Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  The son of Budd-Erling had long been interested in what is known as “psychical research,” but only four years had passed since Laurel had learned that she was a possessor of the gift called mediumship. From that time on the former senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Wall Street bankers, had been her “steady company.” Whenever she went into a trance, he would speak without waiting to be invited. Laurel herself had never heard this “spirit” voice and knew about him only what Lanny or others told her he had said while she lay in a deep kind of sleep. Of late she had feared to enter this state with any person other than her husband present, for Lanny had so many secrets to hide, and Otto seemed to know them. They could not take the risk that he might mention forbidden matters at the séance.

  What Lanny now had in his hands was an address which had been delivered by the great or ex-great banker, revealing him in the role of social philosopher and prophet. Nearly twenty years ago, on November 15, 1923, he had betaken his cultured and affable self to Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and there before the faculty and students had spoken ex cathedra concerning the events of the time. Benito Mussolini had taken power a year and a half earlier, and America wanted to know what sort of man he was. Otto Kahn told them:

  “The credit for having brought about this great change in Italy, and without bloodshed, belongs to a great man, beloved and revered in his own country, a self-made man, setting out with nothing but the genius of his brain. To him not merely his own country but the world at large owes a debt of gratitude.… Mussolini is far from fomenting class hatred or using class animosities or divergencies for political purposes.… He is neither a demagogue nor a reactionary. He is neither a chauvinist nor a bull in the china shop of Europe. He is no enemy of liberty. He is no dictator in the generally understood sense of the word.”

  There was a whole discourse along those lines, and a memorandum attached to the pamphlet stated that the Italy-America Society had printed it in both English and Italian and given it wide circulation in both countries. When Lanny got through with it he remarked, “I ought to remind Otto of that, and hear what he thinks of it now!”

  “He might resent it,” his wife objected. “He might drop us from his calling list.”

  “Well, he hasn’t had anything useful to tell us for some time, and it might be well if you had a change of ‘controls.’ Let’s try a séance and maybe he’ll bring it up himself.”

  XIII

  It was in the autumn of 1929, during the dreadful Wall Street panic, that Lanny had learned about this strange mode of procedure from an old Polish woman whom his stepfather had discovered in a New York tenement. Lanny had taught it to his wife, and now she lay on her bed in a half-darkened room, while he sat close by with a writing pad on his knee and a pencil in his hand. Laurel began to breathe heavily; she moaned for a while and then lay still. Lanny waited. At length he asked in a quiet tone, “Is anyone present?”

  There came at once the voice which claimed to be Otto Kahn. The way to get results from that voice was to take it for what it called itself, and be as urbane as the most urbane of Maecenases had been on earth. “Well, Otto, happy to meet you again. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  “I would tell you if I knew, Lanny.”

  One couldn’t be sure whether that was banter, or whether it was a fact concerning the strange limbo in which these subconscious entities had their existence. The banker-being wouldn’t state explicitly, but at times it appeared that he wanted Lanny to believe that he existed only when Laurel invited him to exist. At other times he would know things that Laurel didn’t know, or at any rate that she didn’t know she knew. Since the learned psychologists agree that the subconscious mind never forgets anything, how can you know what you know? To be accurate, you can only say, “I don’t know it so far as I remember at this moment.”

  Lanny and the banker-being chatted for a while as two gentlemen might who encountered each other in a broker’s office or the smoking-room of a club. After a bit Lanny said, “By the way, Otto, I just happened to come upon a copy of an address which you delivered at Wesleyan University almost twenty years ago.”

  “Indeed,” said the other. “I hope it didn’t bore you as much as it did me.”

  “It didn’t bore me at all. I thought it an interesting example of precognition. Do you remember that you said, ‘Mussolini is far too wise and right-minded a man to lead his people into hazardous foreign adventures’?”

  “Did I really say that, Lanny?”

  “It stands in print; and you went on to say, ‘Mussolini is particularly desirous for close and active co-operation with the United States. I feel certain that American capital invested in Italy will find safety, encouragement, opportunity, and reward.”

  “Dear me!” said the ex-banker. “I am embarrassed.”

  “Did you put any of your own funds into Il Duce’s bonds, Otto?”

  “As you know, my friend, we international bankers took foreign bonds in large blocks and sold them to the public. If we had any left over, we considered that we had exhibited bad judgment.”

  “I believe the record shows that before he marched on Rome—in a sleeping car—Mussolini got the assurance of the American Ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, that he would get a loan of two hundred million dollars from J. P. Morgan and Company.”

  “We bore no affection for that firm, but it may be that we handled a portion of those securities. That was, no doubt, the reason I made the speech. You know how it is, Lanny—no man who plays the races can say that he never backed the wrong horse.”

  Exactly the way it would have been in the smoking-room of the club! Lanny could imagine the smile on the banker’s face and the twinkle in his eyes. Otto knew perfectly well that he was being kidded, and he was giving change in the same currency. Lanny added to his amusement by remarking, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! My father bought some of those bonds.”

