The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Over the clover, over the grass!

  That song had something to convey on the subject of man’s destiny and his attitude toward what he was powerless to change. There was nothing new about it; nearly three thousand years earlier the prophet Isaiah had stated, ‘All flesh is grass’; the Psalmist had sung, ‘As for man his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth’.

  And when the human grass was mown, did it dry up and turn to dust and disappear? Comman sense declared it so; but common sense was faring badly in the modern world. Two centuries ago the philosopher Immanuel Kant had announced that time was not an ultimate reality but merely a form of human thought; and recently the formulas of Albert Einstein had confirmed this. Einstein had announced that space is curved; and what could common sense make of that? To say that time was a mode of thought appeared to imply that all things which had ever existed, and that things which were going to exist already existed.

  Common sense apparently found it easier to believe in telepathy; but what was it, and how did it work? Apparently there was some method by which Laurel in a state of trance and without knowing it could dip into her husband’s mind and take from it things of which he was not consciously thinking at the moment and of which she would have no memory when she came out of the trance. Lanny had never mentioned the poem to her and very certainly he had never spoken the name Ferdinand.

  He told her now that he knew a German who had been arrested by the Reds and that Madame had talked about him. Laurel said, ‘Our minds are one’; and she didn’t mean just her mind and Lanny’s, she meant the mind of the German and perhaps also the mind of Madame, which might still be existing under some mode other than that of time. Lanny referred to a statement of America’s most honoured psychologist, William James, who had spent years investigating the case of a Boston lady, Mrs Piper, a trance medium who was never exposed or accused of fraud. He had written that the case left you a choice between two alternatives: you could believe that Mrs Piper had communications from the dead, or that she had access to the minds and memories of every person living upon earth.

  Lanny went off by himself and thought about the problem from his own special point of view. Had he learned anything about Fritz Meissner? If any part of the communication had come out of the young fellow’s mind, it meant that he had been tortured into unconsciousness. What an odd idea, that when he had lost consciousness his subconsciousness could communicate with a medium! And then, perhaps, when he came back to what we call life, he could no longer do it! Common sense might call that fantastic; but after all, wasn’t the very idea of a subconscious mind fantastic? All the psychologists agreed that such a mind existed; but wasn’t consciousness the very essence of mind as we conceive it?

  The psychologists of materialism conceived of mind as electrons or electrical forces composing the atoms of brain cells. Something set off a spark, something caused a change in the position of those electrons, and a new idea popped into your head. And you yourself, investigating the phenomenon, you with your hopes and fears, intellectual curiosities and moral purposes, you were nothing but trillions of electrons which happened to form accidental combinations; and so you founded an empire, or wrote a book, or composed a symphony. That was common sense.

  IV

  Now and then when Lanny was in New York he would pick up a copy of the Daily Worker on a news stand, because he wanted to know what the Communists were doing and saying. He read that Hansi Robin was giving a concert in one of the large halls on the East side, and when he told Laurel about it she said, ‘Let’s go and hear him’. She was free now, for the baby was weaned and had a dependable nurse.

  They said nothing to anyone about this project, for they were supposed to be cool toward the Hansibesses. They didn’t have any Communists on their Peace staff, and Laurel wanted to make it plain that they had no tolerance for them. But when they were alone they talked a great deal about Hansi and wondered how he was getting along. He must be a lonely man indeed, but Lanny hesitated to try to see him again.

  They motored into the city, had dinner at one of the hotels, and then drove to the neighbourhood of the hall. Their car was not conspicuous, for a number of people came from uptown to hear this violin virtuoso. Lanny bought seats in the balcony, where they would be less apt to be seen by anyone who knew them. About them was a crowd, mostly young people, and nearly all foreigners or of foreign descent. They were, as they proclaimed themselves, ‘the wretched of the earth’. That was nothing to their discredit in the eyes of two ardent friends of social justice. They become objects of distaste only when they espoused a programme of hatred and cruelty.

