“Lanny, do you suppose that Johannes can really afford to take care of us all that time?”
“He could go alone if he preferred,” replied the son of Budd’s. “As a matter of fact, I suspect the rascal has more money now than ever before in his life. He makes it going and coming; whether times are good or bad; whether the market goes up or down.”
“How does he manage it, Lanny?”
“He’s watching all the time, and he keeps his money where he can shift it quickly. He’s a bull in good times and a bear in bad.”
“It’s really quite wonderful,” said Irma. “Do you suppose we, could learn to do things that way?”
“Nothing would please him more than to teach us; but the trouble is you have to put your mind on it and keep it there.”
“I suppose it would get to be a bore,” admitted Irma, stretching her lovely arms and yawning in the pink satin couch of the Grand Monarque’s official mistress.
XI
The young couple ran down to Juan, and Irma and Beauty held a sort of mothers’ conference on the problems of their future. Beauty was keen on yachting trips; she found them a distinguished mode of travel; she had learned her geography and history that way, and Irma might do the same. But the important thing was the safety they afforded. Beauty didn’t care how much Red and Pink talk her young people indulged in, provided that outside Reds and Pinks couldn’t get at them, to borrow their money, get them to start schools or papers or what not, and involve them in fights with Fascists and police. Carry them off to sea and keep them—and perhaps find some lovely tropical island where they could settle down and live in peace and harmony until the cycle of revolutions and counter-revolutions had been completed! Let the yacht serve as a supply ship to bring the latest musical compositions and whatever else they had read of; but no Communist or Socialist agitators, no Fascists or Nazis marching, shouting, brandishing guns and daggers! “Do you suppose they have mosquitoes in the South Seas?” inquired the soft pink Beauty Budd.
She persuaded Irma that this was the way to keep her temperamental husband happy and safe. Paris was a frightfully dangerous place right now; look at the way Jesse was carrying on, rushing about from one meeting to another, making hysterical speeches, calling the Nazis all the bad names in the French language! A copy of L’Humanité came every day to Bienvenu, and Beauty would look into it sometimes, thinking that it was her duty to keep track of her brother’s doings; it made her quail, for she knew what fury it would arouse in the Hitlerites, and she knew how many rich and important persons in France sympathized with them. The Croix de Feu, the Jeunesse Française and other groups were preparing to meet force with force; the great banks and other vested interests would surely not permit their power to be destroyed without a fight, and it would be far more bloody and terrible than what had happened in Germany. “Let’s get away from it,” pleaded Beauty. “Stay until the storm blows over, and we can judge whether it’s safe to return.”
Irma was persuaded, and they sat down and composed between them a letter to Nina, tactfully contrived to be read by Rick without giving him offense. There wasn’t any danger in England—at least, none that Rick would admit—and the word “escapist” was one of his strongest terms of contempt. To Rick the cruise was presented as an ideal opportunity to concentrate upon the writing of a new play. On Nina’s part it would be an act of friendship to come and make a fourth hand at bridge. To Alfy it would offer lessons in geography and history, plus a chance to fight out his temperamental differences with Marceline. If the parents didn’t want to take the youngster from school so early, he could cross to New York by steamer and spend the summer with the party.
They read this letter to Lanny, who said it was all right, but he could do better as concerned his chum. Lanny was cooking up in his head a marvelous scheme. He was guessing the psychology of a Jewish money-master who had just witnessed the seizing of his country by a bunch of gangsters. It was bound to have made a dent in his mind, and dispose him to realize that he and the other capitalists were living and operating inside the crater of a volcano. Lanny was planning to lay a subtle and well-disguised siege to one of the wealthiest of Jews, to persuade him that some form of social change was inevitable, and to get his help to bring it about in orderly fashion. It was the plan which Lanny had already discussed with Rick, to start a weekly paper of free discussion, not pledged to any party or doctrine, but to the general tendency towards co-operative industry conducted under the democratic process.
“We can have him to ourselves for several months, maybe for a year; and if we can persuade him to back us, we can do the job on a big scale and make a real go of it. Won’t you come and help? You can answer his questions so much better than I, and I believe you could put it through.”
This was a greater temptation than any Utopian dreamer could resist. Rick said, “All right,” and Lanny telegraphed the decision to Johannes. He was tempted to repeat the quotation from Tennyson’s Ulysses which he had used a few years ago on a similar occasion—“My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.” But he reminded himself that the Fatherland was now Hitlerland, and a sense of humor has never been a prominent German characteristic. What might not a Nazi party censor make out of eight or ten lines of English blank verse telegraphed from the French Riviera!
