profits of literature sales! Heinrich, perhaps, knew better, but wouldn’t admit it, and Lanny wasn’t free to name the sources of his own information. Better simply to listen, and make careful notes, and let Rick write an article entitled: “England, Awake!”

  II

  Right after the elections came a trial in Berlin of three officers charged with having made Nazi propaganda in the army. It attracted a great deal of public attention, and Adolf Hitler appeared as a witness and delivered one of his characteristic tirades, declaring that when his party took power the “November criminals,” meaning the men who had established the Republic, would be judged by a people’s tribunal. “Heads will roll in the sand,” he said. Such language shocked the civilized German people, and Johannes Robin took it as a proof of what he had been saying to Lanny, that all you had to do was to give this fellow rope enough and he would hang himself. There was a demand from many quarters that Hitler be tried for treason; but probably the government was of the same opinion as Johannes. Why hang a man who was so ready to hang himself? The three officers were dismissed from the army, and Adi went on making his propaganda—in the army as everywhere else.

  Lanny invited Hauptmann Emil Meissner to lunch with him, and they talked about these problems. Kurt’s eldest brother, a World War veteran, had the younger’s pale blue eyes and close-cropped straw-colored hair, but not his ardent temperament; he agreed with Lanny that Kurt had been led astray, and that the Führer was a dangerous fanatic. Emil was loyal to the existing government; he said that would always be the attitude of the army, and was the obligation of every officer, no matter how much he might disapprove the policies of the politicians in control.

  “Would you obey the Nazis if they should take power?” inquired the American.

  Emil shut his eyes for a moment, as if to hide the painful reaction which such a question caused in him. “I don’t think it is necessary to contemplate that,” he said.

  Lanny replied: “The present election has made me do it.” But he didn’t press the point.

  Emil placed his faith in Germany’s symbol of loyalty, Feldmarschall and now Präsident Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. The old commander had won the battle of Tannenberg, the one complete victory the Germans had gained, with the result that the people had idolized him all through the rest of the war. In every town they had set up huge wooden statues of him, and it had been the supreme act of patriotism to buy nails and drive them into this statue, the money going to the German Red Cross. The Hindenburg line had been another name for national security, and now the Hindenburg presidency was the same. But the stern old titan was now eighty-three years old, and his wits were growing dim; it was hard for him to concentrate upon complex matters. The politicians swarmed about him, they pulled him this way and that, and it was painful to him and tragic to those who saw it.

  Emil Meissner had been on the old field marshal’s staff during part of the war, and knew his present plight; but Emil was reserved in the presence of a foreigner, especially one who consorted with Jews and had a sister and a brother-in-law whose redness was notorious. On the other hand, an officer of the Reichswehr owed no love to Adolf Hitler, and reported that the President refused to recognize this upstart even as an Austrian, but persisted in referring to him as “the Bohemian corporal,” and using the name of his father, which was Schicklgruber, a plebeian and humiliating name. Der alte Herr had steadily refused to meet Corporal Schicklgruber, because he talked too much, and in the army it was customary for a non-commissioned officer to wait for his superior to speak first.

  Emil expressed his ideas concerning the disorders which prevailed in the cities of the Republic, amounting to a civil war between the two sets of extremists. The Reds had begun it, without doubt, and the Brownshirts were the answer they had got; but Emil called it an atrocious thing that anybody should be permitted to organize a private army as Hitler had done. Hardly a night passed that the rival groups didn’t clash in the streets, and Emil longed for a courageous Chancellor who would order the Reichswehr to disarm both sides. The Nazi Führer pretended to deplore what his followers did, but of course that was nonsense; every speech he made was an incitement to more violence—like that insane talk about heads rolling in the sand.

