Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  So there was one of those incidents which cause the psychical researchers to prepare long reports. Beauty thought of Ezra Hackabury right away, but she didn’t know that Lanny was up on the deck telling the Robins about him, nor did she know how the Bluebird Soap man had cited the smells of the Naples waterfront as proof that romance and charm in Italy were mostly fraudulent. But Lanny remembered well, and also that the gentleman from Indiana had told him about the strange occupation of raising angleworms and planting them in the soil to keep it porous.

  What were you going to make out of such an episode? Was Mr. Hackabury really there? Was he dead? Lanny hadn’t heard from him for years. He sat down and wrote a letter, to be mailed at Genoa, not mentioning anything about spirits, but saying that he was on his way to Naples, planning to retrace the cruise of the yacht Bluebird, and did his old friend remember the drive they had taken and the smells of the bay? And how was the man who raised angleworms making out? Lanny added: “Let me know how you are, for my mother and I often talk about your many kindnesses to us.” He hoped that, if Ezra Hackabury was dead, some member of his family might be moved to reply.

  X

  They went ashore at Genoa, to inspect that very ancient city. They had in Lanny a cicerone who had wandered about the streets during several weeks of the Genoa Conference. A spice of excitement was added by the fact that he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the country if he were identified. But local officers would hardly know about that old-time misadventure, or cross-question fashionable people coming ashore from a private yacht; they could hardly check every tourist by the records of the Fascist militi in Rome.

  No question was raised. Italy was a poor country, and visitors brought much-needed foreign exchange; the richer they were, the more welcome—a rule that holds good in most parts of the world. They engaged three cars and were driven about the town, which is crowded between mountains and sea, and since it cannot float on the latter is forced to climb the former. Ancient tall buildings jammed close together; churches having façades with stripes of white and black marble, and inside them monotonous paintings of sorrowful Italian women with infants in their arms. Before the shrines were wax images of parts of the body which had been miraculously healed, displays not usually seen outside of hospitals. Mr. Dingle might have been interested, but he had a deep-seated prejudice against the Catholic system, which he called idolatrous. Mr. Hackabury had had the same idea.

  Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny’s father had been here, trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts. Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest it spread to the rest of the world.

  XI

  All this wasn’t the most cheerful line of conversation for a sightseeing jaunt; so Lanny talked about some of the journalists and writers whom he had met at this conference, and forbore to refer to the tragic episode which had cut short his stay in Genoa. But later, when Irma and Rahel had gone back to the yacht, he went for a stroll with Hansi and Bess, and they talked about the Italian Syndicalist leader who had set them to thinking on the subject of social justice. The young Robins looked upon Barbara Pugliese as a heroine and working-class martyr, cherishing her memory as the Italians cherish that virgin mother whose picture they never grow tired of painting. But the Fascist terror had wiped out every trace of Barbara’s organization, and to have revealed sympathy for her would have exposed an Italian to exile and torture on those barren Mediterranean islands which Mussolini used as concentration camps.

  When you talked about things like this you lost interest in ancient buildings and endlessly multiplied Madonnas. You didn’t want to eat any of the food of this town, or pay it any foreign exchange; you wanted to shake its polluted dust from your feet. But the older people were here to entertain themselves with sight-seeing; so, take a walk, climb the narrow streets up into the hills where the flowers of springtime were thick and the air blew from the sea. These gifts of nature were here before the coming of the miserable Fascist braggart, and would remain long after he had become a stench in the nostrils of history. Try not to hate his strutting Blackshirts with their shiny boots, and pistols and daggers in their belts; think of them as misguided children, destined some day to pay with their blood for their swagger and bluster. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

  And when you come down from the heights and get on board the yacht again, keep your thoughts to your own little group, and say nothing to your elders, who have grown up in a different world. You cannot convert them; you can only worry them and spoil their holiday. Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in their ideas and ideals.

  3

  And Their Adoption Tried

  I

  The trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been improved in any way. They gazed at the most famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her way of praying.

  The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years, and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of tall men wearing accordion-pleated and starched white skirts like those of ballet-dancers. They climbed the hills surmounted by ancient temples, and tried to talk in sign language to shepherds having shelters of brush built into little cones.

