Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  VII

  Heinrich Jung also had earned a right to hospitality, so he and his devoted little blue-eyed Hausfrau were invited to a dinner which was an outstanding event in her life. She had presented the Fatherland with three little Aryans, so she didn’t get out very often, she confessed. She exclaimed with naïve delight over the wonders of the Hotel Adlon, and had to have Irma assure her that her home-made dress was adequate for such a grand occasion. Heinrich talked N.S.D.A.P. politics, and incidentally fished around to find out what had happened in the case of Johannes Robin, about which there was no end of curiosity in party circles, he reported. Lanny could only say that he had orders not to talk. A little later he asked: “Have you seen Frau Reichsminister Goebbels since our meeting?”

  Yes, Heinrich had been invited to tea at her home; so Lanny didn’t have to ask who had manifested the curiosity in party circles. Presently Heinrich said that Magda had wished to know whether Mr. and Mrs. Budd would care to be invited to one of her receptions. Irma hastened to say that she would be pleased, and Heinrich undertook to communicate this attitude. So it is that one advances in die grosse Welt; if one has money, plus the right clothes and manners, one can go from drawing-room to drawing-room, filling one’s stomach with choice food and drink and one’s ears with choice gossip.

  Hugo Behr, the Gausportführer, had expressed his desire to meet Lanny again. Heinrich, reporting this, said: “I think I ought to warn you, Lanny. Hugo and I are still friends, but there are differences of opinion developing between us.” Lanny asked questions and learned that some among the Nazis were impatient because the Führer was not carrying out the radical economic planks upon which he had founded the party. He seemed to be growing conservative, allying himself with Göring’s friends, the great industrialists, and forgetting the promises he had made to the common man. Heinrich said it was easy to find fault, but it was the duty of good party members to realize what heavy burdens had been heaped upon the Führer’s shoulders, and to trust him and give him time. He had to reorganize the government, and the new men he put in power had to learn their jobs before they could start on any fundamental changes. However, there were people who were naturally impatient, and perhaps jealous, unwilling to give the Führer the trust he deserved; if they could have their way, the party would be destroyed by factional strife before it got fairly started. Heinrich talked at length, and with great seriousness, as always, and his devoted little wife listened as if it were the Führer himself speaking. From the discourse Lanny gathered that the dissension was really serious; the right wing had won all along the line, and the left was in confusion. Gregor Strasser, who had taken such a dressing down from Hitler in Lanny’s presence, had resigned his high party posts and retired to the country in disgust. Ernst Röhm, Chief of Staff of the S.A. and one of Hitler’s oldest friends, was active in protest and reported to be in touch with Schleicher, the “labor general,” whom Hitler had ousted from the chancellorship. A most dangerous situation, and Hugo was making a tragic mistake in letting himself be drawn into it.

  “But you know how it is,” Heinrich explained. “Hugo was a Social-Democrat, and when the Marxist poison has once got into your veins it’s hard to get it out.”

  Lanny said yes, he could understand; he had been in that camp a while himself; but there was no use expecting everything to be changed in a few months. “You have two elements in your party, Nationalism and Socialism, and I suppose it isn’t always easy to preserve the balance between them.”

  “It will be easy if only they trust the Führer. He knows that our Socialism must be German and fitted to the understanding of the German people. He will give it to them as rapidly as they can adjust themselves to it.”

  After their guests had left, Lanny said to his wife: “If we want to collect the dirt, Hugo’s the boy to give it to us.”

  VIII

  Mama had agreed with Lanny and Irma that there was nothing to be gained by telling the family in Paris about Freddi’s disappearance. They could hardly fail to talk about it, and so imperil the fate of Johannes. It might even be that Hansi or Bess would insist on coming into Germany—and the least hint of that threw poor Mama into another panic. So Lanny wrote vague letters to his mother: “Everything is being arranged. The less publicity the better. Tell our friends to go to Juan and rest; living is cheap there, and I feel sure that times are going to be hard financially.” Little hints like that!

