Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  The first thing to be done, Zoltan urged, was to obtain the best possible photographs of the painting both front and back, so that a future purchaser might be shown exactly what the damage had been and the nature of the repairs. In this case the living Comendador had written on the back his name and titles, his age, and the dates of his sittings, and all this was of the greatest importance as proof of authenticity. Too bad he hadn’t been a woman, Zoltan said; for portraits of women and children always brought more money. But this was all right—it ought to fetch as much as twenty thousand dollars.

  Lanny told what he had paid for the painting, but pledged his friend to secrecy; he wasn’t going to tell anybody else, because he was somewhat embarrassed about it. Zoltan said it was a delicate question how far one participant in a bargaining-duel was obliged to spare his competitor; of course, if it was a minor, a senile or other helpless person, that made a difference; but in general an adult was expected to look out for himself, and if you paid what he was willing to take, without any force or intimidation, your conscience could be clear. Lanny said that Don Pedro had been rather helpless as a bargainer, but would be equally so to keep whatever money he got. The chances were he had already parted with what Lanny had paid him. To salve his conscience Lanny was going to give every penny he made from the deal to the cause he had at heart, not even deducting the expenses of the journey.

  They talked about politics for a while, and Zoltan was rather pessimistic as to the Spanish cause. He had listened to people talking at the Belgian resort, members of the upper classes from France and Germany and England. With hardly an exception anywhere, the statesmen and big business men looked upon the Spanish people’s government as a grave menace to their system, a nest of Red intrigue and agitation established in the center of the Western world. They took no stock whatever in the claims of Madrid to be “liberal” and “republican” in the old sense. In these days such words were mere camouflage for Marxism; a Pink, however sincere, became a tool of the Reds.

  Lanny said: “It might be my father talking.”

  “They are blood-brothers on all the six continents and the seven seas,” replied Zoltan.

  “Not blood-brothers, gold-brothers,” countered the son of Budd-Erling.

  III

  Lanny had written Trudi Schultz that he was on the way, and as soon as he had had the painting photographed and got the repair work started, he went to her little studio, intending to take her out to dinner. But she had fixed a supper, so that they could talk quietly. The story he had to tell was the most exciting in the world to her. Spain had suddenly become a second Fatherland to a German refugee—and this time the people had not been helpless, this time they had weapons and were defending their cause. “They are stubborn fighters,” she said. “I picked up a book about their history. Do you know about the siege of Saragossa?”

  Lanny replied that he had read about it recently. He had hoped to inspect some of the scenes of that desperate stand against the armies of Napoleon, which had been one of the causes contributing to his ultimate downfall; but he hadn’t dared enter the town, and the only persons he had spoken to were a filling-station attendant and two Fascist officers. Trudi plied him with questions about the workers’ groups of Barcelona and Madrid, about Raoul and Constancia de la Mora; how she wished that she was free, so that she could write to these heroic comrades and assure them of her sympathy! She had got herself a small radio set, but couldn’t get Spanish stations very often, and she distrusted what she called the “capitalist” stations. She read Le Populaire every day, and had received a note from Lanny asking her to save the copies for him. He told her how he had sent an airmail letter to Longuet, and now he found it duly spread before the Socialists of Paris, in the form of “Airmail Communication from Our Special Correspondent in Spain.”

  What was going to happen? Trudi’s lips trembled as she listened to his answer. No use fooling one’s self, it was going to be a hard struggle; today there was a report that planes of the German Condor Legion had been flown to General Mola in the north. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed, although she wasn’t sure she believed in this hypothesis. “Can it be possible that Leon Blum will permit things like that to happen?”

  “Blum is in a difficult position,” replied Lanny. “He represents a coalition, and in France it is not the Premier but the Cabinet which decides.”

  “But, Lanny, can’t they all see what it would mean to have Mussolini and Hitler set up a second front at the back door of France?”

  “Only military men see it that way,” he replied; “and Blum is pledged to peace-making.” He repeated what he had just heard from his friend and mentor. “The business men of France fear Stalin far more than they fear Mussolini and Hitler combined,” he told her.

  “But they’ve just made an alliance with Stalin!”

  “The Front Populaire forced that; the business men didn’t want it and don’t mean it. France is split in halves by the class struggle, and if it comes to a showdown between Communism and Fascism, poor Marianne will be one of her peasants with a horse hitched to each end of the cart and pulling opposite ways.”

  IV

  Trudi reported on the progress of her work. So far she had had printed more than two hundred thousand anti-Nazi pamphlets and obtained their distribution in Germany. Several persons who did the distributing had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo—she didn’t know who they were, but this report had been made to her. So far there was no sign that German agents in Paris had uncovered her or those with whom she was dealing; but of course that might happen any day. She was disposed to give Lanny some idea of how the distributing was done, but he stopped her, saying that he didn’t want the responsibility. “So long as you know it’s all right, I’m satisfied,” he said, and gave her part of the money he had got from the Zuloaga. “I’ll need some of it,” he said; “I have to pay for a fancy job of repairs on a picture I brought out from Spain.”

