Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  VI

  Lanny spent the night in a hotel. Next morning he took a taxi to the old houses which had been converted into offices for the Co-ordinator of Information and his rapidly growing staff. They were down by the Potomac River, amid coal yards, behind an old brick brewery, and almost under the shadow of the gasworks; nobody objected, because office room was so scarce that you were lucky to get any sort of roof over your head. Armed guards kept watch, but the all-powerful. Mr. Baker had telephoned, and Lanny was ushered in as soon as he had identified himself.

  Colonel William J. Donovan was a short, somewhat plump Irishman who had commanded the famous 69th New York Regiment in World War I. He had earned all the decorations there were, and the sobriquet of “Wild Bill.” He certainly gave no such impression in his office, for his voice was gentle and rather slow, and his manner lazy and easy going. Sometime early in his life he must have kissed the Blarney stone, for in the first half hour he made Lanny think that they were old friends, and that the story Lanny had to tell was the most interesting the Colonel had ever heard. He seemed to have unlimited time, and it was only after he had heard Lanny all the way through that he thought to call in his confidential stenographer and a couple of department heads, to hear it again and take down the essential facts—names and addresses of Raoul Palma and Bernhardt Monck and Denis de Bruyne and General Béthouart, and what each of them wanted and what sort of person would be best to send them. Lanny got the impression that this amiable officer’s organization was going to be somewhat loosely run; but, then, so was F.D.R.’s, and still we were going to lick the Nazis!

  The Colonel gave his caller a pat on the shoulder, called him by his first name, thanked him with all the warmth of his Irish heart, and assured him that his secret would be kept and also those of his friends. He wound up by asking the son of Budd-Erling if he wouldn’t like to come in and start another department and run it. Apparently there was room for an unlimited number of departments, and when the chiefs and directors and chairmen and what-nots began treading on one another’s toes, the Colonel would pat them on their backs and give them a new title and some more assistants and secretaries to make them happy. That was apparently what it meant to be a “Co-ordinator” with a capital C.

  Lanny spent most of that day and part of the evening in conference with various groups of the Colonel’s administrators, telling them all he could about the old Continent which he knew so well and which most of them knew only from the newspapers; about Hitler and Göring and Hess and their subordinates, and the enormous military and governmental and propaganda machines they had built up; about their ideas and ways of life; how they had achieved power and how they were keeping it; about Pétain, Laval, Darlan and the rest of the French collaborators, and the underground which was opposing them, what sort of people they were, and how to reach them and win their trust; about the conditions they would find in Algeria and Morocco, and who would be their friends and who their enemies in those ancient, half-barbarous lands.

  All these men of the C.O.I. agreed that this experienced man ought to join them, and he couldn’t tell them frankly why he didn’t. He just said: “I have been working independently for a long time, and I have some contacts that I am not free to reveal to anybody else. But I’ll keep in touch with you, and maybe I’ll meet some of you in the field.” They all promised to keep his secret; they were going to send thousands of men and women into the enemy lands, and would keep the secrets of all of them. Very soon the name of their organization would be changed to the Office of Strategic Services, and the cocktail-party wits of Washington and New York would say that O.S.S. meant: “Oh, so secret!” But you could be sure that the men and women in the field didn’t object to that secrecy nor to the armed guards keeping watch over the offices and the files at home.

  VII

  There is a midnight train to New York, and Lanny had asked Baker to make a reservation for him. He had just time to phone Laurel that he was coming; then he found himself in a compartment with two other men—for train space was beyond price. Washington had suddenly become the capital of the world, and New York had become a suburb, with big businessmen commuting, and sometimes sleeping, in limousines between the two cities at night.

  It had been some time since Lanny had had a home of his own—indeed, had he ever had one? His father’s home, his mother’s home, his amie’s home, his wife’s home! When he had been Mister Irma Barnes he had lived in Irma’s palace on Long Island, and in one that she had rented in Paris, and it had all been the way Irma wanted it. When he had been married to Trudi Schultz he had visited her in a tenement room in Paris where she was hiding, carrying on her anti-Nazi activities; that had been her home, and only a stern sense of duty had made it tolerable to a reformed playboy.

