The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  The prisoners were taken to the Tombs. ‘I don’t know about the others’, Hansi said, ‘but they fixed us up comfortably, Johanssen, the accountant, and me—I suppose you read about him in the paper. He is a Dane, a blonde fellow, very quiet and determined, bitter when he talks frankly. It was my business to make friends with him, so I told him about my trips to the Soviet Union and all the wonders I had seen there and how I loved the Russian people I had known—which is true enough. He had every reason to trust me, and he did. He told me the story of his hard life. He got his head cracked in a strike, and that made him into a Communist. He dropped out of party work several years ago, took a new name, and joined the underground. He studied to be an accountant on purpose and then got a job in the Jones plant. He stole the combination to the safe where the classified papers were kept. He was introduced to Bess—he didn’t know who she was. He just knew her as Mary, and she knew him as Jim’.

  ‘He told you all that in the cell?’ demanded Lanny.

  ‘They had caught him with the safe open, so he figured the jig was up; but he talked in a low tone. They told him they had got me nailed down too, so we were comrades in misery. He wasn’t worried over the prospect of several years in jail—he said he could keep busy educating some of the men in there, and they would make as good workers as anyone else once they became class-conscious’.

  Lanny brought up the subject he had discussed with Laurel. ‘Tell me, Hansi, are you going to live alone in that house?’

  ‘I’ll get along all right, Lanny. I will lose myself in my work’.

  ‘Shall we be able to see something of you?’

  ‘After Bess goes on her trip next week. She is terribly afraid of you, and I mustn’t have any quarrel with her—surely not until the trial comes off. If the Communists got the faintest idea of what I’m going to do they would come down on me like a ton of bricks. They might shoot me’.

  ‘If you want to hide we will hide you’, Lanny said. ‘You can tell Bess the newspaper reporters are hounding you’.

  ‘I wouldn’t have to lie about that; they’ve been trying to bribe the servants’.

  IV

  Lanny went home and told his wife about Hansi’s idea of living alone, but she didn’t think much of it. ‘Who’s going to see to getting out his laundry every week?’ she demanded. ‘Who’s going to manage the servants? And those two boys at vacation times? Above all, who’s going to keep the other women away from him?’

  ‘It is not good that the man should be alone’—so Hansi’s Yahweh had declared, and Laurel agreed with Him. If Hansi were left alone he would be surrounded and besieged by adoring females. It was absolutely necessary that he should get the right wife otherwise the wrong one would get him and a second failure would ruin his life.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t let him know you’re thinking about it!’ said Lanny. ‘He’d run away to China’.

  ‘He doesn’t have to know’, was the reply. ‘Men never know. The women attend to it’.

  Laurel set aside her stack of letters and manuscripts, and made Lanny do the same, and they canvassed the field: the ladies who worked in the office, those who came as volunteer helpers, those who wrote letters, those who had been met socially in New York and Baltimore and Hollywood, in London and Paris and Berlin. It wasn’t going to be an easy problem; some were too old and some too young; some were talkative and some not good-looking enough. When Lanny suggested that this last might not matter so much to Hansi, Laurel replied, ‘Hansi is a man!’

  It ought to be somebody who was musical, not necessarily a performer, but somebody who loved music, else how could she stand the racket? It would have to be somebody who was clever, else how could Hansi stand her? It would have to be somebody who was honest and dependable, and Laurel feared that these were growing more scarce. They canvassed possible advisers, and Laurel said they must not leave it to Mamma Robin; kind good soul, she was orthodox and would pick out some submissive girl who would be horrified if Hansi ate a pork chop, would never consent to have butter on the table when meat was served. And suppose she took to wearing a wig! Lanny’s mother knew great numbers of women, young and old, but they were worldly women, otherwise Beauty would have no interest in them. So she was out!

  Lanny, taking the matter lightly, pointed out that Europe would be a favourable hunting ground; Europe was full of women who would like nothing better than to marry an American and be brought to his utopia. But Laurel said that the women of Europe were neurotic; they were at loose ends and would require a lot of sorting out. He assured her that, unfortunately, he had met very few of late. His acquaintances had been mostly middle-aged or elderly men who had been battered by the war and were staggering to their feet again; or middle-aged Americans who were trying to help them and being blamed for all their troubles.

  Then the facetious one remarked, ‘We may have to put an advertisement in the newspapers’. To which Laurel answered, ‘All you’d have to do would be to throw a net over Hansi after one of his concerts; you’d catch a score of candidates; but how would you pick one? Women don’t follow him home because they know he’s married and they’ve heard that his wife watches him; but when the fact is published that he is unattached he’ll have to get double locks on his doors’.

