The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny talked with the proverbial man in the street: the porter in the hotel, the waiter in the restaurant, the attendant at the filling station, the old woman who sold him newspapers at the kiosk. All agreed that the Americans had behaved well and the Reds had behaved badly; all hoped that the Americans would stay but were not sure the Reds would let them. The old woman compared the position of Germany with the wishbone of a chicken with two hands pulling it apart. Each of the pullers was thinking about his own fate and was not interested in the wishbone.

  II

  Lanny was expecting a telephone call, and it came. A voice said, ‘I have decided. I wish to do it’. Lanny said, ‘Can you come to lunch?’

  The seventeen-year-old conspirator looked serious and a bit pale, as if he had been losing sleep. In the hotel dining room they did not mention the crucial subject but talked about the American elections. Lanny explained the peculiar system of American government, in which it could happen that the President and Congress were fighting each other, and everything they said or did was for its political effect. Meantime the bureaucrats would go on running the country as best they could. Congress would try to handicap them by denying them funds and would set up investigating committees which would subject them to hostile questionings.

  It was going to be that way in America for the next two years at least; it might continue even longer, because the Southern wing of President Trumen’s party was fully as conservative as the Republicans and would vote with the Republicans on all economic questions. Indeed, both parties were split down the middle on such questions, and the only thing that distinguished Democrat from Republican was the name he chose.

  Fritz said, ‘One would think that people with the same programmes would get together in the same party’. But Lanny explained that there was in America what he called the ‘grandfather vote’; people voted a certain way because their grandfathers voted that way, and whether a man was to be a Democrat or a Republican was determined long before he was born.

  Up in the room with the door locked they talked in low tones. The boy said, ‘I wrote my father that I had been listening to the various opinions expressed at the school and had made up my mind that I agreed with him entirely. I dared not say more, because the letter might be opened. He will understand, and it will make him happy; when I go home at Christmas time he will take me to his heart. I will tell him that I think the education at the school is being perverted, and I would rather stay at home and study by myself. That way I may be able to find out something’. Lanny could approve, having got most of his own education by reading books.

  Fritz had told his closest friends in the school of his change of mind. ‘They were bitter against me, of course, and said a lot of hateful things. The tears came into my eyes, and I suppose that was a good thing, because it made them say that I was a softy’.

  ‘Are there Hitlerites among your classmates?’ Lanny asked, and Fritz said there were a few, but under cover; he had sought refuge with these and of course had been welcomed. They had no difficulty in believing him, he being known to them as the son of the ‘Führermarsch’.

  III

  Lanny had already talked the matter over with Morrison, who agreed that it would be better to have Fritz report to Monck. The youth might find out a lot of matters other than queer money. So Lanny gave the new pupil an account of this friend of German freedom. Not merely had he risked his life in battle for the people’s republic in Spain; he had risked it again and again in Germany in a battle of wits with the Gestapo. Lanny told how Monck had obtained a position as butler to the eminent physicist, Professor Doktor Plötzen, and had photographed many of that famous gentleman’s papers at night. It was the same thing that had been done by ‘Cicero’ to the British ambassador in Ankara—the difference being that where Cicero had demanded and obtained one or two hundred thousand pounds of bogus money, Monck had been working for the small salary which the American government paid its secret agents to risk their lives.

  Monck came; and it did not take him long to penetrate into the soul of this young idealist, trembling at once with eagerness, with fear, and with conscientious scruples. Monck himself had been like that thirty or forty years ago, and he proceeded to establish himself as a substitute for that father whom Fritz was giving up. ‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household’.

  It was a concentrated lesson in the arts of espionage that Emil Friedrich Meissner received that afternoon and evening. Monck gave him a code name and a letter drop, showed him how to open letters and reseal them, how to make sure that he was not being trailed, how to trail persons without being observed, how to escape from a person who was trailing him, by entering a crowded building and coming out by another door; how to lead people to reveal their secrets without their realising that they were being led; and so on through a regular technique. Fritz made notes and later would take them off and study them while walking on the street, and then tear them into small pieces and lose one piece at a time. Monck told stories of his own work and of the coups his agents had pulled off in various parts of Europe.

  The neophyte was going to cultivate the acquaintance not merely of his Neo-Nazi fellow students and teachers; these would have parents and older friends who would be interested in recruiting a new and promising worker, and the tasks they would set him might reveal what they were up to. Not only was there counterfeit money to be traced down, but the Nazis had huge stores of gold and jewels and other valuables which in the last days they had put away in hiding places. There were still many art works that had not been recovered—and so on through a list. The smallest clue might lead to a big discovery, and the wise agent would keep his eyes and ears open all the time.