  In the course of the evening there came a tap upon Trudi’s door, and she signed to Lanny to step back into an alcove out of sight. He heard her say: “I’m sorry, Andre, but I can’t see you this evening; I have someone here on a matter of business.” After the caller had left and she had closed the door, she said: “That is a young student I met at the art school, a very sweet personality whom I’d like you to know if the circumstances were different.”

  “It is much better to keep your two lives apart,” he assented.

  “He seems to have fallen in love with me,” Trudi added, “and that’s unfortunate. Be sure that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  She said this with her usual seriousness. Lanny, who liked to smile as he went through life, looked into those candid blue eyes and remarked: “You had something to do with it, even though you didn’t know it.” Then deciding that this would serve as a “lead,” he added: “It is easy for any man to fall in love with you, Trudi. I will do it myself if you will let me.”

  “Oh, no, Lanny!” she exclaimed. They were sitting by the open window of the little studio, with the moon lighting one side of her face and the other in darkness. He thought that he could see the color mount into one pale cheek.

  “You know,” he said, “I broke with Irma because we don’t agree in our ideas. I made up my mind if I ever thought of love again, it would be some woman with whom I have no intellectual disagreements. It just so happens that you are the only woman I know who fits that formula.”

  “You ought to meet more women, Lanny!”

  “My fond and adoring mother is forever submitting them for my inspection. They all have money, and carefully cultivated charms which make them deadly traps for the intellectual life. My mother and her fashionable friends talk it over in secret, and they pick out some new bundle of delights, and before they bring her to me they take her aside and warn her about my eccentricities. You know, ideas don’t mean much to the average woman, at least not in the smart world; they put them on and take them off like a new frock. So, if a debutante likes my
looks and manners, she doesn’t scruple to try to pretend that she is concerned about social problems. It is really pathetic; when one of them asks you to tell her all about Russia in fifteen minutes over the teacups, it becomes tragic.”

  “You ought to meet more serious women, Lanny.”

  “My friend Rick has voiced that idea. If I would go and visit him, his wife would be delighted to invite feminist ladies and Socialist ladies, and help to put me in a favorable light before them. Such arts are carefully cultivated among those classes where love means not merely romance, but also the transference of property rights, sometimes of great value. Seven years ago this month the captain of a dingy passenger-freighter in the North Sea pronounced me the husband of Irma Barnes and thereby gave me the usufruct of many millions of dollars; the judge who will some day pronounce me no longer her husband will strip me of these claims and put me back where I started from.”

  “I know, Lanny; it must be rather terrifying to think about.”

  “Our property system has many terrifying aspects. For a matter of twenty years I have been observing its power to distort and destroy human minds and characters. It constitutes a force so overwhelming that only a small fraction of mankind has any chance of resisting it. I am not sure if I myself am among this number; I feel myself struggling in a net, and just when I think I am out of it I discover that another fold has been cast over my head and I am as helplessly entangled as ever.”

  V

  This was a strange kind of wooing; but it was Lanny’s kind, and its ardor, while carefully repressed, would be sensed by a woman of Trudi’s understanding. “You surprise me,” she told him. “I have always thought you a firm-minded person. Certainly I don’t know anyone who has done more for our cause.”

  “I have brought you sums of money, and that seems to you an extraordinary service; but I assure you, the total amount wouldn’t provide my wife with the means of making social appearances for any one of the four seasons of a year. As to my firmness of mind, you do not guess what wavering and wobbling goes on whenever I am confronted with one of those lovely creatures, all dressed up for the sacrifice like a lamb in some ancient religious procession.”

  Trudi couldn’t keep from smiling with him. “Really, Lanny, you ought to live in England for a while and let Rick’s wife perform that important service for you.”

  He had got a fair start, and decided to go ahead with his discourse. “I cannot live in England, Trudi. I am almost afraid to go there, because of an old love affair which haunts me.”

  “You mean some woman who has a claim on you?”

  “Not in the ordinary sense of the word. She is far too proud ever to claim anything that she could not get. She is a member of the nobility, and was my first love; that was during the war, when I was only a boy, and I didn’t understand that women of that class may go outside it to play but not to marry. Now she is the wife of an earl and the mother of a future earl; but she doesn’t live with her husband, and I think she is waiting for me to ask for her.”

  “And would you be happy with her?”

  “It would be the story of Irma all over again. Her class feelings are among her most deeply rooted instincts. She would let me alone, because it is the English way to allow for eccentricity and doing as you damn please; but she wouldn’t have any understanding of my hopes or aims. I haven’t seen her in the last few weeks, but I’m pretty sure that if I should hint my attitude to the Franco rebellion, she would say: ‘But, Lanny, we can’t let the Reds get airports and submarine bases on the Atlantic.’”

