VIII
Don’t think for a moment that the unassuming Billy Burns wasn’t a busy gentleman these days. He had, among a score of jobs, that of answering the fan mail; he kept a stenographer busy all day long, thanking people for their praise, answering their objections, telling them what to do. He had another job, getting the names and addresses of key persons whom they would put on the free list of the paper. How did you get such names? He had to turn himself into a sales promoter and ask the advice of others in the business; he had to go to the library and look up reference books, then buy copies and bring them to the office and put a girl to work cutting stencils. In the World Almanac is a list of a thousand or so organizations, scattered all over America, and he had the idea of asking for the names and addresses of their members. The Authors’ League of America sounded good, but unfortunately they would not give him the list. The American Peace Society sounded promising, and so, perhaps, the Anti-Saloon League; but there wouldn’t be much use circularizing the American Bankers’ Association.
It was necessary to use care in sending out free copies. If you sent too many, you might be classified by the Post Office Department as an “advertising medium.” It was hard to see how’ such a judgment could be passed on Peace, which so far had carried no advertising at all; but you never could tell how the bureaucrats in Washington might view it. Peace was paying one and a half cents a copy on every single paper it mailed; when second-class entry was granted, most of this would be refunded; but the entry was slow in coming. They carefully saved the original of every subscription order; there were boxes and boxes of them piled up in a shed in back, and if an inspector came around they would take him there and let him dig to his heart’s content.
Lanny got lists of foreign papers and of key persons abroad. He put two more girls at work cutting stencils all day long, putting such people on the mailing list. At the same time he would answer the fan mail, inviting likely prospects to put up part of the cost of this operation. He was becoming stingy with Emily’s million. Five years mightn’t be time enough to win the goal; it might take another five—and if the paper had to stop too soon there might be another war!
Now and then he would go into New York on the train—no use driving a car if your destination was the Wall Street district. He would visit the great bank where his own account, and his mother’s and Marceline’s, had been kept for a quarter of a century. Here also was the account of the American Peace Foundation, and an officer of the bank would take him down into the enormous vault, several stories below ground and guarded like nothing else in the world except a store of atomic bombs. The officer would stand by and watch while he opened a large safe-deposit box and took out a handful of gilt-edge securities—not without qualms as to which was the least likely to increase in value during the five-year period. He would button these in an inside pocket and take them down the street to a broker’s office and order them sold “at the market.” The money would be put to the account of “Laurel Creston, Treasurer,” and the receipts would be duly filed and the accounts kept up to the close of each day’s business. So if ever any agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue or some other snooper came asking questions, he would find everything exactly as the law required.
IX
The group prepared a set of questions for Hansi Robin to answer in his radio interview, and Lanny made an appointment to meet Hansi in the city, to go over the questions and his proposed answers. Lanny arranged it so in order to give Bess an excuse to keep out of it gracefully. But when he arrived at the hotel where they were to meet, he discovered that his half-sister had failed to take the hint. She had come along, and she didn’t make any bones about the reason. “I want to know if the Soviet Union is to be brought into this broadcast, and I want to say that if it is I shall consider it an act of great unkindness, not to say betrayal.”
“Betrayal, Bess?” said Lanny. “Of what?”
“Of me and my rights in this matter. You know perfectly well what it means to me to have my husband seduced into taking a public stand on the matter.”
Lanny had been trying his best to keep out of this quarrel, but he saw that he had got himself into the middle of it. Apparently there was no keeping out, for himself or anybody else; it was a world quarrel! “Hansi is forty years old,” he replied as mildly as he could, “and surely it is time for him to make up his own mind what he believes.”
“Hansi and I have been making a career together for twenty years, and I don’t think he will deny that we have always regarded it as community property. It is true that he might have found other accompanists just as good or better, but he chose to blend our music with our marriage. He certainly knows that I have helped him, not merely with faith and enthusiasm, but with social influence and business judgment. Is that true, Hansi?”
“Yes, of course, Bess.” The husband might have said more, but he didn’t, and Lanny also kept silent for the same reason—that nothing he could say would help.
“All the world believes that we are at one in the cause of working-class emancipation; and now the question is, shall Hansi make a public announcement that this harmony no longer exists? So far we have managed to keep our disagreement a private matter. If it is to be dragged into the open, naturally I am concerned to know it, and I don’t intend to let it happen without stating that I consider it a personal attack.”
Lanny wanted to say, “You feel yourself free to voice your own opinions, Bess.” But he saw the look of misery on his brother-in-law’s face, and he decided that it was no third person’s business to take up the gage. They were sitting in the lounge of a fashionable hotel, and even though they were well-bred persons who would never raise their voices it was no place for an argument.
X
Hansi kept silent, and Bess waited, implacable. At last Lanny took from his pocket the list of questions he had brought and quietly drew his pen through a couple of them. “Let us see if you cannot answer these others without troubling Bess,” he said, and read the first one. “What do you believe to be the most important cause of war in the modern world, Mr. Robin?”
