Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  The trial was made, and Parsifal reported that his Ceylonese friend didn’t know anything at all about Ludi, except that a spirit had called, saying he was Ludi looking for his wife. Apparently this strange dark realm was full of spirits wandering about—unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d—and whatever methods they used for communicating were no more perfect than those on earth. Certainly it indicated an unsatisfactory system of card-indexing when a commercial artist and Social-Democrat of Berlin, trying to find his wife, had to call to his aid a Ceylon Buddhist, a Polish widow, an Amerindian chieftain, and a former real-estate man from the com and hog belt of the U.S.A.!

  Every evening during Lanny’s visit one of these seances was held and this strange fantasy continued; if the “Island Hermitage” at Dodanduwa was not real it was certainly well invented. The communications became direct; that is to say, Tecumseh was suppressed and the voice was that of the Bhikkhu, or mendicant monk. Lanny ventured to come in; and this caused no difficulty; the man of God talked with either of the Americans freely. When Lanny wanted to know if the monastery was still in existence, he said Yes, but now there were Germans, recent converts to Buddhism, who found it a pleasant place to live in but neglected their spiritual exercises.

  Lanny, ever suspicious, inquired: “Might it not be that they are working at something else?”

  The Bhikkhu replied: “That might be; they do not tell me.”

  “As to this Ludi,” continued Lanny, “is he German?”

  “He might be. Is it a German name?”

  “Sometimes. Would he have come to you because of the Germans at the monastery?”

  “I don’t know why he came. I will try to find him.” But he never did find him.

  V

  The dutiful son drove his mother to the steamer at Southampton and got her safely off, and then proceeded to Paris. The painting of the picture was done, all but the drying. It gave an odd effect, for the colors did not quite match and you could pick out each of the twelve round spots. But the clever girl said: “It was much worse yesterday; give it three or four days more.” It was a kind of game, and she was quite excited about it; she had rarely had a more agreeable job, she told her client, for she felt physical pain when she saw a fine painting injured like that. “War is a wicked thing,” she declared. “I am glad that we do not have it in France.”

  “Mademoiselle,” replied Lanny, “while the house next door is blazing is hardly the time to congratulate one’s self on safety.” Again the girl looked as if she felt physical pain.

  Lanny went to call on Trudi. It was the end of an unusually hot day and he invited her for a drive; they strolled several blocks away from her neighborhood, to where he had parked his car. He drove out to the southwest, past Versailles and around toward the Chateau de Bruyne. He told about a French lady who had been his amie for six or seven years and taught him much. He told about Marie’s husband, who had become Lanny’s friend and Robbie’s, and about the two sons whom Lanny was pledged to look out for. There wasn’t much he could do, for they had become French Fascists and he had to play a role with them.

  “Lanny, how can you keep up a game like that?” exclaimed the woman.

  He answered: “I have been doing it so many years that it has become a second nature. I am like an actor who plays Iago for two hours and a half in the evening, and the rest of the time plays Romeo, or Mercutio, or the melancholy Jaques, or Prospero the magician, or whatever the actor may be in his own private imagination.”

  “I have forgotten most of those characters,” confessed Trudi. “The time when I went to the theater seems like another life.”

  “I have just come from attendance at a strange drama,” he told her. “Whoever or whatever it is that works in the subconscious mind of Madame has been trying to outdo Shakespeare.”

  He described the ancient monastery on the palm-fringed shore of a hot moist land, and the fantastic theology and ritual which this almost-black Aryan people had been evolving through some twenty-four centuries. “I can’t find any mention of this island,” he said. “It may be some small place in a river or harbor, or it may be entirely imaginary, like the numerous hells with complex terrors of which my stepfather has accumulated a list.”

  He repeated some of these fantastic descriptions, and the woman exclaimed: “Where do you suppose such nightmares come from?”

