The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  And from the other side of the great heartland came the sound of yet other bones being crunched. The Soviet government informed the United Nations that it would not permit a United Nations commission to investigate conditions in North Korea; and a couple of weeks later Soviet headquarters in North Korea announced the setting up in that land of a Democratic People’s Republic and the organising and training of a Democratic People’s Army. All the world knew by now what those adjectives meant. ‘Democratic’ meant that there would be an election with only one ticket, and people who wanted to stay out of slave-labour camps would go to the polls and vote for it by something like 99.8 per cent. A ‘people’s government’ meant that the people would be governed by it, and a ‘people’s army’ meant that the people would be drafted into it and taken into battle whenever their Kremlin masters were ready. Bones, bones!

  BOOK SIX

  They That Sow in Tears

  16 BEST DRAW MY SWORD

  I

  Lanny and Laurel had a special and particular reason for listening to the radio and for looking at headlines whenever they walked past a news-stand. But they couldn’t do these things all the time—especially not when they had waited for many weeks and might have to wait for more. They had to go to the office and read their mail and dictate answers; when they were at home they had to put their minds on editing a manuscript or reading a book.

  And so it came about that somebody else got the news ahead of them. Lanny was in his little office, busy dictating letters to his secretary, when there came a tap on the door. It was a girl, one of those who opened the mail; she was half breathless with excitement. ‘Oh, Mr Budd—excuse me for interrupting—something terrible has happened’.

  ‘What is it?’ Lanny asked. He could pretty nearly guess and had prepared himself for a first-class job of play acting.

  ‘Oh, Mr Budd, my sister lives in New York and works on the Daily Mirror, and she just telephoned me they have a headline coming out—’

  ‘Yes, yes’, said Lanny. ‘What?’

  ‘A big headline on the front page that says, “Hansi Robin Jugged”.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Lanny. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means arrested, sir. And—and—’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And Mrs Robin!’ Presumably the girl had been trying to say ‘and your sister’, but she hadn’t been able to get out the awful words.

  Lanny did his first-class job. ‘But what for?’ he asked.

  ‘It says they are Communist spies!’

  So Lanny did no more dictating that morning. He jumped up and went into the radio room and turned on the receiving set. He knew by heart where to look for news at any particular period. The girl had followed him, and his secretary and others in the office came streaming in. He might have closed the door and kept the radio low, but that would have been cruel. They were all bound to know it before long, and might as well get it here as anywhere. He turned it up, and the whole office came to listen. They heard:

  ‘.… arrests continuing. The F.B.I. refused any further comment on the matter. They would not state the location of the photographic studio, but rumour has it located on Delancey Street. A pickup truck was loaded with photographic material and papers at the place. Several of the alleged conspirators were arrested there and others at their homes. It is said that one of the Russians involved enjoys diplomatic immunity, but this is uncertain, and the F.B.I. refused to discuss the question. They have been watching the spy ring for months and have obtained a great deal of evidence, both at the spy centre and at the homes of those spies who are employed in the factory.

  ‘It is not known whether or not the home of Mr and Mrs Robin has been searched. Both he and his wife have been active in the Communist party and have made no secret of their beliefs. The arrest will cause a sensation in the musical world, as Hansi Robin is considered one of the greatest living violinists, and his wife has been his accompanist for most of their married years. They have made extensive tours in Europe. They lived for nearly two years in Russia and have expressed their satisfaction with what they found there.

  ‘Bessie Budd Robin comes from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Connecticut. Her father is Robert Budd, president of Budd-Erling Aircraft in Newcastle, Connecticut, and her mother is Mrs Esther Remsen Budd, daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle. Hansi Robin’s father is Johannes Robin, who was reputed one of the wealthiest capitalists of Germany and was jailed by the Nazis and lost his fortune there. He is now head of the sales department of Budd-Erling Aircraft in New York.

