Wide Is the Gate

by Sinclair, Upton;

  IV

  On Sunday morning the American couple motored to Wickthorpe Castle to spend the day and night. This was important for Lanny, because he met Gerald Albany and others of the government set and heard them discussing the problems of that very dangerous hour; if he met Goring he would be able to repeat what they had said, of course withholding anything that was really confidential. He played no favorites, but told his English friends about his last meeting with the fat Commander of the German Air Force and what that loquacious personage had revealed about the wonderful new fighter planes he was building, the many skilled pilots he was training, and how they were going to knock all enemy planes out of the air in the first hours of a war. Alas, this didn’t do much harm to Goring, because Ceddy and his friends were serenely certain that the fat General was bluffing, trying to plant fear in their hearts against the day when Hitler would be ready to militarize the Rhineland, or whatever his next move might be.

  Irma knew no reason for being in a hurry, so on Monday they drove to London and she did some shopping and had her hair waved and enjoyed a leisurely tea with one of her women friends, while. Lanny did his professional duty by looking at the offerings of the various picture dealers. In the evening they went to see a comedy which had been running all summer, called Tovarisch. It had to do with a Russian grand duke and his wife who were refugees in Paris, living in destitution because they wouldn’t touch a huge sum which the duke held in trust in a Paris bank for his no-longer-existent government. It was reported that Herr Hitler had greatly enjoyed this play—after having taken the precaution to ascertain that its author was a pure Aryan!

  Among great numbers of refugee “Whites” in Paris and on the Riviera, Lanny Budd had never met any who resembled these romantic figures. When at the end the grand duke’s patriotic feelings caused him to turn the money over to the Soviet government, Lanny enjoyed the “happy ending” to a fairy tale. In the next morning’s papers, he read news of the Comintern Congress, also editorials of embittered loathing in the London press—but nothing either humorous or romantic. Old Europe was a kettle full of seething hatreds, and the only question was, at what moment would it boil over and in which direction would the scalding stream flow?

  There came a letter from Irma’s friend the Furstin Donnerstein, who was spending the hot season in a chalet on the Obersalzberg, near the Austrian border. She called it “little,” but you could be sure there would be a number of guest rooms. “Do come and see it,” she pleaded. “Berlin is absolutely impossible in August. From our upstairs veranda you can see the Berghof, the eagle’s eyrie where our great Fuhrer hides, and perhaps Lanny will take you to visit him.” She had heard of the playboy’s having had this great honor, one which neither she nor her husband had ever enjoyed.

  “How about it?” asked Irma; and Lanny responded: “Would you really like to meet Hitler?” She said it might be amusing, and certainly it would be an adventure to tell her friends about. Lanny thought: “Whatever I can get Adi to reveal about his plans will be of use to Rick, and to Blum and Longuet, and Raoul Palma, perhaps even to Trudi. Certainly they’ll take it more seriously if I get it from the horse’s mouth.”

  To his wife he said: “I’ll ask Heinrich Jung about it when we get to Berlin.” He hadn’t been to see his oldest Nazi friend on recent trips, partly because Lanny himself had been too busy, and partly because Irma found Heinrich and his wife such bores. That was the one thing which the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes refused to endure, and Lanny planned to take advantage of that trait in Berlin. He would have to get away from Irma in order to see Trudi, and it might not be so easy when all her friends were out of town. But if he went to see Heinrich at the latter’s office, and if this fanatical enthusiast took him to see some Hitler Youth demonstration, or school, or recreation center—those were things which would move Irma to remark: “I’ll go to a picture show by myself!”

  V

  There wasn’t any need to telegraph reservations to the Adlon in the midst of summer heat, but Lanny did so and specified the hour of his arrival. He didn’t have to mention that he wanted the reporters to be on hand, for every leisure-class hotel seeks publicity and takes it for granted that all patrons do the same. So when the American party arrived, the press was in the lobby, watching respectfully a procession composed of one heiress, one prince consort, one maid, and three bellboys loaded with four suitcases apiece.

