The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  He had got a few moments to think. Could Hansi have told her? Surely not! The telephone call—at his end or at her end? Was there a spy in his home or in hers? These Communists were everywhere! Had they followed Hansi into New York? Or Lanny from Edgemere? He had the feeling of being besieged.

  VII

  There was a large elm tree growing by the roadside, offering welcome shade. Bess turned off the road and stopped the car, and there they could sit and have their argument out. Passers-by would assume that it was a couple settling their love problems, or possibly a married couple trying to settle their quarrel. They would hardly guess that it was a pro-Soviet secret agent engaged in a duelling match with an American counter-agent.

  Bess came right to the point, as was her custom. ‘Lanny, you helped to make this marriage, and I was boundlessly grateful, and thought I would be grateful all my life; but now you are trying to break it up, and that is a horrid thing’.

  ‘You are mistaken, Bess’, he declared. ‘Neither Laurel nor I has the slightest desire to break it up’.

  ‘You know that we have been quarrelling and have been utterly miserable; but now Hansi has come to an understanding of what I am doing, and why should you consider it your duty to ruin it? We have been so happy again—it has been like another honeymoon’.

  ‘I assure you again, Bess, you are mistaken’. He could have added quite truthfully, ‘I did not say one word to Hansi against you’. But that would have been admitting that he had met Hansi, and he had made up his mind in a quick flash that he wasn’t going to admit anything. He was going to let her talk, and listen carefully, and learn what he could about how much she knew.

  ‘Everything you say to him is an effort to poison his mind against me. You know that the Communist movement has become my whole life, and now you have turned into a fanatical reactionary. Every word that you speak is an attack upon me’.

  A sudden hope was dawning in his mind. Maybe it was just the radio she was talking about. Maybe she had caught Hansi listening to the Peace Programme! ‘This is a free country, Bess’, he said, deliberately platitudinous. ‘You say what you believe, and I say what I believe’.

  ‘Yes, but why do you have to say it to my husband? Why do you have to meet him at all’?

  So it wasn’t the radio!

  He did not answer, and she went on, ‘What has he to give you now? From your point of view he is a softhead, a slave to a woman. He’s a dupe and a dummy; he will go on repeating the Communist formulas, as you say, like a gramophone. Do you have to listen to that gramophone? You’ve got millions of people listening to you—why can’t you be content with that and let my one man alone’?

  It was a cogent argument, and he had no answer ready. The idea was forming in his mind that maybe she didn’t know anything definite; she just had the suspicion that there had been a meeting—maybe from some word that Hansi had let slip. If she had had definite information that he had taken a long drive with Hansi she could hardly have helped bringing the charge. The temptation to boast of it and to frighten him would have been strong.

  But, on the other hand, maybe she was being as careful as he was. She was by now a well-trained spy, and she wouldn’t give him any hint that would put him on the track of her sources. She would be listening to his every word as carefully as he was listening to hers. He had an advantage over her in that he knew that she knew about him, but she didn’t know that he knew about her. That was a subtle advantage and could be used only with extreme care. It was like a harvest which could not be reaped wholesale but had to be picked out grain by grain.

  ‘Tell me just what you want me to do, Bess’, said he. What you want me to do—not what you want me not to do! That would obviously have been fishing for information.

  ‘I have told you more than once what I want you to do, Lanny. I want you to let Hansi alone. He can be of no use to you. He is nothing of a propagandist; he hasn’t the sort of mind that can deal with theoretical ideas’.

  That wasn’t true, of course. Hansi Robin, labelled as a Communist and appearing on public platforms before great crowds of Leftists, was a powerful propagandist, and incidentally a rich source of funds. But Lanny didn’t say that, for it would have meant an argument. He might have said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you; I won’t try to persuade him if you will not use him for propaganda’. But she would have rejected that proposal, and Lanny wasn’t at all sure that the F.B.I. people would approve it, for the more useful Hansi made himself to the party the more quickly would he be taken into the party’s inner circles.

