Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  But no, he couldn’t say anything, it wouldn’t have been good form; art must remain inside its ivory tower, and not descend onto that darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Elegantly gowned ladies with sensitive souls enjoy mournful tones from the G-string of a fiddle, but do not care to weep over a bunch of Jews being beaten and kicked in the underground dungeons of old castles and prisons on the other side of the eastern border.

  15

  Die Strasse Frei

  I

  Hansi and Bess didn’t return to Germany. Papa and Mama forbade them to come, and Lanny forbade them to go; Robbie Budd cabled, forbidding Bess; and more important yet, Adolf Hitler forbade them both. He did it by hunting down and jailing all prominent Communists, and making it plain that they could no longer exert any influence or accomplish any purpose in Germany. The policy of Schrecklichkeit, made famous during the World War, hadn’t worked on the outside world, but could surely be made to work inside the Fatherland.

  There was the Lodge at Bienvenu, and the young couple settled down in it. Beauty felt exactly as Irma did, she didn’t want Reds about her, or want her home to have such an atmosphere; but she, too, had been a guest on the Bessie Budd and at the Berlin home, and couldn’t fail to make a return; nor could she fail in kindness to Robbie’s daughter. A compromise was worked out without ever a word being said about it; Hansi and Bess didn’t invite their Red friends to the estate, but met them in Juan or Cannes. That helped a little, but not entirely, for the young couple couldn’t help bringing their troubles home with them in their thoughts and aspect.

  It was the same thing Lanny had witnessed ten years ago, when Mussolini had seized power. Swarms of refugees fled from the terror, and naturally it wasn’t long before they found out where Hansi and Bess were staying. The young couple were supposed to be rich, and, compared to the status of most Communists, they were. They could hardly say no to anybody—for what did the word “comrade” mean if not to open your heart and your purse in a time of agony such as this? Papa would send money; they didn’t tell him what it was for—since it was to be assumed that letters both going and coming were liable to be opened; but Papa could guess, and no price was too high to keep his darlings from coming back into danger.

  But he couldn’t send enough; not the purse of Fortunatus, not the touch of Midas, would suffice for the needs of all the Hitler victims, from this time on for years beyond any man’s guessing. Either you must have the hide of a rhinoceros, or you would have heartache for your portion. Fate would devise new ways to make you suffer—every day, every hour, if you would permit it. The most pitiful victims, the most tragic stories: people who had been tortured until they were physical and mental wrecks; people whose husbands or wives, sweethearts, children, parents, or what not, were being tortured, or might be tomorrow. People who had fled, leaving everything, and had not the price of a meal; people begging for railroad fare to bring this or that imperiled person out of the clutches of the fiends.

  Hansi and Bess were having their own meals, with one of Leese’s relatives to work for them, and presently this girl began to report that they weren’t having enough to eat; they had given their last franc to some hungry comrade, and were even taking out of the house food which they had obtained on credit. Beauty would invite them over to a meal, and they would come; because, after all, you can’t play music if you don’t eat, and it wouldn’t do for Hansi to faint in the middle of concerts which they were giving for the benefit of refugees. Beauty broke down and wept, and Bess wept, and they had a grand emotional spree; but there wasn’t a word they could say to each other, literally not a word, without getting into an argument.

  Beauty wanted to say: “My God, girl, don’t you know about Europe? I’ve lived here more years than I like to tell, and I can’t remember the time when there weren’t people fleeing from oppression somewhere. Even before the war, it was revolutionists from Russia, and Jews, and people from the Balkans, and from Spain, and from Armenia—I forget most of the places. Do you think you can solve all the problems of the world?”

  Bess wanted to reply: “It is your bourgeois mind.” But you can’t say that to your hostess, so she would content herself with the statement: “These are my comrades and this is my cause.”

  II

  Lanny and Irma went back to Paris, and it was the same there. The refugees had Lanny’s address—the first arrivals got it from Uncle Jesse, and the rest from one another. It was an extremely fashionable address, and it was incomprehensible to any comrade in distress that a person who lived, even temporarily, in the palace of the Duc de Belleaumont could fail to be rolling in wealth, and be in position to help him, and all his comrades, and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts back in the homeland, and bring them all to Paris and put them up in one of the guest suites of the palace—or at least pay for the rent of a garret. It was a situation trying to the tempers and to the moral sense of many unfortunate persons. Not all of them were saints, by any means, and hunger is a powerful force, driving people to all sorts of expedients. There were Reds who were not above exaggerating their distress; there were common beggars and cheats who would pretend to be Reds, or anything whatever in order to get a handout. As time went on such problems would grow worse, because parasites increase and multiply like all other creatures, and are automatically driven to perfect the arts by which they survive.

  Lanny had been through this and had learned costly and painful lessons from the refugees of Fascism; but now it was worse, because Hitler was taking Mussolini’s arts and applying them with German thoroughness. Also, Lanny’s own position was worse because he had a rich wife, and no refugee could be made to understand how, if he lived with her, he couldn’t get money from her. He must be getting it, because look at his car, and how he dressed, and the places he went to! Was he a genuine sympathizer, or just a playboy seeking thrills? If the latter, then surely he was a fair mark; you could figure that if you didn’t get his money, the tailors and restaurateurs and what not would get it; so keep after him and don’t be troubled by false modesty.

