Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  So it had come: the thing which Lanny had been fearing for the past three or four years. The Nazis had got Germany! Most of his friends had thought it unlikely; and now that it had happened, they preferred to believe that it hadn’t. Hitler wasn’t really in power, they said, and could last but a week or two. The German people had too much sense, the governing classes were too able and well trained; they would tone the fanatic down, and the soup would be eaten cool.

  But Adolf Hitler had got, and Adolf Hitler would keep, the power which was most important to him—that of propaganda. He was executive head of the German government, and whatever manifesto he chose to issue took the front page of all the newspapers. Hermann Göring was Prussian Minister of the Interior and could say to the world over the radio: “Bread and work for our countrymen, freedom and honor for the nation!” Dwarfish little Jupp Goebbels, President of the Propaganda Committee of the Party, found himself Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment of the German Republic. The Nazi movement had been made out of propaganda, and now it would cover Germany like an explosion.

  Hitler refused to make any concessions to the other parties, and thus forced Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and order a new election. This meant that for a month the country would be in the turmoil of a campaign. But what a different campaign! No trouble about lack of funds, because Hitler had the funds of the nation, and his tirades were state documents. Goebbels could say anything he pleased about his enemies and suppress their replies. Göring, having control of the Berlin police, could throw his political opponents into jail and nobody could even find out where they were. These were the things of which Adi Schicklgruber had been dreaming ever since the end of the World War; and where else but in the Arabian Nights had it happened that a man awoke and found such dreams come true?

  V

  Lanny Budd lived externally the life of a young man of fashion. He accompanied his wife to various functions, and when she entertained he played the host with dignity. Having been married nearly four years, he was entitled to enjoy mild flirtations with various charming ladies of society; they expected it, and his good looks and conversation gave him reason to expect success. But instead, he would pick out some diplomat or man of affairs and disappear into the library to discuss the problems of Europe. These gentlemen were impressed by a young man’s wide range of knowledge, but they thought he was unduly anxious concerning this new movement of Nazism; they had learned what a French revolution was, and a Russian one, but had difficulty in recognizing a revolution that happened in small instalments and under ingenious camouflage. Hardly a man of wealth and importance in France who didn’t accept Nazism as a business man’s answer to Bolshevism. When they read in the papers that Communists were being shot pretty freely throughout Germany, they shrugged their French shoulders and said: “Eh, bien? Do the Reds complain of illegality?”

  Lanny ran up a large telephone bill calling his friends in Berlin. It was his one form of dissipation, and Irma learned to share it; she would take the wire when he got through and ask Rahel about the baby, or Mama about anything—for Mama’s Yiddish-English was as delightful as a vaudeville turn. Lanny was worried about the safety of his friends, but Johannes said: “Nu, nu! Don’t bother your head. I have assurances that I cannot tell you about. I wear the Tarnhelm.”

  He would retail the latest smart trick of those Nazis, whose cleverness and efficiency he couldn’t help admiring. “No, they will not outlaw the Communist party, because if they did, the vote would go to the Sozis, and there would be the same old deadlock in the Reichstag. But if they let the Communist deputies be elected, and then exclude them from their seats, the Nazis may have a majority of what is left! What is it that you say about skinning a cat? There are nine ways of doing it?”

  How long would a Jew, even the richest, be allowed to tell the inmost secrets of the Führer over the telephone to Paris? Lanny wondered about that, and he wondered about the magic cap which Johannes thought he was wearing. Might he not be fooling himself, like so many other persons who put their trust in political adventurers? Who was there among the Nazi powers who had any respect for a Jew, or would keep faith with one for a moment after it suited his purpose? To go to a rich Schieber to beg money for a struggling outcast party was one thing; but to pay the debt when you had got the powers of the state into your hands—that was something else again, as the Jews said in New York.