  Seated in the drawing-room of their suite, Lanny ordered drinks for the reporters and told them about the Cowes regatta, the art treasures he meant to purchase, and the visit he purposed in the neighborhood of the Fuhrer’s retreat. Every Berlin newspaper had accounts of Lanny’s last interview with the nation’s idol, and this made it certain that he would get space in the morning. “Kornmahler” would see these items, and there should be a letter very soon.

  Lanny figured that it might arrive by mid-afternoon; and meanwhile he would be the most attentive of husbands, so as to excuse himself for later neglect. The weather was warm and sultry, and he said: “How would you like to drive to one of the lakes and have a swim?” In that flat province of Brandenburg, once a swampy forest inhabited by aurochs, bears, and barbarians, were lakes enough for all the population of a metropolis to sail on and swim in. But on a weekday morning nearly all that population was at work, and visiting Americans could have boat-houses and bathing-pavilions to themselves. The hotel porter would tell them where to find the most exclusive, and they could pass a pleasant morning and afterward have lunch. Irma wouldn’t stop to wonder what they were waiting for, because she had all the time there was in her life.

  When they got back to the hotel, there was the expected note, the briefest possible: “I have some sketches which I hope you will like. I would be pleased if you come at twenty-two o’clock any evening that is convenient to you.” That was all. Trudi had never before asked him to come at night, and he guessed that it was because she no longer dared to appear on the streets by daylight.

  Lanny’s first thought was how to get away from Irma at ten o’clock in the evening. But the fates were more than kind to him; there came a telephone call from the Frau Ritter von Fiebewitz, who happened to be in town, on her way from the mountains to the seashore; wouldn’t they come and have supper with her—an impromptu affair, since she had only one servant with her? Irma wanted to go, and Lanny said: “I’ll tell you what: I’ll take you there and leave you, and then I’ll take Heinrich to dinner and save you the boredom. If you’re not present, he won’t expect his wife to be invited. I’ll drive him home afterwards, and your friend can bring you to the hotel, no doubt.”

  “Or I can take a taxi,” said the young wife, amiably. It had worked out like a bit of magic.

  VI

  The son of the head forester of Stubendorf had risen to high rank in that branch of the party machine which had charge of the education and training of the Fuhrer’s youth; but Heinrich Jung still saw Lanny Budd as the darling of fortune who had come visiting, spreading an aura of elegance, chatting airily about the great ones of Europe’s capitals. The National Socialists considered themselves revolutionists and destroyers of Europe’s old culture, but only the crudest and most fanatical had freed themselves entirely from its spell; thus to his Nazi friend Lanny was still a romantic figure, received as a guest as Schloss Stubendorf and recognized by the gleichgeschaltete Presse of Berlin. Before Heinrich came to the Adlon to dine, he took the trouble to hurry home and put on his dress-uniform, much too warm and smelling strongly of moth-balls. When he met his brilliant friend his blue Nordic eyes shone with happiness and his rosy Nordic cheeks which had grown plumper with the years acquired two naive and quite charming dimples.

  “Ach, Lanny!” he exclaimed. “When are you going to come out for us?”

  “What do you want me to do?” smiled the host. “Put on a uniform?”

  “Warum nicht? It would become you, and you would have a distinguished career. In no time at all you could become the Gauleiter of New England. Our
people over there are not doing so very well.”

  “All my friends in New England think I am a foreigner,” replied Lanny. “They would not follow my lead.”

  He asked what Heinrich was doing at present, and, as always, this started a flood. The Nazi official had been on the point of calling up, to beg Lanny to come with him on the morrow to Nurnberg. There was a National Socialist school for selected young men who had been brought from all the nations of the earth—fifteen hundred students chosen for their special aptitudes from fifty-one different lands; they were the future national Fuhrers and world masters. Heinrich had been chosen to lecture them about the Hitlerjugend and how this marvelous organization had been built during the past decade. The term of the school was closing, and there would be impressive ceremonies, including memorial services in front of the War Monument: flags and banners, drums and trumpets, martial hymns, all that ritual which thrilled the soul of a pure Nordic Herrenmensch. “Lanny, you wouldn’t be able to resist it!”