  ‘More news in just a moment, but first here is an important word from our sponsor. If you use Babyskin Soap you can be sure of having a complexion as beautiful and fair as any baby’s. Babyskin Soap is made from the purest olive oil from Italy and coconut oil from the glamorous isles of the South Seas. We guarantee if you will use Babyskin Soap for just one week you will discover’—and so on for sixty seconds, and after that the scores of a golf tournament in Florida, and then intercollegiate basketball matches that might or might not have been ‘fixed.’

  II

  It was permissible for Lanny to be disturbed by that news and to jump into his car to drive to the house to tell his wife. That left the members of the staff in their different rooms to chatter excitedly. There wouldn’t be much work done for an hour or two; that too was excusable.

  At home Lanny discovered that Laurel had just been told the news by a neighbour and friend of the programme who had called up. Alone by themselves, husband and wife didn’t have to do any play-acting. They could shut their door and discuss quietly the course of events. Lanny said, ‘Evidently the F.B.I. means for Hansi to go on. If they hadn’t arrested him it would have been a giveaway.’

  ‘How long do you suppose they will hold him?’ Laurel asked.

  ‘I don’t know what the federal procedure is. No doubt they will be admitted to bail.’

  ‘Poor Hansi! It will give him a dreadful black eye.’

  ‘Yes, but on the other hand it may take him into the very heart of the Communist underground., That, I am guessing, is what the government is figuring on.’

  The telephone began ringing. It would ring all day. One friend after another called up to commiserate, and some, of course out of curiosity, in order to be able to tell their friends how the couple were taking the dreadful news.

  Presently there was a call from New York, a woman’s voice. ‘Mr Budd? This is Mercy Colfax. I don’t know if you will remember me; you had tea in my studio in Greenwich Village many, many years ago.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lanny said politely. ‘I remember you very well, Miss Colfax.’

  ‘I am the secretary of the Liberal Defence League. I would like very much to see you, Mr. Budd—as soon as possible.’

  ‘Could you come out to Edgemere?’

  ‘With pleasure, Mr. Budd.’

  ‘Very well then. Come to my house, please. I expect to be at home the rest of the day.’

  ‘I will come by the first train.’

  Lanny hung up. ‘Mercy Colfax,’ he said to Laurel, who was in the room. ‘She is Bryn Mawr and Boston Back Bay. I met her several times in the old days when I was knocking about in Greenwich Village. She’s been in all the radical groups. Someone said she was Communist, but I didn’t worry about that in those days. We were all practising what we called the “united front.” We found the Communists useful because they were hard workers; we called them “good radicals.”’

  ‘What do you suppose she wants?’

  ‘She announced herself as secretary of the Liberal Defence League; that will be a Commie front, no doubt. They have taken up all the good words and poisoned them. You can’t say “liberal,” you can’t say “democratic,” you can’t say “people’s” you can’t say “workers” any more. She is coming to ask me to put up bail for Bess and to help pay her lawyers.’

  ‘What will you say to her?’

  ‘I’ll say plenty. It w
ill be a show you won’t want to miss, but I want her to think we’re alone, so you can listen at a crack in the door. She might become confidential, or she might get angry and say more than she means.’

  ‘Mercy?’ said Laurel. ‘What an unusual name for a Red.’

  ‘She’s old Puritan, of course,’ he answered. ‘Probably some of her forefathers came on the Mayflower. In her bones she is still proud of them, you can wager.’

  III

  It took Miss Mercy Colfax a couple of hours to make connections and reach Lanny’s home; she arrived in a taxi and may have come all the way in it. He remembered her as a sturdily built, round-faced woman with flaxen hair cut short, in the fashion of the flappers. Now her hair was longer and snow white, but her face was still unlined, and she held herself with dignity. Seated in the living room of the Budd home she stopped for no preliminaries. ‘I suppose, Mr Budd, you have heard the terrible news.’

  ‘I have heard it three times over the radio and about a dozen times over the telephone, Miss Colfax. It is a blow to me, and a worse blow to the family. We all knew that Hansi and Bess were Communists, but we had no idea they were engaged in underground activities.’

