Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  “You have such a high opinion of this woman?”

  “Sometimes I think of Florence Nightingale, and then again of Barbara Pugliese, the Italian Syndicalist who made such an impression on me when I was young. She, too, was a consecrated soul, and I was inspired to be like her. But now I wonder if I’m good enough. I’ve had things too easy for too many years, and I’m afraid my moral fiber is soft.” Lanny paused for a moment and then added: “You ought to understand, because you have felt that way about Parsifal—at least you’ve said so.”

  “I really felt it,” declared the mother, humbly. “But it’s so hard to give things up!”

  “I was caught in a jam where I had to help this woman or else be a cad, and so I did what I could. But I ask myself: ‘Do I want to go on doing things like that?’ At once I start making excuses and telling myself it isn’t my war.”

  “But, Lanny, how can it be?” The frightened mother put her heart into that cry.

  “It keeps coming nearer and nearer. I shouldn’t wonder if, before we got through, it would be every decent man’s war.”

  III

  There was the Italian Riviera, the French and the Spanish Rivieras; one continuous stretch of coast fronting on the same blue sea, and with mountains sheltering it from the north winds. The same climate and the same activities, catching the same fish, growing the same olives and oranges and grapes; the same kinds of people, well mixed through the centuries, and speaking dialects of the same Latin. Also, in each of the three nations was the same deadly and incessant struggle between rich and poor; between those who owned the land and working capital and those who did the hard labor for starvation wages.

  Naturally these nations were interested in one another’s affairs; when the ladies and gentlemen of Lanny’s world got tired of talking about French political prospects they talked about what was happening in Italy and Spain. A railroad ran along this coast, and boats large and small came and went on the sea; through the centuries it had been the practice of refugees driven out of one section to flee to another. France, being in the middle, got most of these victims of persecution. For the past decade and a half it had been the poor and their partisans escaping from Italy; now, after a turn of the wheel of fortune, it was the rich escaping from Spain.

  The arguments in Lanny’s circle were hot and grew hotter every day. What were the comfortable classes to do? In Italy they had got themselves a protector and committed their affairs into his hands. That he had once been the reddest of the Reds was all to the good, for thus he knew their lingo and how to fool them. He had restored order, cleaned up the streets, and made the trains to run on time; now, having got the homeland in order, he was setting out to expand his territory. To most people in Lanny’s world this seemed the normal procedure. Savages were meant to be subdued and put to work—what good were they otherwise, to themselves or anybody else? When Il Duce’s sons dropped mustard gas from airplanes among barefooted black soldiers and thus put them to rout, they were proving themselves superior beings, and the swift march of their army into the mountain heights was one more case of the survival of the fittest.

  If you wanted to see the other side of the picture, travel west instead of east along this Cote d’Azur. The Spanish dictator hadn’t been “firm” enough, the polite way of saying that he hadn’t killed enough peasants and workers. The Reds had been allowed to conduct a political campaign and to win—and now look at the results! A jurist of a Pink tinge, Azana, had become President, and thirty thousand agitators and trouble-makers, thrown into jail by the old regime, had been suddenly turned loose upon the community. The results could have been foreseen by anyone; the newspapers of France featured monasteries being burned, and peasant laborers proceeding to divide up the land, plow and plant it. Great Spanish landlords packed up their families and shipped them to France; here they were, camped in the hotels and villas of Cannes, in a mood receptive to tea-parties, dinner-dances, and other forms of elegant entertainment.

  So it came about that Lanny Budd, without any effort on his part, was in a position to learn about the Spanish governing classes, what they were saying, doing, and planning. They told him they hadn’t the slightest idea of adopting permanent residence abroad or of submitting to the loss of their estates and other privileges. They were going to fight for what they had been brought up to consider their rights. They had left their young and active men at home, and their older and wiser heads had gone on confidential missions to Paris and London, and more especially to Rome and Berlin, from which places they expected the strongest support. Those on the Riviera received letters and talked freely about the contents. For after all, we people du gratin form one fraternity, from whatever part of the world we come; we have the same tastes, enjoy the same pleasures, fear the same pains; it would be strange indeed if we could not trust one another, and receive at least moral support in times of distress and danger.

  IV

  Lanny would call up Raoul Palma and take him for a drive somewhere back in the hills, safe from prying eyes and ears. He would say: “Do your friends in Spain have any idea of what is going on in their army and even in their government? Do they know there is a deputation of reactionaries from Madrid now sitting in with Mussolini and working out the details of a revolt; being told just how much money they have to raise and what supplies of munitions they can count upon? Do they know that General Sanjurjo is in Berlin on the same errand, and that when they have got all the problems straightened out there is going to be a coup d’etat, as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise?”

  “I have heard these reports, Lanny, and have written to all the comrades I know; no doubt they hear it from other sources. But you know how our kind of people are; we don’t like violence and find it hard to believe in. Very sadly I’m beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren’t caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we’ve educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.”