  “Well, Lanny,” was the reply, “they will always be good for wallpaper. I used to have a friend who had covered one wall of his rumpus room with souvenirs of his wrong guesses. It turned out that he had to spoil the job by peeling one of the documents off the wall. It was mining stock, and it paid the cost of the whole house. Tell your father to hold on to his bonds, because Fascism may come back—someday we may find that we need it in our own business.”

  XIV

  Enough of banter! The P.A. had a serious purpose in mind. “Listen, Otto,” he said in a different voice. “I’m not blaming you. I know that many of our greatest thinkers were sure Il Duce had solved the problem of labor unions once and for all; I know that Nicholas Miraculous, almighty president of Columbia University, told the world it was so, and turned the university into one of Mussolini’s transmission belts. But now our country is at war with the rascal, and you have a chance to do a patriotic service.”

  “What can that be, Lanny?”

  “I’d like to talk with somebody who knows the insides of Italian affairs as they stand at the moment.”

  “Santissima Vergine! Do you suppose I keep Italian statesmen on ice?”

  “I don’t know how you do it, Otto, and you don’t seem to want to tell me. See if you can’t find me some Italian who has recently come over. The American armies are going into Italy, and they will need help there.”

  A pause, and Lanny waited patiently for this strange psychic machinery to grind. Suddenly Otto spoke again, and with no mockery in his tone. “There is a man here who was young when he died; he is dark, smooth-shaven, an intellectual; handsome fellow. He says you tried to help him.”

  “What did I do?”

  “He was murdered, and you tried to tell the world about it. He is very grateful.”

  “That must be Matteotti. Can he speak directly to me?”

  “He says he will try, but his English is not good.”

  Lanny replied in Italian, “My Italian is not good either, but I understand it. You must know that a martyr does not die in vain. The name of Giacomo Matte
otti is known not merely in Italy, but also to liberal-minded people throughout the world. They have learned that the cowardly Mussolini ordered your murder because he dared not face the exposure of his regime that you were making in the Chamber of Deputies. The world understands that you spoke for democratic Socialism, the hope of all enlightened elements in Western Europe now.”

  A grave man’s voice replied through the lips of the entranced woman. “The proof of Mussolini’s guilt exists. It is in a memorial of Filippo Filipelli, who was editor of the Fascist newspaper, Corriere Italiano, and the man who provided the assassin Dumini with the car in which I was carried away. That memorial has been suppressed for nineteen years. You should try to get a copy of it. My son Matteo will help you.”

  “I cannot take the chance of meeting members of the underground at present. What I need is the names of those in power who are ready to break with the tyrant.”

  “Galeazzo Ciano is a scoundrel, but he sees that his father-in-law’s days are numbered, and he will seek to save his own skin. One of the men who carried Mussolini’s orders to Dumini is Giovanni Contarelli, and he is one you should meet. He was then Parliamentary Secretary of the Fascist party and served his master well, but now he knows that his idol is about to tumble.”

  Lanny repeated these Italian names as he wrote them down: Filippo Filipelli, Galeazzo Ciano, Dumini, Contarelli. Then he asked, “Are there others?”

  The voice replied, “Cesare Rossi, head of the Press Bureau, and Aldo Finzi, Undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior, also prepared memorials concerning Mussolini’s guilt. It is necessary to be careful in dealing with these men. They are like weathercocks which turn quickly, according to the shifting of the wind.”

  “I shall know about that wind,” replied the P.A. There came a sigh from his wife, and he knew what that meant. She began to groan as if she were having a nightmare; then she opened her eyes and blinked once or twice. The trance was over. She asked, “What happened?”

  “Otto came,” was the reply, “but he just kidded me. Said that my father should use his Italian Fascist bonds to paper the walls of his rumpus room.”

  “What an epitome of the spirit of our time!” exclaimed the literary lady. “I believe I shall put that into a book.”

  She went to bed, but lay awake, and while he slept she went into the next room and sat at her desk. In the morning she put a paper into his hand, saying, “I wrote a poem. Read it when you have the leisure.”

  He took the leisure at once and read:

  The world lies like a stone upon my heart

  With all its urgencies and vast despair;

  The world from which so soon I may depart,

  Not knowing when I go, or where.

  2

  Do Well the Duty

  I

  Laurel drove her husband out to Port Washington on Long Island. He was being flown in a big Douglas, known as a C-54. It had a crew of six and was supposed to carry a score of passengers, but there were only half a dozen and the rest of the load was mail sacks, covered with canvas and laced in position with ropes, like a spider web. The P.A. had a seat upholstered in snakeskin, the latest thing in elegance. Laurel saved her tears until after the plane was up in the air; then she dried them and drove the car back to New York.

  As for the P.A., he read the Italian material he had brought along. The sea beneath him appeared as smooth as a sheet of glass, and the white clouds were close and cool-appearing. Once there was excitement—they were passing a convoy, and the passengers gazed out upon tiny-seeming vessels, scattered in regular rows like a newly planted vineyard. The plane dropped a smoke flare as a recognition signal, and took the precaution to give the convoy a wide berth, for freshly trained crews manning anti-aircraft guns were apt to shoot first and inquire afterward.

