Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  XI

  America had covered itself with a network of radio stations, and Lanny with his portable set could get Tampa and Pensacola and Key West. All stations gave the war news at frequent intervals, and the favorite commentators in afternoon and evening. So, while the baby practiced his arms and legs on a rug, the three adults would sit and follow the denouement of that melodrama, the earlier acts of which Lanny had helped to write in North Africa. He saw the British Eighth Army cut around behind the Mareth line, through the same country of baking-hot rocks and sand and salty shotts where he had traveled with the camels. They forced Rommel’s bedraggled Afrika Korps out of its last strong position, and northward up the coast, into the trap the Mediterranean had prepared at the northeastern corner of Tunisia.

  The Americans released their air cover and blasted the Luftwaffe out of those skies; and then began desperate fighting in the rain and mud, for the capture of one hill after another. British, French, and Americans were attacking along a line some two hundred miles long; the Germans were resisting furiously, and the Italians with considerably less ardor. All that country, and the men, the tanks, the planes, were so familiar to Lanny Budd that he could supply the local color to the two women; he could hear the guns and smell the smoke of battle while the radio eyewitnesses talked.

  A curious experience for a P.A. on vacation: Early in April an enemy force was cut off at a place in southern Tunisia called El Guettar, close to where the camels had brought Lanny in. A great number of Italians had surrendered, and Lanny listened to an American correspondent who had interviewed some of the prisoners. Standing near the microphone was II Maggiore Vittorio di San Girolamo; his voice wasn’t heard, but the correspondent quoted him as saying that the Germans had seized all the trucks and other vehicles and made their escape, leaving their allies in a trap.

  When the broadcast was over, Lanny said to his wife: “Did I ever mention that Italian name to you? He was my half-sister Marceline’s husband, and when he needed money he stole some of Marcel’s paintings and sold them to a dealer in Nice. When Marceline had it proved to her, she divorced him and he went back to Italy. Then he was a capitano, and now they have made him a maggiore, but he is still grumbling about his fate and blaming other people. Handsome fellow with coal-black eyes and hair—he puts oil in the hair—and he can’t keep his eyes off the ladies.”

  “What will we do with him?” asked Laurel.

  “I suppose we’ll ship him over here and put him in some comfortable summer hotel. We can’t make the officers work, you know, and we have to treat them well lest the enemy do worse to ours. If Vittorio is ever turned loose, he will come to me and try to borrow money.”

  XII

  In mid-April began the general attack, all along the narrowing line. The battle lasted for a month, and Lanny could hardly keep away from the radio; he had maps and marked the positions with a red pencil. The line had been shortened to a hundred miles, and every day it was still further reduced. The enemy was in a pocket, with no place to go but the sea, and the British and Americans controlled that with fighting ships and planes. Step by step the drive continued; resistance collapsed, and the enemy forces were driven back upon Tunis and the great naval base of Bizerte. There was another Stalingrad preparing—some three hundred thousand enemy troops being driven toward a peninsula called Cap Bon, where they would have to choose between surrender and destruction.

  A woman novelist wasn’t very good company for listening to events such as these. While Lanny kept talking about military strategy, she was thinking about human beings. She was like Little Peterkin, not content with a glorious victory, but wanting to know what good was going to come of it. She was ill satisfied with what Lanny had to tell her about the government that had been set up in North Africa, and was hardly to be persuaded to entrust decisions to the State Department gentry and the brass hats in command. “Big business will be there and will take over,” she insisted. “What sort of democracy are we going to teach the people of Europe if we leave it to the military and the profiteers?”

  It was a good time for Lanny to clarify his ideas, and he found his wife’s mind an excellent grindstone upon which to sharpen his wits. “This war is either a world revolution or it is a world calamity,” she insisted; “and what part is America going to play? Our businessmen haven’t the remotest idea about a social democracy—they don’t know what the words mean. They will have only one idea, which is to set up the old system in Europe and turn the control over to the big exploiters, including themselves. You know and I know what that will mean in the end, a Communist revolution and a new kind of dictatorship all over Europe.”

