VI
They returned to Berlin, arriving late in the evening. Next morning Lanny attended to his mail, and Irma telephoned some of her fashionable friends and was invited to lunch with the Furstin Donnerstein. Lanny was invited, too, but he said that the ladies were much happier when they were able to gossip alone, so he would go and have a preliminary look at the Salon. It so happened that this was Tuesday, the sixth of November, the day on which, exactly at noon, he was supposed to be standing on a certain street corner in a working-class district of this Hauptstadt of Naziland. It happened also to be Election Day in the land of Lanny’s forefathers, and Robbie Budd was predicting that the American people would come to their senses and elect a Congress opposed to the lunacies of the New Deal.
If a handsome young Auslander, wearing a neatly trimmed little brown mustache and a fall overcoat to match, goes driving in a sport-car in a part of Berlin given up to six-story tenements inhabited by the poor, he will attract some attention, but not so much as you might suppose. The poor do not go strolling on work days, and they have their problems to think about; at noon they are hurrying to get something to eat and do not linger outdoors on a raw gusty day. If a young Herrschaft, as such a stranger is called, parks his car and gets out and strolls, they will glance at him with a moment’s curiosity, but no more; some Strassenjunge may follow him and beg for a pfennig, but that is all. If he stops on the corner and raises his hat to a slender and frail-looking young woman wearing a worn and drab coat and a felt hat with no ornaments, that will cause no sensation, for the poor people of all city streets have learned the facts of life and accept them. If they see the woman acknowledge the greeting and start to walk along with the man, the Polizei will not interfere, and everyone else will make allowances, knowing that life has been terribly hard for the women of Germany for a full two decades.
However, this wasn’t the customary sex encounter, but something which the Geheime Staats-Polizei might have paid a small fortune to know about. Lanny Budd was saying: “So it’s you, Trudi!” And Trudi Schultz, staring straight before her, was murmuring: “You may trust Monck. I know him well.”
“Are you really sure?” Lanny persisted.
“I would trust him as much as any person I know.”
“I ought to be told a little about him, Trudi—”
“Frau Mueller,” she corrected, with a swift glance behind them. “Tell me where I can communicate with you through the next weeks.”
“I expect to be in England until just before Christmas and then to return to my home in France. My mail will always be forwarded.”
“Are you reasonably sure of its not being opened?”
“As much as anyone can be. No one in my home tampers with it.” Trudi had met Irma and knew her attitude.
“Thank you with all my heart, Herr Schmidt. It is very important to us all. And now I ought to go. We are too conspicuous, walking together.”
“I want very much to have a talk with you, Frau Mueller. I have come a long way for it. Can’t you let me drive you for a while?”
“It is a dreadful risk to take!”
“I cannot see how. You go on walking down this street and I will get my car, and after I make sure I’m not being followed, I’ll come up behind you and stop. You step in, and we’ll be gone out of sight before anybody has time to give a thought to us.”
“I will attract attention in your car; I’m not dressed for anything so elegant.”
“They will think I am taking home a new cook.” Lanny could grin even at such a tense moment; he still hadn’t suffered enough.
“They will think something less polite,” replied the young woman. “But—all right, I will go on walking until you come.”
VII
They drove, and no one paid any attention to them. Soon they were out in the country, where there was no possibility of being overheard, so they could drop, the feeble disguise of “Mueller” and “Schmidt.” Trudi could look at him without fear, and he could take a glance at her now and then when driving permitted. As an art lover he had said that her features represented a triumph of some idealistic sculptor; he had never seen a woman’s face more expressive of high thinking and fine feeling. When he had first met her four years ago, a student of drawing and a Socialist devotee, he had been struck by her look of alertness, of concentration upon whatever new idea was presented to her; by the way she held her head—high-spirited was the term he had chosen to describe her. She made him think of a pure-bred racehorse; watching her at work and seeing her intense concentration and delight in achievement, he had thought: “Here is a real talent, and I must help it to recognition.”
In those far-off happy days it had been possible to believe in ideas, and to discuss them freely, and to feel sure that in the long run the soundest would prevail. In those days before Hitler, Trudi Schultz had had color in her cheeks, color that came and went with the excitement of achieving a good portrait or with the discussion of Socialism versus Communism, democracy versus dictatorship. Ludi and Trudi—Lanny had been amused by the musical combination—had argued as Lanny himself had so often done, that the reason there were so many splits and so little real co-operation among the left-wing groups was not so much conflict of ideas as of personalities; the lack of tolerance and open-mindedness, of the old-fashioned virtues of unselfishness and love. The reason one advocate could see no good in the other’s point of view was that both were jealous and greedy for power; the movement was racked and rent because men thought about themselves and not about the masses they professed to serve. Listening to this ardent young couple at a gathering of the intelligentsia in the school which he and Freddi Robin were helping, Lanny had thought: “This is the true German spirit; which Beethoven and Schiller dreamed of spreading over the world. Alle Menschen werden Bruder!”