  What the half-brother said was, ‘I assure you, Bess, I wish Hansi all the happiness in the world, and I wouldn’t do anything to interfere with it’.

  ‘Oh, Lanny, what rubbish’! she exclaimed. ‘One would think you were talking to a child. Haven’t I sat for hours and listened to you pour contempt and abuse upon my cause? Everything you say has been meant to alienate Hansi from me—and for years it has done exactly that’.

  ‘I am sorry, Bess, if you take it that personal way. I have my beliefs, and you have yours, and both of us have expressed them. You yourself said to me the last time we met that individuals do not matter, only the cause matters. Don’t you remember saying that’?

  ‘Yes, I remember it, but I have to take it back; I was mistaken. One individual matters to me, and matters terribly. I have been wretchedly unhappy because I saw Hansi being separated from me’.

  Her voice was trembling, and for the first time he turned his head and looked at her. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I know, Bess’, he said gently, because he too was a husband and a lover.

  ‘I love him, Lanny. I love him with all my heart. I was so happy with him that I was in heaven. The cause that I believed in—the cause that you taught both of us—was a bond between us. I thought we could never be parted except by death. But then I saw that you were ceasing to believe in that cause, and then I saw that you were influencing Hansi against it. I was tempted to hate you, but I couldn’t bear to hate you. I don’t hate you now; I am only heartbroken about it’.

  ‘Where you make your mistake, Bess, is in not realising your cause has changed. It is not the cause I believed in or ever could believe in. I was talking about social justice, brought about by honest means, by free and open discussion, and by the democratic process which we in America know and have practised for centuries’.

  ‘It was a dream, Lanny. It cannot come that way, because the world is not ready for it. The capitalists would never let it happen. You face a situation from which there is no escape. You either have to support the revolutionary proletariat or see the world thrown back once more into complete and utter black reaction’.

  VIII

  So there they were, ready for their argument all over again. ‘Listen for a minute, Bess’, he said. ‘You want me to face facts. I have just been in Soviet-controlled territory. I thought of you often during that trip because I had your arguments in my mind. I would say to myself, “What would Bess make of this”? Be patient and let me tell you some of the facts that I gathered’.

  ‘All right, Lanny’, she said; she had asked him a favour, and she could not refuse one. ‘Tell me your facts, but don’t be surprised if I call them White lies’. There was a capital letter in that word as Bess used it in her thoughts; it didn’t mean what it had meant in her childhood, innocent fibs; it meant monstrous and deadly lies told by the forces of ‘feudal reaction’.

  ‘Let me give you just one illustration. Did you ever hear of the Katyn massacre’?

  ‘Oh, my God, Lanny, are you going to tell me that stale old fantasy’?

  ‘It is two years old and it may be stale, but I assure you it is coming back to fresh life’.

  ‘Everybody knows that the crime was committed by the Nazis, and they have been making a frantic effort to pin it on the Soviets’.

  ‘That is what the Kremlin has told the world, Bess; but I assure you it is a case of truth crushed to earth, and it is bound to rise again. Stalin deliberately mas
sacred fourteen or fifteen thousand Polish officers because he wanted to make it impossible for Poland ever to be revived as a nation’.

  ‘Poland is being revived rapidly right now, I assure you—but as a nation of peasants and workers, and not of aristocrats and landlords’.

  ‘It is being done by the same method of killing and exile to slave-labour camps, and it is being done not on Polish soil, because the Kremlin has taken a great part of the Polish soil and put the Poles on the territory of the Germans. That is the way the seeds of new wars are planted, for it should be perfectly evident to you that the Germans are not going to submit to giving up their land forever to the Poles. Some seven million Germans have been driven out of Silesia and Upper Silesia and the other border provinces. And Poland is no longer Poland; it is becoming a Soviet satellite. The Polish peasants will exist by raising potatoes for the Soviets and selling them at a low price, and buying back machinery from the Soviets at a high price. That may be your idea of social justice, but it surely isn’t mine’.