  All this might seem a trifle premature, since Hansi was living in supposed connubial bliss with his lawful wedded wife, and both of them were under indictment for a felony and liable to ten or twenty years in a federal penitentiary. But women have their ways of doing things that men say cannot be done. Laurel was going to keep her eyes open for a likely candidate, and when she met one she would invite her to lunch and probe her character. If Laurel, in her role of gentile shadchen, or marriage broker, should decide that the woman was right, she would arrange a dinner party. Later on Lanny would say to Hansi, ‘What do you think of Miss Smith?’ and Laurel would say to Miss Smith, ‘What do you think of Hansi Robin? Too bad he is under indictment, isn’t it?’ If it should turn out that the two parties thought well of each other, Laurel would remark to the lady, ‘You know, Hansi isn’t as much of a Communist as he thinks. It was Bess who got him into this, and there’s quite a possibility that they might break up over the situation. But you mustn’t say a word about it to anybody, not even to him!’

  That’s the way people who know the world get what they want in it; and if what they want is something good it’s not so bad.

  V

  It was the month of March, which is fabled to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. It was in its roaring stage; there was snow at night and then in the morning the weather turned warm and there was slush on the ground. Lanny had had a touch of ’flu, so he didn’t go to the office. When he saw that the sun was shining on the front porch he went out in his dressing gown and sat for a while; at that undependable season every ray of sunlight was precious. He was there when Laurel came home with the mail, and she handed him a bundle of unopened letters.

  There were always some addressed to him personally, and he had become expert in picking out those that were important. Business letters had the imprint of the firm in the corner, whereas fan letters were usually handwritten and many of them crude in appearance. Airmail letters took precedence, and especially any with German postage stamps. One was in Monck’s familiar script and started off with the sentence, ‘The deaf girl cannot be found; we sent a man to look for her, but no luck’.

  That was all on that subject, and Lanny was left to speculate. Had Ferdinand betrayed Anna Surden, or was it she who had betrayed him? Of course there was a possibility that she had found herself a man and had gone off with him; but that was unlikely, she being in a land with many more women than men. It was far more likely that she had been caught; and if so, how much had she told? There was no reason to believe that she would protect either Monck or Lanny; certainly no reason to think that she would stand torture for either of them. It was no crime to be trying to catch counterfeiters, but in this ease it seemed likely that the counterfeiters
were in league with some government authorities, whether German or Russian. Betrayal would make further efforts more difficult, if not impossible.

  Lanny could reflect upon the near impossibility of achieving anything against a police state. He had just witnessed the arrest of a Soviet spy in New York, one who had been caught red-handed, together with his American abettors. The law had required that he be arraigned in court immediately—a public procedure. The law required that he should be admitted to bail and that the bail should not be ‘excessive’. Now the man had disappeared, and the newspapers were reporting that he had been put on board a Soviet steamer in Baltimore and was gone. The Soviet government had been able to get back its spy and all his secrets by the payment of thirty thousand dollars, which figured out less than one-thirtieth of a kopeck per capita of the Russian population—certainly a moderate charge.

  On the other hand, when an American spy was caught in Sovietland, the silence of the grave followed. You couldn’t find anybody who had ever heard of the person; if you inquired of the authorities they would say they had never heard of the person and what business was it of yours anyway? Instead of making an appearance in open court the person was buried in a dungeon and subjected to elaborate processes of torture until he told everything he knew, or everything that the police state wanted him to say that he knew.

  Yes, that was one of the many differences between a free society and a dictatorship over the proletariat. Lanny had been for all his thinking life a strong civil-liberties man; but now his mind was troubled by the question whether civil liberties should be extended to the enemies of civil liberties; to persons who were cynically and implacably determined to destroy the civil liberties of everybody in the world but the members of the Politburo.

  VI

  Monck’s letter went on to discuss the situation in Berlin, concerning which he was as pessimistic as always. He reported that the cold war was growing warmer, and he was sure the Soviets intended some drastic action. Their propaganda was incessant, and very effective with the Germans, especially in the East. The American efforts were pitiful in comparison. The R.I.A.S. people meant well, but they had almost no funds and hadn’t yet been able to get a promised building entirely repaired. ‘Can’t you do something with the authorities in Washington?’ Monck pleaded.

  He concluded, ‘Your old friend is living in the mountains with his family. We have been able to make his acquaintance’. Lanny knew that meant Kurt Meissner and that Monck was again in contact with the Völkischerbund. Lanny had had no idea that Kurt would keep his promise to abstain from anti-American activities, and he had been afraid that Monck would have a hard time penetrating the difficult shell of that conspiracy. Here was another group of men who didn’t believe in civil liberties and who were not troubled with any moral scruples whatsoever.

  Thinking these troublesome thoughts, Lanny went into the house and turned on the radio and heard a horrifying story—the death of Jan Masaryk. He had jumped, or fallen, or been thrown from the third-storey window of his official residence and smashed upon the pavement of the courtyard below. The news came, of course, from the Communist government, which had seized power in Czechoslovakia, and naturally they said it was a suicide; but Lanny never believed it for an instant. He knew Masaryk too well to think that he would run away from the fight; he hated the Communists too much to be willing to oblige them. It was no surprise when later the story came out that he had been attacked in his bedroom and beaten to death with a piece of furniture and then thrown from the window. ‘When you hear of my death you will know it is the end’, so he had said—meaning, of course, the end of his country.