  He had said to Laurel: “Get a larger apartment so that you can have a room to work in and I can have one and Agnes can have one.” She had told him that she wanted to pay her own way, even as a wife; she was a feminist. But now he pleaded: “Let me pay for it, please, please! It will be the first time in my life that I ever supplied a home for the woman I loved!”

  That sounded strange, but he proved it to her concerning all the five love affairs which he had had, and about which he had told her truly. One of his wives had died, and another had left him to become a countess; oddly enough, the same thing had happened to two of his sweethearts—one had died and one had left him to become a countess. The third of this unlegitimized group had left him for a stage career, and that surely hadn’t been the young Lanny’s fault. “I never left a woman in my life,” he insisted to his present one, and added: “And believe me, I never mean to.”

  The point was that all five of these ladies had had a home of one sort or another, and the only times when the grandson of Budd Gunmakers and son of Budd-Erling had been able to pay their bills had been when he had taken them traveling. So now Laurel had let him have his way, and the two women were established in an apartment house in the East Sixties, with three bedrooms and two baths. Servants were hard to obtain, but they had a woman who came in and cleaned up twice a week, and they had a kitchenette where light meals could be prepared when they did not feel like going out. It seemed to the economical Laurel a terribly expensive way to live, but New Yorkers took it for granted that you had to spend money in order to make it. Lanny had to have a room in which to type his mysterious reports, and certainly a woman who was carrying a baby and a novel at the same time had a right to comfort and convenience.

  There she was when a taxi delivered him from the Pennsylvania Station at about seven-thirty in the morning. She had his orange juice cold and his toast hot, and Agnes Drury had gone to work early in order to take herself out of the way. Laurel was lovely in one of those dressing gowns with a big floral pattern. He could see at a glance that she was well, and her happiness was written on every feature and in every gesture and word. He caught her in his arms; time didn’t matter—the orange juice would stay cold in the refrigerator and the toast could be reheated. He could say “I love you” as often as he pleased, and could make x-marks for kisses, and with no censor to question whether they were code. Parting might or might not be sweet sorrow, but certainly and without question coming home was sweet joy.

  VIII

  Meeting after two months’ absence, they both had a lot of news. Because ladies like to talk and listening seems more polite, Lanny learned first what had happened to his wife. She had written two articles, one about their trip through China and one about what they had found at Yenan; both had been accepted and were soon to appear; he would read the manuscripts that day. Laurel was working on her novel about an American girl at a German university in the days of the Nazis, and there was a chunk of that awaiting his judgment. Her pregnancy had made no special difference in her work, she told him; she had kept her promise and not let herself get tired. Agnes had been lovely to her; she was a sensible, settled woman, who had great admiration for the art of writing and took many burdens from her friend’s shoulders.


  Then began a questioning of Lanny. How was Beauty, how was Parsifal, and the dear little boy? Lanny recounted what they had said and done and gave her the messages they had sent. He told about the refugees at Bienvenu and how they were getting along; the relationship of benefactor and beneficiary is seldom entirely satisfactory, and poor Beauty was finding this out. Lanny hadn’t considered it his duty to take a hand; she had her own money, a thousand dollars a month that Robbie sent her, plus the large sums from the Detaze sales. He told about Marceline, whom Laurel had never met; a curious nature, quietly cold, pleasure-bent in a silent, incessant, almost vegetative way. Some day Laurel would meet her and probe her secret soul and put it into a story.

  Then the other ladies. Sophie Timmons had obeyed her government and come back to her large hardware family in Cincinnati. Emily Chattersworth wasn’t well enough to move, in fact she was all but bedridden. Lanny had been to call on her twice, and they had talked about the problems of their time. The chatelaine of Sept Chênes had lived too long, she thought; the world had taken on an aspect which she did not understand, and it terrified her; she could not imagine how social life could continue on such terms. Lanny had tried to tell her the basis of his faith, that they were in the midst of the birth pangs of a new social order. A birth is a messy thing, and if you had never seen one before, it would alarm you greatly; but when it is over, it is discovered to be a natural phenomenon.