Now Ludi was gone, and his wife was a fear-ridden, grief-tormented soul, who had not had a moment of real peace or happiness for a year and a half. She twisted her hands together as she talked; her finely chiseled nostrils quivered, and now and then tears would start in her eyes and run down her cheeks untouched. These cheeks were colorless, and Lanny could be sure that her work, whatever it was, left her no time and perhaps no money to eat properly. He would have liked to suggest taking her somewhere for a meal, but he knew this would be an intrusion and an error of taste.
She wanted to bring him to the same state of mind as herself, to make it impossible for him also to enjoy peace or happiness. Since she was taking the risk of being seen with him on streets and highways, she would put the occasion to use by impressing upon his mind the tragic need of help under which she and her comrades labored. She would persuade him to lend his powerful aid in saving Ludi if he was still alive, or if he had perished, in saving his comrades and his cause.
VIII
Lanny had never had a chance to tell any of these German friends what he himself had seen and experienced. Now he listened to the familiar tale of cruelties beyond the imagining of decent human beings. Trudi told him about the fate of this person and that whom he had met at the school receptions. Pale and shivering with horror, she declared:
“They seize men and women, old and young—they respect nobody. They carry them off to the woods outside the city and beat them to death and bury them where they lie or leave them for others to find and bury. They drag them into dungeons which they have in the cellars of police stations and party headquarters, where they torture people to make them confess and name their friends and comrades. Things happen, so hideous that you cannot bring yourself to talk about them; nothing worse was ever done by the Spanish Inquisition, or by Chinese torturers, or by savage Indians in America.”
“I have heard a lot about it,” responded Lanny. He decided not to say more at present.
“Germany has become a land of spies and betrayers; you never know whom you can trust. They teach the children in the schools to spy upon their parents and denounce them; they torture perfectly innocent people because of something some relati
ve has done. No servant can be trusted, no employee, hardly a friend. It is impossible for half a dozen persons to meet, even in a private home; one dares not express an opinion or even ask for news. You never know at what moment of the day or night will come a banging on the door, and it’s a band of Stormtroopers, or the Gestapo with one of their vans to carry you away. You live in the shadow of this awful thing and can never get it out of your mind. Because I am a woman, and because they have so many sadists and degenerates among them, I carry a vial of poison, ready to swallow it before they can lay hands upon me.”
“Listen, Trudi,” he said. “Why don’t you let me help you to get out of this country?”
“And desert my husband? Oh, Lanny, you must know I couldn’t do that!”
“I hate to say it, but what is the chance of his being alive and not having been able to send word to you for a full year and a half? Surely some of his fellow-prisoners must have been released!”
“You can’t tell anything about it, Lanny. Everything happens in the dark. They have people in their solitary dungeons whose names are not known. And even if I knew that Ludi was dead, I would have to stay for the sake of the others. How can I rest while my dearest friends are undergoing these torments and in such dreadful need of help?”
“But can’t you perhaps help them better from the outside?”
“I have watched the exiles, from Russia and other countries; they are impotent people, cut off from their roots. They lose all sense of reality. They become strangers to their own people. They live in a little false world all their own.”
“But you are an artist. You could put what you know and what you feel into your work. You could be another Kathe Kollwitz.”
“Some people have to stay here and keep the spark of freedom alive. There are millions of Germans who need us—all the old party comrades, and those who voted for us, the workers and the intellectuals. Most of the time we do not know who they are, but they are still alive and surely have not forgotten all that we taught them in the old days.”
“But how can you reach them, Trudi?”
“That is something you ought not ask. I am under a solemn oath not to give a hint of our methods without the consent of two other comrades; and if I ask their consent and reveal you to them, there is one more chance of a leak. I don’t mean that you might talk about us, but somebody else might and cast the burden upon you; we might be betrayed, and someone might decide that you were to blame. You must realize how it is—we may have a Gestapo agent working among us right now, and so your name would become known to them. It is ever so much better as it is, with no one knowing about you but Genosse Monck and myself.”
“All right,” said Lanny. “You know that I trust your word.”
“I give you my assurance that we have a way of reaching the people, and telling them the truth about what is going on in Germany and in the outside world. We have told them the truth about the Reichstag fire, and about the number of those murdered last June and July. The Nazis admit less than one hundred, but we have listed more than twelve hundred and our lists have been circulated. The Nazis know that, and of course they are hunting us day and night; so far I do not think they have any clue. Even if they get some group it will be small; we have built ourselves like the worm, which can be cut into sections and each will go on growing by itself. We are bound to succeed in the end, because a great people will not let themselves be dragged down into such degradation.”
