Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  The thought of Trudi would come unexpectedly like that, and each time his heart jumped up and hit him under the throat. This was Trudi’s place of captivity, and these were her captors, her torturers. Was the sharp-eyed Herr Doktor there to say when she had been whipped enough, and to make sure that she was kept alive? Was the round and rosy Hauptmann there to see that the two lieutenants didn’t yield to feelings of a sentimental nature? Did the cold and reserved Rath prepare the reports to Berlin? Thinking such thoughts. Lanny had to smile and smile and let others be the villains. A strange thing, to be sitting in a chair putting stewed fruit into his mouth, and thinking that Trudi might be right under his feet at the moment. One floor down, or possibly two? And what would she be doing and thinking? Should he wangle his way to the piano again, and play the Ça ira, to tell her he was here? He must do nothing unusual, nothing to attract attention to himself. Be polite and completely non-invasive, and give no excuse for anybody to wish him elsewhere!

  The Hauptmann had telephoned to Paris and learned what the afternoon papers had in their early editions. Tremendous excitement, with headlines several centimeters high. The police had discovered a nationwide conspiracy and were seizing great stores of arms: machine guns and mortars, bombs and grenades, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Since it was in the papers, the company felt free to question Lanny, and he told what he knew and more that he had guessed. He wasn’t sure if he was a hero in their eyes or a coward; anyhow, he was a personality, and surely nobody would find him a bore.

  II

  Apparently Rörich had been put in charge of the guest. That suited Lanny perfectly, and after the coffee he said: “Shall we have a stroll?” They went out to the terrace, and he added: “We must go toward the back. I must not be seen from the road.” They walked in a grove of plane-trees, which in America are called sycamores; the guest remarked: “You must be happy, living in such a grand place. I don’t suppose you have had it that way always.”

  “No, indeed,” replied the young officer, and revealed that his father had been a shopkeeper, ruined by the postwar inflation; they had had it very hard indeed. Lanny replied that things were far easier in Germany now, and there was reason to hope they would get better still. He didn’t say how, for just then a dog barked, and he remarked: “Those friends of mine! Let us pay them a visit.”

  Their stroll turned toward the kennels. There were two shepherds and two dobermans, each pair in a separate pen of heavy wire mesh. They were glad to see visitors, and stood with their paws on the wire and their tails wagging briskly. “Oh, the lovely creatures!” exclaimed the American, and talked the language of those who have property to guard and the leisure to play with life. “You know, Rörich, you cannot really understand men until you have had an opportunity to study dogs. I am not joking; it is an amazing thing, how you see all human qualities, both weaknesses and virtues, in these mirrors of our personality. I suppose it is because they have lived by serving man for thousands of years, and have had to accommodate themselves to our dispositions. Whatever the reason, it is the fact that you will rarely in this life find a man who will be as utterly devoted to you and as single-minded in loyalty as a dog. You will find no child more eager for attention, or more ready for a romp, or more quickly aware of any trace of displeasure. As for jealousy, that is really comical. Have you made a special friend of any of these dogs?”

  “Leider, I haven’t had the time.”

  “Then they will not object to your manifesting interest in me. But I have one of these shepherds at my mother’s home who can hardly bear to see my mother kiss me; and as for allowing me to pet another dog, that is out of the question—Pluto simply shoves his nose in and takes the other dog’s place. If I order otherwise, he becomes so miserable that I cannot bear the spectacle.”

  The keeper came, an elderly man whose business it was to know dogs, and what the Herrschaft said about them. He and Lanny talked technicalities; Lanny said: “What are they fed?” and “What exercise do they get?” The man replied that they were turned loose at night and ran all over the place. The visitor made a move to open one of the doors, and he warned: “Achtung, mein Herr.” Lanny said: “We are old friends by now!” They discussed the instincts of watchdogs and what they could be taught. Lanny declared: “They know exactly what is in your mind. If you are afraid of them, they will give you cause for fear, but if you trust them they will deserve it.”

  He walked into the pen with the two shepherds; the man went with him, speaking words of command. It was a formal introduction, and the dogs came humbly. Lanny said: “Schön Prinz!” and “Brave Lizzi!” He let them smell him to their noses’ content; he patted them on the heads, and said: “I shall never have any trouble with anything so beautiful.” The bitch was expecting pups, and he asked: “What do you do with them?” The man said: “We shall have to give some of them away,” and Rörich added: “Would you like one?” Lanny replied that he would like nothing more, and would take it in his car the next time he went to the Riviera.

  There were the dobermans, the old-style German police dogs, smooth-coated, black and tan, lithe and eager. The visitor said he didn’t know them so well, and asked about their qualities. They were less excitable than the shepherds; more stolid, but hard fighters. He wished to make their acquaintance, and the keeper asked to go in first. The same introduction was made, and this pair also had full opportunity to learn Lanny’s smell, his hands, and his English tweed suit and his shoes from New York. “My dogs remember my friends after years of absence,” he said. He would have liked to add: “I suppose you don’t need any nightwatchman”—but he was afraid this remark might be remembered if anything went wrong.