Poor Hansi knew exactly what he was allowed to say; he had been drilled in a hundred lessons at home and knew every word that would please his wife and every word that would move her to anger. He didn’t want a row—how could any sensitive artist want a row with anybody, and especially with the woman he loved? Said he, “I believe there are many causes, but I am inclined to think the principal one is the fact that present-day governments are driven by economic compulsion to serve the interest of powerful groups seeking raw materials, foreign markets, and other advantages throughout the world.”
“Will you give us an illustration of what you mean, Mr. Robin?”
“Well, for example, the pool of oil which I am told is the greatest in the world, situated in Arabia. Obviously all the great powers need that oil, and they are all intriguing and taking every measure short of actual war to get it for themselves. The oil belongs, or ought to belong, to the people of Arabia, and should be sold for their benefit. But there you have a feudal society, with corrupt and ignorant men holding power, and whatever money they get for the oil is spent upon luxury and display.”
“And the remedy for this?”
“Manifestly some international authority, to see that the oil is made available on equal terms to all the world, and that the money is spent upon education and public improvements.”
So far, so good. But presently Hansi began to hesitate and to have difficulty finding words. What could he say about any threat of war that he saw on the world’s horizon now? Such a threat there surely was, and every Communist would give one answer about it and every non-Communist would give a contrary answer.
The violinist said lamely, “I think perhaps I had better write out the answers, Lanny.” And Lanny knew what he meant. Hansi would write, and Bess would censor, and they might have the worst quarrel yet. It had been a mistake to invite this public statement; but Lanny hadn’t realized it until it was too late.
XI
Lanny and Laurel took a trip, not a very long one, down to Princeton. Dear, kind, gentle Albert Einstein was the target for all the idealists and promoters of causes in the world. It was hard for him to say no to anybody, so he made speeches and signed manifestoes when he ought to have had his unique brain concentrated upon his unified field theory. Of course every propagandist thinks his own cause is of especial importance, and this married pair could make out a perfect case; for what good would it do to find a mathematical formula that would cover gravitation and magnetism, if all the world’s great centers of civilization were going to be wiped out by atomic bombs and humanity forced to join the moles and the gophers underground?
This time Laurel didn’t have to sit outside in the car. Nuclear fission was no longer the world’s most closely guarded secret but had become the world’s most notorious reality. Something just had to be done, and the physicists had formed themselves into an association to try to make an impression upon the public mind; the discoverer of the special and the general theory of relativity held himself the most responsible of all men, and was signing appeals to selected persons of means, trying to persuade them to put up two hundred thousand dollars to be used in awakening the civilized world to its peril.
And here came a man and a woman who had a whole million. What were they going to use it for? The great thinker sat in the elegant study which Jewish philanthropy had provided for him and for other top minds of all races and tribes. Laurel asked him, “Why are you a Zionist, Dr. Einstein?” And he answered, “I am a Zionist because I am a Jew.” He told her that he had shipped all his belongings from Naziland to Palestine, hoping to go there; but now he wasn’t sure whether he would ever be able to live there. Palestine had oil pipe-lines running through it, and that made it an epicenter of political earthquakes.
This elderly cherub with the halo of rebellious silver hair spoke like one of the Jewish prophets of old; but, unlike them, he was speaking to all mankind. He said that no nation and no race and no creed dared to think about itself in this crisis; this one concerned the whole of mankind, and no group could be left out. The atomic bomb had changed world unity from a poet’s dream into a statesman’s duty; it made international government an inescapable necessity. This new power released by modern science could transform the world into a garden of peace and plenty, or it could hurl mankind back into primitive savagery. “Choose well; your choice is brief, and yet endless!”
He plied the couple with questions as to what they were doing. He agreed with their ideas and was impressed by the practical judgment they had displayed. Of course he would come; they might set the date—and they set it right away for several weeks hence. They would go back home and engage time on as many stations as possible, and let him have ten minutes to tell the American people how they were sleepwalking on the edge of an abyss. Lanny would come for the learned elder in the car, bundle him up, and drive him to Edgemere, and when he was through they would feed him smörgåsbord, invite him to play a couple of Mozart sonatas, and then bundle him up again and drive him back to Number 14 Mercer Street, Princeton.
XII
Hansi Robin made his appearance and read his written answers in his usual quiet, unassuming manner. Bess didn’t come—but you may be sure she was listening at home, to make certain that Lanny didn’t tempt him to break faith. The answers were what Bess would call “wishy-washy,” but then she would have said that about any statement that failed to proclaim the Soviet Union the champion and only hope of the workers of the world. There was just no compromising that issue; either you believed that the workers had to set themselves free by seizing the powers of government, or you didn’t believe it—in which case the believers would call you names, of which “wishy-washy” was the very mildest. Much more likely they would call you a Red-baiter and a Social Fascist.