  ‘I am shocked to hear you say such a thing, Mr Budd. Surely you will not prejudge this case! I assure you most earnestly that Hansi and Bess are perfectly innocent, the victims of a wretched conspiracy inspired by the redbaiters.’

  ‘I hope you are correct, Miss Colfax,’ said Lanny mildly. ‘Before we go any further, let me ask you one question. Are you a Communist?’

  The lady’s tone became precise and puritanical. ‘I am, as I told you, Mr Budd, the secretary of the Liberal Defence League, and I have come to see you in that capacity.’

  ‘Yes, but I do not know about the League, Miss Colfax, and I can only judge it by its secretary. Are you a Communist?’

  ‘What my personal beliefs are surely have nothing to do with the question, Mr Budd.’

  ‘From my point of view they have everything to do with it, so I hope you will answer my question.’

  ‘Please let me tell you what I have come for—’

  ‘You understand of course that if you refuse to answer the question I have to assume that you are a Communist.’

  ‘I cannot help what conclusions you draw, Mr Budd, I beg you to hear what I have to say.’

  ‘Certainly I will hear you, Miss Colfax, but I wish you to know in advance that I know I’m listening to a Communist.’

  ‘I assure you, Mr Budd, that this series of arrests is an act of provocation on the part of the reactionary forces in our government. It is an effort to intimidate those few intellectuals who have had the courage to speak on behalf of peace and against the frenzy of red-baiting that has seized our public.’

  Lanny’s tone was no less precise. ‘You have refused to admit that you are a Communist, Miss Colfax. I will tell you that I have known many Communists, and I know all their phrases, and when a Communist talks about peace and freedom I am not fooled for a single instant. I am not going to argue with you; I am just telling you that your generalised words are meaningless to me.”

  ‘It can’t be meaningless to you, Mr Budd, that your sister and your brother-in-law have been thrown into jail—Hansi Robin, one of the great musical artists of our time!”

  ‘Yes, Miss Colfax; but I did my suffering a long time ago, when I saw that they were becoming Communists. I warned them what would happen, and now I have a clear conscience in the matter.’

  ‘And you mean that you would let your own sister rot in jail?’

  ‘I mean that I know perfectly well my own sister will not be in jail more than a few hours. I know that my own sister belongs to an organisation which has immense resources, collected in part from our enemies abroad and in part from wealthy dupes at home. Let them put up the bail and pay the Red lawyers. I certainly will not.’

  ‘I have never been more shocked, Mr Budd—’

  ‘I’m truly sorry to shock you, Miss Colfax, and I am not speaking sarcastically. From your first name alone I would know who your forefathers were and what your heritage is. Bess has the same heritage, and so have I. I say to you what I said to her years ago: I know that you joined the Communist party from the noblest of motives, a real sense of mercy, of pity for the poor and oppressed. It is terrible indeed to see such idealism betrayed. I beg you to open your eyes to the facts and realise that your cause has been taken over by gangsters. It has become a counterfeit revolution. It has broken all its promises and forsaken all its dreams and blasted all the hopes of its followers. It has become history’s horror. You and I who were good radicals back in the old Greenwich Village days have no place in the programme of such men. They use us so long as we still have power and can be of use to them; but the moment they have the power and need us no longer, we become a mockery to them. We become nuisances and pests, and they throw us into jail, they subject us to hideous tortures, they send us to slave-labour camps where we exist on eight hundred calories a day and fade away in two or three years of the diseases of malnutrition; or more mercifully they take us into a dark cellar and shoot us in the back of the neck and then carry us out and dump us into a crematory.’

  This granddaughter of the Puritans was sitting rigidly, her fists tightly clenched and the blood mounting into her well-rounded cheeks. ‘I see, Mr Budd, that you have fallen a hopeless victim to the redbaiters!’

  ‘Redbaiting, Miss Colfax? Redbaiting is the crime of telling the historical facts about the Communist party, that it has taken up lock, stock, and barrel the programme of Tsarist imperialism. It has taken the tactics also and has multiplied them in horror. Don’t you know how Engels promised that the state would wither away and how Lenin endorsed this? How much withering have you seen? Don’t you know that all the old Bolsheviks, the old idealists who were Lenin’s comrades and friends, have every one of them been foully murdered?

