The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘Lanny, I’m in hell’, said the violinist, slumped in soul as well as in body.

  Lanny knew only too well what Hansi was suffering—having suffered the same things himself. ‘What have you found out’?

  ‘Bess drove to a town out on Long Island where there is a factory making proximity fuses. One of the employees of the company gave her a package of microfilm, and she took it to the city and personally delivered it to a Red photographic concern’.

  ‘And what are our authorities going to do about it’?

  ‘They are following it up. They want to get all the gang, and I have to help them. Against my own wife’!

  Lanny wasn’t too shocked; he had prepared himself for exactly this. Also, he had prepared what he was going to say to his brother-in-law and dear friend. ‘I know how you feel, Hansi. You have to do just what the Communists have done, turn yourself to steel. You are rendering an important service to your country and to all the free world’.

  Lanny said it, but it sounded hollow. He hadn’t been able to turn his own self to steel. His hands were trembling, and he had to grip the steering wheel tighter.

  ‘It’s the woman I love’! exclaimed Hansi in the voice of the doomed. ‘It’s the most awful thing, Lanny. I have to make love to her; a part of me loves her and another part of me hates her, and I’m torn in halves’.

  ‘I know how you feel, old fellow. Don’t forget, she’s my sister’.

  ‘Oh, but that is not the same as a wife! And a sweetheart! She has always been both. It tortures me all the time. I don’t know how I can stand it. I chose the wrong profession. For such a duty I should have been an actor’.

  ‘Every artist is an actor, Hansi. You become what you play. Mozart or Beethoven, Paganini or Kreisler—they are such different persons’.

  ‘That is for the time being, and it is only play; but this is something that goes on all the time and that I can’t get away from. I am acting a lie, my whole life becomes a lie, and I can’t help despising myself’.

  ‘You know, Hansi, I have been doing exactly that same thing for a dozen years—’

  ‘That’s why I came to you, Lanny. You’ve been through it. But I’m not so firm in mind, so rational as you are. I’m chicken-hearted! My nerve is breaking. Honestly, I don’t know how I can stand it’!

  III

  Yes, Lanny understood what was in the soul of this onetime shepherd boy from ancient Judea. He was suffering the ethical pangs of his people, in whom good and evil had wrestled for some five thousand traditional years. He was that shepherd boy David, who had been ‘a cunning player on a harp’ and had played before Saul, the great king. The son of Budd-Erling had never been crowned a king, but he had been a prince in the eyes of a Jewish lad of humble parentage; he had been rich and elegant, with all the social graces and the love of all the arts.

  So now what Hansi wanted was to pour out his soul to this wonderful Lanny Budd. He wanted to tell the details of the mental and moral struggles of a man who had never lied before and now had to make his whole life a fabric woven of lies. He wanted to have Lanny tell him over and over again that it was his duty to do it, that he must do it, that he must never weaken, that he must match in his soul the grim determination of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken for his professional name Stalin, meaning steel.

  Hansi had to make love to a woman whom he half loved and half hated. Lanny was able to assure him that that was by no means an uncommon experience, both in the grand monde in which Lanny had lived and in the various small worlds he had visited. Hansi had to lie and lie and be a villain; and Lanny was able to assure him that that too was no extraordinary phenomenon in the world of affairs. Hansi had to learn to be one thing in his secret soul and something quite different when he went out into the world; that was an art practiced not merely on the stage of the theatre but on the stage of business and politics—all the men and women merely players. It was something that every fashionable mother taught to her daughter, preparing her for a career of social charm and the capture of a desirable life partner.

  ‘Look, Hansi’, said his worldly friend, ‘you told me that Bess had been admitted to study at the Lenin Academy in Moscow, an honour granted to very few Americans. Did she tell you what they taught her’?

  ‘They taught her the economic and political principles of Lenin’.

  ‘Did she tell you they taught her anything about spying’?

  ‘No, she didn’t mention that’.

  ‘Of course she wouldn’t, because the first thing they taught her was that under no circumstances must she reveal to anyone but those of the party’s inner circle what the true economic and political principles of Lenin are. If Bess was going out to be a friend and promoter of communism she would vigorously deny to everybody else in the world that the Communists advocated the violent overthrow of capitalist governments. Communists are always for peace, and it is the capitalist imperialists who threaten and make war. The only place where Communists talk frankly is among trusted party members; and if anyone were to voice pacific ideas there he would be immediately classified as a cosmopolitan deviationist and Social Fascist.

  ‘As it works out in practice, no party member can be sure what any other party member really believes or what he is up to. He may have been sent to tempt you and try you out to make sure that your ideas are true to the party line of the moment. Also, thousands of party members are trained to become what are called “sleepers”; they remain loyal and true in their hearts and they report to some leader, but they go out into the world as non-Communists; they make an intensive study of the ideas and practices of some other party, some creed, some social group. They join that group and live as members and work subtly and secretly to undermine it.