  History had been made in these waters between Lanny’s visits. German submarines had lurked here, British and French craft had hunted them, and a bitter duel of intrigue had been carried on over the part which Greece was to play. The Allies had landed an army at Salonika, and the Bessie Budd now followed in the wake of their transports; her guests were driven about in a dusty old city of narrow crooked streets and great numbers of mosques with towering minarets. The more active members of the party wandered over the hills where the armies of Alexander had marched to the conquest of Persia; through which the Slavs had come in the seventh century, followed by Bulgars, Saracens, Gauls, Venetians, Turks.

  There are people who have a sense of the past; they are stirred by the thought of it, and by the presence of its relics; there are others who have very little of this sense, and would rather play a game of bridge than climb a hill to see where a battle was fought or a goddess was worshiped. Lanny discovered that his wife was among these latter. She was interested in the stories he told the company, but only mildly, and while he and Hansi were studying the fragments of a fallen column, Irma would be watching the baby lambs gamboling among the spring flowers. “Oh, how charming!” Observing one of them beginning to nuzzle its mother, she would look at her wrist-watch and say: “Don’t forget that we have to be back on board in an hour.” Lanny would return to the world of now, and resume the delights of child study which he had begun long ago
with Marceline.

  II

  When you live day and night on a yacht, in close contact with your fellow-guests, there isn’t much they can hide from you. It was Lanny’s fourth cruise with a Jewish man of money, but still he did not tire of studying a subtle and complex personality. Johannes Robin was not merely an individual; he was a race and a culture, a religion and a history of a large part of human society for several thousand years. To understand him fully was a problem not merely in psychology, but in business and finance, in literature and language, ethnology, archaeology—a list of subjects about which Lanny was curious.

  This man of many affairs could be tender-hearted as a child, and again could state flatly that he was not in business for his health. He could be frank to the point of dubious taste, or he could be devious as any of the diplomats whom Lanny had watched at a dozen international conferences. He would drive a hard bargain, and then turn around and spend a fortune upon hospitality to that same person. He was bold, yet he was haunted by fears. He ardently desired the approval of his fellows, yet he would study them and pass judgments indicating that their opinion was not worth so very much. Finally, with his keen mind he observed these conflicts in himself, and to Lanny, whom he trusted, he would blurt them out in disconcerting fashion.

  They were sitting on deck after the others had gone to bed; a still night, and the yacht gliding through the water with scarcely a sound. Suddenly the host remarked: “Do you know what this show costs every hour?”

  “I never tried to estimate,” said the guest, taken aback.

  “You wouldn’t, because you’ve always had money. I figured it up last night—about a hundred dollars every hour of the day or night. It cost me several hours’ sleep to realize it.”

  There was a pause. Lanny didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s a weakness; I suppose it’s racial. I can’t get over the fear of spending so much!”

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “I force myself to be rational. What good is money if you hoard it? My children don’t want it, and their children won’t know how to use it; and, anyhow, it mayn’t last. I assume that I give my friends some pleasure, and I don’t do any harm that I can think of. Can you?”

  “No,” replied the other.

  “Of course I shouldn’t mention it,” said the host, “but you like to understand people.”

  “We’d all be happier if we did,” replied Lanny. “I, too, am conscious of weaknesses. If I happened to be in your position, I would be trying to make up my mind whether I had a right to own a yacht.”

  III

  Lanny went to bed thinking about this “racial” peculiarity. When he had first met Johannes Robin, the salesman had been traveling over Europe with two heavy suitcases full of electric curling-irons and toasters, and a “spiel” about promoting international trade and the spread of civilization. During the war he had made money buying magnetos and such things to be sold in Germany. Then he had gone in with Robbie Budd and bought left-over supplies of the American army. He had sold marks and bought shares in German industry, and now he was sometimes referred to as a “king” of this and that. Doubtless all kings, underneath their crowns and inside their royal robes, were hesitant and worried mortals, craving affection and tormented by fears of poison and daggers, of demons and gods, or, in these modern times, of financial collapses and revolutions.

  Jascha Rabinowich had changed his name but had remained a Jew; which meant that he was race-conscious; he was kept that way by contempt and persecution. Part of the time he blustered and part of the time he cringed, but he tried to hide both moods. What he wanted was to be a man like other men, and to be judged according to his merits. But he had had to flee from a pogrom in Russia, and he lived in Germany knowing that great numbers of people despised and hated him; he knew that even in America, which he considered the most enlightened of countries, the people in the slums would call him a “sheeny” and a Christ-killer, while the “best” people would exclude him from their country clubs.