  Lanny told his wife what Emily had said, that she was going to leave part of her considerable fortune to her near-godson. Lanny had protested that he didn’t want her to do that, that he had no need of more money; but she had answered that she had no special interest in her surviving relatives and thought that Lanny might find some way to put money to good use. He had asked what she wanted done with it, and she had said something to stop these cruel and dreadful wars. Lanny had decided that she was not long for this world and thought he ought to give her some hint that he was not just an ivory-tower dweller but was rendering service of importance to his government. She had told him: “I guessed that years ago. I have known you since you were a babe-in-arms, and I perceived that you were drawing out our near-Fascist friends. Don’t worry, I have never spoken of it.”

  IX

  It was Lanny’s turn to ask questions of his wife. She had been down to visit the widow of Reverdy Holdenhurst, her aunt by marriage, to condole with her and tell her how it had happened that two passengers of the Oriole had been left behind in Hongkong and how the yacht had sailed away to its doom. “Poor soul!” Laurel said. “She was never able to forgive Uncle Reverdy’s offense against her, but now she remembers only his good qualities and is a prey to remorse. She cannot make up her mind that he and Lizbeth are really gone. She studies the maps and speculates about what may happen to people on jungle islands, and whenever she reads in the papers a story about a sailor or a flyer who has come back to civilization, she starts hoping all over again.”

  “Did you tell her about your psychic experience?” Lanny asked.

  “I told her, and it disturbed her greatly. You know, she is a devout Episcopalian, but she was educated in a Catholic convent, and I think she has the Catholic attitude deeply buried in her mind—the notion that there is something dangerous and even immoral in dabbling with ‘spirits.’ She came back to the subject again and again and cross-questioned me. I had brought the notes you had taken down and I read them to her. You remember, the spirit of Lizbeth, or whatever it was, said that her childhood-rag doll in the old gray trunk in the attic had been used as a nest by mice. We went and found it was so, and I thought that Aunt Millicent was going to faint. An extraordinary thing, Lanny, and I don’t know how to account for it.”

  “Let’s give Lizbeth another chance to tell us,” Lanny said, “if it isn’t a strain on you.”

  “Not at all,” she replied. “That is one of the things that surprise me; it seems to be a natural process, like falling asleep. I am puzzled as to how I manage to distinguish between going to sleep and going into a trance.”

  “I take it that you give an order to your subconscious mind. It is like what you do in breathing and swallowing food; you are using the same apparatus, and it is a question of which of two valves you close. Sometimes you make a mistake, and then you have a disagreeable choking spell.”

  “I must have made a mistake that day on the plane, flying to Ulan-Bator; I thought I was falling asleep, and instead I went into a trance.”

  “Possibly you do it often and never realize it. I shall have to practice listening while you are asleep.” It reminded him of a story he had heard as a lad and had almost forgotten. It was told by a visitor at St. Thomas’s Academy in Connecticut, which he had attended during World War I. It had been introduced playfully, as “a story that nobody can understand.” A woman came into a grocery store and ordered a dozen boxes of matches. The grocer said: “But Mrs. Smith, you bought a dozen boxes of matches last week.” The woman answered: “Yes, but you see, my husband is deaf and dumb and he talks in his sleep!”

  X

  They tried a séance that evening. A curious procedure, which would keep Lanny wondering as long as he lived on this earth. It disappointed him frequently, for these manifestations of the subconscious mind are vagarious and undependable, and the psychic prospector is like that other kind who goes wandering out into the desert with pick and shovel, blanket, food, and water, all loaded upon a patient burro; he may search for years and even for a lifetime and find no gold, but if he does find it—well, it is gold. Any chemist knows what gold is, but where is the soul chemist who can tell you where trance phenomena come from?—fragments of mentality that seem to be floating around loose in an infinite universe, and sometimes put themselves together in a fashion beyond the power of any conscious mind to explain.