Hansi played a sad little “Lament” of his own composition, and if you knew the facts about his situation it would bring tears to your eyes. His marriage was drifting onto the rocks, and he knew it and suffered the pangs of parting in his imagination. Every day he bit his tongue off, as the saying goes. He was ashamed of his talk that evening, yet he really didn’t need to be, as both Lanny and Laurel assured him. True, he dealt in generalities, peace and brotherhood and world unity; but then, is it the business of a musical artist to be an economist and political scientist? Let him lift the standard for the wise and brave to repair to, and leave it for men of tougher fiber to carry that standard into action.
26
Mills of the Gods
I
Not long after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had proposed to the various Allied nations the forming of a War Crimes Commission, to collect evidence and provide for the trial and punishment of the guilty men. All through the rest of the war this body had been working, and in October of 1945, two months after the Japanese surrender, an International Military Tribunal brought indictments against twenty-two of the leading military and civilian officials of Germany, charging them with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. Nürnberg was selected as the scene of the trial, and, there in the Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings not destroyed in that ancient city, the most elaborate judicial procedure in all history was going on.
Captain Jerry Pendleton wrote Lanny about it. The twenty-two had been selected from among the fifty-two whom Jerry had been helping to guard at Mondorf, and he had helped bring them to Nürnberg and lodge them in the city’s jail, adjoining the Palace. The purpose of the trial was to establish the guilt of Nazidom to the entire world, so there was every provision for publicity; a couple of hundred newspapermen were in attendance, and a swarm of photographers. A fascinating thing to the Peace conspirators of Edgemere, who had lived through the rise and fall of Nazism and had had it in their thoughts over a period of two decades, to read the accounts and see the faces of these men of blood and terror, who had risen so high and now had sunk so low. Had there ever been in human records such a turn of the wheel of fortune?
Lanny Budd was content to follow the events from afar. He had seen enough of these hate-filled creatures, and now he had found a labor of love, among people of love. He read the news accounts day by day and saw that the mills of the gods were grinding; he was pleased that they should grind exceeding small. How he wished that F.D.R. might have lived to watch the process; also Harry the Hop—that long-suffering man had passed from the scene of his success early in the new year. He had once told Lanny of a scene with the Boss, who had been in favor of the Army’s plan of taking the war criminals out and shooting them as they were captured; it was Hopkins and Judge Rosenman who persuaded him that the wiser course would be to make a world show of it and put the record of Nazism formally and officially on the pages of history.
II
Lanny had told his father of his radio alias, and the father had been duly grateful. Now when he called on the telephone he asked for “Mr. Burns,” and told the secretary, “It’s his father.” Robbie always asked first about the three-year-old junior Lanny, who had been brought to The Willows. Then he asked about the parents, and reported that his own family was well. Only after that would he mention business matters.
He called one afternoon while Lanny was sitting in his little cubicle in the onetime fuse factory, dictating letters in celebration of the weekly paper’s passing the hundred thousand circulation mark. He told Robbie of this triumph, and Robbie in reply told of a businessman who had set his son up in charge of a brush factory and left him alone for a year; then he looked over the books and remarked, “It appears to me that you have been selling brushes at a loss.” “Yes,” replied the son, “but see what a big business we have done!”
After getting that off his chest, the father reported, “There is a call for you from Washington. You are to call the War Crimes Branch, Civil Affairs Division of the War Department General Staff. Ask for Colonel Josephus.”
Lanny put in the Washington call, curious
to know what the Army could want with him now. The voice at the other end of the wire did not explain but asked, “Could you make it convenient to come to Washington at once?” Lanny replied, “I am afraid that by the time I can get to an airport and get a plane the workday will be over.” The voice replied, “Tomorrow morning will do.”
Lanny glanced out of the window and saw that the weather was good; he said, “I will drive tonight. Can you make a hotel reservation for me?” He was told, “Come to the Mayflower. Your expense account will be honored.”
He needed no clairvoyance to guess that they wanted information bearing on the trial, and he began searching his memory. It was hard to imagine that the Army, which had taken so many top-rank prisoners and collected so many hundreds of tons of Nazi documents, could need anything from a humble interrogation officer. They might, of course, have learned that he had been a presidential agent; but it seemed more likely that they had got word of his interrogations of General Emil Meissner and General-Major Furtwängler. He wondered, could Furtwängler have turned against Göring, his chief?
The ex-P.A. told his wife about the call and suggested that she drive with him; she hadn’t had a holiday in a long time. They both had competent secretaries and could keep in touch with the office by telephone. She said all right, so they told Nina and Rick, and then drove to the house and packed their bags. There were warm robes in the car and they would enjoy the snowy scenery, have dinner in Baltimore, and get into Washington in midevening, and perhaps take in a movie before they went to bed.
III
At nine next morning Lanny took a taxi to the Pentagon, that marvelous five-sided, five-storied building the Army had completed during the war. He didn’t drive himself because he had been told about the complicated set of roads that led up to it and away from it. When you got inside there was a new labyrinth; the wits of Washington never tired of telling stories about people who had got in and never been heard from since—they were still following arrows and trying to follow directions in the four million square feet of enclosure.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 55