  So they wrangled, and it was the same as it had been for the past two years, ever since the Politburo had decreed the end of the wartime alliance. Whatever the Politburo ordered Bess to believe, she believed. And if the Politburo told her that something was a White lie, she was sure it was a White lie. As for Red lies, there would, of course, be no such thing.

  Lanny said to her, ‘I wonder, Bess, do you really believe all these things, or do you only say that you believe them, because that is the party’s orders’?

  Her answer was, ‘There is no use being nasty, Lanny. We don’t get anywhere by insulting each other’.

  ‘No—but look. I see you following the party line; I see you shifting your point of view overnight, turning right around in your tracks and saying the opposite of what you said the day before—whenever the party line changes. Can it be possible for any thinking person to do that and not see there is something phony about it, something crazy’?

  ‘You are talking rubbish, Lanny. I never did any such thing’.

  ‘Good Lord, have you forgotten about the time Hitler made his deal with Stalin, in August, 1939? I knew Hitler and I knew that was coming, and I told you so. Don’t you remember how you flew into a fury with me; you called it an obscene idea, a consequence of my associating with the rotten ruling classes. Then the deal was announced and all the Communists had to shift overnight. That deal was permission granted Hitler to attack Poland; and it was not merely a deal for that one purpose: it was complete co-operation between German nazism and Russian communism, which lasted to the very day that Hitler attacked Russia. For almost two years they were allies’.

  ‘You will have to prove that to me’, said Bess.

  ‘If you do not know it’, Lanny answered, ‘it’s because you did not follow your own party doings. Countless tons of literature attacking Britain and attacking the Jews were printed in Germany and shipped from Hamburg in Russian vessels to Vladivostok, and from there to America, to be distributed by the Nazi Bunds in the United States. Members of the German-American Bund received orders to join the Communists and work with them in the United States—of course for peace, to be brought about by means of agitation and strikes in American industry’.

  ‘You seem to know a great deal about Communist party affairs’, remarked the woman sarcastically, and Lanny realised that it mightn’t be good to reveal any more.

  He answered quietly, ‘These things are well known to the public, and if you don’t know them it’s because you don’t want to. It was by that deal with Hitler that Stalin got the eastern third of Poland, and to satisfy the Poles Stalin later gave them the eastern third of Germany. He had to murder millions of human beings to do it and exile ten millions from their homes; but that didn’t mean a thing to Joe Stalin. Human beings as such mean no more to him than so many potato bugs to be exterminated with D.D.T.’

  That was a mistake, because it set Bess to defending the reputation of the great Soviet father and saved her from having to answer for her party-line shifts. They wrangled all over Europe and Asia, and Lanny said that Bess was a gramophone, and Bess said that Lanny was a puppet of the Truman Doctrine and was trying to buy both Europe and Asia with Marshall Plan money.

  At last she broke out, ‘We’re not getting anywhere! We’re just hating each other! I didn’t come for this. I can’t make any impression on you, and I know that you can’t make any on me. What I came for was to beg you just one thing: let my husband alone’!

  He answered her very gravely and carefully, ‘Bess, I have no present reason for seeing Hansi and I have no present intention of seeing him. I am perfectly willing to promise you that if I do see him again I will carefully avoid saying anything to turn him against you and to interfere with your happiness’. He could say that quite truthfully, for he knew there was no need to argue with or persuade Hansi on the subject of world communism and its determination to ‘be the human race’.

  IX

  So she drove him back to his own car, and they parted. At Shepherdstown, through which he passed, he sought out a telephone pay station, shut himself up in the little booth, and put in a person-to-person call to Hansi Robin at his home. He listened in while the operator got Mr Robin, and then he said, ‘Is Mr Rotterdam there’?

  ‘There’s no such person here’, was the answer. That was Hansi speaking; it was code, arranged between them. There were telephones both on the ground floor and the second floor of Hansi’s house, and thus a possibility of someone listening in. Lanny said, ‘Call Shepherdstown 1438 immediately’.