  ‘I have been in the Soviet Union, Miss Colfax; and before that I knew some of those men in Europe. My own uncle Jesse Blackless was one of them; he was a painter and a fairly good one, and he gave his whole life to the cause. When I was at the Yalta Conference I met him secretly and found him a wretched disillusioned, heartbroken old man. I knew Lincoln Steffens, who died in the same state of mind. Don’t you know the list of old Bolsheviks whom Stalin and his minions of the Gaypayoo have had shot or poisoned? I will call the roll to you’—and Lanny began, like a drill sergeant calling off the names of his squad: ‘Zinoviev, Rykov, Rakovsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Krylenko, Smirnov, Tukashevsky, Piatakov, Karakhan—’

  The list was too long for the woman’s patience. ‘That will do, Mr Budd,’ she said. ‘I was told that you were a liberal man, but I see I have wasted my time.’

  ‘I hope that I have not wasted my time, Miss Colfax,’ he said very gently. ‘I have planted a seed; and sometimes a seed may lie dormant for years before it begins to sprout and take root. I have told you the truth, and it will lie in your mind, and someday you may begin to relate your observations to it, and your mind will change. If ever the time comes that you really believe in democracy and understand freedom as your forefathers and mine understood it, you may come to me with a cause that is honest, and I will not refuse help.’

  That was the last affront to her New England conscience. She got up and stalked out without another word, and Laurel, who had been standing behind the door, came forward, wreathed in smiles. ‘I am relieved,’ she said, ‘I was afraid she might consider it her duty to shoot you.’

  Lanny replied, ‘The combination of perfect Boston and Bolshevik is horribly strange. I am sure that in her heart she looks down upon the “kumrads” from a great height.’

  IV

  Lanny called up his father to see how he was taking it, and more especially how Esther was taking it. Robbie said, ‘I was worried because I couldn’t prepare her, but I found that she had prepared herself.’

  Lanny wasn’t surprised, for he knew that Esther Remsen Budd, another daughter of the Puritans, had
intelligence enough to look at the world about her and observe where it was going. ‘She had it out with Bess a long time ago,’ said her husband, ‘and she guessed what Bess was up to. What she insists now is that I must go to the jail and put it up to Bess once and for all. If she will promise to quit the Communists for good we will put the bail and get the right man to defend her.’

  ‘Of course she won’t do that,’ Lanny said.

  ‘I know,’ replied the father. ‘But we must give her the chance, and then our consciences will be clear. Esther says if I don’t go she will. I just talked with Johannes about it, and he says he will do the same thing for Hansi. It won’t do any good, of course, but we will go together.’

  ‘How is Mamma Robin taking it?’

  ‘He’s terribly worried about her. The poor old creature—he says she hasn’t stopped crying for a moment since she heard the news. He’s afraid it will kill her. You had better call her up and say something kind.’

  Lanny made a sudden resolution. ‘I’ll do more than that,’ he said. ‘I’ll go see her and let her weep on my shoulder.’

  That would be no new thing, for Lanny Budd had met Leah Robin in Berlin when she was in the utmost despair and terror. Her husband was in the hands of the Nazis, who were forcing him to part with everything he owned in the world. Her youngest son, Freddi, had disappeared, and she was a fugitive, hiding like a terrified rabbit. Lanny had been able to get the husband, wife, and the older son out of Germany. He had tried to help Freddi, but in vain; Freddi, her baby, her gentle and kind one, who had played the clarinet so charmingly and had never done harm to any living soul! After the Nazis had brought him close to death with their tortures—because he was a Socialist as well as a Jew—they had turned him over to Lanny at the border. He had died in France and been buried according to Jewish ritual on the Riviera near Lanny’s home. Some thirteen years had passed since then, and Leah had found a safe home in America; she was no longer rich, but then she had never wanted to be rich, so she had insisted to Lanny. All she wanted was enough so that they could live in peace.