  “Out of the bewilderment and terror of the race. Primitive men don’t know much about the world they live in, and I imagine they know still less about their own minds. They have no way to tell reality from fantasy, and when one of them has had a dream, how is he to know whether or not he has been meeting angels and demons and lovely houris, or gods with two heads or six arms or whatever it may be?”

  “But where does Madame get all that Buddhist stuff?”

  “Parsifal has been reading endless mystical literature, and he may have read about Buddhist monasteries and hells and forgotten it—just as he had forgotten that he once met Ludi in Berlin.”

  “Ludi?” exclaimed the woman.

  “I am leading up to that. Ludi chose this strange mishmash in which to insert himself again.”

  He told that part of the story and the woman listened with a mixture of emotions. “Lanny!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t make up a thing like that?”

  “It is natural for you to ask,” he smiled. “But I assure you, what I can’t get fairly in this world I will do without.”

  “I know; but you might think it was for my own good to stop my brooding over Ludi.”

  “I am treating you as an adult. You will choose your own destiny, and also you will make up your own mind about psychic phenomena. I tell you what happened, but I can’t tell you why or how. I, of course, always have Ludi in mind, and I have convictions about him; it is possible that my mind injected him into the mind of the monk or into my stepfather’s imaginings about the monk. The fascinating thing is that our minds appear to be all mixed up together, or at any rate they leak into one another, they explode and hurl fragments into one another. I don’t know what it is, but I surely wish some scientific men would find out and tell me.”

  VI

  They talked about the victim of the Nazis and his probable fate, and about the victim’s wife or widow and her future. Trudi said again that she couldn’t make up her mind that Ludi was dead, and couldn’t face the grief she would feel if she did so decide. Lanny replied: “You think you can’t face it, but the fact is you are facing it every day. Ordinary grief is something that one gets over in time—I know, because I had it in the case of Marie. I didn’t know how I was ever going to live without her, but I learned to. In your case the uncertainty can last forever; you renew your grief every day and so handicap your whole life. I think you ought to ask yourself whether Ludi would wish you to go on like that.”

  “Probably he wouldn’t, Lanny, but what am I to do? Suppose I were to decide that he was dead, and then some day he came back?”

  “It is a well-known narrative poem by Tennyson. Enoch Arden looked in at the window and saw the happiness of his wife, and went away so as not to disturb it.”

  “Yes, but Ludi will be ill and will need me. He may not be any more able to go away than Freddi Robin was.”

  “Ludi is no Victorian sailor, but a sensible modern man; he would not expect you to mutilate your life on such a slender chance. He knows that you know about the Nazi fiends, and how many comrades they have tortured to death and thrown into sandpits.”

  “But, if he came back, what should I do?”

  “Be sensible, Trudi. You know that if Ludi turned up I’d be just as anxious to help him as you, and I would help him—in whatever way was needed. If that meant stepping aside and leaving you to him, I would do it. You would be the one to decide, and certainly I wouldn’t make a fuss about it, any more than I’m doing in the case of Irma.”

  He told her the story of his interview with the ambassador uncle, and to Trudi it was a glimpse into another fabulous world. She took the view
of the economic determinist. “I suppose that so much money automatically makes people selfish.”

  Lanny explained: “It has gradually become clear to me what has been going on in Irma’s mind. I believe she has had it for several years, ever since she first met a certain English earl at one of the League of Nations affairs in Geneva. There was the man she wished she had married. When she saw his splendid old castle she became fired by the idea of putting in modern plumbing, with bathtubs built into the floor like swimming-pools, lined with green marble and having little red electric lights to illuminate each step. In Shore Acres Irma’s fixtures are of solid gold and mine are of silver; this gave her father feelings of great splendor, and Irma inherited both fixtures and feelings: Naturally, she finds my mother’s old home on the Riviera a cheap and shoddy place. She has no room to entertain there, and so what is the good of having all that money?”

  “Lanny, I think that people like that are wicked, wicked!”