  ‘I had a curious example of that just recently on my trip to Berlin. In a social gathering I met a German gentleman of high position, a scholar and a true liberal, who had made sacrifices for his ideas. Present also was his wife, a charming lady who told me that she had become a Quaker; she had become convinced that the only way to get world peace was to take an out-and-out position and make no compromise under any circumstances. She set forth her Quaker creed, and I was impressed by it and by her; but next day I received a note from the gentleman, saying, “I feel it my duty to inform you that my wife is a Communist”’.

  IV

  Hansi knew about sleepers, it turned out. He was now trusted enough to learn about techniques and devices; his own duties had been explained to him, and he was being given a sort of trial run. ‘Bess has been put in charge of me’, he said. ‘I am not to be a sleeper but to be publicly known’.

  ‘That is because you have a name. There are many sincere persons who are gullible and let themselves be used by the Communists, who get up all kinds of organisations with high-sounding titles in the name of worthy causes. Or a group of the sleepers will move in upon some old established organisation; one will become a stenographer in the office and will rise to become executive secretary and run the whole affair. There are Civil Liberties sleepers and Racial Equality sleepers and Anti-militarist sleepers and Freedom of Immigration sleepers—to make it easy for Communist agents to come and go and to raise bail for them when they get caught. All these organisations hold mass meetings sponsored by a list of distinguished names, and there they make speeches in which they say, “I am no Communist, but”, and they go on to advocate whatever set of ideas happens to fit the party line at the moment’.

  ‘Oh, I am so sick of them’! broke in the violinist.

  ‘I know, Hansi. Imagine how sick I grew of Adolf Hitler in the course of ten years. He would start spouting and work himself into a frenzy just talking to me, or anybody. He never knew when to stop; he would go on and on until I thought I was getting dizzy; but I couldn’t let my mind wander for a moment. I had to be attentive and ready to put in a word or even a nod of agreement. I had to make a psychological study of it, to take it as a game and devote myself to playing it. You, a violinist, learn to play a caden
za; you know it’s no good, it doesn’t say anything, it’s just a showpiece; but it’s there, and you learn to do it with a flourish and enjoy the doing’.

  ‘That helps, Lanny’, said the man of music gratefully. ‘I will try to take it that way’.

  ‘Let me tell you something interesting that I read in an English magazine on my trip home. Some anthropologist was reporting on the practices of a New Guinea tribe called the Marindese. They are head-hunters but not cannibals; they don’t eat the bodies of those they slay; they do their killing because of a philosophy. It seems that their children have to have names, and the names are no good unless they are taken from a person who bore them in life. The victim’s head, which is shrunk and preserved, is merely a symbol of the name. If a child has to grow up without a name he is miserable and feeble all his life. So the tribe sends out spies to watch carefully the habits of some nearby tribe. They make elaborate ceremonial preparations, and then on a certain night they steal up on the tribe and in a sudden attack slaughter a great many of the men and bring home their heads; they also bring home the children of their victims, in order to make sure of finding out the names of the fathers who have been killed. So the Marindese children get names and grow up happy and strong’.

  ‘The spying part sounds strikingly like Communist practice’, commented Hansi.

  ‘Yes, but with a curious reverse twist. The Marindese want to take the names of their victims, but the Reds want to give their names to the victims. When the class struggle is over we shall be just as poor and miserable as they are now, but we shall no longer be American imperialists preaching the Truman Doctrine; we shall be Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-William-Z.-Fosterites, living under the dictatorship of the proletariat and learning the Diamat and the Proletcult. All great philosophical questions will have been settled, and only details will be left; and we shall be back in the fourth century, when men fought and died for the difference between Homoousianism and Homoiousianism’.

  ‘Oh God’! exclaimed Hansi. ‘You should see the things I have to study and the lessons I have to recite! I am trying to please Bess and to convince her that I am seriously interested in this new mumbo-jumbo. I have to learn the dangers of objectism, practicism, opportunism, scholasticism, cosmopolitanism. I have to specify the differences between these deviations, and I have to promise never to fall victim to any of them. I must hold exactly the right and only true doctrine—which some professor of metaphysics in the Kremlin has dreamed up only last week’.

  ‘And next week’, said Lanny with a chuckle, ‘the Politburo will decide that the professor was a Trotskyite, and he will be shipped off to work in a gold mine in Verkhoyansk, the coldest spot on earth, and you will have a new doctrine to learn’.

  V

  Hansi said it did him a world of good to have somebody to pour out his troubles to. He would go back into Hades and try his earnest best to acclimatise himself. He had to be told over and over again that it was an honourable thing to be a spy in the cause of human freedom; and Lanny pointed again to those black savages in the wilds of New Guinea. The reason the Marindese tribe had so many heads to hang in their doorways was that their spies were active and determined, while the other tribes had become lazy and their counterspies had failed. Eternal vigilance was still the price of liberty, and not merely in steaming tropical jungles but in the world of jet aeroplanes and atomic bombs.