  “It wasn’t played that way by Mussolini and Hitler, and they’re just started on their careers. Mussolini has backed the League down on sanctions, so he says: ‘That’s the way to do it; scare the wits out of the dotards and their knees give way.’”

  “Do you really believe that England and France would let Mussolini and Hitler overthrow our legally elected government in Spain?”

  “We mustn’t depend upon capitalist statesmen. We must have our own ways of reaching the masses and teaching them to defend their interests.”

  “But, Lanny, I’m told that the British have great investments in Spanish mines—iron ore and copper and mercury.”

  “The capitalists make gentlemen’s agreements and respect one another’s interests. Look at how the French and Germans protected the steel plants of the Briey Basin during the war. British capitalists don’t want a Left government in Spain; they’d be afraid of severance taxes. They want what they call a strong government, one that holds labor down and puts the taxes on the consumer.”

  “Lanny, you ought to go into Spain and warn the government people of their danger. You could get to them.”

  “No doubt; but the story would come right back home, and I’d be blackballed and lose all my sources of information. I am telling you and letting you pass it on.”

  “But when I don’t give the source of my information, the comrades think it is just the gossip of the Riviera idlers. Everybody knows how refugees delude themselves; they believe anything that holds out a hope.”

  “You can tell your friends that there are relatives of Juan March on the Cap—you’ve heard of the ‘tobacco king’ from Majorca? I’m told that he began as a tobacco smuggler, and now he has put up several million pesetas for the rebellion. They say that General Francisco Franco is the Caudillo he has picked.”

  “But I read that our government has shipped Franco away to the Canary Islands!”

  “Maybe so; but how many hours would it take him to fly from there to Moroc
co? Ask yourself what Franco would do if he should learn that some of his officers were plotting to overthrow him and kick him out of the army.”

  “That’s where we intellectuals are at such a disadvantage,” remarked the school director, greatly depressed. “Our opponents can commit murder any time they feel like it; but if we did it, what would become of our ideals?”

  “Ah, yes!” replied the art expert, no more cheerfully. “We cannot commit murder, so we suffer it!”

  V

  Raoul repeated his urging that Lanny should visit Spain; but Lanny said that at present he had important negotiations in hand regarding pictures. The school director pointed out that the spring was an agreeable season, but the summer was very hot. Lanny said he didn’t mind heat, he had been raised on it. He had written to several clients asking if they would be interested in Spanish paintings; so later on he might be able to combine business with sociological pleasure.

  The school director incorporated Lanny’s warnings into an article which was published in one of the Leftist papers in Barcelona, also in Socialist papers in France. The same information was used by Rick in a London weekly, and the article appeared also in New York. So Lanny could feel that he was really serving the democratic peoples, and could play his part in smart society with fewer twinges of conscience. His mother saw to it that he met important persons, and he learned to guide the conversation with finesse. He collected the names of those who were doing the work of the Fascists and the Nazis on the Riviera, and got an idea of the amount of money they were spending to influence the French elections. Much as the two dictators disliked each other, they were drawing together against their common enemies. Ribentrop, the champagne salesman who had become Hitler’s traveling diplomat, had met with Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Ciano, and agreed to drop all press attacks by one nation upon the other.

  By the time the French elections were due, Lanny was so loaded with information that he hopped into his car and drove to Paris for a talk with Leon Blum. In the peaceful old days the meeting would have been in some cafe, but now Lanny went secretly to the Socialist leader’s home on the Ile St.-Louis and asked him to say nothing about it. Blum was at the climax of a grueling campaign and showed its effects; always thin and rather frail, he was now close to exhaustion. This is one of the tragic consequences of the democratic system, that in order to get a chance to do anything a man has to go through an ordeal which all but deprives him of the power to do it. The reactionary leaders, having the backing of great wealth and ninety per cent of the press, can take things easily, while the people’s champion has to drag himself from one meeting to the next, shout himself hoarse, and sit up most of the night attending committee meetings.

  If Leon Blum could have had his own way he would have been a poet and art collector. In this old house full of bibelots he looked with pathetic envy upon a younger man who, in spite of Socialist convictions, managed somehow to keep time for all the Muses. Bold and defiant on the platform, Blum was shy and rather deprecating in his private life. It seemed to him that his party was taking an unnecessary burden upon its shoulders by putting a Jew at its head; but the party thought otherwise, so he was making the fight. He had almost paid for it with his life, for the Fascist rowdies had mobbed him in his car, hurling glass at him and cutting him to the jugular vein.

  Lanny found him distressed about the international situation, but obliged to give most of his time and thought to domestic problems. He was pledging himself to put down the Fascist leagues and to break the power of the great Banque de France, the real ruler of the Republic. He was going to nationalize the munitions industry, he declared. Lanny replied: “That is fine, but are you sure it will get you more munitions in a shorter time?”

