Presidential Mission

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Lanny had time for a séance himself. He had managed to make peace with Tecumseh by being very respectful, even reverent; and now as a reward the ancient Amerindian reported that there was a spirit present who said he was Lanny’s Uncle Phil. At first Lanny said that he had no such uncle, but the spirit insisted, and a vague memory stirred; there had been a younger brother of Jesse and Mabel, alias Beauty Budd. In childhood Lanny had heard his name mentioned, and that he was “no good,” and had gone off to the South Seas.

  Now the “spirit” said that he had lived in the Philippines, had been captured by the Japanese, and had died in a concentration camp. Uncle Phil described his physical appearance, and when Lanny told his mother about it, she said it was right, and it gave her a jolt. Immediately she wanted to try a séance herself; but all she got was that little daughter of hers which she had not permitted to be born. That gave her an even worse jolt, and renewed her conviction that this frightening underworld of the mind was not made for her entertainment.

  X

  The airport at Marrakech was large, and gangs of Moors were working day and night to make it still larger. Lanny boarded the olive-drab aluminum transport which was to take him home, and found it like the one on which he had attempted to fly by way of Greenland and Iceland, and which had dumped him into the sea. He resolved to keep his fingers crossed this time, but he didn’t, because he found work to do. The floor of the transport was covered with little thin mattresses called “pads,” and on these lay men with bandaged arms, feet, or heads. There was only one nurse to attend them, a young man who, as Lanny learned, was a “C.O.,” a conscientious objector who had accepted this unpleasant sort of duty. Lanny saw many chances to help and took them all.

  He was deeply interested in these boys, whose war experience had been so brief and so lacking in glamour. They had come ashore in the darkness of a rainy night or early morning. They had been wounded in the surf or on the beach and had lain for hours and then been carried to a hotel which had been turned into a hospital. Then they had been put into trucks and carried to Marrakech, and now they were going home, at least for a time. Lanny didn’t hear a single complaint; they had been luckier than a lot of other guys, they said. The Army had got ashore, and it was going to stay, wasn’t it? Lanny could tell them: “It sure is, soldier!”

  He thought it was a good thing for himself to make friends with some of these “guys,” to remind him that war wasn’t all pomp and parade, trumpets blowing and flags waving. He had seen that showy side, and so far had escaped the other; as it chanced, he hadn’t seen a single dead body in North Africa. He had seen politicians pulling wires in their struggle for position and power, and he thought he preferred these simple, straightforward fellows who did their duty and took it for granted that there was nothing else to be thought of.

  The trip was without incident; warm sunshine outside and no wind to be noticed—it was like being ferried across the Mississippi River, as one G.I. said who lived upon its banks. The engines roared and never stopped until they were set down in the gigantic new airport of Belém in Brazil. There they stopped only long enough for Lanny to stretch his legs, and incidentally for the plane to renew its fuel and food and to take on some mail. Then off they went to Puerto Rico for another stop, and then to Washington, where these boys would rest in a hospital, and then have a brief furlough before they went back to General Patton’s hard-fighting command.

  Lanny’s first duty was, of course, to phone Baker; and then, while waiting for his appointment, he called the apartment in New York. He had cabled that he was coming, but in these times there could be no certainty that any message would arrive. This one hadn’t, and his announcement that he was in Washington all but took Laurel’s breath away. “Oh, Lanny! Lanny!” was all she could say, and he heard a little sob of joy. He told her that he was safe and well and would be with her in a day or two. First she laughed a little, and then she said: “I am nursing the baby; perhaps he will talk to you.” She must have put the baby’s lips close to the receiver, for the father heard a little gurgling sound such as babies make when they are pleased with what is being done to them. He took it for a greeting and said: “Hello, Buster!”

  Then he added: “I promised to cable Beauty about my arrival, and she wants to know the color of the baby’s hair.” When Laurel answered: “It is brown, like ours,” he said: “She will be satisfied.”

  “Is she satisfied with me?” asked the wife.

  “She is tickled to death,” he told her. “She says that I am to stick this time and I promised that I would.”

  “Oh, please do!” cried Laurel.

  XI

  Lanny’s appointment was made for that evening, and Baker took him into the White House in the customary way. It was a cold and rainy night, and Lanny found a warm grate fire in that large bedroom; the Chief had on his warm blue cape, for one of his weaknesses was a susceptibility to what he called “the sniffles.” He was just getting over some of them now and looked worn; but nothing could have been more cordial than his greeting, and he proclaimed himself the happiest man in the land. “We’ve really done it!” he exclaimed. “And nobody on this earth will ever know what a responsibility I carried and what fears have tormented me.”

  “I have tried to imagine it, Governor,” replied the caller.

  “The first time sets the pattern; and, by golly, we got away with it! There is going to be a tide of vehicles and men rolling across that land. No doubt you have seen the beginning.”