  ‘Look, Hansi’, said Hansi’s brother-in-law, ‘I was a spy working against Adolf Hitler; I was trying to keep him from starting his world war. I didn’t succeed, but I thought I had a chance. I knew that he believed in astrology and spiritualism and all that sort of thing, and I trained Laurel to pretend that she was a wonderful spiritualist medium. I taught her all about the Nazi “old companions”, the only people Hitler ever respected and listened to; then I called up Hess and told him about her, and we were invited to the Berghof. We were in that mountain retreat, crowded with diplomats and top military men, all buzzing and seething like bees, and Laurel went into her pretended trance—that was the way she found out that she could really go into a trance—and she made the Führer think he was listening to Haushofer, and Dietrich Eckart, and the other dead heroes of his movement, warning him against going to war. We did actually cause him to put off the movement of those armies for a full week. We gave the free world that much more time to realise the situation. And who can ever know how much difference it made? Laurel and I were spying as hard as we could, and we were lying like the devil, both of us; but can anybody tell us that we weren’t doing a moral action’?

  Hansi thought it over. ‘I suppose that only an out-and-out pacifist could say no’.

  ‘Yes; you can be a Quaker, you can turn the other cheek to the attacker and give him your cloak too. I can’t think of any nation that ever tried it, but we could try it to-morrow if we adopted the Sermon on the Mount as our code. We could announce that we would make no resistance to communist philosophy, and the Communists would come by aeroplane loads and shiploads, waving red flags and singing the “Internationale”. Our government would step quietly aside and Foster would become chief commissar, and Jack Stachel would become commander-in-chief of the Army. They would last about three months, until the Politburo decided they were devotees of cosmopolitanism or scholasticism, and then they would be replaced by Russians. The workers would take possession of the factories, and in about one month they would all be put in charge of a commissar. The farms would be collectivised, and the same thing would happen there. In another three months the Politburo would have decided that Americans were incorrigible and must all be forbidden to hold public office. All our books on political and economic questions would be burned, and the Russian language would become compulsory in our public schools.

  ‘Some of those things are happening in Central Europe now, and the rest will be happening before long; anybody who is willing to see them happen in the United States will, of course, say that I was wrong to report my sister to the F.B.I. and that you are wrong to spy upon your wife. What I say is that it is not your duty to let your wife go on betraying the military secrets of our country to our furious and embittered enemies. What I say is that you and I were born into a dangerous time, and we have to learn to fight the devil with his own fire. I admit that we have new freedoms to win, economic freedoms, but we can win them without sacrificing the old freedoms which are infinitely precious to us. That has to be our religion, Hansi’.

  So they talked, and when they were nearing the city again Hansi said, ‘There’s no use your going down into that traffic, and besides it’s risky. If I’m going to be a spy I had better be a good one, and I don’t want anyone to see us together’.

  Lanny assented and let his friend off at the nearest subway station, where he could take an express and reach Pennsylvania Station in a third of the driving time. Lanny turned westward across the George Washington Bridge into Jersey and so home. He told Laurel about the talk and about Hansi’s state of soul; but he did not mention what Bess was doing, for that was ‘classified’.

  Laurel said, ‘I’m sorry for both of them, but most of all, I think, for those two boys. Adults know what they are doing; but what can children make of it’?

  Lanny’s answer was, ‘I have seen so many children suffering in Europe that I seem to be losing the power to worry about individuals’.

  ‘That is getting to be true of everybody’, replied Laurel, ‘and it is a form of moral death. It may be the end of our civilisation’.

  VI

  A few days passed, and Lanny at the office was called to the telephone; it happened often, but this call was unusual—the voice of Bess. ‘Lanny, I want to see you’, she said.

  ‘Sure thing’, he answered. ‘Can you come over’?

  ‘I don’t want to come to the office, and I don’t want to come to your house, because I know I’m not welcome at either, and I’m bored by both’.

  ‘Okay’, said Lanny cheerfully. ‘Name the place and time’.

  ‘I will drive to
your neighbourhood and make it easy for you’, she said and named the nearby village of Beverly. ‘I’ll be in front of the post office at ten to-morrow morning’.

  ‘I’ll be on hand’, he said. And that was that.

  He told Laurel about it, and Laurel said with a smile, ‘Don’t let her convert you’. If she had had any idea that the effort might be successful she would have gone along. They both took it for granted that what Bess wanted was to enter another protest against the broadcasts, especially those in which Lanny told what he had learned in Berlin, including the determination of the Reds to drive their former allies out of the city.

  Lanny drove to the village appointed, parked his car around the corner from the post office, locked it, and went for a stroll. Presently Bess came. She drew up to the side, opened the door, and said, ‘Get in’. He took the seat beside her and closed the door, and after that she had him at her mercy; she could drive as long as the petrol in the tank held out, and he would have to listen.

  But it wasn’t what he had come prepared for. Bess’s opening sentence was enough to send a chill all over him. ‘Lanny, why can’t you let my husband alone’?

  He would have had to turn his head to look at her, and he chose to look straight down the road. ‘What do you mean, Bess’? he inquired in as toneless a voice as he could manage.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean’.

  He might have said, ‘No, I don’t,’ Again, he might have said, ‘How did you find out’? But he didn’t want to say either of those things; he wanted time to gather his wits; he was like a boxer who rolls with a heavy punch. He said, ‘Hansi was my friend a long time before he was yours, Bess’.

  ‘Yes, but he was never your husband. And I want to know whether you have made up your mind that it is your duty to break up our marriage’.