  “I am putting my faith in Roosevelt,” he told her. “I know from his own lips that he understands all that.”

  “Yes, Lanny, but if he can’t find men to carry out his orders? If he has to please the Catholic Church, and the Southern senators, and the big-business crowd who are the only ones who know how to restore industry, and mean to have it exactly as it was before? Are we going to overthrow Nazi-Fascism and set up a polite American brand of the same thing?”

  Lanny had had these same thoughts, but oddly enough he didn’t like hearing them from his wife’s lips; he had the impression that she was going to an extreme. The Vichy gang was being curbed in North Africa, the Jews were getting a better deal, a good part of the political prisoners had been released, and so on. But Laurel said all that was just window-dressing; what counted was the fact that the bankers, the landlords, the trading magnates, were inviting the American “brass” to their dinner parties, introducing them to their wives and daughters, and perhaps letting them in on a “good thing” now and then. “When the war is over they will form a solid phalanx, and the ragged proletariat will be outside, starving.”

  It took no special gift of seership to foresee what was coming to the postwar world. There would be three great powers, the Communist, headed by the Soviet Union, the capitalist, headed by America, and the democratic Socialist, hoped for in Britain, France, and the Scandinavian lands. Laurel said: “We Socialists will be out in No Man’s Land, under the fire of both extremists; it will be our task to teach the Russians that democracy in industry is nothing without democracy in politics, and to teach the Americans that democracy in politics is nothing without democracy in industry.”

  “Will you write a book about that?” he asked.

  “I was about to ask what you were going to do,” she answered. “We must both work at it, with all we have. Let us both save our money, and prepare for a long battle. It will be that, and Roosevelt cannot do it all. We must help to carry his cross!”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Lanny Budd Novels

  1

  Who Will Go for Us?

  I

  The small catboat slapped the waves of the gulf, and the salt-laden spray flew over the man and the woman; they were clad only in bathing suits and smiles, and it was the same as an early morning swim. They leaned out to windward, to keep the boat level, and gazed over the blue water, glinting with sunshine. Here and there a small flying fish rose from the water in front of them, sailed along like a toy airplane, and then plunged into the sea. “Look!” Lanny would exclaim, and Laurel would be amused by his eagerness. Along the shore, lined with palm trees and small houses of white, blue, and coral pink, flew a procession of pelicans, gray birds which moved their wings with slow dignity and permitted nothing to disturb their course. Being early, it was pleasantly cool; later on the visitors from the north would seek shelter from a subtropic sun.

  There is time to think while you sail, especially when someone else does the sailing and the course does not have to be changed often. Laurel Creston thought, What a lovely vacation! And then, I ought to be so happy! But there could not be a single note of joy in her symphony without its accompaniment of pain. She thought, He may have to go any day, and I may never see him again! Such was the fate of women in wartime; and in her heart she raged at the vile Nazi-Fascist creed that had caus
ed millions of men to be torn from the women who loved them on all the five continents of the earth. Mothers, wives, and sweethearts everywhere had faced this war with anguish and then steeled their hearts to endure it.

  She did not voice these thoughts to Lanny. To all appearances he was serene; he had lived through wars most of his life, world wars and civil wars all over Europe, and had adjusted his mind to them. He would go back to his job and be so wrapped up in it that he would have no time to grieve. But she would stay at home and think about him with heartache. She would cry, I must not love him too much! Some of my love must be given to mankind! But she found to her surprise that she was loving him more, and it was harder to give him to mankind.

  Now and then she had expressed this thought to him and had found that, manlike, he took it merely as a compliment. She reflected that he had had two wives before her, and she could never be to him what her only man was to her. She wanted to ask him, Do you love me wholly? And will you always love me? But she had learned that men do not like these questions; that they want to take love as a matter of course, and not to pull up the plant by the roots to make sure that it is growing. The woman wants to be wooed over and over and studies arts to bring about that pleasant experience.