BOOK FOUR
As on a Darkling Plain
16
Root of All Evil
I
A world conqueror had appeared in modern times. Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon—another such as these, appearing in the age of electricity, of rotary presses and radio, when nine men out of ten would have said it was impossible. A world conqueror has to be a man of few ideas, and those fixed; a peculiar combination of exactly the right qualities, both good and bad—iron determination, irresistible energy, and no scruples of any sort. He has to know what he wants, and permit no obstacle to stand in the way of his getting it. He has to understand the minds of other men, both foes and friends, and what greeds, fears, hates, jealousies will move them to action. He must understand the mass mind, the ideals or delusions which sway it; he must be enough of a fanatic to talk their language, though not enough to be controlled by it. He must believe in nothing but his own destiny, the glorified image of himself on the screen of history; whole races of mankind made over in his own image and according to his will. To accomplish that purpose he must be liar, thief, and murderer upon a world-wide scale; he must be ready without hesitation to commit every crime his own interest commands, whether upon individuals or nations. He must pave the highway for his legions with the bones of his enemies, he must float his battleships upon oceans of human blood, he must compose his songs of glory out of the groans and curses of mankind.
The singular advantage enjoyed by Adolf Hitler was that his own people believed what he said, while other peoples couldn’t and wouldn’t. The attitude of the outside world to him was that of the farmer who stared at a giraffe in the circus and exclaimed: “There ain’t no sich animal!” The more Adolf told the world what he was and what he meant to do, the more the world smiled incredulously. There were men like that in every lunatic asylum; the type was so familiar that any psychiatrist could diagnose it from a single paragraph of a speech or a single page of a book. Sensible men said: “Nut!” and went on about their affairs, leaving Adolf to conquer the world. Here and there a man of social insight cried out warnings of what was going on; but these, too, were a well-known type and the psychiatrists had names for them.
Adolf Hitler got the mastery of the National Socialist Party because of his combination of qualities; because he was the most fanatical, the most determined, the most tireless, and at the same time the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous, the most deadly. From the beginning men had revolted against his authority, and while he was weak he had wheedled and cajoled them and when he became strong he had crushed them. There had been split after split in his movement, and he had gone after
the leaders of the factions without ruth; even before he had got the authority of government in his hands, his fanatical Stormtroopers had been beating and sometimes murdering the opponents of this new dark religion of Blut und Boden, blood and soil. Work with Adolf Hitler and you would rise to power in the world; oppose him, and your brains would be spattered on the pavement, or you would be shot in the back and left unburied in a dark wood.
Hermann Göring, aviator and army officer, man of wealth, of luxurious tastes and insatiable vanities, hated and despised Joseph Goebbels, the blabbing journalist, the club-footed little dwarf with the venom-spitting tongue; and these sentiments were cordially reciprocated. Jupp would have thrown vitriol into Hermann’s face, Hermann would have shot Jupp on sight—if either had dared. But the Führer needed Hermann as a master executive and Jupp as a master propagandist, and he put them into harness and drove them as a team. The same thing was true of hundreds of men in that party of madness and hate: World War victims, depression victims, psychopaths, drug addicts, perverts, criminals—they all needed Adolf a little more than Adolf needed them, and he welded them into something more powerful than themselves. Hardly one who wasn’t sure that he was a greater man than Adolf, and better fitted to lead the party; in the old days many had patronized him, and in their hearts they still did so; but he had won out over them, because of the combination of qualities. He was the one who had persuaded the masses to trust him, and he was the one who could lead the N.S.D.A.P. and all its members and officials upon the road to conquest.
II
Adolf Hitler had watched Lenin, he now was watching Stalin and Mussolini, and had learned from them all. In June of the year 1924, when Lanny Budd had been in Rome, Benito Mussolini had been Premier of Italy for more than twenty months, but the Socialists were still publishing papers with several times as many readers as Mussolini’s papers, and there was still freedom of speech in the Italian parliament and elsewhere; there was still an opposition party, there were labor unions and co-operatives and other means of resistance to the will of the Fascists. It had taken the murderer of Matteotti another year and more to accomplish his purpose of crushing opposition and making himself master of the Italian nation.
But Adolf’s time-table was different from that. Adolf had a job to do in the outside world, and had no idea of dawdling for three years before beginning it. He knew how to wait, but would never wait an hour longer than necessary, and would be his own judge of the timing; he would startle the world, and even his own followers, by the suddenness and speed of his moves.
First, always first, the psychological preparation. Was he going to wipe out the rights of German labor, to destroy a movement which the workers had been patiently building for nearly a century? Obviously, then, the first step was to come to labor with outstretched hands, to enfold it in a brotherly clasp while it was stabbed in the back; to set it upon a throne where it could be safely and surely riddled with machine gun bullets.
Europe’s labor day was the First of May, and everywhere over the continent the workers paraded, they held enormous meetings, picnics and sports, they sang songs and listened to speeches from their leaders, they heartened and inspired themselves for the three hundred and sixty-four hard days. So now, several weeks in advance, it was announced that the Hitler government was going to take over the First of May and make it the “Day of National Labor.” This was a government of “true Socialism”; it was the friend of labor, it was labor, and no longer could there be a class struggle or any conflict of interest. The revolution having been accomplished, the workers would celebrate their conquest and the new and splendid future which lay before them. All these golden, glowing words—and all the power of press and radio to carry the message to every corner of the Fatherland. Also, of course, the power of the police and the private Nazi armies to terrify and crush anyone who might try to voice any other idea.