  “And yet it is possible for you to be in love with her?”

  “You are a saint, Trudi, and a completely integrated personality. You know exactly what you believe, and it is impossible for you to act or desire to act along any other line. I imagine it would be hard for you to understand, to say nothing of forgiving, a person like me, who has been torn since boyhood by two sets of ideas, two sets of inclinations, two worlds which are in conflict; and each has a claim upon me and lays hold of me and pulls. It used to be tolerable, in the old days when ideas were not taken too seriously; but now these two worlds have gone to war, and they pull as hard as they can and don’t care if they pull me to pieces.”

  Perhaps she couldn’t understand, but apparently she wanted to try. “You have a love in each of those worlds?”

  “I have no love anywhere at present, Trudi.”

  “I mean, an impulse toward love.”

  “Ah, well, if you talk about impulses, you must learn not to take the matter too seriously, or else be prepared for a shock. The average man has many love impulses; and when he talks about loving one woman and cleaving to her for the rest of his life, he is under the influence of intense excitements which nature has put into his heart for her own purposes. If he keeps that pledge through the years, it is not because of his impulses, but because of public opinion, or religious faith, or intellectual conviction, or perhaps the strong and complex bond of shared experience. Being torn between two worlds as I am, naturally my love impulses are involved in that conflct, along with everything else. Does that shock you?”

  “No, but it interests me greatly.”

  “I am telling you the truth as I know it, because the one conviction I have brought out of my misadventures in love and marriage is that there is no happiness except in frankness and understanding. When a man is very much in love he will make all sorts of promises, and afterwards he may keep them but be very unhappy doing so. It is much safer for the women to know what he really is and really wants. Can you go that far with me?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Well, I have just spent a month or so traveling in a foreign country, during which I ran into some discomfort and some danger. I traveled with a man, and enjoyed few opportunities to talk with women; but I saw many, and naturally thought about them. What Goethe calls das ewig weibliche is seldom out of my consciousness; I don’t think it is ever entirely out of any man’s consciousness. I visited strange places, I had amusing adventures, and I would find myself thinking: ‘How Trudi would enjoy this!’ I would see some wistful little waif on the street, some toil-worn worker, or a sturdy brown militiaman with a gun hanging by a strap from his shoulder, and I would think: ‘How Trudi would love to draw him!’ Since that wasn’t possible, I told myself what fun it would be sitting by this window, looking out over the roofs of Paris in the moonlight, and telling Trudi what I had seen. You will realize that that is one of the symptoms of love.”

  “Did you never think about your English lady?” inquired the woman, not without a touch of mischief.

  “She didn’t fit in Spain. What could it have meant but annoyance to her? She is used to servants knowing their places, and if she saw a great number of them rising up in insurrection she would have only one impulse, to telephone the Admiralty to send a cruiser.”

  “But you think of her in London?”

  “Oh, of course; fashionable London is full of memories of happiness that we enjoyed together. But how can I come back from war in Spain and endure going to dinners and balls and theater parties? I should feel myself a skunk.”

  VI

  There was a long silence, and Trudi’s voice was gentle and sad when she spoke again. “Lanny, you honestly mustn’t get your thoughts centered on me. You know how it is: I can’t stop thinking of Ludi.”

  “I understand,” he said, quietly. “But you will have to stop sooner or later. It’s been more than three years since you have heard from him or about him. How much longer can you persuade yourself that he is still alive?”

  “How could he find me, Lanny? I can think of a score of friends in Germany who have vanished completely. If I wanted to communicate with them, I wouldn’t have the remotest idea how; and the same would apply if they wanted to communicate with me.”

  “I know how Ludi could find you easily, and Ludi would know, too. He would reason that if you were alive you had probably escaped abroad, and one of his first thoughts would be that you have a frie
nd in France who sold your sketches for you and who would surely be helping you now. He knows my address—or if he has forgotten it, he has not forgotten Budd Gunmakers of Newcastle, Connecticut, U.S.A.”

  “But he may be held incommunicado, Lanny.”

  “Few prisoners are ever completely incommunicado. There are jailers and there are comrades, and as time passes they devise ways. When I was in the Munich city jail, they were tapping water-pipes all over the place, and everybody in the building knew about the blood purge that was going on outside. Believe me, in three years Ludi would have found somebody who was going out and who would remember a simple message: ‘Write to Lanny Budd, Juan-les-Pins, France, and tell him where I am and ask him to find my wife and tell her.’”

  “I admit the force of your argument,” she answered; “but I can’t get away from the thought that he might be alive, and if so, the longer he was in prison, the more he would need me when he came out.”

  “All right, dear, if that’s the way it is I’ll wait a while longer. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, or give you anything else to be unhappy about. I’m bound for London, and meantime you can think it over.”

  “You’ll meet that English lady?”