  “Perhaps that is why I don’t go,” replied the irreverent American. “I couldn’t settle down and work as hard as you, Heinrich; but I admire you for it, all the same.” The cheeks of the head forester’s son glowed with pleasure, and Lanny signed to the waiter to fill up his glass. The lavish host had ordered a liter of the best French champagne and would see that his friend drank the greater part of it.

  “As a matter of fact I’m really busy right now,” the host continued. “I am selling some of Minister-Prasident General Goring’s paintings for him. He has rather extraordinary taste, you know, and I find it instructive as well as profitable to cooperate with him.” Lanny talked with easy familiarity about Karinhall, and Emmy, and the wonderful wedding-gifts, and the fat General’s skill as a hunter of wild boars—taking the hunter’s word for it. Since Lanny’s visit to the preserve, official announcement had been made of the film star’s intention to retire and present the German people with an heir, and this stirred in Heinrich that philoprogenitive instinct which characterizes a Herrenvolk on its way to power and glory.

  All through dinner the American listened to good Nazi propaganda; then he took his friend up to the suite, where they had coffee and brandy, and Heinrich talked about the sad fate of his one-time friend Hugo Behr and others who had been so tragically misled as to oppose the Fuhrer’s will. The international situation now showed how right the Fuhrer had been; how Germany’s freedom could be won by boldness and in no other way. Heinrich quoted a speech recently made by General Goring to the effect that he wanted and would have “no dishwater internationalism” in the Fatherland. Lanny, who had pleaded at the Paris Peace Conference against the cutting off of Stubendorf from the German Republic, was taken by the young official to be in complete sympathy with anything the Fuhrer saw fit to do; so the listener had only to go on listening.

  VII

  Presently there was a chance to change the subject. Lanny remarked: “Irma and I are planning to drive to Salzburg tomorrow, to visit a friend in the mountains there. I wish we could drive you as far as Nurnberg, Heinrich, but Irma has her maid along, and with all the bags she’s about buried.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” replied the other. “There’s a party car going with three of us.”

  “This occurred to me,” continued the other. “It might be good form for us to drop in and pay our respects to the Fuhrer, if you think he would like it.”

  “Oh, Lanny, I’m sure he would! I wish I could go, too; but you know how it is—I cannot neglect an important duty to our youth.”

  “Of course not. What would you advise me to do? Would you like to phone and find out if he would care to receive us?”

  “Gewiss, if you wish it.”

  “Well, why not put in a call from here?” Heinrich was greatly excited by this honor, and Lanny knew the hotel staff would be the same; he guessed that before the call had been completed the whole of the immense establishment would know what was going on.

  Heinrich spoke the portentous words with proud distinctness: “Hallo. Heil Hitler! Bitte, des Fuhrers Heim, Der Berghof, in Berchtesgarden, Obersalzberg.” After that he could hardly sit still in his chair, and could talk about nothing but, should he ask to speak to the greatest of men personally, and would the greatest come? Lanny, who had had much to do with the great, advised that the proper procedure was to ask for the Fuhrer’s secretary; there was pretty sure to be one on duty at all times. Avoid attempting to give an important message to butlers or maids, who lack familiarity with the outside world and may get names wrong, especially foreign names. Lanny knew that Heinrich’s own name, was one of power, because in his youth he had twice visited Adi in prison and that was something the ex-painter of picture postcards would never forget.

  The phone rang and Heinrich picked up the receiver with a trembling hand. Lanny listened to the conversation: “Hallo. 1st dort Der Berghof? Heil Hitler. Hier Heinrich Jung. Wollen Sie mich bitte mit dem Sekretar des Fuhrers verbinden? Ja? Danke schon.” A wait, and then: “Sekretar des Fuhrers? Heil Hitler. Hier spricht Heinrich Jung, Gruppenfuhrerstellvertreter des funften Gaus der Reichsjugendfuhrung und ein alter Freund des Fuhrers. Heil Hitler.”