  Beauty herself didn’t go to Juan. Her next letter was written on stationery of the Château de Balincourt. “Do you remember Lady Caillard? She is the widow of Sir Vincent Caillard, who was one of Sir Basil’s closest associates in Vickers. She is an ardent spiritualist, and has published a pamphlet of messages received from her husband in the spirit world. She is immensely impressed by Madame, and wants to borrow her for as long as Sir Basil will spare her. He invited me out here, and we have had several séances. One thing that came up worries me. Tecumseh said: ‘There is a man who speaks German. Does anyone know German?’ Sir Basil said: ‘I know a little,’ and the control said: ‘Clarinet ist verstimmt.’ That was all. Madame began to moan, and when she came out of the trance she was greatly depressed and could do no more that day. I didn’t get the idea for a while. Now I wonder, can there be anything the matter with your Clarinet? I shall say nothing to anybody else until I hear from you.”

  So there it was again; one of those mysterious hints out of the subconscious world. The word verstimmt can mean either “out of tune” or “out of humor.” Beauty had known that “Clarinet” meant Freddi, and it was easy to imagine Tecumseh getting that out of her subconscious mind; but Beauty had no reason to imagine that Freddi was in trouble. Was it to be supposed that when Beauty sat in a “circle,” her subconscious mind became merged with her son’s, and his worries passed over into hers? Or was it easier to believe that some Socialist had been kicked or beaten or shot into the spirit world by the Nazis and was now trying to bring help to his comrade?

  Lanny sent a telegram to his mother: “Clarinet music interesting send more if possible.” He decided that here was a way he could pass some time while waiting upon the convenience of Minister-Präsident Göring. Like Paris and London, Berlin was full of mediums and fortune tellers of all varieties; it was reported that the Führer himself consulted an astrologer—oddly enough, a Jew. Here was Lanny, obliged to sit around indefinitely, and with no heart for social life, for music or books. Why not take a chance, and see if he could get any further hints from that underworld which had surprised him so many times?

  Irma was interested, and they agreed to go separately to different mediums, thus doubling their chances. Maybe not all the spirits had been Nazified, and the young couple could get ahead of Göring in that shadowy realm!

  IX

  So there was Lanny being ushered into the fashionable apartment of one of the most famous of Berlin’s clairvoyants, Madame Diseuse. (If she had been practicing in Paris she would have been Frau Wahrsagerin.) You had to be introduced by a friend, and sittings were by appointment, well in advance; but this was an emergency call, arranged by Frau Ritter von Fiebewitz, and was to cost a hundred marks. No Arabian costumes, or zodiacal charts, or other hocus-pocus, but a reception-room with the latest furniture of tubular light metal, and an elegant French lady with white hair and a St. Germain accent. She sometimes produced physical phenomena, and spoke with various voices in languages of which she claimed not to know a word. The séance was held in a tiny interior room which became utterly dark when a soft fluorescent light was turned off.

  There Lanny sat in silence for perhaps twenty minutes, and had about concluded that his hundred marks had been wasted, when he heard a sort of cooing voice, like a child’s, saying in English: “What is it that you want, sir?” He replied: “I want news about a young friend who may or may not be in the spirit world.” After another wait the voice said: “An old gentleman comes. He says you do not want him.”

  Lanny had learned that you must always be polite to any spirit. He
said: “I am always glad to meet an old friend. Who is he?”

  So came an experience which a young philosopher would retain as a subject of speculation for the rest of his life. A deep masculine voice seemed to burst the tiny room, declaring: “Men have forgotten the Word of God.” Lanny didn’t have to ask: “Who are you?” for it was just as if he were sitting in the study of a rather dreary New England mansion with hundred-year-old furniture, listening to his Grandfather Samuel expounding Holy Writ. Not the feeble old man with the quavering voice who had said that he would not be there when Lanny came again, but the grim gunmaker of the World War days who had talked about sin, knowing that Lanny was a child of sin—but all of us were that in the sight of the Lord God of Sabaoth.