  Laurel’s “control” was a personality whom she had met long ago, but only casually, and if she had, been especially interested in him she had entirely forgotten it. The idea that he would some day decide to move in upon her subconscious mind and take his residence there would have sounded utterly crazy to her. But now, whenever she dropped into a trance, which she had discovered by accident, here he was, seemingly always at hand. She herself did not hear his voice, but whoever sat by and listened heard him speaking through her lips—or claiming that he did so, and what were you to make of the claim?

  This “spirit” Otto Kahn chatted with urbanity, just as he would have done in life. He took it as a queer sort of joke, exactly as he would have taken it if anybody had presented him with such a proposition while he was alive. He was good company, and at the same time dignified, accustomed to be treated as a person of distinction. How he would have behaved if he had been treated otherwise Lanny had no means of knowing, for he had never tried it.

  On this occasion Otto was in his best drawing-room mood. He responded to any playful remark about what was going on in the world, and especially in the great metropolis which had been his home. When asked if he had any messages for his family, he said No, they seemed to be getting along very well. When asked if he had any message for a certain operatic soprano, he said No with emphasis; she was married now, and he wouldn’t take any chance of disturbing her tranquillity. When asked if there was any way he could find Reverdy Holdenhurst or his daughter Lizbeth, he replied that he was keeping away from the spirits, they bored him, and besides, he couldn’t make up his mind that he believed in them. Then, somewhat incongruously, he added: “That old bore Zaharoff is here as usual. I don’t suppose you are interested in him, Lanny?”

  “Not especially,” was the reply. “At least not until he can figure out some way for me to get that money he wants me to pay out for him.”

  Then—one of those unforeseeable developments—there came suddenly from Laurel’s lips a different voice, surprisingly like that of the aged Sir Basil, Knight Commander of the Bath and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. “Go and see my niece in London, and she will give you the money.”

  “I’d be
afraid to, Sir Basil,” said the son of Budd-Erling, smiling. “She might have me arrested for attempted fraud.”

  “Tell her to consult a medium, and I will talk to her,” commanded the voice of the Knight Commander.

  “That would only make it a more elaborate fraud, Sir Basil. And besides, such things cannot be arranged nowadays. Don’t you know there’s a war on?” This was a stock formula of the time; it caused the former partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Company to break into laughter, and it brought the séance to a sudden end. There was a long silence.

  “Did something go wrong?” asked Laurel when she opened her eyes. “I have a strange sort of feeling about it.” When he told her, she said: “You offended the old man, and he took it out on me.”

  XI

  Laurel told how she had been to call upon Mrs. Roosevelt, and what they had talked about. A truly great woman, she said, and one whose impress upon the country would not soon be erased. For the first time in our history there was in the White House a woman who was not merely a housekeeper or an ornament, but a democratic force. She was that in her own right, by the power of her own mind and heart. “She and her husband make a team,” Laurel said. “He might not have the same steadfastness if he stood alone.”

  Lanny would have liked to say: “I was with him in Washington,” but he didn’t. It might seem strange that he had revealed his secret to friends such as Raoul and Monck, and would not reveal it to the woman of his heart. But those people in Europe needed the facts for the work they were doing; Laurel did not need them. She understood that and never asked. What she guessed was her own affair, of course.

  He told her the details of his trip: the aspects of Vichy, the elderly roués being taken to the baths in wheel chairs, the half-starved poor standing patiently in front of half-empty foodshops. And then the Riviera, where the contrasts between the conditions of rich and poor were even greater; and then Switzerland, standing on guard day and night, making money, but having to spend most of it on defense preparations. He told about the paintings he had inspected and those he had bought; about North Africa and the mosaics, and the amusing process of bargaining; about the ruins of Timgad, the mosques and minarets and marabouts of Morocco, and the ten-course banquet he had tried so valiantly to eat. But nothing about the underground, nothing about the collaborateurs or the American vice-consuls. “Everybody is expecting something to happen, and everybody tries to guess what.” That was as far as he would go.