  On the shore was a baby boy, and Laurel knew he was a bond between them; Lanny had a daughter some thirteen years old, but this was his first son. A man wants a man child to bear his name and carry on his work; to be and think like himself, and Laurel was enough in love to want it to be that way. She looked at the father—easy to see, in bathing trunks and a pair of sneakers. He showed few signs of his forty-three years, for he had taken care of himself. His face and neck and hands had been browned by the sun of Africa; he played tennis whenever he got a chance, and pounded the piano with vigor. Now he was happy as a boy, leaning backward over the side of a leaping sailboat. Laurel knew that he really was a boy in his thoughts, back in the Golfe Juan, where he had swam and fished and sailed from his earliest days. He had had a happy childhood, and Laurel was determined that if he did not have a happy manhood it would not be her fault.

  Ashore there was a breeze off the gulf, and if you stayed in the shade it was endurable. Lanny still wore his trunks, and his wife wore a crepe slip. The baby wore nothing, unless you counted a mosquito netting which covered the basket in which he lay. He was restless, because there were a number of little red swellings on his skin, and they itched. The parents had developed the same trouble, and had thought it must be hives, due perhaps to the heat; but the people of this small fishing village told them that the trouble was caused by a tiny bug called a chigger which burrowed under the skin. Lanny had driven to Tampa to consult a doctor and had got a lotion which was supposed to help.

  Now he was discussing the information he had gained; the chigger was a small red flea, and what it did was to bore a little hole and inject a drop of a digestive juice which was intended to prepare your flesh for its sucking apparatus. Usually its purpose was foiled because you knocked it off by your scratching—but that didn’t help you much, because the bit of your flesh went on being digested. The creatures climbed up the stalks of grass or weeds, waiting for you to brush against them, so it was better to wear leggings, and never to lie on the ground. Laurel listened to all this, and was amused to observe her husband’s interest in entomological details. She asked him why, and he said he was fascinated by the problem of what nature could have meant by creating so many strange forms of life, each struggling desperately to survive at the expense of others.

  When the couple had exhausted this subject, they turned to the sponge industry of the Florida west coast: They had engaged a small powerboat which was to present itself at the two planks which served for a dock and take them out to the sponge beds. It was their plan to start at dawn and return before the worst of the heat, for early June was midsummer here. They were in love with the marvelous clear water, green in the shallows and blue in the deeps, in which you could watch innumerable strange forms, both animal and vegetable. Here was more material for speculation about Mother Nature and her reasons or lack of them. The world of men was at war, and that fact pained and grieved you; but here was a world that had been at war for millions of years, and no creature in it could have any sense of friendship for any other.

  II

  Their talk was interrupted by the arrival of a small boy. He was barefoot, and what he did about the chiggers was not clear; his clothing consisted of a pair of khaki shorts, all patches. He had wavy black hair, dark eyes, and skin the color of the pecan tree which grew beside his father’s house. For his two rows of pearly white teeth many a rich man or woman would have paid a fortune. He showed them when he smiled, and still more when Lanny gave him a small coin for his errand.

  Now he said, “Telephone call for you, Mr. Budd.” Laurel caught her breath. She thought, Oh, God! But, being a well-disciplined lady, she made no sound.

  Lanny replied, “Thank you, Toni,” and to his wife, “Excuse me, dear.” He got up and walked fast, the youngster trotting by his side. Along the unpaved road which served this little cove were scattered a few houses, and one of them was the café where Toni’s parents lived and labored. Both of them were large, and in the sunlight they shone with exudations of good living. America had treated them well, and their only trouble was that the land of their birth had got into a miserable war with the land of their adoption.