  “All the troubles in the world are caused by men ceasing to hear the Word of God,” announced this surprising voice in the darkness. “They will continue to suffer until they hear and obey. So is it, world without end, amen.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” said Lanny, just as he had said many times in the ancestral study. Wishing to be especially polite, he asked: “Is this really you, Grandfather?”

  “All flesh is grass, and my voice is vain, except that I speak the words which God has given to men. I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.”

  Either that was the late president of Budd Gunmakers, or else a highly skilled actor! Lanny waited a respectful time, and then inquired: “What is it you wish of me, Grandfather?”

  “You have not heeded the Word!” exploded the voice.

  Lanny could think of many Words to which this statement might apply; so he waited, and after another pause the voice went on: “Swear now therefore unto me by the Lord, that thou wilt not cut off my seed after me.”

  Lanny knew only too well what that meant. The old man had objected strenuously to the practice known as birth control. He had wanted grandchildren, plenty of them, because that was the Lord’s command. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. It had been one of Samuel Budd’s obsessions, and the first time Irma had been taken to see him he had quoted the words of old King Saul to David. But Irma had disregarded the injunction; she didn’t want a lot of babies, she wanted to have a good time while she was young. The price which nature exacts for babies is far too high for fashionable ladies to pay. So now the old man had come back from the grave!

  Or was it just Lanny’s subconscious mind? His guilty conscience—plus that of Irma’s, since she was defying not merely Lanny’s grandfather in the spirit world, but her own mother in this world! A strange enough phenomenon in either case.

  “I will bear your words in mind, Grandfather,” said Lanny, with the tactfulness which had become his very soul. “How am I to know that this really is you?”

  “I have already taken steps to make sure that you know,” replied the voice. “But do not try to put me off with polite phrases.”

  That was convincing, and Lanny was really quite awestricken. But still, he wasn’t going to forget about Freddi. “Grandfather, do you remember Bess’s husband, and his young brother? Can you find out anything about him?”

  But Grandfather could be just as stubborn as Grandson. “Remember the Word of the Lord,” the voice commanded; and then no more. Lanny spoke two or three times, but got no answer. At last he heard a sigh in the darkness, and the soft fluorescent light was switched on, and there sat Madame Diseuse, asking in a dull, tired voice: “Did you get what you wanted?”

  X

  Lanny arrived at the hotel just a few minutes before Irma, who had consulted two other mediums, chosen from advertisements in the newspapers because they had English names. “Well, did you get anything?” she asked, and Lanny said: “Nothing about Clarinet. Did you?”

  “I didn’t get anything at all. It was pure waste of time. One of the mediums was supposed to be a Hindu woman, and she said I would get a letter from a handsome dark lover. The other was a greasy old creature with false teeth that didn’t fit, and all she said was that an old man was trying to talk to me. She wouldn’t tell me his name, and all he wanted was for me to learn some words.”

  “Did you learn them?”

  “I couldn’t help it; he made me repeat them three times, and he kept saying: ‘You will know what they mean.’ They sounded like they came from the Bible.”

  “Say them!” exclaimed Lanny.

  “And that thou wilt not destroy my name out of my father’s house.”

  “Oh, my God, Irma! It’s a cross-correspondence!”

  “What is that?”

  “Don’t you remember the first time you met Grandfather, he quoted a verse from the Bible, telling you to have babies, and not to interfere with the Lord’s will?”

  “Yes, but I don’t remember the words.”

  “That is a part of what he said. He came to me just now and gave me the beginning of it. ‘Swear now therefore unto me by the Lord, that thou wilt not cut off my seed after me, and that thou wilt not destroy my name out of my father’s house.’”