  Irma, like Beauty, had a “bourgeois mind,” and wanted to say the things which bourgeois ladies say. But she had discovered by now what hurt her husband’s feelings and what, if persisted in, made him angry. They had so many ways of being happy together, and she did so desire to avoid quarreling, as so many other young couples were doing. She would repress her ideas on the subject of the class struggle, and try by various devices to keep her weak-minded partner out of the way of temptation. The servants were told that when dubious-looking strangers called, they were to say that Monsieur Budd was not at home, and that they didn’t know when he would return. Irma would invent subtle schemes to keep him occupied and out of the company of Red deputies and Pink editors.

  But Lanny wasn’t altogether without understanding of subtleties. He had been brought up with bourgeois ladies, and knew their minds, and just when they were engaged in manipulating him, and what for. He tried to play fair about it, and not give too much of Irma’s money to the refugees, and not so much of his own that he would be caught without funds. This meant that he, too, had to do a lot of dodging and making of excuses to the unfortunates; and then he would feel ashamed of himself, and more sick at heart than ever, because the world wasn’t what he wanted it to be, nor was he the noble and generous soul he would have preferred to believe himself.

  III

  In spite of the best efforts in the world, Lanny found it impossible to keep out of arguments with the people he met. Political and economic affairs kept forcing themselves upon him. People who came to the house wanted to talk about what was happening in Germany, and to know what he thought—or perhaps they already knew, and were moved to challenge him. Nobody had been better trained in drawing-room manners than Beauty Budd’s son, but in these times even French urbanity would fail; people couldn’t listen to ideas which they considered outrageous without giving some signs of disapproval. Gone were the old days when it was a gossip tidbit t
hat Mr. Irma Barnes was a Pink and that his wife was upset about it; now it was a serious matter, and quite insufferable.

  “I thought you said you were not a Communist,” remarked Madame de Cloisson, the banker’s wife, with acid in her tone.

  “I am not, Madame. I am only defending those fundamental liberties which have been the glory of the French Republic.”

  “Liberties which the Communists repudiate, I am told!”

  “Even so, Madame, we do not wish to make ourselves like them, or to surrender what we hold dear.”

  “That sounds very well, but it means that you are doing exactly what they would wish to have done.”

  That was all, but it was enough. Madame de Cloisson was a grande dame, and her influence might mean success or failure to an American woman with social ambitions. Irma didn’t hear this passage at arms, but some kind friend was at pains to tell her about it, and she knew that it might cancel the efforts she had been making during the past year. But still she didn’t say anything; she wanted to be fair, and she knew that Lanny had been fair—he had told her about his eccentricities before he asked for her, and she had taken him on his own terms. It was her hard luck that she hadn’t realized what it would mean to have a husband dyed a shade of Pink so deep that the bourgeois mind couldn’t tell it from scarlet.

  IV

  The new Reichstag was summoned promptly. It met in Potsdam, home of the old glories of Prussia, and Hitler applied his genius to the invention of ceremonies to express his patriotic intentions and to arouse the hopes of the German Volk. All the land burst out with flags—the new Hakenkreuz flag, which the Cabinet had decreed should replace that of the dying Republic. Once more the beacons blazed on the hilltops, and there were torchlight parades of all the Nazi organizations, and of students and children. Hitler laid a wreath on the tomb of his dead comrades. Hindenburg opened the Reichstag, and the ceremonies were broadcast to all the schools. The “Bohemian corporal” delivered one of his inspired addresses, in which he told his former Field Marshal that by making him Chancellor he had “consummated the marriage between the symbols of ancient glory and of young might.”

  Hitler wanted two things: to get the mastery of Germany, and to be let alone by the outside world while he was doing it. When the Reichstag began its regular sessions, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, he delivered a carefully prepared address in which he declared that it was the Communists who had fired the Reichstag building, and that their treason was to be “blotted out with barbaric ruthlessness.” He told the rich that “capital serves business, and business the people”; that there was to be “strongest support of private initiative and the recognition of property.” The rich could have asked no more. To the German peasants he promised “rescue,” and to the army of the unemployed “restoration to the productive process.”

  To enable him to carry out this program he asked for a grant of power in a trickily worded measure which he called a “law for the lifting of want from the people and empire.” The purpose of the law was to permit the present Cabinet, and the present Cabinet alone, to make laws and spend money without consulting the Reichstag; but it didn’t say that; it merely repealed by number those articles in the Constitution which reserved these crucial powers to the Reichstag. The new grant was to come to an end in four years, and sooner if any other Cabinet came into office. Nobody but Adolf was ever to be the Führer of Germany!