“Oh, Lanny, you should come to see it!” wrote Heinrich Jung, ecstatically. “It will be something the like of which has not been seen in the world before. All our youth forces will assemble in the Lustgarten in the morning and President Hindenburg himself will address us. In the afternoon there will be costume parades of every craft and trade, even every great factory in Germany. All will gather in the Tempelhof Airfield, and the decorations will exceed anything you could imagine. The rich are paying for them by buying tickets so as to sit near the Führer. Of course He will speak, and afterwards there will be fireworks like a battle—three hundred meters of silver rain! I beg you and your wife to come as my guests—you will always be glad that you witnessed these historic scenes.… P.S. I am sending you some literature about our wonderful new labor program. You cannot have any doubts after this.”
Lanny wrote, acknowledging the letter and expressing his regrets. It cost nothing to keep in touch with this ardent young official, and the literature he sent might some day be useful to Rick. Lanny was quite sure that he wouldn’t care to enter Germany so long as Adolf Hitler remained its Chancellor.
III
The celebration came off, with all the splendor which Heinrich had promised. Everything was the biggest and most elaborate ever known, and even the hardboiled foreign correspondents were awe-stricken; they sent out word that something new was being born into the world. On the enormous airfield three hundred thousand persons had assembled by noon, to sit on the ground and await ceremonies which did not begin until eight in the evening. By that time there were a million or a million and a half in the crowd, believed to be the greatest number ever gathered in one place. Hitler and Hindenburg drove side by side, the first time that had happened. They passed along Friedrichstrasse, packed to the curb with shouting masses, and hung with streamers reading: “For German Socialism,” and “Honor the Worker.” In front of the speaker’s platform stood the new Chancellor, looking over a vast sea of faces. He stood under the spotlight, giving the Nazi salute over and over, and when at last he spoke, the amplifiers carried his voice to every part of the airfield, and wireless and cables carried it over the world.
The new Chancellor’s message was that “the German people must learn to know one another again.” The divisions within Germany had been invented “by human madness,” and could be remedied “by human wisdom.” Hitler ordained that from now on the First of May should be a day of universal giving of hands, and that its motto was to be: “Honor work and have respect for the worker.” He told the Germans what they wanted most of all to hear: “You are not a second-rate nation, but are strong if you wish to be strong.” He became devout, and prayed: “O Lord, help Thou our fight for liberty!”
Nothing could have been more eloquent, nothing nobler. Did Adi wink to his journalist and say: “Well, Juppchen, we got away with it,” or some German equivalent for that slang? At any rate, on the following morning the labor unions of Germany, representing four million workers and having annual incomes of nearly two hundred million marks, were wiped out at one single stroke. The agents of the job were so-called “action committees” of the Shop-Cell Organization, the Nazi group which had carried on their propaganda in the unions. Armed gangs appeared at the headquarters of all the unions, arrested officials and threw them into concentration camps. Their funds were confiscated, their newspapers suppressed, their editors jailed, their banks closed; and there was no resistance. The Socialists had insisted upon waiting until the Nazis did something “illegal”; and here it was.”
“What can we do?” wrote Freddi to Lanny, in an unsigned letter written on a typewriter—for such a letter might well have cost him his life. “Our friends hold little meetings in their homes, but they have no arms, and the rank and file are demoralized by the cowardice of their leaders. The rumor is that the co-operatives are to be confiscated also. There is to be a new organization called the ‘German Labor Front,’ to be directed by Robert Ley, the drunken braggart who ordered these raids. I suppose the papers in Paris will have published his manifesto, in which he says: ‘No, workers, your institutions are sacred and inviola
ble to us National Socialists.’ Can anyone imagine such hypocrisy? Have words lost all meaning?
“Do not answer this letter and write us nothing but harmless things, for our mail is pretty certain to be watched. We have to ask our relatives abroad not to attend any political meetings for the present. The reason for this is clear.”
An agonizing thing to Hansi and Bess, to have to sit with folded hands while this horror was going on. But the Nazis had made plain that they were going to revive the ancient barbarian custom of punishing innocent members of a family in order to intimidate the guilty ones. A man doesn’t make quite such a good anti-Nazi fighter when he knows that he may be causing his wife and children, his parents, his brothers and sisters, to be thrown into concentration camps and tortured. Hansi had no choice but to cancel engagements he had made to play at concerts for the benefit of refugees.
“Wait at least until the family is out of Germany,” pleaded Beauty; and the young Reds asked their consciences: “What then?” Did they have the right to go off on a pleasure yacht while friends and comrades were suffering agonies? On the other hand, what about Papa’s need of rest? The sense of family solidarity is strong among the Jews. “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” The Lord in His wisdom had seen fit to take away the land, but the commandment still stood, and Hansi thought of his father, who had given him the best of everything in the world, and now would surely get no rest if his oldest son should declare war upon the Nazis. Also, there was the mother, who had lived for her family and hardly had a thought of any other happiness. Was she to be kept in terror from this time on?
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