  The café served a concoction called a gumbo, with crabs and shrimps and oysters and fish, peppers and onions and tomatoes and celery; a big bowl of it was a meal, and the three visitors from the north—husband and wife and the nurse who was the wife’s friend—had come every evening, to save the need of cooking in their rented cottage. Big Toni—Dantone was his name—was enraptured to meet a gentleman who had been raised on the French Riviera and had played with fisherboys who spoke the Ligurian dialect of Italian; he would stand and twist his handle-bar mustaches and gossip with Lanny all through the meal. Toni came from the Bay of Salerno, in the south, and took the same delight in Lanny’s phrases that an inhabitant, say of Savannah, would have taken in the twang of Cape Cod. He seized the chance to learn-in Italian, and safe from American ears—what this war was about. Was it true that the American Army was going into Sicily, and even to the mainland, and would Napoli and the other beautiful cities be entirely destroyed? They were being bombed now—you could hear it over the little radio which was kept going in the café, and the large and slouchy Signora Toni would stand listening, the tears gathering in her eyes. Ah, i poveri gente!

  This agreeable gentleman from up north came striding quickly, and gave his name over the telephone, and all the Dantones, big and little, heard words which made them sad. Yes, he could come at once; he could leave in half an hour. He wouldn’t save much time by flying because he might be delayed in getting a plane. He had his family with him and would drive day and night; his wife would take a turn at the wheel. If all went well, he should reach Washington the next day, certainly by evening; he would send a wire in the morning to report what progress he was making. Yes, he had coupons for gasoline, and his tires were good. So long!

  III

  Lanny shook hands all round with his “dago” friends—he didn’t call them that, but others in the South did, and meant no harm by it; it was a name, like “Joe” for a soldier, and you grinned when you said it. Lanny promised to come back someday. Then he strode back to the cottage. Laurel wasn’t too shocked by the news; she had guessed long ago that her husband was doing some kind of secret work in a grim and terrible war, and that his duties took precedence over love and marriage. They threw their things into suitcases, and the other odds and ends into carton boxes, and stowed them in the trunk of the car. The baby, asleep, was laid on a pillow in his traveling basket; Agnes Drury, trained nurse and mother’s helper, would ride in the rear seat with him and keep watch. The cottage was locked up and the key left with the agent.

  Northward along the coast, through the bay city of Tampa and beyond. By nig
htfall they were speeding across the peninsula of Florida, through seemingly endless forests of pine. The road was smoothly paved, and a mile a minute was standard—but you had to watch the shaft of light ahead, for a cow might wander out into the highway, and deer were plentiful, and would stand in the road, dazzled by the glare. Before midnight the car was speeding up the east coast, along which resorts were strung like beads on a thread. They had been through the usual cycle of boom and bust and then boom again, and now many of the great hotels were turned into military hospitals.

  The travelers did not stop for meals but ate what they had in the car and bought more the next day. Lanny drove while the others slept, and when daylight came they were in the interior of Georgia, land of red clay and unpainted shacks. Two hounds, chasing a rabbit, dashed madly out of a pine wood, one of them directly under the wheels of the car. They did not stop; it was another casualty of war.

  Laurel drove for a while, and her husband slid down in his seat and took a long nap. By midmorning they were in North Carolina, and he sent a telegram saying that he would reach Washington by dinnertime, and that two rooms should be reserved for him. That was necessary, for the city had become the capital of the world, and important businessmen were sleeping in chairs in hotel lobbies, in washrooms, taxicabs, and sometimes on park benches.

  It was Highway Number One, all the way from Key West to the northern tip of Maine. They were coming into a district where war industries had been set up, and heavy trucks escorted them, behind and before. Lanny kept a space in front of him, so that if he were hit in the rear there would be room to slide. The highways of America had been transformed and would never again be the same; nothing in America would be the same, after this dreadful ordeal by battle. As they drove they listened to the radio, familiar voices of men whom they had never seen, telling them the events of the hour and explaining their import. The Japanese were being cleaned out of the Aleutians, and the Americans were holding on desperately at Guadalcanal in the Solomons; the Allies were bombing the island of Pantelleria in the Mediterranean, also various cities in the Ruhr; the Russians and Germans were sparring like two boxers, all along a two-thousand-mile line, and it was a problem which of them would begin the expected major onslaught. The airwaves echoed with Russian clamor for a second front and their refusal to accept the Mediterranean attack as an equivalent.