  The pacifist statesman was rather shocked to discover how much of a militarist his American friend had become. Lanny had to assure him that this wasn’t because his father had gone in for the manufacture of fighter planes; it was because he had learned so much about what airplanes could do and what use the dictators were planning to make of them. Lanny wasn’t violating any confidence in mentioning that General Goring had purchased some of the new Budd-Erlings; he could be sure the French Army intelligence service knew this, even though they had not troubled to mention it to the leader of the Front Populaire and probable next Premier of their country. Perhaps it was a secret that United States oil companies were taking Hitler’s money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs. But these were Hitler’s secrets, not Lanny Budd’s!

  VI

  Trudi Schultz had taken Lanny’s advice and got herself a studio over on the Left Bank, near a famous art school. The place was one of the tiniest, for she was doing only drawing and needed no apparatus but a board and some paper. Already she had made acquaintances and become a part of the student life of Paris, taken for granted and left undisturbed. She was making sketches of the workers of the neighborhood and delighting them greatly; the works had been hung in a near-by cafe, and several had been sold for fifty francs each, about two dollars American—but it wasn’t American. Trudi was pleased, because if she earned her rent and food, all of Lanny’s money could go for the cause.

  It was in order that a gentleman friend should call upon her—indeed, there would have been something eccentric about her if this hadn’t happened. She made cocoa, and spread a supper of bread and cheese and olives, with well-washed endive. Meanwhile Lanny told about Spain and the calamities which were threatened there; this time he had an audience easy to convince. He told about Blum and his fears that this kindly idealist was taking on a task which called for tougher fiber. Trudi told about her neighbors and what part they took in the political struggle. Many of the students wore the beret basque, which had come to be the symbol of the Fascists in France; others wore the red cap, and there were fights between them and broken heads to be mended.

  Lanny’s mother had fixed his mind on the question whether he was in love with Trudi. It was cozy in this studio, with dormer windows open and the soft breeze of a spring evening drifting in; a young man of romantic disposition thought it might be charming to call your attic room a studio, to cultivate your talents and prepare your own meals of peasant food. Trudi’s place differed from those of French art students whom Lanny had known in that everything about it was orderly and clean. The same thing applied to her person. Watching those delicately chiseled features, candid blue eyes, and fair hair, wavy, with glints in it, Lanny thought he would like to get some painter to do her as that Aryan whom the Nazi propagandists were desecrating.

  Trudi was a stranger in a strange land. She watched the people about her, and would talk about them for a while, but in the end the conversation would return to her homeland. Her mind was obsessed by concentration camps and torture dungeons, and the horrors which had befallen not merely German workers and intellectuals, but German civilization, German ideals, German decency. When she talked about it her sensitive lips would begin to tremble and tears would be close to her eyes. What she wanted to talk about was not art, even her own, but the question of what she was going to put into her next indictment of the Nazi fiends. Lanny saw that if he ever made love to Gertrud Schultz, alias Mueller, alias Kornmahler, he would have to learn to eat his bread with tears and make the acquaintance of those heavenly powers of which Goethe had sung.

  He had just come from Zoltan’s Paris apartment, full of art treasures of one sort or another; autographed drawings and photographs on the walls, beautifully bound works of literature and art upon the shelves. There was a piano, and Lanny had spent the afternoon playing Mozart’s violin sonatas with his friend. They found delight in rendering those melodies of infinite variety and delicacy. If it was an andante, their souls would be flooded with melancholy—but the lovely and charming kind, having to do with old unhappy far-off things, and not with the crude and cruel realities of the morning newspaper. If it was an allegro, it was
the gay dancing of spring breezes over flowery fields, with young lambs and rabbits and other light-footed creatures taking part; the musicians would be flushed with pleasure both physical and imaginative, a sense of triumph in their own skill and of oneness with all created and rejoicing life. Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

  But if Lanny made love to Trudi he would have to bid good-by to such innocent delights. He would have to learn to weep for the world’s wrong, and to look upon idleness and pleasure-seeking as treason to his martyred comrades. Even to have him coming here and talking about Mozart must present itself as a temptation to Trudi. She could hardly have failed to contemplate the possibility of loving this agreeable American, or at any rate having him make love to her. And would she feel about him as he felt about Rosemary?

  VII

  He went to call upon his uncle Jesse, going early in the morning so as to catch the old warrior before he set forth to his electioneering duties. To his surprise he found the incumbent deputy also recumbent, having been knocked out by the flu; a most inopportune attack, holding him helpless while enemies raided his political preserves. Jesse’s faithful wife sat by his bedside while he whispered his orders for the day; after that he was glad of his nephew’s company, to take his mind off what the damned Fascists and the near-damned Socialists would be saying and doing.

  The Front Populaire worked in a peculiar way under the French practice. There was an election in which the parties all ran their individual candidates, and then a week later there was a run-off in which the two highest candidates fought it out. This meant that until the twenty-sixth of April the Communists and the Socialists were bitter rivals; then until the third of May they would be friends, uniting against a common foe; after that date—“Well, we’ll see how it works out,” said the Red deputy. Having faithfully served the proletariat of a Paris faubourg through four years of general betrayal, Zhess Block-less was appealing for a vindication, and it was indeed a cruel thought that a canary-colored Socialist might take advantage of his stricken condition to steal his votes and his post of service.