The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  That gave Lanny a severe jolt. ‘Oh, Bess!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t let them do that to you!’

  ‘How could I go, Lanny? I am under bond. I am forbidden to leave the country. It would cost them fifty thousand dollars if I did’.

  ‘Well, they might be willing to pay that to get you. Bess, you must promise me—don’t let that happen to you! They get you in that place of horrors and you will be lost forever. There is nothing they won’t do to you. You must realise it—you mean absolutely nothing to them—your services, your record, your honour, your faith in the cause. Death will be the kindest thing, and you will pray for it’.

  He had her now where she had to listen. In past times he had talked to her about torturing, about frame-ups and confessions extracted, and she had said it was all nonsense, it was counterrevolutionary propaganda. But now he had been through it himself, and she could not doubt his word. He told her his own feelings under torture; he spared no painful detail. She sat there staring at him, fascinated, shuddering now and then, clenching and unclenching her hands. All that proud resistance, that flaring anger that he had known of old were gone. Her spirit was broken, and he saw it and went to work all the harder.

  ‘Bess’, he insisted, ‘you must listen to me. For God’s sake, don’t put yourself in that man’s power. Don’t meet him again! He is a little Stalin; he owns the world, he is destined to rule it; he will be the Commissar of all America. It sounds crazy, I know, but that is what life means to him, that is his destiny. All this hateful prosperity that he sees—he is going to take it over and possess it. He is going to rule and give out wholesale death to everyone who does not obey. He will take over our newspapers and make them into little Pravdas. He will take our radio and pour out Stalinist doctrine varied with the “Internationale”. He will take our children and make them into little robots, little tattletales turning their parents over to the M.V.D.’

  ‘Lanny’, she protested, ‘you don’t have to pile it on’.

  ‘I’m telling you what I know, Bess. It is not only my own experience, it’s all the people I’ve talked to over there, people who have been through it, people who have fled from it. They are fleeing from it by the hundreds every day. If the gates were opened half of Eastern Europe would flee into the West. If our gates were opened half of Europe would come to America. Europe is in torment, Bess; they have learned what freedom is by being denied it. It is the most awful thing to live under the terror; to have your lips sealed, to be afraid that your very looks may betray you, to know that somebody may whisper a slander about you—your own child may do it if you punish the child! And to be accused is to be guilty. Someone has accused you, Bess. They don’t tell you what—maybe because it’s so preposterous it would be absurd to speak it! Something as absurd as the charge that I was plotting to take Stalin’s life—and paying out five thousand dollars at a time to have it done!’

  V

  He saw that tears had come into her eyes, and he believed that she was going to break. ‘What am I to do, Lanny?’ she whispered.

  ‘The first thing for you to do is to get out of this apartment. You must not live alone. Don’t you know the part that murder plays in Stalin’s techniques? Have you never seen the list of his victims? I don’t mean in Russia, for there they are counted in tens of millions; I mean in Europe and America—the onetime Stalinists who turned against him and were no longer permitted to live. There was Trotsky, and his son Sedov, and his secretary, whose headless body was found floating in the Seine, and his guard, and several others of his followers. There was José Robles, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; there was Kurt Landau, an Austrian editor, kidnapped and killed. Carlo Tresca was shot down on Fifth Avenue, and Walter Krivitsky, former chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Europe, was murdered in a hotel room in Washington. I can’t remember them all, but there are books about it’.

  ‘That’s enough, Lanny. I know’.

  ‘What I’m trying to make you realise is that you’re only about half an hour from Moscow’.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by that’.

  ‘I mean there are Russian ships here in the harbour; they’re always here, and every ship is Moscow and every captain is Stalin. The C. I. Rep. comes here to question you, and all he has to do is to bring a couple of the sailors with him. They grab you and clamp a chloroform rag to your nose, as they did to me; they carry you downstairs in the early hours of the morning, put you into a car, and take you to the ship. They put you down in the hold where your cries cannot be heard, and in three or four weeks you are in Moscow, in the Lubianka. They put you on the Conveyor and tell you what to confess; they torture you until you sign it, and then they ship you off to Siberia in a cattle car, and work you in a mine on half rations, and in a year or two you fade away and are buried in an unmarked grave’.