  Lanny worried especially about Hansi, who was not merely of the hated race, but of the hated party, and had proclaimed it from public platforms. The Nazi press had made note of him; they had called him a tenth-rate fiddler who couldn’t even play in tune. Would they permit him to go on playing out of tune at Red meetings? The Stormtroopers were now turned loose to wreak their will upon the Reds, and how long would it be before some ardent young patriot would take it into his head to stop this Jewish swine from profaning German music?

  Lanny wrote, begging Hansi to come to Paris. He wrote to Bess, who admitted that she was afraid; but she was a granddaughter of the Puritans, who hadn’t run away from the Indians. She pointed out that she and her husband had helped to make Communists in Berlin, and now to desert them in the hour of trial wouldn’t be exactly heroic, would it? Lanny argued that a great artist was a special kind of being, different from a fighting man and not to be held to the military code. Lanny wrote to Mama, telling her that it was her business to take charge of the family in a time like this. But it wasn’t so easy to manage Red children as it had been in the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments.

  However, there was still a Providence overseeing human affairs. At this moment it came about that a certain Italian diva, popular in Paris, was struck by a taxicab. The kind Providence didn’t let her be seriously hurt, just a couple of ribs broken, enough to put her out of the diva business for a while. The news appeared in the papers while Lanny and Irma were at Bienvenu, having run down to see the baby and to attend one of Emily’s social functions. Lanny recalled that the diva was scheduled with one of the Paris symphony orchestras; she would have to be replaced, and Lanny asked Emily to get busy on the long distance telephone. She knew the conductor of this orchestra, and suggested Hansi Robin to replace the damaged singer; Mrs. Chattersworth being a well-known patron of the arts, it was natural that she should offer to contribute to the funds of the symphony society an amount equal to the fee which Hansi Robin would expect to receive.

  The bargain was struck, and Lanny got to work on Hansi at some twenty francs per minute, to persuade him that German music ought to be promoted in France; that every such performance was a service to world culture, also to the Jewish race, now so much in need of international sympathy. After the Paris appearance, Emily would have a soirée at Sept Chênes, and other engagements would help to make the trip worth while.

  “All right,” replied the violinist, anxious to cut short the expenditure of francs. “I’m scheduled to give a concert at Cologne, and that is half way.”

  Lanny said: “For God’s sake, keep off the streets at night, and don’t go out alone!”

  VI

  Lanny missed his inside news about Germany, because the government forbade the publication of Vorwärts for three days, as a punishment for having published a campaign appeal of the Social-Democratic Party. Communist meetings were forbidden throughout the whole nation, and many Communist and Socialist papers were permanently suspended. “In ten years there will be no Marxism in Germany,” proclaimed the Führer. All over Prussia Göring was replacing police chiefs with Nazis, and the Stormtroopers were now attending political meetings in force, stopping those in which the government was criticized. Next, all meetings of the Centrists, the Catholic party, were banned; the Catholic paper, Germania, of which Papen was the principal stockholder, was suppressed, and then Rote Fahne, the Communist paper of Berlin. These events were reported in L’Humanité under the biggest of headlines, and Uncle Jesse denounced them furiously in the Chamber of Deputies; but that didn’t appear to have much effect upon Hitler.r />
  What the Nazis were determined to do was to win those elections on the fifth of March. If they could get a majority in the Reichstag, they would be masters of the country; the Nationalists and aristocrats would be expelled from the cabinet and the revolution would be complete. Papen, Hugenberg, and their backers knew it well, and were in a state of distress, according to Johannes’s reports. A curious state of affairs—the gentlemen of the Herren Klub defending the Reds, because they knew that Hitler was using the Red bogy to frighten the people into voting for him! Goebbels was demanding the head of the Berlin police chief because he wouldn’t produce evidence of treasonable actions on the part of the Communists. “The history of Germany is becoming a melodrama,” wrote the Jewish financier. “In times to come people will refuse to believe it.”