  So much for preliminaries, and Heinrich went on to explain that the American Lanny Budd and his multimillionaire wife—Heinrich hadn’t had to be told to mention this—were motoring to the vicinity of the Berghof, and Herr Budd, who had already twice met the Fuhrer, desired to call with his wife and pay their respects. Again there was a wait; longer this time, and at last a beaming smile exploded upon the round Aryan features of the Hitler Youth official. “Ja, ja! Bitte, einen Augenblick.”

  He turned to Lanny. “The Fuhrer will see you tomorrow evening at twenty-two o’clock. Can you be there?”

  “Sure, I’ll be there.” Since Lanny didn’t intend to load himself up with the pictures until he was ready to leave Germany, he had nothing to do but see Trudi this evening, and could start early next morning. He wasn’t surprised by the lateness of the appointment, knowing that Adi suffered from insomnia and kept late hours.

  Of course he didn’t fail to thank his old friend for this honor. Few persons in the Fatherland could have done this, he said, and added that he and his wife would be careful not to say a word which would trouble the great man, who sought this retreat in the high mountains to commune with his soul and escape from the cares of state.

  It was then a little after nine o’clock, or twenty-one continental. Lanny said he had an engagement to meet his wife, and hoped that Heinrich wouldn’t mind being sent home in a taxicab. The head forester’s son said he hadn’t got that important yet, so Lanny escorted him downstairs—flushed in the cheeks and extremely talkative with mixed liquors—and put him into a car, paying the driver twice what the fare could amount to. “Heil Hitler fur dich und gruss Gott fur die Frau!” said Lanny, knowing that his friend’s plump little spouse came from Bavaria.

  VIII

  Lanny got his car and drove, and promptly on the stroke of twenty-two—a great many strokes to count—he was at the corner where for the past eight months or so he had been meeting his fellow-conspirator. His heart was in his throat; for suppose she didn’t come, or—just supposing!—there should come in her stead one of the armored cars of the Gestapo, accompanied by a couple of fast-driving motorcyclists with side-arms!

  But no, here she was! Wearing a hat with a wide brim, which shaded her features from the street lights and the moon; walking fast, and looking neither to right nor to left. Lanny drew up to the curb not far ahead, and she sprang in quickly, saying: “Drive!” His high-powered car started away, and he asked: “Is anybody following you?”

  Her answer was: “They have been following me everywhere.” He turned a corner, and watched for car lights behind him or for a car without lights. After several turns he was sure they were safe for the time being, and said: “You can rest for a while; nobody is going to pay any attention to you in this car.”

  “Oh, Lanny!” she exclaimed. “I have been having th
e most dreadful time ever since I saw you last. I’ve hardly had a day of peace. The police got on our trail, and they have taken most of my friends. It is too horrible to talk about or even to think about.”

  “You had better tell me a little,” he said, gently. “After all, I am in it too, you know.”

  “That is one of the things that have made me sick. I waited a couple of months, trying to make up my mind whether I ought to bring you back into Germany again.”

  “All the Nazis appear glad to see me. I have an appointment to call on the Fuhrer at Berchtesgaden tomorrow evening.”

  “Herrgott, Lanny! You might kill him!”

  “Would you advise me to?” He thought it worth while to make sure.

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean, they wouldn’t let you near him if they had any suspicion of you.”

  “I have been consoling myself with that idea. I don’t suppose he wants the pleasure of torturing me personally. Tell me what you have been doing, so that I can advise you.”

  “We were getting out an underground paper—fifty thousand copies of a tiny four-page weekly, with the real news. They got our press and our printer, and two of our key men who were doing the distributing.”

  “So you’ve had to quit?”

  “For the present. I am afraid to go about, because they have my picture on a sheet which they distribute. Twice they have arrested the people with whom I have been staying, and that is the most awful thing to me; I don’t know what to do—I give the kiss of death wherever I go.”

  “Trudi,” he said, gravely, “how much do you really know about Monck?”