  The first call was Bermuda, which had been a tourist paradise and now was a busy naval and air base, taken over from the British. A couple of hours stop and they were off to the Azores, where the British had charge of the job of hunting submarines and escorting convoys. The farms were tiny, and from above had as many colors as a crazy quilt, the border stitches being fences of piled-up stones. Coming down, Lanny could see brown, barefooted peasants cultivating their toy plots with bullocks. The houses were of volcanic rock, plastered with adobe, resembling those he had seen in the valley of the Rio Grande. Centuries ago Texas and the Azores had been part of the great Spanish Empire.

  The same plane but with a new crew carried him on the next leg of the journey, to Marrakech in French Morocco. This oasis in a desert land had been made into an airport for American bombers, which now flew the Atlantic without a stop. Lanny had been here just after the Casablanca Conference, and had spent a night in a sumptuous villa along with Roosevelt and Churchill. Now he was to have a night in the town, and he was pleased, because his mother and stepfather were at the Hotel Mamounia.

  II

  Beauty Budd had never thought that she could face the ordeal of having her sixtieth birthday. But somehow, when it came, it was like any other day; she had avoided mentioning it, and nobody but her husband knew about it, and it didn’t bother him because he was a religious mystic who had learned that time was only a form of thought, and his thought was that it didn’t matter. His hair had become snow-white and made a nice combination with his rosy complexion and bland and benign countenance.

  Beauty had never been much for the outdoor life, not even on the French Riviera where she had spent most of her days. She considered the sun an enemy of a peach complexion, and when she went out to cut roses for her dinner table it had always been with a big straw hat and a white veil. For years she had had her reward and been able to justify her name with only the normal amount of cosmetics. But now the wrinkles had gathered, and she had given up counting them; skin enamel and other devices did no good, and, besides, it was becoming impossible to get the stuff at any price. There was nothing for poor Beauty to do but turn to God, according to her husband’s advice.

  Now came her only son, with whom she was well pleased. Only terror kept her from gossiping about his wonderfulness, his ability to meet the great ones of the earth in whatever land he visited, even in wartime. He had warned her with the utmost seriousness that talk might cost him his life; so all she could say was, “My son is one of the most celebrated art experts. The museums accept his authority, and some of our greatest millionaires employ him to purchase paintings for them.” She was free to pile that on as thick as she pleased; she might name the Taft collection, and the Winstead collection, and the Vernon collection of Moorish mosaics and doorways and fountains for ablutions. Everybody knew him in Marrakech and points northeast, and hopes would rise among the owners of cultural treasures.

  This time Lanny could only stay overnight. He was bound for Algiers, and beyond that he would not say. He had dumped his printed matter about Italy into the sea, and Beauty could not get any clues from his baggage—even if she had had a chance to peek into it. They sat up most of the night while she plied him with questions about families and friends. How was his wife, and how were they getting along? Lanny said they were doing fine, and that Beauty’s judgment had been vindicated. She swallowed that, as she had swallowed all compliments all her life—most of them had been true, and why should she bother to sort them out? The fact was, she had accepted Laurel Creston only in the last extreme, after trying one heiress after another as bait for the most eligible of men. She had given up gracefully at the end, and now, since they had a baby, the matter was settled.

  How was the baby? Had his blond hair changed color? No, it hadn’t. Were his eyes still blue? No, they were brown now, like those of Lanny and his mother. Had he spoken any word yet? Had he made any effort to get up on his feet? And so on and on, as you might expect from a grandmother who was being kept by a cruel war four thousand miles away from the most precious of her possessions.

  And then Robbie Budd, and his family in Newcastle, Connecticut. Several years had passed since Beauty had seen L
anny’s father; but Lanny had talked with him over the phone just before flying and reported that all was well. Budd-Erling was turning out the fastest pursuit plane in the world, and doing it wholesale now; the planes had helped to win the battle in Tunisia and were doing a job over Sicily that you could hear about every hour or two over the French radio. Beauty did not fail to listen, because it was a question of when she would be free to return to her home in Juan-les-Pins.

  Did Lanny think that little bit of heaven was going to be blasted into ruins? Lanny didn’t think so, at least not soon. That was as far as he would go, and he warned her not to repeat even that much to anybody. In the present situation of the Armed Forces his words meant that the next destination must be Sicily. Beauty complained that other people talked so much more freely than her son. He answered, “Those who talk freely don’t know what they are talking about.”

  In the morning there was Marcel, child of Lanny’s half-sister Marceline. He had an Italian father, and looked it, with lovely dark eyes and hair. In Florida, not long ago, listening to an overseas broadcast, Lanny had heard this father, a major in the Italian Army in Tunisia, referred to as a war prisoner. He told Beauty about it, and they agreed in hoping that the bad egg whom Marceline had divorced would be put away for a long period. The child, nearly five, had taken this splendid hotel for his playground, making friends equally with guests and staff. His mother was in Germany, and he had pretty well forgotten her; he knew Uncle Lanny better, and was grieved because this delightful person couldn’t stay and teach him dancing steps.