  He talked about all this with Lanny, who had fought hard for his sister’s right to marry Hansi. People accused the Jews of loving money abnormally. “We are traders,” said Johannes. “We have been traders for a couple of thousand years, because we have been driven from our land. We have had to hide in whatever holes we could find in one of these Mediterranean ports, and subsist by buying something at a low price and selling it at a higher price. The penalty of failure being death has sharpened our wits. In a port it often happens that we buy from a person we shall never see again, and sell to some other person under the same conditions; they do not worry much about our welfare, nor we about theirs. That may be a limitation in our morality, but it is easy to understand.”

  Lanny admitted that he understood it, and his host continued:

  “My ancestors were master-traders all the way from Smyrna to Gibraltar while yours were barbarians in the dark northern forests, killing the aurochs with clubs and spears. Naturally our view of life was different from yours. But when you take to commerce, the differences disappear quickly. I have heard that in your ancestral state of Connecticut the Yankee does not have his feelings hurt when you call him slick. You have heard, perhaps, of David Harum, who traded horses.”

  “I have heard also of Potash and Perlmutter,” said Lanny, with a smile.

  “It is the same here, all around the shores of this ancient sea which once was the civilized world. The Greeks are considered skillful traders; take Zaharoff, for example. The Turks are not easy to deceive, and I am told that the Armenians can get the better of any race in the world. Always, of course, I am referring to the professional traders, those who live or die by it. The peasant is a different proposition; the primary producer is the predestined victim, whether he is in Connecticut buying wooden nutmegs or in Anatolia receiving coins made of base metal which he will not be clever enough to pass on.”

  IV

  Lanny sat with Madame Zyszynski, but the results he obtained were not of the best. Tecumseh, the noble redskin, was suspicious and inclined to be crotchety; he took offense when one did not accept his word, and Lanny had made the mistake of being too honest. The way to get results was to be like Parsifal Dingle, who welcomed the spirits quite simply as his friends, chatting with them and the “control” in an amiable matter-of-fact way. Apparently it was with the spirits as with healing: except ye be converted, and become as little children!…

  What Tecumseh would do was to send messages to Lanny through Parsifal. He would say: “Tell that smart young man that Marcel was here, and that he is painting spirit pictures, much more wonderful than anything he ever did on earth—but they will never be sold at auctions.” Lanny wanted to know if Marcel objected to having his works sold; but for a long time the painter ignored his question. Then one day Tecumseh said, rather grudgingly, that it didn’t really matter to Marcel; everything was sold in Lanny’s world, and it was no use keeping beautiful things in a storeroom. This sounded as if the spirit world was acquiring a “pinkish” tinge.

  Madame gave several séances every day. She had done it while she was earning her living on Sixth Avenue, and insisted that it didn’t hurt her. She would accommodate anyone who was interested, and presently she was delving into the past of the Rabinowich family, telling about those members who had “passed over.” It was a bit unsatisfactory, for there were many members of that family, and Jascha had lost track of them; he said that he never heard from them except when someone needed money for some worthy purpose, and all purposes were worthy. He said that the way to check on the identity of any member of his family in the spirit world would be that he was asking for money to be given to a son or daughter, a nephew or niece still on earth!

  But there had been indeed an Uncle Nahum, who had peddled goods in Russian-Polish villages, and had been clubbed to death by the Black Hundreds. The realistic details of this event sounded convincing to Mama Robin, who had witnessed such an incident as a child and still had nightmares now and
then as a result. Then it was Jascha’s own father talking to him; when he mentioned that his beard had turned white faster on one side than on the other, and how he had kept his money hidden under a loose brick in the hearth, Lanny saw his urbane host look startled. Johannes said afterward that he had thought all this must be a fraud of some sort, but now he didn’t know what to think. It was really unthinkable.

  So it went on, all over the pleasure vessel. The gray-bearded and heavy-minded Captain Moeller condescended to try the experiment, and found himself in conversation with his eldest son, who had been a junior officer on a U-boat, and told how it felt to be suffocated at the bottom of the sea. Baby Frances’s nursemaid, a girl with a Cockney accent who had got a few scraps of education at a “council school,” learned to sit for long periods talking with her father, a Tommy who had been killed on the Somme, and who told her all about his early life, the name of the pub where he had made bets on horse races, and where his name was still chalked up on a board, along with that of other dead soldiers of the neighborhood.