  III

  “Don’t let me keep you from your work,” he said to his friend. “I have a book, and am used to entertaining myself.” He took a seat in one of the great leather armchairs of the library, and started the reading of a learned work by a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. It had been comforting to Lanny that a scholar of this standing had taken the trouble to examine a layman’s notes of experiences, and certify to their value as a contribution to knowledge.

  In his book Professor Driesch began, as all Germans do, at the beginning of the beginning; he discussed the problem: “How is knowing possible,” and he pointed out the importance of remembering that the knower is a part of Reality, as well as the known. We are forced to assume that there exists between the knower and the thing known “a primordial relation, which we shall call knowing potentia.” Somehow the thing known affects the mind, and this affection takes the form of matter, and some matter which comprises what we call a flower affects some other matter which we call our body and our sense organs and our brain. Said the learned Professor Hans Driesch:

  “This is a great miracle, and is by no means understood. Think of this: The ultimate result of the affection is a certain rearrangement of the electrons and protons in my brain—and then I ‘see’ the flower ‘outside in space.’ This in fact is a real enigma and will be an enigma forever. Things would be much easier for us to understand if the electrons and protons of the brain would ‘see’ themselves, but this, as you know, is not the case.”

  When Lanny read words such as these he knew that a man who had thought deeply was trying to explain to him in the simplest possible words ideas which were extremely complex. He did not read such words quickly, but stopped and pondered each sentence to make sure he understood its full meaning. He looked up from the page of the book at the very stately library which the Due de Belcour had inherited from his forefathers, and found it strange to reflect that it was all “an arrangement of electrons and protons.”

  Lanny’s eyes ran quickly over the outsides of hundreds of books, and these outsides affected the electrons and protons which composed his brain in a certain special way, for the reason that in the course of his life he had opened a great many volumes of the French classics, and so had acquired a special kind of “knowing potentia” for the langua
ge and history and philosophy and drama and fiction of the French. When he saw the name Racine on the leather binding of a volume, the electrons and protons of his brain began to dance in a certain special way, and when he saw the name Rochefoucauld, they danced in a way entirely different; it might be said with probability that there existed in the whole universe no other assemblage of electrons and protons which would have danced in exactly the same way as those of Lanny Budd. All this, surely, was to be recognized as “a great miracle!”

  Some force which was “a real enigma” drew the objects which Lanny Budd called his “eyes” away from the leather-bound and gold-stamped volumes to the floor of the room, and along the floor to the third pair of French windows from the northwest corner. In front of those windows, on the soft carpet of dark green velvet, he saw a small coin lying, a franc, which had formerly been made of silver but was now made of base metal, and has on one side a figure of Marianne, or liberty, or the republic, whatever you choose to call her, sowing seed. Lanny couldn’t see this with his physical eye, but he knew that this figure on the coin was turned up. He knew it because there wasn’t really any coin there; he was seeing with what Hamlet called his “mind’s eye” a coin which was going to be there sometime after one-thirty next morning, as a signal from Monck and Hofman that they were in the château. Ever since this signal had been agreed upon, Lanny had been seeing imaginary coins on carpets in front of windows, and each time the electrons and protons of his brain had been set to cavorting with a special and peculiar sort of violence.

  Here was a problem which might have been found worthy of investigation by a professor of philosophy at Leipzig University. If the manner of the vibrations had been exactly the same as if the coins were “really” there, we should have said that Lanny Budd was suffering an hallucination. If such vibrations had continued in the same way for an indefinite period, we should have had to say that Lanny was mildly insane. But because the vibrations were such that Lanny knew they were different, we said merely that he was “imagining” the coin; he knew it wasn’t “really” there, but expected it to be there soon, and felt now the things he was going to feel when he saw it “really” there. Yet the emotions he was going to feel were so violent that he couldn’t bear them even in imagination, and took his eyes off the carpet and his mind off the coin that wasn’t there, and forced himself to go back and read some more sentences from the learned professor’s book.

  IV

  What did this authority have to say about the special kind of problem which had been puzzling Lanny’s mind for so many years? Under the heading “Telepathy,” he read:

  “All our normal knowledge about another mind’s contents is reached in an indirect way; we see and hear that the other being moves and speaks, and then infer that his mind is in a certain state. In the realm of psychic phenomena the indirect way is turned into a direct one. Sense organs and brain are excluded. The knowing goes from subject to subject immediately; the relation knowing potentia, therefore, must have existed also between them.”

  A strange thing, whatever way you looked at it. Lanny wondered which would seem the stranger—that we possessors of minds should be compelled to know other minds by the roundabout and complicated method of “inferring,” or that we should now be coming to a stage of evolution where we were discovering another, a “direct” method. For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, men had been using the indirect method, and their minds were so set in it that they were unwilling, perhaps unable, to contemplate the possibility of the direct method. Yet, what a saving of time it would be! What a convenience—or possibly a nuisance! Like any power whatever, it would depend upon who was using it, we or the other person. What a different world it would make if ever it came into general use! A world so different that we couldn’t imagine it, and wouldn’t know how to live in it; some might prefer to commit suicide and take themselves out of it!