  Lanny’s heart ached as he saw this earnest youth go off to his harsh assignment. Lanny hated lying above everything in the world. He had observed the systematic lying of the Nazis for a matter of twenty-five years. Now he was observing the systematic lying of the Communists, and he hated both alike. He hated a world in which men were forced to lie to one another; but he could see no escape from it. The Nazis had declared war upon the rest of the civilised world, and they had had to be beaten. Now the Communists were doing the same thing, but doing it more cleverly, profiting by the many blunders of Hitler, Goebbels and the rest. Of course one could refuse to have anything to do with this poisoned and poisonous world; having plenty of money, Lanny Budd could have looked at beautiful paintings, listened to great music, and read poetry about the processes of his own soul; but he wasn’t built that way.

  IV

  Morrison told Lanny he was satisfied that Guzman had given all the information he possessed and so was to be paid the price agreed upon. He was going to Guatemala; he had picked that place because Poland was cold and he thought he would rather be warm. He had his five hundred dollars safely hidden and declared his intentions to get a job and lead a respectable life. Whether he would do it, or whether he would lose his money gambling with sailors on the ship, no one could guess. He was taken to Bremen and put on board a British freighter.

  Lanny had a parting talk with Morrison and received the thanks of that bureaucrat. Lanny had chosen to fly home by the way of Marseille in order to stop off and see his mother. To have skipped over her would have hurt her feelings, and there could be no excuse for it now when planes were flying all over Europe; you bought a magazine or two and settled down in a comfortable seat, and in a couple of hours you were put down at any airport you had chosen.

  Beauty Budd, for many years now Mrs Parsifal Dingle, was at the airport to meet her darling son in a shiny new American automobile, a treasure difficult to acquire in America and impossible in Europe at that time. One person who could acquire anything was the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft; he had shipped this car to Beauty, and it had arrived only that week. Beauty herself was blooming, with the help of the tiniest bit of
rouge. She was in her mid-sixties, though she did not mention it; her hair had turned grey but had acquired an ethereal bluish tinge. With her was Marceline, her daughter by her marriage to the French painter Marcel Detaze, and the daughter’s little seven-year-old son. Marceline had been tortured in a concentration camp, and Lanny had found her and helped bring her back to health.

  Beauty, as always, was full of curiosity, and Lanny was, as always, what she called a clam. All he said was that he had come to get information for President Truman. But he told her the news about his family and its extension, the Peace group. What they were doing with Emily Chattersworth’s money was a personal matter to Beauty, for she had known about that money and watched it ever since the days before Lanny was born.

  The shiny new automobile took them a hundred miles or so along the beautiful coast of the French Riviera, to the small estate called Bienvenu with which Robbie Budd had endowed his youthful love. Here Lanny had spent all his boyhood days, except for motor and yacht trips. It was on the heights above this place that he had sat with Kurt Meissner and listened to an exposition of German idealism. It was on those same heights, only two years ago, that he had sat and watched a great American armada bombard German guns on the shore and send in an army upon landing craft. Lanny, then what was called an ‘assimilated’ colonel, had come down to the shore and joined them, and accompanied them on the march up the Rhone Valley as a translator interviewing war prisoners.

  Now there was peace again; and, oh God, was it going to last? Beauty wanted to know that more than all else. She had been driven into luxurious exile in Morocco, but had seen too much of the sufferings of other persons. That included Marceline’s, also Marceline’s new husband, an American aviator who had lost one arm; on account of other injuries he would walk with a limp the rest of his life. Lanny couldn’t give his mother much encouragement; he said that the future of the world rested in the hands of a little group of men in the Kremlin, and they were torn between two contradictory motives of ambition and fear. ‘I am afraid we shall have to take steps to increase their fear’, he said.

  Also in this household was Parsifal Dingle, Beauty’s second husband, now a grey-haired man of seventy. He was a teacher of New Thought, as it was called in America, and had a gift of healing which he practised free of charge on all who called upon him. He was the most benevolent soul alive, and Beauty thought him wonderful—which is the basis for a proper marriage. Lanny was interested in both his theories and his practices, and they would sit and talk for hours whenever they met. Beauty would listen, an unusual role for her; she had taken up knitting and made crude garments for the poor people who came to their door. She had turned over the management of the place to Marceline’s new husband, who was called Billy. He and Lanny had been to the same places during the war and had reminiscences to exchange. Altogether it was an agreeable family.

  V

  Lanny couldn’t stay in this peaceful household more than a couple of days. Duty called him, and he got a plane to Lisbon, and from there one to New York. He was set down after dark at the La Guardia Airport; it was a Thursday, and that was the day of the Peace Programme. Lanny was wondering if he would arrive in time to hear it. When he stepped out of the plane it lacked just ten minutes to the hour. He walked off the field, got into a taxi, and told the driver to take him to the nearest row of residences. He stepped out, carrying his bags, paid the driver, and went to a house directly in front of him and rang the bell. It was a working-class district, with little stucco houses not more than ten or fifteen feet apart; the occupants were not rich people but it was a safe guess that few of them would be without a radio.