  “Lanny, how perfectly amazing!” exclaimed the young wife.

  “He said he had already taken steps to convince me that it was really he. He had probably already talked to you.”

  Irma had been living with the spirits now for nearly four years, and had got more or less used to them; but this was the first time she had come upon such an incident. Lanny explained that the literature of psychical research was full of “cross-correspondences.” Sometimes one part of a sentence would be given in England and another in Australia. Sometimes there would be references by page and line to a book, and through another medium references to some other book, and when the words were put together they made sense. It seemed to prove that whatever intelligence was at work was bound by none of the limitations of time and space. The main trouble was, it was all so hard to believe—people just couldn’t and wouldn’t face it.

  “Well,” said Lanny, “do you want to have another baby?”

  “What do you suppose Grandfather will do if we don’t?”

  “You go and ask him,” chuckled Lanny.

  Irma didn’t. But a day or two later came a letter from Robbie, telling what the old gentleman would do if they obeyed him. He had established in his will a trust fund for Frances Barnes Budd to the amount of fifty thousand dollars, and had provided the same amount for any other child or children Irma Barnes Budd might bear within two years after his death. The old realist had taken no chances, but added: “Lanny Budd being the father.”

  XI

  The golden-haired and blue-eyed young sports director, Hugo Behr, came to see his American friend, and was taken for a drive. Hugo didn’t need any urging to induce him to “spill the dirt” about the present tendencies of his National Socialist Party; he said he had joined because he had believed it was a Socialist party and there were millions who felt as he did—they wanted it to remain Socialist and they had a right to try to keep it so, and have it carry out at least part of the program upon which it had won the faith of the German masses. Breaking up the great landed estates, socializing basic industries and department stores, abolishing interest slavery—these were the pledges which had been made, millions of times over. But now the party was hand in glove with the Ruhr magnates, and the old program was forgotten; the Führer had come under the spell of men who cared only about power, and if they could have their way, all the energies of the country would go into military preparation and none into social welfare.

  “Yes,” said Hugo, “many of the leaders feel as I do, and some of them are Hitler’s oldest party comrades. It is no threat to his leadership, but a loyal effort to make him realize the danger and return to the true path.” The young official offered to introduce Lanny to some of the men who were active in this movement; but the visitor explained the peculiar position he was in, with a Jewish relative in the toils of the law and the need of being discreet on his account.

  That led to the subject of the Jews, and the apple-cheeked you
ng Aryan proved that he was loyal to his creed by denouncing this evil people and the part they had played in corrupting German culture. But he added he did not approve the persecution of individual Jews who had broken no law, and he thought the recent one-day boycott had been silly. It represented an effort on the part of reactionary elements in the party to keep the people from remembering the radical promises which had been made to them. “It’s a lot cheaper and easier to beat up a few poor Jews than to oust some of the great Junker landlords.”

  Lanny found this conversation promising, and ventured tactfully to give his young friend some idea of the plight in which he found himself. His brother-in-law’s brother had been missing for more than a week, but he was afraid to initiate any inquiry for fear of arousing those elements about which Hugo had spoken, the fanatics who were eager to find some excuse for persecuting harmless, idealistic Jews. Lanny drew a picture of a shepherd boy out of ancient Judea, watching his flocks, playing his pipe, and dreaming of the Lord and His angels. Freddi Robin was a Socialist in the high sense of the word; desiring justice and kindness among men, and willing to set an example by living a selfless life here and now. He was a fine musician, a devoted husband and father, and his wife and mother were in an agony of dread about him.

  “Ach, leider!” exclaimed the sports director, and added the formula which Lanny already knew by heart, that unfortunate incidents were bound to happen in the course of any great social overturn.

  “For that reason,” said Lanny, “each of us has to do what he can in the cases which come to his knowledge. What I need now is some person in the party whom I can trust, and who will do me the service to try to locate Freddi and tell me what he is accused of.”