  ‘You must have the wrong number’, said the voice of Hansi.

  ‘I repeat, Shepherdstown 1438’. And Lanny hung up.

  They had taken pains to work out this arrangement. Hansi was to leave the house and go to some pay station where he was not known, or at any rate would not attract attention. He was then to call the number Lanny had given. So Lanny waited, strolling up and down, near enough so that he could hear the sound of the bell, and meantime pondering a mystery. He thought of the people who were in Hansi’s house and the people who were in his own house and in the office and what part any one of them could have played in the betrayal. He had been struck by the fact that Bess had not revealed knowledge of the circumstances of the meeting between himself and her husband. It seemed humanly unlikely that she would have failed to boast of her knowledge if she had possessed it. She would have tried to pin him down as to where they had gone and how long they had been together. It seemed the best guess that some party member, knowing Lanny and Hansi by sight, had seen them driving in the car.

  A man came to the little booth and used the phone. This meant that Hansi would get a report that the line was busy; but he wouldn’t give up. So Lanny waited until at last he heard a ring and stepped to the phone, and there was Hansi. Neither spoke the other’s name; they knew each other’s voices. Lanny said, ‘Did you tell Isabella about our meeting’?

  ‘Certainly not’, was the reply in a tone of surprise.

  ‘I was quite sure you hadn’t, but I wanted to warn you. We must be more careful. She came to see me and wanted me to promise not to see you. I did promise that I wouldn’t try to change your ideas. I can’t be sure how it happened, but I am guessing that someone saw us. Anyhow, be warned’.

  ‘There is something important going on’, said the other voice, ‘but I can’t talk about it’.

  ‘Of course not. Good luck, and don’t worry too much about this’.

  BOOK FIVE

  Fate Sits on These Dark Battlements

  13 WITH BLUSTER TO CONFOUND

  I

  There came a letter from Monck. He gave more details of that strange cold war that was going on with Berlin as its focal point. Berlin, the helpless, unwilling city—Monck compared it to the living prey for which two fierce beasts contend, pulling it this way and that and snarling at each other. ‘Hate is a blind thing’, Monck wrote. ‘They are hoping to drive you Americans out, but they are only making you angry’.

>   Lanny examined his own heart and realised that this was true. Day by day as the news came in he found that he was thinking less about the Russian people, who were as helpless as the Germans, and more about those masters in the Kremlin, those men of hatred and lies who were making the name ‘Russian’ odious to all decent and honest people in the world. It was all so needless, so utterly senseless; yet here it was, the whole civilised world being kept in torment, torn in half, and perhaps doomed to destruction, by deliberately inculcated hatred, built up by deliberately concocted falsehoods.

  Monck never wrote more than a line or two about his own work. ‘We are making progress’, he said, ‘but slowly’. And then he added a puzzling sentence: ‘The deaf French girl is at work’. Lanny stopped and searched his memory; he hadn’t met any French girl in Germany that he could recall, and certainly no deaf one. He read on: ‘She has met Ferdinand, and I think something is developing between them. That indeed would be a complication, and I wouldn’t know what to expect from it’.

  Suddenly it flashed over Lanny what Monck was doing—making up a code as he wrote. No code name had been assigned Anna Surden, or at any rate it hadn’t been told to Lanny. Now Monck was giving him one. Monck had lived in Paris and worked with Lanny there, and both of them knew the language. He was making a pun on the French word sourde, meaning deaf. He was calling her the French girl to give Lanny the clue.

  Plainly he was suggesting that Anna and Fritz Meissner were involved in some sort of affair; and that was a curious development indeed. In Lanny’s conference with Morrison and Monck the suggestion had been that Anna might get hold of one of the Himmler-money men, but apparently no one of the three had thought of the possibility that Fritz might be the victim. Yet what could be more natural? Fritz was there, home from school; he was at the susceptible age, and to a female spy on the hunt he would present himself as the perfect target.