  A man in his shirtsleeves came to the door. Lanny said, ‘I beg your pardon, I have just stepped off a plane from Europe and I’m very much interested in a radio programme called the Peace Programme on station WYZ. My name is Lanny Budd, and if you have listened to the programme you have heard me announcing it. The programme is about to begin, and I am wondering if you would be kind enough to let me listen to it’.

  The answer was, ‘Sure, come in’. Very probably this man had never met a radio announcer in his life, nor ever expected to; such a being was to him a voice out of celestial regions. He led the visitor into the little living room, where three children had scattered their toys on the floor. The woman of the house came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and apologising for the state of confusion. Lanny repeated his story for her benefit, and she said she had heard of the programme; she didn’t say that she had listened to it, and Lanny was too polite to ask—he could guess that she hadn’t because it was the same hour as a mystery thriller.

  Lanny set down his bags, and they gave him a chair. They had three or four minutes to wait, and he exercised his well-known charm. He told how he had flown to Newfoundland, London, Berlin, motored into Poland, and then flown back by way of Marseille and Lisbon. ‘O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful!’—so Shakespeare had written, without having either aeroplanes or radio.

  The moment arrived and the dial was turned, and there was something else that was wonderful—no commercial. A voice said, ‘Radio WYZ. This is a paid programme, and this studio has no responsibility for what is said’. Then came the elegant and cultivated voice of Gerald de Groot: ‘The Peace Programme. Let us have peace. This programme is conducted by the Peace Foundation, an endowed institution devoted to the promotion of world organisation and world order. Our speaker this evening is Professor James Alverson Philips of the Department of Sociology at Calthorpe University. Professor Philips has a long and distinguished record as a liberal and friend of humanity. He has chosen as the theme of his talk “The Psychological Causes of War”. I take pleasure in introducing Professor Philips’.

  The professor had evidently done a good deal of speaking. His manner was quiet and restrained but incisive. It was Lanny who had arranged this programme, and he had met the professor, and now had before him the visage of an elderly gentleman, rather short, stoutish and bespectacled. He was talking now about a subject that lay close to his heart.

  What he had to say was that the primary cause of war lay in the minds of men. They cultivated bitterness against one another, suspicions which led to fears, and fears multiplied hatreds, and out of this complex nothing could come but physical conflict. The professor had studied history and gave illustrations of what he meant. He said that the first duty of every lover of peace was to adjust his mental and emotional attitudes toward other peoples. He must learn to understand that foreigners were human beings like himself; that they were capable of fear and would respond to moral appeals.

  What the professor was advocating was a spiritual change, but he said that the word spiritual had gone out of fashion, and he was trying to put it on a practical, common-sense basis. He said that the country was being launched on a campaign to generate suspicion of the Russians. He enumerated the agencies that were doing it and quoted some of the things they had said; he declared that was not the way to get peace but the way to get war, and war of the deadliest sort, that which had its basis in fanaticism.

  He said that the Russian people were launched on a colossal experiment in the economic field and had a right to try that experiment if they wanted to. This experiment had begun near the end of the First World War, and then the Allies—Britain, France, and the United States—had manifested the will to put down that Russian experiment and strangle it in the cradle. Winston Churchill had come to the Paris Peace Conference and used all his influence to persuade the Allies to engage in such a repressive campaign. That was where the Russian fear of the Allies had been generated; and only recently that same Winston Churchill had come all the way to Missouri to denounce the so-called ‘iron curtain’ and to revive all those Russian fears. So it was we who had the task of changing the psychological state and convincing the Russians that we were willing to live in a world where every nation was free to make its own social experiments and be guaranteed against attack by its neighbours.


  In his eloquent peroration the professor pleaded for a change of attitude on the part of all the peoples of the world. He welcomed this Peace Programme because it appeared to be calling for exactly that. A group of people had changed their minds, and were appealing to others to change theirs, and were meeting with a wide response. This movement would spread; it would reach to the nations of Europe; it would even reach behind the iron curtain. People there would discover that they had generous and sincere friends abroad, and the leaders would be forced to recognise it—they would be shamed into recognising it.

  Faith was what would do it, not necessarily faith in God, but faith in that moral principle which exists in all of us and which we learn to recognise in others. That was the principle upon which Christianity had been founded, and if all the peoples of the earth had failed to accept Christianity it was because its advocates had come to put their trust in atomic bombs rather than in the spiritual nature of man. Regardless of what creed we professed we must rid our minds of suspicion and fear and reorganise them upon a basis of love. The Bible had given us the correct formula when it had associated together the two phrases, ‘Peace on earth, good will toward men’. The professor said that the purpose of his talk was to reverse the order of those two phrases and suggest to his hearers that good will toward men came first and peace on earth would follow.