  This device was in accord with the new Chancellor’s “legality complex”; he would get the tools of power into his hands by what the great mass of the people would accept as due process of law. His speech in support of the measure was shrewdly contrived to meet the prejudices of all the different parties, except the Communists, who had been barred from their seats, and the Socialists, who were soon to share that fate. A mob of armed Nazis stood outside the building, shouting their demands that the act be passed, and it carried by a vote of 441 to 94, the dissenters being Socialists. Then Göring, President of the Reichstag, declared the session adjourned, and so a great people lost their liberties while rejoicing over gaining them.

  V

  During this period there were excitements in the United States as well as in Germany. Crises and failures became epidemic; in one state after another it was necessary for the governor to decree a closing of all the banks. Robbie Budd wrote that it was because the people of the country couldn’t contemplate the prospect of having their affairs managed by a Democrat. When the new President was inaugurated—which fell upon the day before the Hitler elections—his first action was to order the closing of all the banks in the United States—which to Robbie was about the same thing as the ending of the world. His letter on the subject was so pessimistic that his son was moved to send him a cablegram: “Cheer up you will still eat.”

  Really it wasn’t as bad as everybody had expected. People took it as a joke; the richest man in the country might happen to have only a few dimes in his pocket, and that was all he had, and his friends thought it was funny, and he had to laugh, too. But everybody trusted him, and took his checks, so he could have whatever he wanted, the same as before. Robbie didn’t miss a meal, nor did any other Budd. Meanwhile they listened to a magnificent radio voice telling them with calm confidence that the new government was going to act, and act quickly, and that all the problems of the country were going to be solved. The New Deal was getting under way.

  The first step was to join Britain and the other nations off the gold standard. To Robbie it meant inflation, and that his country was going to see what Germany had seen. The next thing was to sort out the banks, and decide which were sound and in position to open with government backing. The effect of that was to move Wall Street to Washington; the government became the center of power, and the bankers came hurrying with their lawyers and their brief-cases. A harum-scarum sort of affair, in which all sorts of blunders were made; America was going to be a land of absurdities for many years, and the Robbie Budds would have endless opportunities to ridicule and denounce. But business would begin to pick up and people would begin to eat again—and not just the Budds.

  Lanny didn’t have any trouble, for the French banks weren’t closed, and he had money to spare for his refugees. If Irma’s income stayed in hock they could go back to Bienvenu—the cyclone cellar, she called it. She had never had to earn any money in her life, so it was easy for her to take her husband’s debonair attitude to it. If she lost hers, everybody else would lose theirs, and you wouldn’t have any sense of inferiority. Really, it was rather exciting, and the younger generation took it as a sporting proposition. Irma would swing between that attitude and her dream of an august and distinguished salon; when Lanny pointed out to her the inconsistency of the two attitudes she was content to laugh.

  VI

  Rick came over to spend a few days with them; he was no longer so poor that he had to worry about a trip to Paris, and it was his business to meet all sorts of people and watch what was going on. A lame ex-aviator who would some day become a baronet, and who meanwhile had made a hit as a playwright, was a romantic figure, even though he was extreme in his talk. The ladies were pleased with him, and Irma discovered that she had what she might call a home-made lion; she would tell the smartest people how Lanny had been Rick’s boyhood chum, had taken him to conferences all over Europe and helped to plan and even revise his plays; also how she, Irma, had helped to finance The Dress-Suit Bribe, and was not merely getting her money back but a considerable profit. It was the first investment that had been her very own, and she could be excused for being proud of it, and for boasting about it to her mother and her several uncles.

  Irma decided more and more that she liked the English attitude to life. Englishmen felt intensely, as you soon found out, but they were content to state their position quietly, and even to understate it; they didn’t raise their voices like so many Americans, or gesticulate like the French, or bluster like the Germans. They had been in the business of governing for a long time, and rather took it for granted; but
at the same time they were willing to consider the other fellow’s point of view, and to work out some sort of compromise. Especially did that seem to be the case with continental affairs, where they were trying so hard to mediate between the French and the Germans. Denis de Bruyne said: “Vraiment, how generous they can be when they are disposing of French interests!”

  The Conference on Arms Limitation was still in session at Geneva, still wrangling, exposing the unwillingness of any nation to trust any other, or to concede what might be to a rival nation’s advantage. Rick, the Socialist, said: “There isn’t enough trade to go round, and they can’t agree how to divide it.” Jesse Blackless, the Communist, said: “They are castaways on a raft, and the food is giving out; they know that somebody has to be eaten, and who will consent to be the first?”

  There was a lot of private conferring between the British and the French, and British officials were continually coming and going in Paris. Rick brought several of them to the palace for tea and for dancing, and this was the sort of thing for which Irma had wanted the palace; she felt that she was getting her money’s worth—though of course she didn’t use any such crude phrase. Among those who came was that Lord Wickthorpe whom she had met in Geneva last year. He had a post of some responsibility, and talked among insiders, as he counted Rick and the Budds. Irma listened attentively, because, as a hostess, she had to say something and wanted it to be right. Afterward she talked with Lanny, getting him to explain what she hadn’t understood. Incidentally she remarked: “I wish you could take a balanced view of things, the way Wickthorpe does.”