  Many, of course, were there for music and that alone, music having no class divisions and knowing no class enemies. When the tall, blackclad figure of Hansi Robin appeared upon the stage they greeted him with vigorous applause and kept it up; there was no way to tell how many were applauding a musical magician who would lead them into a land of dreams, and how many were hailing the new, the real, the very imminent social revolution.

  Hansi had got himself a young man as accompanist. He had done this at the party’s orders, so he had told Lanny. Hansi was a ‘name character’, as the jargon had it; he was to be exploited for his fame and his earning capacity.

  Bess, on the other hand, had become a secret worker. She had given up her party card and was no longer listed as a member. Such persons never appear in public and are never mentioned in the party press. The party didn’t go so far as to order her to divorce her husband, but they were not permitted to appear in public together. She would never again enter any party headquarters or be seen with a known party official. For her to enter the Russian Consulate or the Amtorg office would have been unthinkable.

  Hansi Robin never spoke from the platform; he let the music speak, and if there was any ‘class angling’ it was supplied by the imagination of the audience. Hansi seldom played Bach or other music in which the element of structure was important; he played tumultuous music, music of passion, and whether it was Paganini or Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Prokofiev, the hearers made their own interpretations of it; they marched to battle with it, they stormed the barricades with it, they shouted with its rage or its triumph. And when Hansi reached the climax they rose and gave him such an ovation as only a conquering commissar receives. The mob spirit flamed so high that it frightened Laurel, and she whispered to her husband, ‘He should not go on with it! He is doing more harm than good!’

  The crowd clamoured for encore after encore, and at last when Hansi was tired he played ‘Home, Sweet Home’, and the show broke up with laughter. They crowded to the platform before he could make his escape. Women were in the forefront. It was always that way; they went crazy over him. He stood with the fiddle in his left hand and the bow in his right hand, holding them in front of him defensively. ‘They cannot storm the breastworks’, he had said to Lanny and Laurel with his quiet humour. By holding the instruments he made sure that nobody could get to shake his hands and ruin them.

  The two friends did not try to approach him. Bess might be there, or she would have a party representative to take care of him and watch him. So precious a piece of freight would never be left alone. One or more of them would drive him out to his home. They would be proud of the opportunity and afterward would boast of the intimacy. They would plaster him with flattery on the way, and he would not enjoy it.

  V

  Driving back to Jersey, Laurel said, ‘You ought to see him, Lanny, and cheer him up. He is having such a miserable life’.

  So late the next morning, the time when Bess was apt to be gone about her business and Hansi either practising or composing, Lanny drove to a nearby town and dropped some coins into the box of a pay station. He disguised his voice and asked, ‘Who is that?’ If it had been anyone but Hansi he was prepared to say, ‘Wrong number’, and hang up.

  But it was Hansi, and Lanny said quickly, ‘North end of the Mall in Central Park, ten o’clock tomorrow morning’. Hansi said, ‘R
ight’, and that was all. It had been done so quickly that Lanny felt sure no spy could have heard it.

  He had picked out that spot because only nursemaids and children were likely to be there; the Communists would be busy with their jobs on a weekday morning and not apt to be strolling in the middle of Central Park. He got there a bit ahead of time and sat buried in the reading of his newspaper. He did not look up when a taxicab came along the other side of the drive and a man got out, paid the driver, and took a little stroll until the taxi had disappeared. Then he came over and hopped in beside Lanny and away they went. There really seemed no chance that they could be caught this time.

  Lanny drove rapidly north, out of the park and up to the George Washington Bridge. On the other side was the drive that went up the Hudson River; beautiful scenery, but they wouldn’t think about it for long. They would have lunch in some obscure café and make a day of it, if Hansi could spare the time, which he did. ‘I’ll have to say I’ve been to a movie’, he explained. ‘Have you seen one recently?’ As it happened, Lanny had read about one, so he told the plot and the names of the stars, enough detail so that Hansi would be able to answer his wife’s questions.

  ‘You’ve no idea how closely she watches me’, he said. ‘We live in a state of siege, and she doesn’t let the enemy get near me’.

  ‘You haven’t managed to convince her yet?’