  Indeed yes! Lanny told what he had witnessed. This man of eager curiosity had the figures before him in reports, but he wanted to see the thing as a show. There was a boy in him that had never died, and how he would have enjoyed being thirty years younger, sound of limb and free of responsibilities, so that he could take an active part in this war, as his four tall sons were doing! He listened to the story of the Cherchell adventure the first eyewitness account he had had; and to the intrigues in Algiers on D-day, or rather D-night. What melodrama, mixed with opéra bouffe! And yet every detail had happened, just as Lanny told it. F.D.R. slapped the bedcover with delight when Lanny told about Juin and Darlan spending the night arresting Murphy and being arrested in turn. When Lanny told about Kenneth Pendar’s three arrests in a twelve-hour period, the President burst into a guffaw—you would have thought he was the most carefree gentleman who had ever been graduated from Harvard University.

  But of course it wasn’t all fun. Lanny had to tell about the other side of that seemingly-good coin, the Darlan deal: the wire-pulling, the betrayals, the vengeance on political opponents. When Lanny mentioned that some of the men who had done most to help the Americans were now in jail, his Boss exclaimed: “You don’t tell me!”—one of his favorite exclamations. When Lanny told about General Béthouart being under arrest and about his interviews with that officer before D-day, F.D.R. exclaimed: “Something must be done about that!”

  Lanny ventured to explain: “Murphy is in a difficult position because he has made promises to Darlan and Lemaigre and others of that ex-Vichy gang. Also, the British agents work on him incessantly for their own purposes, which of course are imperialist.”

  “I know, Lanny; it’s the old story. Where can I find men who know the business of diplomacy and will carry out my policies?”

  Lanny didn’t try to answer that. He said: “I don’t want to say anything against Bob Murphy; he’s been doing a good job. The thing is to tell him to be tough with that Vichy crowd. Give him explicit orders.”

  “I am planning to make him our Minister, with the idea of giving him more prestige.”

  “That will help, certainly. But somehow the striped-pants boys in that old building across the street here will have to have some starch put into their spines. Nobody can do it but you.”

  “What specific measures have you in mind, Lanny?”

  “First of all, the Darlan outfit must restore to the Jews their civil rights in North Africa. Everybody took that for granted, and is puzzled that we d
on’t do it. The Jews were active in the crowd that kept the Vichyites busy on D-day, so busy that they had no time to resist us. And of course now the Vichyites are paying the Jews back in every way, both open and secret.”

  “Check,” said the Governor. “And what else?”

  “Almost as important is the release of political prisoners. There are about ten thousand in concentration camps, under shocking conditions. They include Jews, and of course Communists. That could be understood in 1939, when the Reds were opposing the war, but what sense does it make now, when they are all for the war and ready to work as hard as anybody? Many of the prisoners are liberals and democrats like you and me, and many have only one black mark against them, that they fought against Franco in Spain. I don’t need to tell you, Governor, that Franco and Laval are two worms out of the same apple.”

  “Check,” said the Governor a second time.

  XII

  Lanny knew better than to argue or insist. He could foresee easily enough what reasons the reactionaries in the Administration and the Army would present for not taking this step or that to trouble the French administration of North Africa during the advance into Tunis. He could imagine that an overworked executive might hesitate and postpone. The thing to do was to give him more facts; to tell him Pendar’s story about how Old Blood and Guts had refused to send the President’s letter to the Sultan of Morocco as the President had written it. F.D.R.’s brow darkened, and Lanny could be sure he wasn’t going to forget that bit of warning.

  The question period continued. A bearer of grave responsibilities wanted to have the different personalities put before him, their connections, their functions, their ideas. What was the North African reaction to General Giraud, and to De Gaulle? Who were the fanatics promoting the Comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne? What was the attitude of the French Navy, and could we depend upon its officers now? How were the roads across the Algerian plain, and would they stand military traffic, and how soon would our boys hit the mountains on the way eastward? How heavy were the rains, and what did the French think of the chances of our taking Tunis before the Germans had reinforced it?

  Lanny mentioned his friend Jerry Pendleton, and how they had worked to get the U-boats to Dakar. The President gave the figures as to ship losses, and said there was no doubt that the Nazis had been fooled. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said, and Lanny answered: “You know how I feel, Governor. All I want is another chance to be of use. How about that little scheme of mine to visit Hitler?”

  The great man looked at his faithful servant, who was so much like himself, and his lips twitched into a chuckle. “It’s hard to give up, isn’t it?” he said. “I am going to give you a military order.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lanny in military fashion.

  “Forget that little scheme. Don’t let it keep worrying your mind. I have told you that I need you in North Africa, and later in France. I want you to go back there and keep track of those Vichy so-and-so’s, and give me the inside dope, week by week.”

  “All right, Governor, if that’s it, that’s it.”

  “I’ll prove my trust in you by telling you a top secret. Instead of your having to come to see me, there’s a chance that I may be coming to see you.”

  “Indeed, sir? The latchstring will be out!”

  “You know that Churchill has paid me two visits, and it won’t seem courteous if I make him come a third time.”

  “I can understand that he might feel so.”

  “Well, keep it under your hat. It will depend upon events, and probably won’t be till after Christmas. I suppose you’ll be wanting to see your wife for a while?”

  “I have just had word that we have a son.”

  “You don’t say! Congratulations! Take a furlough until New Year’s and then let me see you again. Take the precaution to tell Baker your whereabouts so that I could reach you in case of emergency.”