  So far two cultivated and modern men could agree over their coffee-cups. But Emil went on to reveal that he was a German like the others. He said that fundamentally the situation was due to the Allies and their monstrous treaty of Versailles; Germany had been stripped of everything by the reparations demands, deprived of her ships, colonies, and trade—and no people ever would starve gladly. Lanny had done his share of protesting against Versailles, and had argued for helping Germany to get on her feet again; but somehow, when he listened to Germans, he found himself shifting to the other side and wishing to remind them that they had lost the war. After all, it hadn’t been a game of ping-pong, and somebody had to pay for it. Also, Germany had had her program of what she meant to do if she had won; she had revealed it clearly in the terms she had forced upon Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Also, there had been a Franco-Prussian War, and Germany had taken Alsace-Lorraine; there had been Frederick the Great and the partition of Poland; there had been a whole string of Prussian conquests—but you had better not mention them if you wanted to have friends in the Fatherland!

  III

  Three evenings a week Freddi and Rahel went to the school which they helped to support. Freddi taught a class in the history of economic theory and Rahel taught one in singing, both subjects important for German workers. Lanny went along more than once, and when the students old and young discovered that he lived in France and had helped with a school there, they wanted to hear about conditions in that country and what the workers were thinking and doing. Discussions arose, and Lanny discovered that the disciplined and orderly working people of Germany were not so different from the independent and free-spoken bunch in the Midi. The same problems vexed them, the same splits turned every discussion into a miniature war.

  Could the workers “take over” by peaceable processes? You could tell the answer by the very words in which the speaker put the question. If he said “by parliamentary action,” he was some sort of Socialist; if he said “by electing politicians,” he was some sort of Communist. The former had the prestige of the greatest party of the Fatherland behind him, and quoted Marx, Bebel, and Kautsky. His opponent in the controversy took the Soviet Union for his model, and quoted Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Between the two extremes were those who followed the recently exiled Trotsky, or the martyred Karl Liebknecht and “Red Rosa” Luxemburg. There were various “splinter groups” that Lanny hadn’t heard of; indeed, it appeared that the nearer the rebel workers came to danger, the more they fought among themselves. Lanny compared them to people on a sinking ship trying to throw one another overboard.

  At the school the “Sozis” were in a majority; and Lanny would explain to them his amiable idea that all groups ought to unite against the threat of National Socialism. Since he was a stranger, and Freddi’s brother-in-law, they would be patient and explain that nobody could co-operate with the Communists, because they wouldn’t let you. Nobody talked more about co-operating than the Communists, but when you tried it you found that what they meant was undermining your organization and poisoning the minds of your followers, the process known as “boring from within.” Any Socialist you talked to was ready with a score of illustrations—and also with citations from Lenin, to pro
ve that it was no accident, but a policy.

  Members of the Social-Democratic party went even further; they charged that the Communists were co-operating with the Nazis against the coalition government in which the Social-Democrats were participating. That too was a policy; the Bolsheviks believed in making chaos, because they hoped to profit from it; chaos had given them their chance to seize power in Russia, and the fact that it hadn’t in Italy did not cause them to revise the theory. It was easy for them to co-operate with Nazis, because both believed in force, in dictatorship; the one great danger that the friends of peaceful change confronted was a deal, more or less open, between the second and third largest parties of Germany. To Lanny that seemed a sort of nightmare—not the idea that it might happen, but the fact that the Socialists should have got themselves into such a state of hatred of another working-class party that they were willing to believe such a deal might be made. Once more he had to sink back into the role of listener, keep his thoughts to himself, and not tell Hansi and Bess what the friends of Freddi and Rahel were teaching in their school.

  IV

  Once a week the institution gave a reception; the Left intellectuals came, and drank coffee and ate great quantities of Leberwurst and Schweizerkäse sandwiches, and discussed the policies of the school and the events of the time. Then indeed the forces of chaos and old night were released. Lanny decided that every Berlin intellectual was a new political party, and every two Berlin intellectuals were a political conflict. Some of them wore long hair because it looked picturesque, and others because they didn’t own a pair of scissors. Some came because they wanted an audience, and others because it was a chance to get a meal. But whatever their reason, nothing could keep them quiet, and nothing could get them to agree. Lanny had always thought that loud voices and vehement gestures marked the Latin races, but now he decided that it wasn’t a matter of race at all, but of economic determinism. The nearer a country came to a crisis, the more noise its intellectuals made in drawing-rooms!