  He was now beginning to be worried about the possibility of attacks upon his boys; those gentle, idealistic boys who had been playing with fire without realizing how hot it could get. Being now twenty-eight and twenty-six respectively, they ought to have had some sense. Johannes didn’t say it was Lanny’s half-sister who led them into the worst extremes, but Lanny knew the father thought this, and not without reason. Anyhow, he had got a trusted bodyguard in the palace—a well-established and indubitable Aryan bodyguard. Freddi’s school had been closed; such a simple operation—a group of Stormtroopers appeared one evening and ordered the people out. Nothing you could do, for they had arms and appeared eager to use them. Everybody went, not even being allowed to get their hats and coats in February. The building was closed, and all the papers had been carted away in a truck.

  The Nazis wouldn’t find any treason in those documents; only receipted bills, and examination papers in Marxist theory. But maybe that was treason now! Or maybe the Nazis would prepare other documents and put them into the files. Orders to the students to blow up Nazi headquarters, or perhaps the Chancellery? Such forgeries had been prepared more than once, and not alone in Germany. Hadn’t an election been won in Britain on the basis of an alleged “Zinoviev letter”?

  The headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany was in Karl Liebknecht Haus, and that was the place where treason was to be sought. The police had seized the documents, and two days later Herr Goebbels’s press service gave details about “catacombs” and “underground vaults,” a secret and illegal organization functioning in the basement of the building, and so on. Johannes reported an embittered conflict in the Cabinet over these too obvious forgeries; they were considered beneath the dignity of the German government—but perhaps the German government wasn’t going to be so dignified from now on! The Jewish financier couldn’t conceal his amusement over the discomfiture of the “gentleman jockey,” the “silver fox,” and the rest of the Junker crew. They had made this bed of roses, and discovered too late how full of thorns it was.

  The thing that worried Lanny was the possibility that some Nazi agent might produce letters proving that Hansi Robin had been carrying dynamite in his violin case, or Freddi in his clarinet case. They must have had spies in the school, and known everything that both boys had been doing and saying. Lanny said: “Johannes, why don’t you and the whole family come visit us for a while?”

  “Maybe we’ll all take a yachting trip,” replied the man of money, with a chuckle. “When the weather gets a little better.”

  “The weather is going to get worse,” insisted the Paris end of the line.

  VII

  Lanny talked this problem over with his wife. She couldn’t very well refuse hospitality to Johannes, from whom she had accepted so much. But she didn’t like the atmosphere which the young Robins brought with them, and she thought them a bad influence for her husband. She argued that the danger couldn’t really be so great as Lanny feared. “If the Nazis are anxious to get votes, they won’t do anything to important persons, especially those known abroad.”

  Lanny replied: “The party is full of criminals and degenerates, and they are drunk with the sense of power.”

  He couldn’t stop worrying about it, and when the day for Hansi’s coming drew near, he said to Irma: “How would you like to motor to Cologne and bring them out with us?”

  “What could we do, Lanny?”

  “There’s safety in numbers; and then, too, Americans have a certain amount of prestige in Germany.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant time for motoring, the end of February, but they had heat in their car, and with fur coats they would be all right unless there happened to be a heavy storm. Irma liked adventure; one of the reasons she and Lanny got along so well was that whenever one suggested hopping into a car the other always said: “O.K.” No important engagement stood in the way of this trip, and they allowed themselves an extra day on chance of bad weather.

  Old Boreas was kind, and they rolled down the valley of the Meuse, by which the Germans had made their entry into France some eighteen and a half years ago. Lanny told his wife the story of Sophie Timmons, Baroness de la Tourette, who had been caught in the rush of the armies and had got away in a peasant’s cart pulled by a spavined old horse.

  They reached Cologne late that evening, and spent the next day looking at a grand cathedral, and at paintings in a near-by Gothic museum. Hansi and Bess arrived on the afternoon train, and thereafter they stayed in their hotel suite, doing nothing to attract attention to a member of the accursed race. Among the music-lovers Hansi would be all right, for these were “good Europeans,” who for a couple of centuries had been building up a tradition of internationalism. A large percentage of Europe’s favorite musicians had been Jews, and there would have been gaps in concert programs if their works had been omitted.