  ‘You really believe all that, Lanny?’

  ‘Believe it? I know it! People have escaped, people have managed to live through it, and I have talked to them. I can find some here in New York if that is necessary to your salvation. There are people who have disappeared from New York, people who have got in wrong with the party—I can get you their names if you don’t know them’.

  ‘Where do you want me to go, Lanny?’

  ‘I want you to get out of this hideous movement which has betrayed the hopes of mankind. I want you to realise that you are finished in it, regardless of what you may do. You have a black mark, and nobody will trust you any more, nobody will dare to. One or two intimate friends may stick by you, but they will do it at the sacrifice of their own party standing. They will be Trotskyites, Browderites, any kind of left or right deviationists. Maybe there will be Buddites’.

  ‘You seem to forget that I have to go to prison, Lanny’.

  ‘Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Maybe if you would break with the Communists Robbie could wangle you a pardon. I don’t know if he can, but I know how quickly he’d go to it’.

  ‘Would they take me back, Lanny?’

  ‘Take you back? Oh, my God! If you’d break with the Reds they would be the happiest couple in Connecticut. Your mother is just eating her heart out about you. If you want love instead of hate in your life, that is the place to go. And, incidentally, you would be safe there. Robbie knows how to take care of property and also of persons; there wouldn’t be any kidnappers on his grounds. You might take up your piano practice again and recover your skill’.

  ‘Imagine people wanting to hear me play the piano after this!’

  ‘You are missing an important point. In a woman’s prison they are pretty sure to have music; they have it even in factories nowadays—they find that it works. Another point, also—you might get to see your children’.

  Bess began to sob. He had never seen her do that before, and she was embarrassed and buried her face in her hands. He decided to strike while the iron was hot; he said, ‘Listen, old dear, let me go to the phone and call Esther; she will come, I know. You can be as miserable as you please, but it will help some to know that you are making her happier than she has been in many years’.

  ‘All right, Lanny’, she whispered, and he stepped quickly to the phone.

  VI

  It took only a minute or so to get the home in Newcastle, and by good fortune Esther was there. He told her, ‘I am at Bess’s apartment in the city, and she wants to see you. Don’t delay, take the first train. No, she’s not ill, but she’s at a crisis in her thinking. Don’t ask about it, just come’.

  He hung up and told Bess, ‘She’s coming’. Then he thought he had talked enough. ‘I have a confession to make, sister dear’, he said. ‘I can’t sit in a chair very long without hurting. Also, I get exhausted easily; so let me lie down and sleep for a while’.

  She had only one bedroom, and she put him in that. Before he lay down he made her promise that if the doorbell rang she would call through the door and ask who it was, and if it was the C. I. Rep. she wouldn’t let him in. ‘You may not be afraid of him’, he said, ‘
but I am. He wants me even more than he wants you’.

  So then he slept. A most wonderful thing to sleep—he had never appreciated it until he had come out of the Prenzlauerberg. And always for the rest of his life when he woke up he would have a moment of fear and would think about the Number One, the Number Two, the Number Three.

  This time he heard a murmur of voices and knew that Esther had come. When he went into the room he found them sitting on the sofa, and Esther had her child in her arms. Both of them had red eyes, so he knew that everything was all right. Weeping was women’s business, and he would leave it to them. He said a few friendly words and took his departure and went back to Edgemere to tell Laurel. It wasn’t a secret now.