  ‘It’s a case of off-again, on-again; one day she is satisfied and very affectionate and happy; the next day she is assailed by doubts and watches me like a hawk. She is more afraid of you than of anybody else’.

  They talked about the mysterious betrayal of their previous assignation. Hansi said that the two servants in their home were both comrades, and it was entirely possible that Bess had had them keep watch over a wayward husband; but he didn’t think they had overheard that telephone conversation. It was easier for him to believe that someone who knew Bess had observed the meeting at the Lexington Avenue corner. ‘The Mall is a much better place’, he said. ‘Let’s meet there in the future’. So they agreed.

  Lanny told of having been to the concert and of his reaction and Laurel’s. Hansi said, ‘For the comrades it is “comes the revolution”; but there are always some music lovers, and I play for them. Of course, when Bess asks me to play something, that is a command, and I obey; she is the one I have to please. I don’t know whether she has been officially appointed my party boss, but she has taken that role and controls my affairs’.

  ‘Have you managed to toughen your skin, Hansi?’

  ‘It is a terrible life. I haven’t a single human being I can talk to frankly—I mean, excepting you, and I am afraid to see you. Post won’t let me come to the office any more; you gave him a scare. He says I’m too well known and too important; so I have to meet a man in a car as I meet you. I give him what material I have, and he gives me orders, and that does for another week unless I strike something urgent’.

  ‘How long do they expect you to go on with this?’

  ‘They don’t know, Lanny; at any rate they don’t tell me. It depends on circumstances. They are on the trail of a network of spies. I have been able to guide them to a place in New York where the microfilm is developed, and you can imagine how important that is. The trail leads right up to one of the principal Consulate people’.

  ‘What will they do to him?’

  ‘They can’t do anything but put him out; he has diplomatic immunity. But there are others who can be jailed. I suppose the government people are playing them along until they make out a perfect case’.

  ‘Isn’t it possible the Reds may be getting vitally important evidence in the meantime?’

  ‘They don’t tell me much about it, but I gather they are playing the Reds for suckers. They are supplying them with information that looks good but isn’t. You can see how it must be in some big industry, carrying on research to perfect a new invention or a technique. They try various schemes that don’t work out. Sometimes they go a long way; they get formulas, blueprints, working models, all kinds of things that cost a lot of money and then don’t pay off. They are getting a lot of those things together and making it possible for the spies to steal them; the Soviet people are just gobbling them up, paying money for them and flying them to Moscow by special couriers. It means they will waste a lot of time and money and get nowhere. Then maybe they will shoot the spies and save us the trouble’.

  ‘This world gets more like a melodrama every day I live in it’, said Lanny. ‘We must learn to take it as a show, Hansi’.

  ‘I’m trying to’, was the reply, ‘but it’s not my temperament. I guess I’m too emotional. I’m trying to discipline myself; but what it will do to my music I don’t know’.

  Said Lanny. ‘Your fiddle wouldn’t be of much use to you if you were shipped off to Siberia and put to work in a coal mine’.

  VI

  Lanny told a little about the case of Fritz Meissner, not naming or describing him, simply saying that he was a German who had been doing espionage work for the Americans and had disappeared without a trace. ‘Here in New York’, Lanny said, ‘it is just a class war, but there it’s both class war and national war. It’s so close and so hot that you can feel the enemy’s breath in your face’.

  He described the events of the Writers’ Congress and told of the new decision, that R.I.A.S. was to fight back against the Red slanders. He told about his visit to Paris and the scenes he had witnessed there. Thorez, the leader of the Communists, had remarked, ‘This is not a strike, it is a battle’.

  These stories were of vital importance to Hansi; they gave him fresh courage and made him realise that he was not alone in the world; that he was right in what he was doing; and especially that he was right in deceiving his wife and bringing her efforts to failure. Lanny knew Bess; he had known her from her childhood, close to a decade before Hansi had entered her life.

  ‘Can you bear to have me talk frankly about her?’ asked the musician.