  Was the audience trying to say this by the storms of applause with which they greeted the performance of Mendelssohn’s gracious concerto by a young Jewish virtuoso? Did Hansi have such a message in his mind when he played Bruch’s Kol Nidrei as one of his encores? When the audience leaped to its feet and shouted, “Bravo!” were they really meaning to say: “We are not Nazis! We shall never be Nazis!” Lanny chose to believe this, and was heartened; he was sure that many of the adoring Rheinlanders had a purpose in waiting at the stage door and escorting the four young people to their car. But out in the dark street, with a cold rain falling, doubts began to assail him, and he wondered if the amiable Rhinelanders had guns for their protection.

  However, no Nazi cars followed, and no Stormtroopers were waiting at the Hotel Monopol. Next morning they drove to the border, and nobody searched Hansi’s two violin cases for dynamite. They went through the routine performance of declaring what money they were taking out of the country, and were then passed over to the Belgian customs men. Lanny remembered the day when he had been ordered out of Italy, and with what relief he had seen French uniforms and heard French voices. Eight years had passed, and Benito, the “Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon,” was still haughtily declaring that his successor had not yet been born. Now his feat was being duplicated in another and far more powerful land, and rumors had it that he was giving advice. In how many more countries would Lanny Budd see that pattern followed? How many more transformations would it undergo? Would the Japanese conquerors of Manchuria adopt some new-colored shirts or kimonos? Or would it be the Croix de Feu in France? Or Mosley’s group in England? And if so, to what part of the world would the lovers of freedom move?

  VIII

  The tall slender figure of Hansi Robin stood before the audience in the symphony hall; an audience of fastidious Parisians whose greeting was reserved. In the front row sat Lanny, Irma, and Bess, greatly excited. Hansi’s appearance was grave and his bows dignified; he knew that this performance was an important one, but was not too nervous, having learned by now what he could do. The conductor was a Frenchman who had given a long life to the service of the art he loved; his hair had grown white, and what was left of it stood out as a fringe under his shiny bald pate. He tapped upon the edge of his stand and raised his baton; there came four beats of the kettledrum, followed by a few notes of a timid marching
song; then four more beats, and more notes. It was Beethoven’s violin concerto.

  Hansi stood waiting, with his instrument in the crook of his arm and his bow at his side; the introduction is elaborate, and not even by a movement of his eyes would he distract anyone’s attention from the sounds. Lanny Budd, in the front row with his wife and Bess, knew every note of this composition, and had played a piano transcription of the orchestral part for Hansi at Les Forêts, on that fateful day seven years ago when Bess had first met the shepherd boy out of ancient Judea and fallen under his spell. That was one reason why Hansi made a specialty of this concerto; love infused his rendition, as love has a way of doing with whatever it touches.

  The march acquired the firm tread of Beethoven; the orchestra thundered, and Lanny wanted to say: “Careful, Maestro. He didn’t have so many instruments!” But the conductor’s expressive hands signed for gentleness as Hansi’s bow touched the strings. The song floated forth, gay yet tender, gentle yet strong—those high qualities which the soul of Beethoven possessed and which the soul of Hansi honored. The fiddle sang and the orchestra made comments upon it; various instruments took up the melody, while Hansi wove embroidery about it, danced around it, over and under it, leaping, skipping, flying in feats of gay acrobatics. A concerto is a device to exhibit the possibilities of a musical instrument; but at its best it may also illustrate the possibilities of the human spirit, its joys and griefs, toils and triumphs, glories and grandeurs. Men and women plod through their daily routine, they become tired and insensitive, skeptical or worse; then comes a master spirit and flings open the gates of their being, and they realize how much they have been missing in their lives.