  The only secret was what he had said about Bess in the Prenzlauerberg, and that secret he would keep locked up for a long time. There would be debate in his soul; he would suppress it, but it would bob up now and then and come to life. He had taken the destiny of his sister into his own hands; and had he done her a great wrong, or a great right? It was like the inner duel that Shakespeare tells about: ‘“Budge,” says the fiend. “Budge not”, says my conscience’. Lanny’s fiend would say, ‘You violated her autonomy’. Lanny’s conscience would reply, ‘I got her out of the Communist party’. Fiend would inquire, ‘Have you adopted the doctrine that the end justifies the means?’ Conscience would reply, ‘Can people who deny truth claim the right to truth? Can people use liberty to destroy liberty?’ Fiend would jeer, ‘You sound much like a Communist to me!’ The debate would go on for the rest of Lanny’s life.

  One thing Lanny made up his mind to and would never waver about—the right of Hansi and Rose to happiness. He talked it over with Laurel, and she agreed that they would not write or say a word about the change of heart of Hansi’s ex-wife; he might take up the notion that he had ‘done her wrong’, and if he started brooding, that might mean the end of his new marriage. Wherever the blame for the mix-up might lie, it surely wasn’t with Rose Pippin. She had met a man distracted and forlorn, a man whose spouse, convicted of a felony, had given him the right to a divorce in more than half of the forty-eight states. Rose had given him her treasure of affection and trust, and she had a right to expect that her marriage should be permitted to thrive and blossom. Laurel said, ‘She has the task of raising another woman’s children, and that is danger enough for any woman’s one life’.

  VII

  So Lanny Budd was home again and promised most solemnly to stay for a while. He had those two lovely children to get acquainted with all over again. It was astonishing how many new things there were to learn about them. Junior hadn’t been told the terrible details about his father’s experience; Laurel had said only that some bad men had carried his father off and put him in jail. But that had been enough, astonishingly enough; it had set fire to a young imagination. These ‘bad men’ were hiding behind every bush, and stick would do to fight them. Any stick became a machine gun to be fired with a rattling noise from ambush. The bad men were mowed down, and Lanny was miraculously delivered. All methods of killing were discovered or invented, and Laurel, a pacifist at heart and hoping to raise a pacifist child, was astounded by the murderous impulses that she saw.

  Also, she had the theory that a young mind should not be overstimulated; but Junior had been given a set of alphabet blocks and had taught himself all the letters, and presently he was finding out how to make them into words. He was teaching himself to read—and in the most awful way imaginable, from those funny papers which came on Sundays. He learned all the names of those multicoloured characters and their wild eccentricities. He would spell out the captions, and when he couldn’t understand he would go, not to his mother, but to one of the servants for help. The ‘funnies’ became his wonderland, his mythology. Laurel was horrified; but Lanny said that he was exactly at the mental age of the persons for whom these fantasies were created. He would outgrow them and not be hopelessly corrupted.

  The little girl was learning to walk and talk, all according to the Gesell schedule. In short, all was well with the family, if only the father would stay at home and let the world run itself for a while. Rick and Nina had been holding the fort for him, and now they could have the vacation which had been promised them; it would be in the cold and wet season, but they would love it, they had been brought up in it. Irma and Ceddy were coming to New York; they couldn’t bring money from England, but Irma had an abundance over here, and she had kept her American citizenship in order to be free to use it here. She and Ceddy were planning to spend the winter in Florida, and Scrubbie and Frances would motor down and pay them a visit.

  So Lanny and Laurel would have their hands full with the Peace Programme. They would go on, ‘saying, Peace, peace’, when there was no peace. It was a real problem, like staying out in no man’s land and dodging the shells and the hand grenades from both sides. You knew that the cold war enemy didn’t want peace, and every time he said the word he was getting ready to throw another hand grenade. Yet you must go on talking peace in order to meet his propaganda, in order to answer his unceasing charges that you were a warmonger. You must enter every discussion and attend every conference, make precise and careful propositions, show exactly why your efforts failed and why he rejected your offers.