  “Sure thing, Governor. I’ll be in New York, or perhaps at my father’s in Newcastle. I have to tell him how his planes behaved over the Maison Blanche airport at Algiers. An odd coincidence, Governor; you plan a campaign in the White House, and you capture a town called White House in Spanish and an airport named White House in French.”

  “Capital!” exclaimed the President, who nearly always had time for a joke. “See if there is a place in Germany called Weisses Haus!” Then, as happened so often, this busy man’s mood changed suddenly. “Lanny,” he remarked, “you have earned an honor. I pay it to you because it may give you courage for your work. It is for yourself and no other person on this earth.”

  “Yes, Governor?”

  “A new era in human affairs has begun. The first uranium pile has started operation; we are making the fissionable material at last.”

  “That is indeed extraordinary news, Governor!”

  “It is at one of our great universities, I won’t tell you which. Suffice it that the operation was started early this month; so this year may be known as A.A.I—the first year of the Atomic Age. That is worth having lived to see.”

  “And to have helped in,” ventured the P.A. “What you have done along that line may dwarf this war.”

  XIII

  Baker had reserved a berth for Lanny on the midnight train to New York, so at breakfast time next morning the traveler stepped into the apartment and surprised his wife, who was sitting up in bed. What an exciting homecoming, with that small bundle of life that gurgled and winked and made strange faces! “Bundle from heaven” was the popular phrase; but where was heaven? Not where the prophets and the saints had imagined it, up in the sky. No, there had to be a new set of ideas to account for this creature, which, during a period of nine months, had been repeating the history of life on this planet over a period of many millions of years. It had consciousness, and had—or was—what people called a “soul.” It would go on expanding and would become what it was now fashionable to call a “personality.” Lanny and Laurel together had made this mite of being, or, at any rate, it wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t caused it to be.

  Lanny would sit and study it. A scattering of light brown hair, finer than any silk he had ever seen; he had promised to wire Beauty about this, and he did so. The lips kept moving; the creature was reaching out for food, the thing of greatest importance to him. Sometimes he smiled, and Lanny could think only of Wordsworth’s ode:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,…

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

  Lanny knew that Freud had a different opinion, and so did the evolutionists. Where was the philosopher who would reconcile these contrary sets of ideas?

  Lanny thought about the psychic experience he had had in Marrakech, only a few days ago. Wherever souls, or personalities, came from, did they return to that same place? Was the universe full of souls, or personalities, some waiting to be born, others coming back from having lived? Did they come into the world more than once, as the reincarnationists imagined? Or were they broken up and shaped into new forms every time, like the dust of which their earthly bodies had been made? And were there traces of them left over, psychic bones in the void, as it were?

  A crazy lot of speculations, a materialist would say. And yet, think what the materialist was so blandly imagining inside his own head! Millions of memories stored away in brain cells and kept at call as long as life lasted, although nobody had ever seen a memory in a cell or anywhere else. Millions of ideas, constantly changing and shifting, drifting into consciousness and out again, and all supposedly at random, with no “soul” to direct them! No purpose, no goal, though every materialist was a living determination to destroy the idea of a soul, and of a God who had anything to do with a purely accidental universe! What a strange accident, that men should labor so purposefully to destroy the idea of purpose!

  BOOK SIX

  Doors That Lead to Death

  18

  ’Twas the Night before Christmas

  I

  Lanny’s furlough centered on a
baby, whose name already stood on the city’s records as Lanny Creston-Budd. The very determined mother said, not Lanning, but Lanny; she didn’t know any Lanning, but she had met a man named Lanny whom she liked fairly well. The hyphen was to call attention to the fact that she, Laurel Creston, was just as important as any of the self-important Budds; at any rate, she had had as much to do with this baby as all of them put together. Lanning Prescott Budd in his usual amiable fashion remarked: “O.K. by me.”

  Laurel had developed emphatic ideas on the subject of motherhood and the care of infants. She had read books, and had made up her mind that her child was going to be a model specimen. In the first place, it was going to be breast-fed, and the nonsense called “social life” was never going to interfere. Literary life was another matter; a woman could hit the typewriter keys in between her maternal duties, and the baby would learn to accept the sound as a phenomenon of nature. In the next place, there was never to be any fondling or dandling or rocking to sleep; the baby would be laid in its crib, modern style. The precious mite of life was never going down into the dust- and germladen atmosphere of megalopolis; it was going to stay in a high-up room where the air was pure, and several times a day it would be covered warmly and the room would be thoroughly aired. When the child was fed and when it was bathed, it would be brought into a warm room, but it would sleep in winter air. Nobody who had a cold would ever come near it, and any person who kissed it would be executed on the spot.

  Laurel would bundle herself in the wonderful fur coat which the Russians had insisted upon giving her, and her husband would take her for a drive, first into Central Park and up Riverside Drive, and later into the country—anywhere, so long as she could be sure of returning home within the four-hour schedule which the pediatrician recommended. It was almost unimaginable luxury, Laurel said, to have a fur coat and a car and a husband all at the same time. But for how long a time?