  “Irma is the daughter of a man who saw what he wanted and went and took it. She admires him and is following his example. She will modernize the castle, add a half-million-dollar ballroom, perhaps a million-dollar sports building. She will entertain extensively and acquire standing as an intellectual. For seven years she has been training and equipping herself to preside over a salon, as she has seen an old friend of mine doing here in Paris. Irma will adopt the ideas of her new husband, and make her home the headquarters of that wing of the Tory party which desires peace and hopes to get it by some sort of deal with Hitler. Her goal will be to have her husband retire from the Foreign Office and become Foreign Minister. You can see how much more glorious this is than being the wife of a peddler of old paintings, and why her family and friends all thought she was throwing herself away on a second-rate personality.”

  Lanny was bitter, in spite of all his smiles!

  VII

  It was hard to think about art, love, or psychic research in the madhouse which Paris had now become. No one who cared about political questions could talk or think about anything but the Spanish war, and the newspapers carried on a propaganda war in their columns, accusing their opponents of the most atrocious crimes. General Franco’s armies had begun moving northward along the Portuguese border, and on the fourteenth of August, 1936, he took Badajoz, effecting a juncture with the armies of General Mola coming southward. The taking of this small city was celebrated by crowding four thousand prisoners into the bullring, locking the gates, and then blasting them with machine guns.

  When the news of this horror reached Paris, the forces of the Front Populaire went wild. The Rightist press of course said it was all a Red lie; they adopted the regular Fascist tactics of denying everything and turning the accusations against the Reds, charging that they had committed such crimes and were trying to conceal them by a smoke-screen. So the war of charge and countercharge went on, in print and over the air, at public meetings and wherever one Frenchman met another. Rick’s saying that class had become more than country found its complete vindication, for the Rightist press of Paris was calling upon Adolf Hitler to keep France from selling arms to the Spanish government.

  Italian troops were pouring into Seville, and Italian and German planes, tanks, and artillery were coming to Franco by way of Spanish Morocco and Portugal. The troops were all “volunteers,” of course, and that farce was going to be maintained by a solid block of reactionary gentlemen throughout the civilized world: the aristocracy, the bankers and big industrialists, the two hundred families who ruled France, the heads of the armies and navies, and the hierarchy of the Church. The duly elected people’s government of Spain furnished a pattern of procedure to the discontented masses everywhere; their suppression was necessary to the survival of the established order, and Mussolini and Hitler were the boys who were going to do the job. Persons who understood the modern world could see in this Spanish struggle the line-up and preliminary skirmishes of a world-wide civil war.

  Hitherto in international relationships it had been the firmly established law that all governments had the right to buy arms for their own defense and that neutrality forbade the supplying of arms to rebels. But now the safety of the ruling classes depended upon, reversing this custom overnight, and it was done. History’s most astonishing example of organized hypocrisy—so the Pomeroy-Nielson family had agreed in calling it, and Lanny and Trudi in Paris found no reason to change the phrase. Trudi had received from some underground source a pamphlet being distributed among the workers in Germany; the Nazis had known everything that was coming and had got ready in advance, with pictures of the shooting of priests, the looting of church treasure, and nuns being raped by ferocious Spanish and Jewish Reds. Here was proof positive of that Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy which an inspired Fuhrer had warned against. Trudi, agonizing over this mess of falsehood, had prepared an answer, giving the German workers facts which they would never see in any newspaper or hear over any radio in the Fatherland. When Lanny went to call on her, it was this that she wanted to talk about, not art, or love, or psychic research. Lanny said: “Yes, that is excellent. I will get the money for it.”

  VIII

  Lanny Budd’s most bitter disappointment in this crisis was Leon Blum. The people’s leader failed most tragically. A week after the attack on Spain, the French Cabinet forbade arms shipments to the periled country. That was called a measure of non-intervention, but obviously it was the opposite; it was abrogating international law for the benefit of international gangsters. After hesitating another week Blum called for an agreement among all the interested nations that none of them would supply armaments to either side. So began weeks of dickering, and then months of lying and cheating which took the heart out of every lover of justice. Blum would keep his pledges, while Hitler and Mussolini laughed at theirs. Who stands to gain when an honest man makes a bargain with thieves?