IX
Lanny Budd had done some reading in the literature of martyrdom. He knew that liberty has nowhere been won without blood sacrifice, and now he was learning that it cannot be kept without further payments. Through his mind would come at times a procession of verses which he had read and learned: his Shakespeare, his Milton, his Byron; also Egmont, Wilhelm Tell, Die Rauber—there had been lovers of freedom in Germany, too. Kurt Meissner had taught his American friend some verses about the Tirolese innkeeper Andreas Hofer, who had taken Innsbruck by storm from the forces of Napoleon; when the students came in a festival and wanted to sing his hero deeds, he made them a speech, one line of which Lanny had never forgotten: “Wir sind all des Todes Eigen”—we are all death’s own.
A grown-up American playboy realized that this was an important moment in his personal life. Something inside him was humbled and shamed, and he felt that he wanted to live the second half of his life to better purpose than the first. He said: “Just what is it you wish of me, Trudi?”
“There are many ways you can help us abroad. We may not always be as successful as we are now, and we may need such things as radio tubes or a printing-press or paper, things it would be too dangerous to obtain here at home. For the moment, our great need is money. Monck has told me what you said about your own position—”
“Never mind what I said, Trudi,” broke in the grandson of Budd’s, in one of those emotional moments to which idealists are liable. “I’ll get you some money now and then. I’ll take it as my job.”
So here he was, pledging himself again; forgetting that he was a married man, that other people had claims upon him, a vested interest in him; taking upon himself that task which Irma considered the height of lunacy, the overthrowing of the National Socialist government of Germany. It would become his job to earn the money, and a handful of social outlaws hiding in tenement rooms were going to print leaflets or something, and perhaps poke them under doors or leave them on park benches, and by this means overcome the power of the Geheime Staats-Polizei, of the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel and the Wehrmacht, with their enormous armaments, their tens of thousands of highly trained experts, their incessant watchfulness and skill in torturing and killing!
“I ought to have some way of reaching you, Trudi,” he said.
“I have racked my brains to think of a safe way. I am a poor workingwoman, living in a tenement, and I would not dare receive letters from abroad. Nor do I want to trust anybody else with the secret about you.”
“Can Monck come to England or France now and then?”
“He can arrange it, but it is difficult and risky. How often are you in Germany?”
“I never intended to come at all, until I got your message. However, I can arrange to come occasionally.”
“That would be expensive for you, Lanny.”
“I travel on my wife’s money,” he told her, with a smile. “She wishes it that way, and I have long since abandoned my scruples in the matter. I tell myself that hers is capitalist money—she doesn’t have to earn it and it is her pleasure to spend it. Most of what I earn I will bring to you.”
“Won’t your wife wonder what you are doing with so much?”
“Happily, the idea will not occur to her. It is the mark of elegance among the rich that you do not bother your head with money. If the whim takes me, I buy a picture and put it in my storeroom, and I may not remember to mention it to my wife.”
“It sounds quite fabulous. People of our sort cannot imagine such a way of life.”
“I have had opportunity to observe the effects of inherited wealth, and for the average young person it is a sentence to futility and boredom. It cuts the mainspring of activity; the person no longer has to do anything, and so he doesn’t, and if he tries, he fails nine times out of ten. You at this moment are providing the strongest incentive to labor that I have ever had in my life.”
She couldn’t keep from smiling. “Lanny, you are an angel! If I believed in such, I would be certain that you had been sent from heaven.”
“I am planning just now to purchase three of these celestial creatures. They are cherubim, which I believe is a high order in the hierarchy; but they have no overcoats and I cannot imagine them in the climate of Berlin in the month of November.”
X
The angel from overseas was moved to tell his friend about his visit to the Baroninwitwe, and by this means succeeded in amusing her for several minutes. He mentioned that the price of the picture could hardly be less than a hundred thousand marks, and so, if
he sold it, he would have several thousand for the comrades. The question was, how was he to get it to her?
Trudi could think of no safe way for them to meet except as they had just done. She gave him the name of a street intersection close to her own home, so that she could without great trouble arrange to pass there at noon every day. “I will arrange to do my marketing at that time,” she told him. “The only thing that will keep me away is being ill, and in that case I will write you that I cannot send any drawings at present.”
Said he: “It would be inconvenient if you were ill on the day when I had a large sum for you. Therefore, you can do a service to the cause by keeping well.”
“I will do my best, Lanny—”
“I impose a condition as part of our bargain: that you pledge yourself to use part of the money to purchase one liter of milk per day and drink every drop of it yourself. You show that you need it, and this is to be considered doctor’s orders.”
“All right,” she said, gently; then, after a pause: “When you see me on the street, do not speak to me, but watch in what direction I start to walk; then you may get your car and follow me, and after a couple of blocks you may stop for me. I will walk on the right side of the street and will be carrying a package. If I carry it in my left arm, so that you can see it, you will know that it is all right to stop; but if I carry it in my right arm, it means there is something wrong, and you will drive on around the block, and not stop until the package is held in the crook of my left arm.”
“Sehr klug!” he said, amused. “And now one thing more: suppose I am able to get you quite large sums of money, could you put them to use?”
“What do you mean by large?”
“A hundred thousand marks.”
“Herrgott!” she exclaimed. “I never thought of anything like that!”
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 11