  You could never convert him, you could never make the slightest impression upon him; but always you must have in mind the humble people who suffered under his despotism, who heard only his propaganda, who were fed upon a diet of falsehoods. The dictators meant war and slavery, but the humble people craved peace and freedom. You must find ways to reach them with the truth and help them to understand it. You would be called a warmonger a million times a day, but you must go on talking peace, praising peace, pleading for peace—and making plain who it was that was blocking the road to peace.

  VIII

  Lanny and Laurel had brought back from Europe the dreadful conviction that we were failing in our propaganda against the Reds. We were failing because we did not understand our enemies and did not appreciate the importance of propaganda. They were pouring out treasure to deceive and indoctrinate the peoples of their captive states and all the impoverished and oppressed peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, as well as of the Western world. They were spending a billion, maybe two billion dollars every year, while all that the Congress of the United States could be persuaded to appropriate was a few tens of millions. We ought to be meeting them dollar for dollar and voice for voice and page for page of the printed word. We ought to be meeting them with brains and moral force; we ought to be making clear to all the oppressed and impoverished peoples of the earth that America was not a country of landlords and moneylenders, it was the sweet land of liberty. It was the land of Washington and Jefferson, the land of Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, the land of Tom Paine, Patrick Henry, and Eugene Debs, of Whittier, Whitman, and Emerson.

  These were the names which would carry meaning to the young people of the old world, to the opening minds which were going to shape the future. The Stalinists had set deadly traps for their feet and would drag them into servitude. We must show them the true paths to freedom, and it must be not merely political freedom but economic as well.

  Said Lanny over the radio, ‘It is futile to think that the hungry hordes of Asia and Africa can be persuaded to become our debtors and servants. There is no use thinking that we can win either the cold war or the hot war with our organised labour in revolt, or with a great part of our population held in the status of second-class citizens. We have to make our minds flexible and understand that evolution is a process that applies in the field of industry as well as in that of government. We have to study the ideas of other peoples and understand their needs. We have to offer them more than Stalin offers them, and to make plain to them that what we offer is real and not a fraud, as his offers are.

  ‘And we have to act quickly. We have to realise that Stalin is setting the pace. He is watching like a cat at a mousehole for our every move. He knows all o
ur weaknesses and is quick to take advantage of them. A dictatorship has the advantage of secrecy, whereas democracy and freedom of necessity work in the open. That is a weakness if we leave it unexplained, but it is a great strength if we make the world understand it and what it means to them.

  ‘Tom Paine sounded the call to the American Revolution with this statement: “These are the times that try men’s souls”. We have to be equally clear-sighted and bold. It is not too much to say that our civilisation with all its intellectual and moral values hangs in the balance today. It will certainly go down if Stalin wins the victory, and it may even go down if he loses. It is necessary for us to prepare to give military resistance, but we must prepare with no less energy to give intellectual and moral resistance. We must give to that duty the same fortitude and determination that our forefathers gave at Valley Forge and Gettysburg.

  ‘We must win the minds of the masses all over the world; we must win them away from the false hopes of Red communism and to the ideas of democracy and freedom, both political and economic. We have the truth on our side, but it will be of use to us only if we use it and defend it. We must live and speak in the spirit of those immortal words which Thomas Jefferson wrote and which fifty-five of our forefathers signed: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour”.’

  Acknowledgments

  The author expresses his thanks to three fellow writers who have generously permitted him to make use of both their experiences and their personalities in this story: an American, Boris Shub, author of The Choice, published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce; a German, Heinrich Graf Einsiedel, author of Tagebuch der Versuchung, soon to be published in an English translation by Yale University Press; and a Russian, G. A. Tokaev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Army, author of Stalin Means War, published by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd, London. Also, thanks to David Krichevsky, formerly liaison officer, O.I.C. of U.S. platoons in the Soviet zone of Germany, who is writing a book about his adventures; and to Melvin J. Lasky, editor of Der Monat, Berlin.