  It was as Lanny had feared, a bibliophile and aesthete wasn’t the sort for a job like this; he was a polite and gentle victim in the hands of the toughest bullies. They ganged up on him, they browbeat him and raged at him until they broke his nerve. Lanny tried to see him, but he was too busy—and perhaps didn’t want to face any of his old friends of the Left. His own paper repudiated his policy, and those who had fought hardest to elect him were full of bitterness and despair.

  Lanny, knowing the inside of affairs, could understand his dreadful plight. There he was, a Jew, with his reactionary Cabinet members, some of them hired by the enemy, threatening to resign; his domestic policy, upon which all his hopes were centered, brought near to ruin. The British Tories had told him that he could expect no support from that quarter; the entire French Right was shrieking at him that if he got into that war they would make it a civil war. He couldn’t even depend upon the generals in his own Army; many of them were ready to do what Franco had done, and there might be Fascist armies marching on Paris as on Madrid. He had an ally in the Soviet Union, but that was eight or nine hundred miles away, with Hitler and Mussolini threatening to close the gap. The poor man was so crushed that he didn’t even dare discuss a military convention to implement the Russian alliance.

  Lanny went to visit his Red uncle, to find out what the Russians were going to do in this crisis. He had to listen to a lecture and a moral homily; almost it seemed that the righteous indignation of Jesse Blackless was partly turned to satisfaction because his Leninist thesis was being so completely vindicated. “You picked out your perfect Socialist politician and elected him—and he hasn’t been in office three months before he deserts his party and puts himself into the hands of the capitalist class!”

  Lanny, repelled by extremism, of course had to take the other side. “You have just heard Blum announce to the Chamber the complete fulfillment of his domestic program, every single promise he made to the electorate.”

  “Oh, yes!” jeered the Communist deputy. “He has swept the floors, he has dusted the furniture, he has made the beds in all the upstairs rooms—while below stairs incendiaries h
ave been setting fires and pouring gasoline on them!”

  “I admit it’s very short-sighted, Uncle Jesse—”

  “It’s a deliberate closing of his middle-class eyes, because he cannot face what he sees. He has to choose between Communism and Fascism, and he cannot make up his mind, so he lets the enemy choose for him—and for France!”

  Jesse Blackless was going to one of his reunions, where he would make a fiery speech, and his audience would sing the Internationale and shout: “Les soviets partout!” He invited his nephew, but Lanny pleaded a previous engagement. That was true—and anyhow, he was sick about what was happening, and couldn’t bring himself to listen to any more stories of workers and intellectuals in Spain being slaughtered in cold blood.

  IX

  Lanny owed a duty to the de Bruynes; their feelings would be hurt if he came to town and didn’t see them. Charlot had just got married, and Lanny had to meet the bride. He drove out to the chateau for dinner and spent the night. Both the young men had installed their families in the old home—they were not so used to having their own way as American families, and whatever friction might occur they would take as a part of living. Denis, the father, had never remarried; he had his peculiar love-life which he carried on in Paris, and the rest of the family either didn’t know about it or pretended not to.

  Three Frenchmen talked politics and one American listened. It had been years since Lanny had made any attempt to influence the two sons to what he considered liberal ideas; he had come to realize that it was hopeless, and that if he should succeed, he would be making a family split. The American took refuge in his ivory tower; he was the art connoisseur, and incidentally one who made a magnificent living out of it and had adventures which made him good company whenever he came along. Now he had been to Spain and seen the beginning of the Franco crusade; he would tell what he had seen, confining himself to facts and drawing no conclusions. He had seen the great Church of Santa Ana burning. “Oh, les sales cochons—they burned every church in Barcelona, excepting the Cathedral!” This happened to be true, unlike most of the beliefs the family held. Lanny said nothing about arms being stored in crypts or heavy masonry being used as fortifications.