  There were civil liberties for you! There were the Reds who in America were praising civil liberties and claiming the privileges of them! Lanny paced the room, cursing them in his heart—and the fools in America who swallowed their poisonous propaganda. Lanny had had many qualms over the idea of helping to send his own sister to prison and of advising Hansi Robin to divorce her; but the last trace of doubt faded from his mind as he stood in imagination by the broken body of that genial gentleman who had gone back deliberately to his homeland, offering himself as a sacrifice, a protest, an appeal to the free world. To Lanny’s mind came the lines which Byron had written on the prisoner of Chillon:

  Chillon, thy prison is a holy place

  And thy sad floor an altar, for ’twas trod.…

  By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!

  For they appeal from tyranny to God.

  VII

  A few days later came another letter from Monck. He had promised to keep Lanny in touch with deveploments, and now he stated, ‘Ferdinand’s father is as active as ever. I enclose a sample, so you may see that the old fires are still smouldering’. He added, ‘I am reading a story called Treasure Island by Stevenson and finding it extremely interesting. You should read it’.

  Lanny pondered that last. He was sure it was code; Monck didn’t have any time to be reading adventure stories generally taken as suitable for boys. Always cautious, he would seldom put things in plain words and trust them to the mails. There were too many spies where he worked, and it was too easy to steam open a letter. The word ‘treasure’ told Lanny that Monck was on the trail of some of the jewels and gold the Nazi fanatics had buried. Lanny didn’t know whether there was an island in the Tegernsee, but he knew there were islands in some of those mountain lakes, and it might well be that the Völkischerbund knew of treasure hidden on one of these.

  There was a bit of paper enclosed, and Lanny opened it. Like the letter, it was in German, and done on the same typewriter. Obviously Monck had typed the copy:

  ‘We have a right to salvation, the right of the believers. Our salvation must be won by ourselves. We hold our heads high. Our way was straight and without blame. We ask no man to give us back our honour; we possess it! We have made no terms with the enemy; we are ourselves’.

  There was the voice of the unregenerate Nazi! There was das Wort—‘the Word!’ Guzman had told Lanny that Kurt’s prophetic utterances consisted of only one sentence at a time. But apparently Kurt’s daimon was becoming importunate; or had Monck put several of ‘the Words’ together?

  Anyhow, it meant that Kurt, who had made Lanny a pledge of honour, was not keeping it. He had taken the Nazi will-to-rule and made it into a Mystik, a thing superior to manmade laws and to merely human rights. It was the old notion that the end justified the means. In German it was even more fanatical: Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel. The verb means more than justifies, it means hallows, sanctifies. The German determination to take the mastery of the world became a holy thing; moved by this divinely inspired impulse, they had made three attempts in a period of less than seventy years, and now Kurt was telling them to cherish the impulse in their hearts and get ready for a fourth try.

  But meantime had come the Stalin Communists, repudiating the old gods and setting up a new one. Oddly enough he too was of Jewish origin; he was the Diamat, the Marxian dialectic! In the realm of this new divinity everything was automatic and inevitable; it was materialistic determinism. His followers were fated to seize the world and rule it whether they wanted to or not—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were fated to want to. They were fated to hate capitalism, and to hate it so bitterly that they would rise up and abolish it and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Presumably those individuals who seized the power and became the rulers were fated to believe that they were the ones who were worthy to do so. The end was that they got the power, and this sanctified whatever hideous means were required to keep it.

  So there were the Reds, facing their conquered Nazi foes, both sides with fanatical hatred blazing in their hearts. And in between them stood a third set of men with a wholly different set of notions in their heads, men from thousands of miles overseas, wedged in between the old antagonisms, separated from them by no more than an imaginary line drawn down the middle of a city’s streets. What whim of an ancient malicious god or of a dialec
tical synthesis had brought it about that Americans should be in that situation?

  Certainly the Power, whatever it was, had not brought it about that the Americans wanted to be there. Lanny Budd had met hundreds of ‘Amis’ on the scene, all the way from the lowliest GI to the five-star general at the top, and he had not met a single man who was not yearning in his heart to be back in Abilene, Kansas, or Dead Man’s Gulch, Montana. But here they were, bound by some notion of duty; by an idea, inherited from their forefathers, that men should be free and that no nation should be permitted to conquer and enslave another. They didn’t know how to dress it up in metaphysical language, they just said in their stubborn, matter-of-fact way that they believed in the free world and were saving it; so they stayed. And Lanny, reading this letter from his friend in Berlin, thought that if there had ever been a more explosive situation in history it was recorded in some book he had not read.

  VIII