  Lanny said, ‘The last time I talked to her I could have boxed her ears’.

  ‘She regards me as her trophy, Lanny. She wears me as a military man wears his decorations. She is proud of me and exhibits me, but at the same time I am her property, and if I were to change my mind I would be a robber. She takes care of me the same way she would take care of a diamond tiara; she watches everybody who comes near me. If she sees a woman showing too great interest in me she wants to tear her hair out, or her eyes’.

  ‘The Communist women, I imagine, are not much troubled by timidity’.

  ‘Oh, my God! The Communist women are trained from girlhood to go after men and bring them in; to seduce them; indoctrinate them, compromise them—anything to get them into the movement. The Communist boss will point out a target, a man who has something the party wants—a lawyer who will defend them, a legislator who will vote for a bill, a reporter who will write up their stories, a labour leader who will call a strike, or just an ordinary rich man who will put up the funds for their fellow-traveller organisations, their papers, their Workers’ Aid, or whatever it may be’.

  ‘Has Bess become like that, Hansi?’

  ‘How can I know? Bess goes off for an hour, a day, or a week, and when she comes back she doesn’t say where she has been; the words “party work” are supposed to cover everything. But she questions me on where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, and I have to answer her. I have to keep her satisfied at all hazards; my progress and usefulness in the party depend upon her support. The party bigwigs ask her if I can be trusted, and if she doesn’t say yes, then I am out’.

  ‘They are terrible people, Hansi!’

  ‘There are some good people among them; people who come in believing the propaganda that they love the workers, that they believe in peace, and that all they seek is the abolition of poverty and exploitation. Sometimes it takes a year or two, but in the end the good people find out what the party really is and get out. But meantime they have joined some of the front organisations, they h
ave let their names be used, they have even taken out party cards—and so they are ruined for life. They have the fear hanging over them that they will be exposed and will lose their jobs, their influence, their careers’.

  ‘It’s the dogma that brings out the worst in them, Hansi. At least that’s the conclusion I’ve come to’.

  ‘It’s the teaching and the practice of hatred. I have watched it—I have become an expert in this study of hatred. It ruins the minds of both men and women. They say they hate only their class enemies, but it doesn’t work that way. They get into a dispute over party doctrine and in no time at all they are hating the persons who hold the wrong ideas. They seek power and are jealous of those who get it. They can’t have the smallest conference or party meeting without hurling accusations at each other, calling each other abusive names—deviationist, Social Fascist, Trotskyite, traitor to the working class, lackey of Wall Street, renegade, betrayer, and so on without end. They are full of suspicion, they attribute bad motives to everybody. They cultivate bad manners, which they consider the proper proletarian signature. I listen to them in amazement and wonder where all this comes from; I never heard it in Holland, where I was brought up, nor in Germany, and surely not in America. Where does it come from?’

  Lanny answered with some reluctance, ‘I have made up my mind that it is something out of Russia. It is a product of age-old despotism and terror. It is the way of life where people are suspicious because their lives depend upon it; they are in danger of being poisoned or stabbed every hour. We in the free world cannot understand it, can’t even believe it’.

  ‘That is it!’ exclaimed Hansi. ‘I shudder sometimes when I see it. I say to myself, My God, I’m back in the Dark Ages! I am no longer a civilised man!’

  VII

  They had come to the country below West Point, where the Hudson River narrows between mountains. They stopped at a little café by the roadside, where it seemed unlikely that anyone would recognise them—and nobody did. After lunch they rode again and stopped at a lonely place and got out to admire the view. Snow had fallen up here, and the hills were beautiful with a fresh white coat glistening in the sun. They locked the car and climbed a little knoll from which the view of the river was magnificent. ‘How much like the Rhine!’ Hansi exclaimed, and Lanny agreed. But there were no castles. It was the country Washington Irving had made famous by his tales. They could have imagined the little men who caused the thunder by their playing ninepins; they could have imagined Rip Van Winkle waking in the meadow from his twenty-year sleep. But no such thoughts occurred to them; they were not romancing about things past, they were helping to make the events of the future.