  Here was Lanny Budd, for example; seated in a soft leather armchair, comfortably reading a book, or trying to. His wife whom he loved, the dearest being in the world to him, might be only ten or twenty feet away from him, lying on a bench in a stone cell in torment. He had been imagining her, or trying to avoid imagining her, for a couple of months; and here he was, this close, yet powerless to find out a single thing about her. Heavy stone walls lay between them, and the poet had been lying when he said that stone walls did not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. They made a prison for Trudi Schultz, and had obligated Lanny to carry on an elaborate set of investigations and intrigues in order to get this near; it would require a man in a Schutzstaffel Hauptmann’s uniform and another with an elaborate set of steel tools to find out if she was there, and what was going on in her mind.

  But here came this strange and mysterious possibility of mind reading, or telepathy. If it was a reality, the mind of Trudi would be able to flash a message into Lanny’s mind, instantly and directly. Had she done something of the sort, that time when she appeared at the foot of his bed? He himself had tried it many, many times, in all ways and under all conditions: in the stillness of the night, when she might be asleep; when he himself was falling asleep, or just awakening; whenever his thoughts of her became vivid, and she might be thinking of him. Nothing had ever come in reply, but he kept on hoping.

  He had read about the experiments of Coué, who claimed that it is not will but imagination which affects the subconsciousness. Since it was easier to imagine Trudi when he had reason to believe that she was so near to him, he sat now deliberately holding her in his mind, employing his art-lover’s memory to visualize her. He saw her perfectly chiseled features, expressive of intelligence and of moral conscientiousness, of concern about truth telling and justice doing. He recalled her as he had known her ten years ago, young, eager, full of hope for her cause and for personal achievement in the work she loved; he recalled her as he had known her of late, when hope had been replaced by grim determination, when love of truth and justice had become stern anger against wholesale liars and killers. Fanatical, if you chose to use an unkind word, and by no means easy to live with, but commanding a husband’s admiration and immovable loyalty;

  He put his arms about her in love; he did not command her to come to him, but told himself happily that she was coming, that she was welcoming him and responding to his embraces. He permitted his senses to be warmed and his thoughts to be dissolved in memories of the oneness they had enjoyed for a couple of years. Belle nuit, O nuit d’amour, souris à nos ivresses! And in that sort of semi-trance his conscious mind waited, hiding in a corner as it were, trying to fool itself and pretend that it wasn’t there, keeping watch for something that might possibly be a communication, a message from a beloved one who might be buried just beneath him in a dungeon of heavy masonry.

  The trouble with all such experiments was, how were you going to know a message if you got it? How were you to distinguish between a thing from outside and the swarm of things you already had inside? Lanny had had a thousand imaginings concerning Trudi in that dungeon; he had had many others of her being elsewhere, including under the sod of France or Germany. How would he know which was the real “hunch” and which was self-deception. Even if he saw her, or heard her voice—how would he know that wasn’t an hallucination, the product of his overstrained fancy? Tecumseh had called him a “highbrow,” and had bade him become as a little child; but how did one perform that feat? Backward, turn backward, O time, in thy flight!

  V

  Dinner was a more formal meal, served in the great paneled dining room. The same men attended, but they now had two servants to wait upon them and there were several courses. The Nazis were no ascetics; they did themselves well, as you could see by looking at them. The afternoon papers had been brought out from the village, and everybody had had a glance at them; they all knew French, otherwise they wouldn’t have had this assignment. Lanny learned that his efforts in Paris had been unsuccessful; all three of the de Bruynes were in prison, and likewise several of the other leaders
whose names he had been hearing and using. All the papers were violent, raging in favor of their special point of view.

  So the diners had plenty to talk about, and all expressed their opinions, mainly to the effect that the French were poor organizers and worse keepers of secrets. “It can’t be done in a democracy,” declared Fiedler; the well-informed Secretary vom Rath supported him: “That is why they are doomed.” The consensus was that the chances of reconciliation between Germany and France were greatly reduced. They wouldn’t say in the presence of an American that this meant war, but such were the implications of their talk.

  After the meal they repaired to the music room. Rörich had told them that Lanny was a musician, and of course his talents were at their service. “What shall I play?” he asked, and the Leutnant, who had known him first and had taken him up as a protégé, remarked: “Didn’t you say you had played for the Führer?” It was up to Eduard vom Rath, the ranking officer, to suggest: “You might play for us what you played for him.”

  Lanny seated himself at the fine rosewood piano, and began the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. It is a composition laden with grief; and here were five German males, full of good food and wine and ready to sink into a mood of exquisite melancholy. They were separated from the homeland, and from the women they loved; they didn’t know when they would go back, and they turned all slow music into a Liebestraum. Beethoven had been born in Germany, and the fact that he had chosen to spend most of his life in Vienna was overlooked; that he had been a democrat and in rebellion against authority was quite unknown to these Nazis. They had been taught that he was one of the glories of the Herrenvolk and a proof of their superiority over all others. To enjoy him was honorable, and for a foreigner to play him was an act of homage.